KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  In the early war years, then, the camp administration was headed by two old hands, Glücks and Liebehenschel, who had learned their trade under Eicke. Continuity was the watchword in the individual camps, too, at least inside the Commandant Staffs, where key positions, from senior officers down to block leaders, were largely held by Camp SS veterans. Most of the eleven men promoted by Glücks to camp commandant between 1939 and 1942, for example, had previously held senior KL positions, and they, too, had internalized Eicke’s values.17 Take Martin Weiss, appointed in April 1940 as commandant of the new SS camp Neuengamme. Weiss was a first-generation member of the Camp SS, having started his career in April 1933, aged twenty-seven, as a sentry in Dachau. He later moved to the Commandant Staff, and by 1938 had risen to adjutant. An electrical engineer, Weiss was better educated than most of his comrades, but like them, he had frequented radical nationalist circles in the Weimar years and had been active early on in the nascent Nazi movement. Weiss was part of the new breed of technocrats of terror, graduates of Eicke’s school who came to the fore during the Second World War. Above all else, Weiss saw himself as a professional: just as other people became army or police officers, he had become a camp commandant, and he was so proud that he used his job title even on his private notepaper.18 In the daily running of their KL, commandants like Weiss needed little prompting from above. Inspector Glücks was not looking for administrators but for men of action who knew the rules of the game, and he was generally happy to let them get on with it. According to Rudolf Höss, Glücks often dismissed questions from commandants: “You all know much better than me what’s going on.”19

  And yet, the early war-time commandants were never autonomous, despite their considerable might. Glücks and his IKL managers were in constant contact with individual camps, ruling on requests and issuing instructions about labor, punishment, transfers, promotions, discipline, and much else besides; the IKL also updated Eicke’s old camp regulations.20 Some commandants grumbled about “unrealistic” directives sent by Oranienburg pencil pushers.21 But although they could sidestep some central rules, local camp officials implemented most orders. They also sent a stream of statistics to the IKL, including daily updates on inmate numbers and categories, and monthly figures of fatalities and causes of prisoner deaths.22 Of course, the managers at the IKL gained no complete picture from this data, thanks not least to cover-ups by individual commandants. “What the camps really looked like,” Rudolf Höss cautioned, “could not be seen from the correspondence and the files.”23 But the IKL officials had more than reports to go on. They inspected camps and called local officials for regular meetings to Oranienburg, keeping up the informal contacts so important in the Camp SS.24 Overall, then, the IKL kept a watchful eye on its camps.

  Other agencies and individuals interfered with the concentration camps, too. The police continued to hold great sway; in charge of arrests and releases, it regulated the prisoner flow to and from the KL system, and involved itself in many internal matters.25 Other branches of the SS were shaping the camps as well, none more so than Oswald Pohl’s buoyant business and administration empire. Finally, some of the most critical choices were still made at the top of the Nazi state. The personal power of Heinrich Himmler grew enormously during the war; among all the pretenders to Hitler’s throne, it was Himmler who gained the most, outflanking more senior rivals. And despite his increasingly hectic schedule, he retained an intense interest in the KL, his own creation. Himmler continued to involve himself on all levels, from trivial minutiae to pivotal decisions, sometimes bypassing the police and the Inspectorate altogether.26 In fact, SS officials could barely keep him away; in 1940 alone, his itinerary included at least nine trips to KL and associated sites.27 The camps were still very much Himmler’s camps.

  Changing the Guards

  While there was much continuity at the top of the Camp SS, the situation was different further below. After the invasion of Poland, a large number of sentries, who had long trained for military duties, departed. In all, an estimated 6,500 to 7,000 Camp SS men joined the SS Death’s Head division in autumn 1939.28 The gaps were filled with new recruits, who were quickly trained and deployed, generally as sentries in the Guard Troop.29 Camp SS veterans passed on the basics. Shortly before he left to take up his military command, Theodor Eicke assembled SS men in charge of training in Sachsenhausen. They had to teach the novices to treat prisoners with absolute severity, Eicke ordered, as all foes and saboteurs had to be exterminated.30 SS publications reminded new recruits of their duties, too, rehashing the old story of guards performing a soldier’s job.31 The fictional parity with the combat troops was upheld in other ways, as Camp SS men were soon subsumed under the large umbrella of the Waffen SS (Armed SS), which included all the militarized sections of the SS.32

