KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Pogrom

  On the morning of November 7, 1938, a Jewish teenager from Hanover, Herschel Grynszpan, walked into the German embassy in Paris, drew a revolver, and fatally wounded a German diplomat. This lone and desperate act of protest—Grynszpan’s parents and siblings had just been deported from the Third Reich to the Polish border, together with some eighteen thousand other Jews of Polish nationality—was the spark that set off the pogrom. Two days later, Nazi leaders, who had gathered in Munich for the ritual celebration of the anniversary of Hitler’s failed 1923 putsch, seized on the German diplomat’s death to launch a nationwide orgy of destruction, later called the “night of broken glass” (Kristallnacht) by sarcastic Germans. It was instigated on the evening of November 9, 1938, by Joseph Goebbels, backed by Adolf Hitler, who agreed that the time had come for Jews “to feel the fury of the people,” as the eager Goebbels noted in his diary. Senior Nazi officials frantically sent instructions to their underlings across the country, and within hours, local Nazi thugs were on the rampage everywhere.278

  The pogrom was accompanied by mass arrests, after Hitler ordered the urgent detention of tens of thousands of Jews.279 Just before midnight on November 9, Gestapo headquarters instructed its forces to prepare the arrest of twenty to thirty thousand Jews, especially prosperous ones. More detailed orders followed less than two hours later, this time directly from Reinhard Heydrich: police officers should arrest as many Jews—above all wealthy, healthy, and younger men—as they could detain locally and then ensure their rapid transfer to concentration camps.280

  In the days after November 9, 1938, more than thirty thousand Jews of all ages and backgrounds were rounded up in German villages, towns, and cities. SA and SS fanatics, drafted in as auxiliaries, abused their victims during the arrests. Regular policemen, by contrast, often acted in a more detached manner. As a middle-aged Frankfurt doctor, whom I shall call Dr. Julius Adler, recalled a few weeks later, the police officer who had detained him at his home on the morning of November 10, 1938, behaved “not particularly friendly but perfectly proper.” Like many other prisoners, Dr. Adler was moved to a temporary holding center, in his case a large hall in the Festhalle, the Frankfurt convention center, where Jews had to hand over valuables and endure occasional harassment and assaults by SS men who mingled among the police.281 Several thousand Jewish prisoners were spared the KL as the authorities released women and also some men (among them seniors and army veterans) from protective custody within a matter of hours or days.282 Many other elderly and weak men, however, had to join the other male Jewish prisoners on mass transports to one of three KL—Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald.

  Much of the pogrom unfolded before the eyes of ordinary Germans, and the mass arrests and deportations of Jewish men to the KL took place in plain view, too. In many cities, triumphant Nazis publicly humiliated the prisoners; in Regensburg, the victims were paraded through town with a large placard reading “Exodus of the Jews,” before they boarded a train to Dachau. Popular reactions are hard to gauge, but there was at least some sympathy for the plight of the prisoners. As one regional SD office complained, “hardened democrats” showed great pity for the imprisoned Jews and spread rumors about suicides and deaths in the camps. There were also some anonymous protests to Nazi leaders. But only a few Germans dared to voice open criticism, while hard-liners loudly applauded the deportations.283

  The transports were terrifying. When Dr. Adler and other Jews were locked into a special train in Frankfurt, late on November 10, they were warned that they would be shot if they tried to open the windows. Although they were not abused during the journey—unlike prisoners on some other transports—the men were greatly worried about what would happen next. Screaming SS guards met them at Weimar train station and pushed them onto waiting trucks. At Buchenwald, the prisoners had to run into the camp, past more guards who kicked and punched them. “Then we moved at the double across the assembly ground of the camp,” Dr. Adler later wrote, “with those who were too slow being again spurred on by blows with sticks.” During those dark November days, an endless stream of prisoners spilled onto the Buchenwald roll call square, where they faced hours of torment during registration. Some prisoners arrived drenched in blood, with swollen heads and broken bones, following the SS “welcome” at the gate. “I was hit in the eye,” one man later reported, “and as a result lost the sight in that eye.”284 Similar scenes unfolded in Dachau and Sachsenhausen in mid-November 1938, as the SS pressed a total of around twenty-six thousand Jewish men into its three big KL.285

  Almost overnight, the SS concentration camps had dramatically changed. Never before had they held more inmates: within days, the prisoner population doubled from twenty-four thousand to around fifty thousand.286 Never since the inclusion of female prisoners in the KL system had there been so few women among them: as there were no mass transports of Jewish women to Lichtenburg, the overall proportion of female prisoners in the camps fell to under two percent.287 Never before had there been as many Jews in the KL: at the start of 1938, they had made up only around five percent of the prisoner population; now they were suddenly in the majority. And never before did as many prisoners die in the KL as in the weeks following the pogrom.

