KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  The camps’ seemingly irresistible rise had stalled in the run-up to war. This was not what SS and police leaders had envisaged. In late 1938, Himmler and his men had hoped to use the momentum of the pogrom to enlarge the camps even further. More construction was urgently needed, they argued, so that thirty-five thousand prisoners could be accommodated at any one time. However, the call for an injection of 4.6 million Reichsmark for new buildings met with staunch opposition from Reich minister of finance Count Schwerin von Krosigk, backed by Hermann Göring. Von Krosigk wanted to prevent the unchecked growth of the concentration camps. Every time they were extended, he warned, the police would fill them with more prisoners, and then demand further extensions, setting off an endless cycle of arrests. Instead of enlarging the KL system, he proposed the release of thousands of work-shy prisoners and others who posed no real threat to the state.314 Even in the late 1930s, leading Nazi figures still questioned the radical direction of Himmler’s terror apparatus and saw no need for bigger camps.

  What, then, about the long-term impact of the SS assault on the “November Jews” on life inside the KL? In the history of the prewar camps, the weeks after the pogrom stand out as the most deadly by far, in terms of the total number of dead. This is not to say, however, that the Camp SS had suddenly moved to new extremes of violence, as historians have often suggested.315 Rather, the weeks after the pogrom marked a deadly peak in a much longer lethal spell, which began in summer 1938 and lasted until spring 1939, and which claimed many victims in addition to the Jewish men arrested after the pogrom.

  As we have seen, the expansion of terror and the deterioration of conditions began several months prior to the pogrom, in summer 1938. Following the raids against the “work-shy,” prisoner mortality across the concentration camp system shot up, from a monthly average of around eighteen deaths between January and May 1938 to around 118 deaths between June and August 1938.316 The main victims were “asocial” men, with the Jews among them being the most vulnerable of all—sometimes even more vulnerable than the so-called November Jews who arrived months later.317 As far as Jewish prisoners were concerned, at least, SS terror in the camps did not suddenly intensify after the pogrom. It had started to escalate before.

  And the terror carried on for several months after the pogrom. From late 1938, inmates were at greater risk of death than before; on average, 323 prisoners perished each month between November 1938 and January 1939.318 Nearly half of them were Jews arrested after the pogrom. The remaining victims came from other prisoner groups, who were also hit by the rise in SS terror.319 This was especially true, once more, for so-called asocials.320 Crucially, mass mortality in the KL persisted well into spring 1939, long after the release of almost all so-called November Jews.321 Despite a drop, the death rate initially remained extremely high; on average, 189 inmates lost their lives each month between February and April 1939. Almost two-thirds of the dead were “asocial” prisoners, for whom lethal SS repression continued almost unchanged into 1939.322

  Only later that year did the KL death rate decline more markedly, at a fast pace. Soon, prisoner mortality had fallen well below the highs of the preceding months. During the summer of 1939, the last period of calm before the outbreak of the Second World War, an average of thirty-two prisoners died each month in the camps—far fewer even than in summer 1938, although overall prisoner numbers were almost identical.323 This serves as another reminder that the Nazi camps did not head straight into the abyss. Instead, just like the Soviet Gulag, periods of rising terror were followed by greater moderation. There were structural reasons for the turnaround in summer 1939: the weather was much better, prisoner quarters were less crammed, and other elements of the infrastructure improved, too, such as the water supply at Buchenwald. At the same time, the SS also pulled back from some of its most violent excesses.324

  Inmates were grateful for the respite in summer 1939, after the horrors of the previous twelve months. “If we were not prisoners,” the Sachsenhausen camp elder Harry Naujoks wrote, “one could almost describe our life at the moment as peaceful.”325 Long-term prisoners like him were not deceived, however. They had seen enough of the KL to know that their course could change again at any moment, in a far more deadly direction.