  The longer the war lasted, the more diverse the Camp SS became. This trend was set already in autumn 1939. The replacements arriving in the KL were far older than Eicke’s “bright-eyed” youngsters had been. Many were in their forties or fifties, judged unfit for frontline duties and drafted from the regular SS.33 The Buchenwald prisoner Walter Poller remembered most of these recruits as “elderly SS men with minor physical ailments.”34 It was not just their appearance that counteracted SS ideals. Many of the new men were markedly less enthusiastic than the prewar volunteers had been. And although some had previously received basic training as sentries, or had gained military experience during the First World War, they were frequently lambasted for their incompetence by Camp SS veterans.35 A few newcomers even committed the sin of showing a human face to prisoners. Having lived through the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, they had retained some sense of right and wrong, and were not cut out for the KL.36 In Dachau, for example, an older SS man on sentry duty confessed to prisoners that he was disgusted by his job and did not want to shoot at “helpless and desperate people.”37

  The new recruits were pushed hard to fall into line. Camp Inspector Glücks signed a thundering directive in early 1940, threatening anyone guilty of “sentimental humanitarianism” with severe consequences; newcomers had to handle all prisoners as “enemies of the state of the worst kind.”38 More reminders kept on coming.39 Such interventions probably had some effect, as did the passage of time; what had first seemed unbearable to some novices quickly became acceptable. Many new guards soaked up the spirit of the Camp SS and became inured to the violence, just as members of Nazi killing squads in occupied Europe found that their bloody task became easier over time.40 In a private letter soon after his arrival in Flossenbürg, one new recruit expressed his “pride” in protecting the German public from all the “bums and public enemies” inside the KL.41

  Camp commandants piled added pressure on their men, old and new. The most domineering figure in the early war years was the Buchenwald commandant Karl Otto Koch, as the following directives from autumn and winter 1939 demonstrate. Again and again, Koch blasted his men for being lazy, stupid, and useless. Prisoners were not worked hard enough, he ranted: building sites were dirty, output “pretty much zero,” and discipline “rotten.”42 It was no better inside the prisoner barracks, thanks to “indifferent” SS block leaders, who were practically “asleep.”43 His men showed no initiative, Koch railed, leaving everything to him. “It won’t be long,” he sneered in October 1939, “before I will have to make sure that everyone wipes their own asses.”44 Worst of all, some SS men colluded with inmates. Rather than punish or shoot prisoners who foraged for food in the camp’s no-go zone, guards had asked the prisoners to fetch some vegetables for them, too. “Truly a charming way,” Koch remarked acidly, “to fraternize and cooperate with criminals.”45

  Punishment was never far from Commandant Koch’s mind. His main targets were prisoners, of course.46 But the failings of SS men called for strict sanctions, too, like special drill exercises.47 Koch habitually spied on his men through SS confidants, and in late November 1939, he took the drastic step of grounding all block leaders for two weeks; even marri
ed SS men who lived outside the camp complex were forbidden to leave.48 The final punishment for miscreant SS men, Koch said more than once, would be their own detention in the KL: “He who gets involved with prisoners will be treated like a prisoner.”49 Other Camp SS officers made similar threats and occasionally followed through; in Sachsenhausen, an SS man was publicly whipped because he had been bribed (by prisoner relatives) to treat some inmates better.50