  The KL After Kristallnacht

  “One of the bloodiest and most horrible chapters in the history of Buchenwald”—this is how two veteran prisoners later described the period after the pogrom.288 The SS was largely unprepared for the huge influx of Jewish prisoners in November 1938, plunging the camp system into even greater chaos than after the June raids against “asocials.” In Dachau, barracks that had been cleared for Jews were soon so overcrowded that some new arrivals were forced into a vast tent instead. In Sachsenhausen, the SS used the makeshift barracks of the little camp, first set up after the summer raids against “asocials,” and they, too, were bursting.289 But Buchenwald proved the greatest ordeal.

  The first so-called November Jews arriving in Buchenwald were crammed into a primitive barrack erected a few weeks earlier for Austrian prisoners. Meanwhile, other inmates had to build, at frantic pace, four more provisional barracks out of thin wooden boards, with no floors, right on the muddy soil. The entire new area, at the far corner of the roll call square, was cut off from the rest of the compound with barbed wire. At night, each barrack was filled with almost two thousand prisoners, who slept on tiny wooden bunks, more like shelves, without mattresses or blankets; the men were pushed so tightly against one another that it was impossible to move. “Our accommodation was such,” the Frankfurt doctor Julius Adler wrote a few weeks later, “that we always felt like cattle locked into a dirty cowshed.” One night, two of the barracks caved in under the weight of the bodies inside.290

  Every day in Buchenwald, the Jews suffered from dirt and disease, thirst and hunger. Food was only handed out at irregular intervals, as the SS struggled to maintain any semblance of order, while the persistent water shortages caused terrible dehydration. The men could not wash either, or change their damp and soiled civilian clothes; “one was covered up to one’s knees with a thick crust of clay,” reported Dr. Adler. Inside the barracks, the stench soon became unbearable, especially after a mass outbreak of diarrhea. There were no sanitary facilities to speak of, just two overflowing ditches, where murderous SS men tried to drown several Jewish men. Inevitably, many Buchenwald prisoners suffered from infections and injuries, including frozen limbs, as well as mental illness, but the SS initially refused them any medical care. Instead, the sick were dumped in a rickety shed—“a hovel stinking of excrement, urine, and pus,” as a prisoner orderly remembered; it was nicknamed the “barrack of death.”291

  The Camp SS did not quite know what to do with the “November Jews” and never fully integrated them into the regular routines. In Buchenwald, as well as in Dachau, these inmates were not pressed into forced labor, watching as other prisoners marched off to work outside the compound. Instead, they spent most of the day sitting, standing, or running on the rol
l call square, enduring endless drills, parades, and punitive exercises. Only in Sachsenhausen did the SS decide, after a week or so, to draft Jews into work, often at the brick works, where accidents were frequent, and medical treatment scarce. “For Jews, I only sign death certificates,” the Sachsenhausen SS camp doctor is said to have exclaimed.292

  The special status of the so-called November Jews was reinforced by their separation from the other KL inmates, including all other Jews. Despite SS threats, some prisoners—both Jews and non-Jews—passed food and water to the desperate new arrivals, and offered vital advice on how to behave.293 Such support for the “November Jews” remained rather rare, however, not just because of the obvious dangers, but also because of long-standing prejudices against Jews. “Among the prisoners,” an underground SPD report about Dachau concluded, “there are many who despise the Jews.”294

  The “November Jews” had to look to one another for help. Inevitably, there were many obstacles to solidarity, starting with the general deprivation. Many of the new prisoners had yet to adjust to the camps, and were bewildered by the daily torment. Moreover, while the SS may have seen all Jews as alike, things looked very different from the perspective of the prisoners themselves, who were acutely conscious of all the barriers of class, religion, nationality, and politics. The so-called November Jews were German and Austrian, secular and orthodox, young and old, Communist and conservative, intellectual and uneducated, Zionist and assimilated, bourgeois and proletarian. Often, they had nothing in common except for being victims of Nazi racial mania. Such divisions were hard to overcome, especially in the face of extreme suffering.295 And yet, there were acts of mutual aid, especially among men who had known each other already before their imprisonment.296