  One of these veteran prisoners was Ernst Heilmann, who had suffered all the pains of the camps, many times over. Back in summer 1933, as we have seen, he had been beaten and degraded as the “director of the crapper” in the early camp Oranienburg. Later, he was tortured in the Prussian “model” camp Börgermoor, where guards shot and wounded him during a suicide attempt. His abuse had continued after the coordination of the KL system in Sachsenhausen and Dachau, and from September 1938 in Buchenwald, the new central camp for Jews, where he was pressed into a transport detail, carrying heavy stones and earth. It was in Buchenwald that another prisoner, who had known Heilmann in his glory days as a leading Weimar politician, met him in one of the barracks reserved for Jewish inmates, sometime after the November pogrom. Heilmann was unrecognizable; his clothes were soiled and ripped, his face furrowed, his mustache cut off, his hands chapped, his back bent, his spirit broken. “He was no longer the human being Heilmann,” his acquaintance later wrote, “he was just the wreck Heilmann.” After they exchanged some news about mutual friends and politics, Heilmann told him about his torment at the hands of the guards. Asked about the future, Heilmann gave a stark reply: “There will be war. You Aryans will still have a chance, because they will need you. But we Jews will probably all be beaten to death.” This chilling prediction soon came true for Heilmann himself, who died in the early months of the Second World War, as the KL descended into terror on an unprecedented scale.326

  4

  War

  On the morning of September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler, wearing a simple gray military uniform, addressed the hastily convened Reichstag in Berlin. Unusually tense and nervous, Hitler announced to millions of Germans listening on the radio—among them KL prisoners lined up on roll call squares—that war with Poland had broken out. In his speech, Hitler played the victim. Germany was forced to act because of Polish provocations and border violations, he claimed, including no fewer than three serious incidents during the previous night. “Tonight,” Hitler announced, “Poland has for the first time fired on our territory with regular troops. Since 5:45 a.m., fire is being returned!”1 There had indeed been trouble on the German-Polish border in Upper Silesia. But it had all been staged by the Nazis themselves: dramatic political theater—devised by Hitler and Himmler, directed by Heydrich, performed by special Nazi forces—to give an excuse, however flimsy, for German aggression. “The victor,” Hitler had bluntly told his military commanders a few days earlier, “will not be asked whether he told the truth or not.”2

  The sinister plot had been prepared for some time, and on August 31, in anticipation of the imminent German attack, Heydrich gave the final go-ahead to his men in Upper Silesia. That evening, a covert commando stormed a radio station in the German border town of Gleiwitz. The men brandished pistols and announced over the airwaves that the station was in the hands of Polish freedom fighters; for effect, shots were fired in the background. Later that night, other Nazi special commandos staged the “Polish assaults” on German territory that Hitler later referred to in the Reichstag. The SS and policemen involved had trained for weeks at secret locations, even learning to sing Polish songs and growing beards and sideburns to look the part. The most elaborate mock attack came at Hochlinden, where one group, wearing Polish army uniforms and screaming in Polish, attacked and demolished the German border post, before another group, dressed as German guards, overpowered them.

  To make this farce look more convincing, the conspirators decided that bodies of killed “insurgents” were needed. Looking for men who could be executed on cue, their eyes fell on KL prisoners. Sometime in mid-summer 1939, Heinrich Müller, who headed the central Gestapo department for domestic matters, arranged for top-secret transports of prisoners—or
“supplies,” as he apparently called them—from Sachsenhausen, Flossenbürg, and other concentration camps to a police prison in Breslau, where they were placed in solitary confinement. On August 31, 1939, some of these prisoners were taken out of their cells. An SS doctor apparently drugged them, before their lifeless bodies, dressed in Polish uniforms, were driven to Hochlinden in black Mercedes limousines with drawn blinds. After the staged attack began, the bodies were dragged out, dumped at the border post, and shot. To obscure the identity of the dead, the killers smashed their faces with hammers and axes. Then they took photos of the slain at the scene, which were sent to Berlin as “proof” of the Polish attack. The following morning, as the actual German troops were advancing into Poland, the special commando hastily buried the prisoners’ corpses in the forest near Hochlinden.3