  Koch’s tirades infuriated many Buchenwald SS men. To them, Koch’s posing as a paragon of propriety must have smacked of grand hypocrisy, for the commandant was corrupt to the core. Not for him the small-scale scams of most SS men; as greedy as he was brutal, Koch had bigger ambitions. He had already demonstrated his ruthlessness after the 1938 pogrom, when he systematically robbed imprisoned Jews, and he became ever more brazen during the war, squirreling away tens of thousands of Reichsmark in secret bank accounts and hoarding gold ripped from the mouths of prisoners. He spent his loot on food and drink and on his mistresses in Weimar; he also bought himself a motorboat and extended his lavish villa. Koch lived like an SS king. His greatest extravagance was the massive indoor riding hall, complete with mirrors, which he had commissioned in February 1940 for himself and his wife, who often took her turns in the morning, accompanied by music from the camp orchestra. The prisoners paid for her pleasure with their lives; dozens had died during the breakneck construction of the riding hall, which stood near the prisoner canteen.

  Eventually, Koch’s crimes caught up with him. He had alienated too many SS men inside the camp and outside, including the regional higher SS and police leader, who ordered Koch’s arrest in late 1941 (he was succeeded as Buchenwald commandant by Hermann Pister, who had previously run the small SS special camp Hinzert). But Koch was not finished yet. As a key member of the Camp SS, and a protégé of Eicke’s, he still had powerful friends, and following an intervention from Himmler, Koch was swiftly released.51 On probation, he was sent in January 1942 to one of the new camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. Luckily for Koch, the camp system was expanding quickly during the war, affording him another opportunity for violence, theft, and abuse.52

  New Prisoners

  Adolf Hitler always saw the Second World War as a conflict fought on two fronts. On the battlefield, he believed, Germany waged a life-and-death struggle for survival. But there was another war going on, at the home front, where Germany had to face down its remaining internal enemies. Hitler had been obsessed with the home front ever since the defeat of 1918, which he (like many Germans) blamed on the collapse of civilian morale and the “stab in the back” by Jews, Communists, Social Democrats, criminals, and others.53 Lessons had been learned, Hitler swore in the Reichstag as he announced the attack on Poland: “A November 1918 will never be repeated in German history!” This was a rallying cry he would return to again and again during the Second World War.54

  Policing the home front was Himmler’s domain. His terror apparatus was consolidated on September 27, 1939, when the security police and the SD merged into the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), led by Heydrich. The RSHA became the center of Nazi repression. Over the coming years, all the most radical measures were coordinated in the RSHA, a new type of Nazi institution without limits and restraint, run by young, ambitious, and educated fanatics.55

  The police swung into action at the start of the war, pulling many more Germans into the KL. Using up-to-date databases of potential “enemies of the state,” Gestapo raids caught several thousand political suspects, mainly former activists from the KPD and SPD.56 Some were veterans of the prewar KL and now returned to the place they feared the most.57 The criminal police, meanwhile, wanted to use the cover of war to cleanse Germany of deviants. In autumn 1939, its targets included the “work-shy,” “Gypsies without fixed residence,” and “criminal psychopaths,” as well as homosexual men and female prostitutes.58 As a result, the number of social outsiders in concentration camps gradually increased once more; by the end of 1940, there were over thirteen thousand prisoners in preventive police custody, slightly more than two years earlier.59 German Jews were on the police radar, too. As early as September 7, 1939, the criminal police ordered that former Jewish camp inmates should be rearrested if they had made no real effort to leave the country—never mind the fact that escaping Germany was fast becoming impossible. Jews working “productively” were supposed to be exempt from imprisonment, as were elderly and ill Jews, at least for now.60

  This detention of German Jews, political opponents, and social outsiders could build on prewar practices. What was new, during the war, were mass arrests of foreign nationals. As Nazi Germany staked its claim on Europe—following the conquest of Poland in 1939, Denmark was occupied in April 1940, Holland and Belgium capitulated in May, and France and Norway followed in June—more and more people from abroad were dragged to the KL. At the beginning of the Third Reich, the camps had been conceived as weapons against Germans; a decade later, they threatened the people of Europe.