  Solidarity could only achieve so much, however, and prisoners were helpless against SS assaults. While Nazi leaders called off the pogrom outside within a day, the looting and violence inside the KL continued for weeks, effectively extending the pogrom. Whenever an SS man approached, Jewish prisoners feared verbal abuse and worse. “Words like Jewish pig are the order of the day,” Dr. Julius Adler recalled, adding: “Woe unto him who was driven to protest.”297 Camp SS men used all their well-honed methods of humiliation, though some were still unsure about how far they should go. When Dr. Adler first arrived in Buchenwald, a guard knocked the glasses off his face; when Adler could not find them, however, the same SS man picked them up for him and handed them back. Other guards had no second thoughts, though, and assaulted the new inmates at every turn, on the roll call squares during the day, and inside the barracks at night. All this violence, as Jewish prisoners recognized only too well, laid bare the true intentions of the Nazi regime. “They have declared war against us,” a Buchenwald prisoner later wrote, “having rendered us defenseless for years.”298

  The Camp SS men did not stop at abuse. They also robbed the “November Jews,” on a grand scale. Corruption was as old as the camps; it was not exceptional, it was endemic. In the early camps, for example, officials often blackmailed prisoners, forcing them to pay a ransom to regain their freedom.299 Corruption continued after the SS coordination. Guards forced inmates to carry out household chores in their own homes, ordered prisoners to make goods for them, stole their money, and diverted SS supplies into their own pockets. Few SS men could resist the temptations of near-total power. Almost the entire Camp SS was on the make, from rank-and-file men to leading officers; even Theodor Eicke, who periodically reproached his men for dishonesty, ran a secret account, spending the funds at his discretion.300

  SS corruption reached new heights in November 1938. The pogrom outside had involved mass looting, followed by more state-sponsored theft; in the most cynical move, the regime ordered German Jews on November 12 to pay one billion Reichsmark as “atonement” for the damage done by the Nazi mob.301 The Camp SS enriched itself, too, above all in Buchenwald. Here, SS men ordered incoming “November Jews” to throw their valuables into open crates, never to be returned. Prisoners who had kept back money were robbed later on, in various other ways. SS guards sold them basic goods—like water, food, shoes, sweaters, and blankets—at exorbitant prices, and also forced them to make “donations” to escape more violence. The Buchenwald SS was not shy about flaunting its ill-gotten gains; even NCOs were seen around town wearing fancy clothes and driving luxury cars.302

  While the Camp SS reveled in its newfound wealth, the balance sheet for Jewish prisoners was grim. After just a few days in the camps, almost all of them carried serious wounds, both physical and psychological. There was a spate of suicides. Several Jewish men, unable to bear their torment, ran into the electrified fence or crossed the sentry line. In the past, the Camp SS had sometimes prevented suicide attempts. Not this time. “Just let them get on with it,” Theodor Eicke told his men.303

  In all, at least 469 Jewish men died in the KL in November and December 1938. Buchenwald was by far the most lethal site, accounting for almost two-thirds of these deaths; 297 Jewish prisoners are known to have lost their lives here. Sachsenhausen claimed at least another 58 lives, and Dachau 114. To put these figures into context: in the five years between 1933 and 1937, 108 men (of all backgrounds) are known to have died in Dachau, an average of fewer than two fatalities per month.304

  The Pogrom in Perspective

  When Dr. Julius Adler was released from Buchenwald on November 18, 1938, after eight days inside, he walked toward the next village with some other freed Jewish men. Famished, they entered a tavern, where the friendly landlord and his wife served them plenty of coffee, water, and sandwiches. Then the former prisoners drove to Weimar and boarded an express train back to Frankfurt, still dressed in the filthy clothes they had worn inside the camp. On his return home, Dr. Adler was grateful for the warm welcome from many non-Jewish acquaintances. But looking back at Buchenwald, he had learned two critical lessons: “Make every effort to get out those who are still in Germany, or in the camp, and second, to tell oneself in every situation: Anything is better than the concentration camp!” By the time he wrote these lines in January 1939, Dr. Adler had already left Germany.305