  It could be said that the first victims of the Second World War were concentration camp inmates. Many more casualties would follow, and when the war finally ended, six years later, more than sixty million men, women, and children were dead, including more than 1.7 million KL victims.4 Nazi leaders had long despised the prisoners, their savage mind-set summed up in spring 1938 by Joseph Goebbels, following a private conversation with Hitler and Himmler about the concentration camps. “There is only scum inside,” he noted in his diary. “It has to be annihilated—for the benefit and welfare of the people.”5 This was no empty talk. During World War II, mass death engulfed inmates in almost all the camps. And although the great majority of victims died during the second half of the war, the lethal turn of the KL system began early, in the years between 1939 and 1941.

  THE CAMP SS AT WAR

  “War came,” Rudolf Höss wrote in early 1947, looking back on the Nazi invasion of Poland, “and with it the great turn in the life of the concentration camps.”6 Höss was right, at least up to a point. The prisoner population doubled in little more than a year, reaching around fifty-three thousand at the end of 1940, and it continued to rise. A year later, by early 1942, around eighty thousand men and women were locked up, many of them crammed into new concentration camps. Because just as inmate numbers grew, so did the KL system. In autumn 1939, the SS had controlled six main camps; by early 1942, it was thirteen.7 Considered in isolation, the expansion of the concentration camps might seem exceptional. But the KL system remained part of the wider Nazi web of terror, which also grew much denser during the early war years; existing sites flourished and new ones sprang up everywhere, with camps, jails, ghettos, prisons, and dungeons holding millions of men, women, and children. And yet, the war did not change everything; it did not revolutionize the Third Reich.8 As far as KL terror was concerned, there was no immediate break with the past. The SS remained in overall charge and saw no need to redraw the basic outlines. The ability of the concentration camp system to absorb change and to adapt, without losing its core mission, would prove to be one of its most terrifying strengths over the coming years.

  Eicke’s Legacy

  Hitler envisaged the war with Poland as more than an ordinary military campaign. His view of the Polish people as racial enemies—“subhuman” Slavs who had to be enslaved or destroyed—helped to make the Polish campaign the first of the Nazis’ racial wars.9 This was Himmler’s moment. Since summer 1939, his deputy Reinhard Heydrich had overseen the formation of special SS and police task forces, primed to follow the army and fight against “anti-German elements.”10 After the invasion, these task forces wreaked havoc in Nazi-occupied Poland, targeting politicians, state officials, priests, and noblemen, as well as local Jews. Other troops went on a rampage, too, and by the end of 1939, after the German victory, tens of thousands of Polish civilians had been murdered, including at least seven thousand Jews.11

  Among the fiercest killers in newly occupied Poland were Death’s Head SS troops, led by none other than Theodor Eicke. Eicke had long styled himself as a “political soldier” and now moved from the imaginary inner front of the camps to the real front line. During the invasion, he commanded three SS Death’s Head regiments, giving some of his orders from the safety of Hitler’s armored train. For weeks, his men laid waste to villages and cities, robbing, arresting, torturing, and murdering many of the locals. As a reward, the insatiable Eicke was entrusted with the formation of the SS Death’s Head division, which gradually developed its own organizational structure, separate from the KL, as Eicke’s move from the camps to the front became permanent. He was joined by thousands of SS sentries as well as several senior KL officials, who came to occupy almost all leading positions in the new division (some later returned to the Camp SS). Once more, Eicke drummed his core values—brutality, racism, ruthlessness—into his men, and they did him proud. The SS Death’s Head division was responsible for countless war crimes and became one of the most feared units during the Second World War.12