  Foreigners began to arrive in larger numbers in concentration camps from autumn 1939. Among the first were further Czech nationals. At the start of the war, the Nazi occupation authorities arrested hundreds of politicians and officials as “hostages” to deter resistance. But the Czech population was not cowed, resulting in large demonstrations at universities in Prague and elsewhere. The Nazi authorities quickly crushed these protests, apparently on Hitler’s orders, and forced more prisoners into the KL.61 The largest transport, with some 1,200 Czechs, arrived in November 1939 in Sachsenhausen. Among them was Jiri Volf, arrested with fellow students in his hall of residence, who later recalled the SS reception: “We were immediately beaten with truncheons, so that I lost four teeth.”62

  Other foreign political prisoners, such as those who had been on the side of the doomed Republic during the Spanish Civil War, fared even worse. Many left-wing veterans had fled Spain after Franco’s victory and sought refuge in France, together with their families. It was here, often fighting for the French army, that they fell into Nazi hands. Reinhard Heydrich ordered that they should normally be taken to the KL, with Mauthausen, the most punitive camp at the time, set as the main destination. The first prisoners arrived on August 6, 1940, and within a year, more than six thousand men had been taken to the camp. Some were Germans and Austrians who had fought in the international brigades, but the great majority of the “Red Spaniards,” as the Nazis called them, were Spanish.63

  Despite the arrests across Nazi-controlled Europe, the KL did not become truly international overnight; in all, foreign prisoners still made up a rather small group until summer 1941. There was just one exception—Polish prisoners. The Nazi invasion of Poland was accompanied by extreme violence, as we have seen. The German forces started as they meant to go on, and over the coming months a brutal occupation regime was set up, aimed at the destruction of the Polish nation, the plunder of its economic resources, and the enslavement of its people. One radical project was the ethnic cleansing of the western Polish territory, which was incorporated into the Reich; by the end of 1940, more than three hundred thousand Poles had been deported from here to the so-called General Government, the eastern part of Nazi-controlled Poland, under German civilian administration (headed by Hans Frank).64 At the same time, the occupation of Poland also radicalized Nazi anti-Jewish policy.65

  Terror was ever-present in German-controlled Poland. Mass arrests had been in the cards well before the invasion; in late August 1939, Reinhard Heydrich envisaged that his task forces would take some thirty thousand people to the KL, far more than the entire camp population at the time.66 The first Polish prisoners duly arrived in autumn 1939, among them resistance fighters and members of the intelligentsia, including 168 academics from Krakow University.67 But the number of prisoners from the newly occupied Polish territory initially remained much smaller than the SS had anticipated.

  Far more Poles were detained inside the old German borders in autumn 1939; above all, police leaders wanted to remove Poli
sh Jews, sanctioning the arrest of men who had often lived in Germany or Austria for decades.68 Police terror against Poles inside the German heartland expanded further during the following year, after the mass influx of civilian workers. The Nazi regime was determined to place most of the war’s burden on other shoulders and increasingly exploited foreign workers. In the early war years, most of them were Poles. Some came voluntarily, deceived by Nazi promises of a rosy life, while many more were dragged westward by force. Conditions were poor and discipline harsh, and the police were never far away. Prejudice and paranoia were ingrained in the minds of the policemen, who saw Polish foreign workers as potential thieves, saboteurs, and rapists. Infractions of the strict rules—written and unwritten—were severely punished, not least with transfer to the concentration camps.69

  Mass arrests in occupied Poland were stepped up, too, and in line with Himmler’s wishes, countless prisoner transports set off for the KL from spring 1940. Often, the Gestapo offered no more than a stereotypical phrase to justify their detention, such as: “Belongs to the Polish intelligentsia and harbors the spirit of resistance.” In Dachau alone, 13,337 Polish men arrived between March and December 1940, mostly from the incorporated Polish territories; among them were hundreds of Polish priests, after Dachau was designated as the central concentration camp for arrested clergymen.70

  In some of the older KL for men, the number of Polish prisoners soon began to rival that of German inmates.71 The Ravensbrück women’s camp was affected, too; in April 1940, more than seventy percent of all new arrivals were Polish. As they watched Ravensbrück fill up with even more Polish women over the coming months, other prisoners began to wonder whether Hitler had decided “to wipe out the Polish people altogether.”72