  Many other German Jews did the same. Almost every family had been hit by the mass arrests, in one way or another. And although not all released men would, or could, share their experiences—“My husband does not talk about it,” the wife of Erich Nathorff noted on December 20, 1938, after his return from Sachsenhausen—their suffering was written on their faces and bodies. And so the horror of the KL, together with the devastation of the pogrom itself, led to a desperate scramble to escape the Third Reich—exactly what Nazi leaders had wanted.306

  The pogrom was a watershed for Jews in Nazi Germany. But was it a watershed for the KL, too? The answer seems obvious. The camps changed dramatically in November 1938, after all, becoming bigger and deadlier than ever before, while the acts of theft and violence fused the Camp SS even closer together. Also, the camps proved themselves once more as versatile tools of Nazi terror. By quickly locking away tens of thousands of Jews, and terrorizing more into leaving the country, the men of the Camp SS passed another test in the eyes of Nazi leaders, just as they had done during the Röhm purge more than four years earlier.307 And yet, one should not overstate the lasting impact of the pogrom on the KL system. In many ways, it marked an exceptional moment in the prewar years, and the camps soon returned to their prior state.

  To start with, Jewish prisoners did not remain in the majority for long. Nazi leaders had wanted to shock them, not to lock them away for good, and most so-called November Jews were quickly freed, far more quickly than previous victims of police raids. Mass releases set in around ten days after the pogrom and continued for weeks, as Heydrich’s office issued various orders for the discharge of elderly, sick, and disabled Jews, as well as First World War veterans. Of course, the ensuing releases were tied to certain conditions. Some men had to sign over their businesses to non-Jews. Many more had to promise to leave Germany. As early as November 16, 1938, Heydri
ch had ordered the release of Jews “whose date of departure” from Germany was “imminent”—men like Julius Adler, who had long prepared his exit. Emigration thus became closely tied to the release of “November Jews,” with prisoners signing written pledges to get out of the country. “Are any of you not emigrating?” the Dachau commandant Loritz would ask Jewish men, just before they left the camp. But at least the prisoners were released, and at a rapid rate. In Buchenwald, the total number of “November Jews” dropped from almost ten thousand in mid-November 1938 to 1,534 on January 3, 1939, to just twenty-eight on April 19, 1939.308 With the departure of these so-called November Jews, the total number of Jewish KL prisoners declined to pre-pogrom levels. From the regime’s perspective, the camps had served their function—forcing many Jews out of Germany—and there was no need for further mass arrests. Only a few hundred new Jewish prisoners arrived between January and August 1939, and like those Jews still inside, they had largely been detained as asocials, criminals, or political opponents. When war broke out in September 1939, the Nazi regime held no more than 1,500 Jews in its concentration camps, out of a population of 270,000 to 300,000 Jews still living on the territory of the Third Reich.309 The pogrom, in short, did not turn the KL into places for the permanent mass confinement of German Jews.

  Neither did it lead to a permanent extension of the KL system. Following the dramatic growth after the pogrom, prisoner numbers quickly dropped again after most of the “November Jews” departed, falling to around 31,600 by the end of 1938.310 Numbers continued to fall over the coming months. True, there were some major police actions—including mass arrests of Austrian Gypsies in summer 1939—but not on the scale of the raids in the previous year; overall, far fewer new prisoners entered the camps.311 Meanwhile, the police continued its prisoner releases. Most surprisingly, given his previous hostility to mass releases, Heinrich Himmler agreed to mark Hitler’s fiftieth birthday on April 20, 1939, with a major amnesty, extended to various long-term political prisoners and social outsiders. On the instructions of Himmler and Eicke, the inmates were told that they had reached “the road to freedom” (though their fate would be dependent on their future behavior). Thousands of prisoners were freed in late April 1939, among them the petty criminal Josef Kolacek from Vienna and the beggar Wilhelm Müller from Duisburg, whom we encountered earlier on. Because of the amnesty, which was not publicized in the press, KL prisoner numbers fell to around twenty-two thousand in late April 1939, slightly below the mark for summer 1938.312 This figure was virtually unchanged when Germany went to war four months later; on September 1, 1939, the KL system held around 21,400 prisoners.313