  The SS men chosen for Eicke’s division initially assembled for training on a site many of them knew well—Dachau. Eicke had started his career there as commandant in 1933 and now returned, six years later, as a general. On November 4, 1939, Himmler himself came to check on Eicke’s progress, finding the whole complex much changed; to make room for the SS troops, Dachau had been cleared of almost all prisoners in late September 1939, with some 4,700 men transported to Mauthausen, Buchenwald, and Flossenbürg. The survivors returned after January 1940, once Eicke and his SS troops had left for another training ground.13

  With Eicke gone, the Camp SS had lost the headmaster of its school of violence. But Eicke’s spirit remained; the essence of his teachings had entered the core of the Camp SS. Also, Eicke never fully severed his ties to the camp system, acting as its elder statesman. His family still lived in the SS settlement in Oranienburg, and whenever he was on leave, he was welcome at the nearby IKL office, where he was more than happy to share his thoughts with his successor as inspector of the concentration camps, Richard Glücks.14

  A sturdy man in his early fifties—born on April 22, 1889, just two days after Hitler—Richard Glücks had spent most of his adult life in uniform. During the First World War, he mainly fought in France, participating in the battles of Verdun and the Somme. Following a brief interlude in a Freikorps after the German defeat, the decorated soldier served in the much-reduced German army, aiding its illegal rearmament. Glücks eventually lost his post in 1931, during the depression, and was briefly unemployed. He was already a member of the Nazi Party by then, having joined in March 1930, and in November 1932, he entered the SS: the professional soldier became a professional SS officer. Glücks quickly moved ahead and caught the eye of Theodor Eicke, who appointed him on April 1, 1936, as his chief of staff, the second most powerful position in the IKL. The querulous Eicke was difficult to please, but Glücks was a man after his taste. Efficient and energetic, he was devoted to his boss, a key quality for advancing in an organization built on personal connections and favoritism. Eicke duly secured Glücks an early promotion to Oberführer, and as his boss got increasingly bogged down in military schemes in the run-up to war, it was Glücks who took over much of the day-to-day management in the IKL, well before his appointment as inspector in October 1939. He would head the KL administration for more than five years, longer even than Eicke, right up to the collapse of Nazi Germany.

  Ideological commitment Glücks had in abundance; but of charisma he had none, and he was always destined to remain in the shadow of his mentor, Eicke. Compared to the overbearing Eicke, who led from the front, Glücks appeared indecisive, a serious character flaw in SS circles. And while Eicke had sought the company of his men, Glücks was a more remote figure. The intense male world of SS camaraderie was not really for him. “I live very frugally, don’t drink, and have no passions,” he wrote in 1935. Some senior Camp SS members viewed him with suspicion because he had never served an apprenticeship inside a KL, complaining that he was just a desk-bound bureaucrat. His superiors were more positive, but even here Glücks could not emulate Eicke. Although he was directly subordinate to Himmler, the two men were never close an
d rarely met.15 Himmler had promoted Glücks not for his initiative or leadership skills, but because he stood for continuity, promising to consolidate his predecessor’s legacy.

  The same message was sent by the appointment of Arthur Liebehenschel as Glücks’s second-in-command. More than ten years Glücks’s junior, he had also been a career soldier, leaving the German army after twelve years in late 1931 as an NCO. Just a few months later, he enlisted in the SS, and in summer 1934 he joined the Camp SS, which he served for almost all of the Third Reich. As adjutant in Lichtenburg, Liebehenschel gained hands-on experience and then moved to the IKL in summer 1937. Here, he headed the political department and worked closely with Glücks, who valued his managerial skills. Some of his other colleagues, by contrast, saw Liebehenschel as a weak figure, describing him as “sensitive,” “quiet,” and “kind”—damning words in the martial world of the Camp SS. Rudolf Höss, his former neighbor in the genteel SS settlement in Sachsenhausen, where their children had sometimes played together, pictured him as a man “who could not even hurt a fly.” In reality, Liebehenschel was deeply implicated in the increasingly murderous IKL policies, and he later got a chance to prove himself as commandant of Auschwitz.16