KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Extending the KL System

  Heinrich Himmler had never expected his camp system to stay still. Speaking candidly in November 1938, he told the top brass of the SS that during a war “we won’t be able to make do” with the existing concentration camps. He was worried about another so-called stab in the back, no doubt, and his prescription was clear: more people would be arrested, more space would be required.73 Himmler’s vision soon came true, though even he did not foresee what would become of his terror apparatus—a sprawling, squalid maze of hundreds of camps.

  This apocalyptic final stage was still some years off. Nonetheless, the wide-ranging arrests after the outbreak of war quickly led to overcrowding; by late 1939, the KL population had already risen to around thirty thousand prisoners, and SS leaders cast around for more camps.74 It was around this time that Heinrich Himmler ordered a survey of provisional prisoner camps set up since the start of the war. Primarily, he wanted to stop regional Nazi officials from running their own private camps, as they had done in 1933. “Concentration camps can only be established with my authorization,” he insisted in December 1939. But Himmler was also thinking about adding one of these provisional sites to his official KL portfolio.75

  Several of his lieutenants, including Camp Inspector Glücks, championed a new KL “for the East,” to hold down the Polish population.76 After much deliberation, the SS settled on a site in the provincial Polish border town Oświęcim, southeast of Katowice (Kattowitz). Oświęcim, part of the Habsburg Empire until 1918, had been occupied in the first days of the Second World War, and incorporated into the German Reich in late October 1939, together with the rest of east Upper Silesia. Even before then, the occupiers had taken the symbolic step of renaming the town, reverting to its old German name—Auschwitz.77

  The origins of the Auschwitz camp go back to the First World War, when a temporary settlement for seasonal workers en route to Germany had been set up just outside the town. Most of the grounds, containing brick houses and wooden barracks, were later used by the Polish army, before being taken over by the Wehrmacht in September 1939 as a POW camp. But it was quickly closed down again and by the end of the year the site was almost empty, if only for a short time.78 In the early months of 1940, SS experts repeatedly inspected the location, weighing up the pros and cons of its use as a KL. In their eyes, it was not perfect; the buildings were run down and the groundwater of poor quality. Worst of all, two rivers, the Soła and Vistula, met nearby, creating a flood-risk area infested with insects. At the same time, the SS noted several advantages. The site was already established, lay close to a railway hub, and could easily be shielded from prying eyes. In the end, these arguments won the day, and in April 1940, work on the grounds began.79 Faced with new demands in wartime, the Camp SS was willing to improvise; contrary to its recent policy of purpose-building new camps, it returned to the old practice of converting existing structures.

  Auschwitz officially operated from June 14, 1940, when the first mass transport of Polish inmates arrived: 728 men from Tarnów prison near Krakow, across the border in the General Government. Most of them were young men, including students and soldiers, accused of a wide range of anti-German activities.80 On arrival, they were assaulted by SS men and by some of the thirty German Kapos who had come from Sachsenhausen more than three weeks earlier. Soon, the shirts and jackets of the Polish prisoners were covered in sweat and blood. One of them was twenty-one-year-old Wiesław Kielar, who received inmate number 290. Once he and his fellow prisoners had lined up on the roll call square, they were addressed by the new camp compound leader, Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, previously stationed at Dachau and one of around 120 SS men in Auschwitz, who told them that this was not a sanatorium but a German concentration camp. “We were soon to experience,” Kielar wrote later, “what that meant, a concentration camp!”81

  The Auschwitz commandant was another old hand of the Camp SS. Rudolf Höss was officially appointed (by Himmler) on May 4, 1940, having just returned from an inspection of the site. As commandant, the tireless Höss was eager to apply what he had learned in Dachau and Sachsenhausen. For over a million prisoners, Auschwitz was death. For Höss, it was his life. When he arrived, he envisaged a new model camp, with himself at the helm. But the dilapidated place he took over was far removed from his dreams. There was not enough wood or bricks during the initial construction, and Höss could not even put up a fence around his camp: “So I had to steal the urgently needed pieces of barbed wire.”82

  Auschwitz remained a wasteland, as even the SS acknowledged, though this did not stop its rapid expansion into one of the largest KL.83 At the end of 1940, just half a year after it opened, nearly 7,900 prisoners had been transported to Auschwitz, where they were held in one-story and two-story brick buildings on the former army barrack grounds.84 Many more arrived over the following year, as the grounds were extended. By early 1942, Auschwitz had become the largest concentration camp of all (except for Mauthausen), with nearly twelve thousand men locked up inside. More than three-quarters of these men were Poles, as the camp’s main purpose remained the battle against the conquered population.85 Today Auschwitz is synonymous with the Holocaust, but it was built to impose German rule over Poland.86

  In addition to Auschwitz, the SS established four other KL for men between spring 1940 and late summer 1941.87 The first was Neuengamme, close to Hamburg. Previously a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen, it was now turned into a main camp, a few months after an inspection by Himmler in January 1940. The SS transferred more prisoners from Sachsenhausen, who had to build the new main camp, working for up to sixteen hours a day in frost and rain. One inmate recalled that, early on, the ground had been completely frozen: “We had to dig the foundation for the barracks. The pickaxes were heavier than we were.” On June 4, 1940, survivors and recent arrivals were finally relocated to the new compound, which was far from ready; around eight hundred prisoners were crammed into three half-finished barracks. Nonetheless, the camp grew quickly; at the end of 1941, Neuengamme held 4,500 to 4,800 prisoners.88

  Gross-Rosen, another of the new main camps, had started out as a satellite camp, too. Situated in Lower Silesia, on a hill near the town of Striegau, it had operated as an outpost of Sachsenhausen since early August 1940, when the first prisoners were taken to two provisional barracks surrounded by a fence. Himmler himself visited in late October 1940, and in the following spring, on May 1, 1941, Gross-Rosen was designated as a main camp. At first, it remained rather small, however, as there were no funds for its enlargement, and by October 1, 1941, no more than 1,185 prisoners were held inside.89 Its moment as a place of mass detention and death was still to come.

  At the same time as Gross-Rosen, another main camp was founded—Natzweiler, in idyllic surroundings on a steep hill in the Vosges Mountains in Alsace. It also started out as a small camp, with the first three hundred prisoners arriving toward the end of May 1941. As in the other new camps, the SS was forced to improvise during the construction phase. At the outset, inmates were held on a temporary site, while the SS administration was housed in a hotel in the nearby village of Struthof.90 And just as in Gross-Rosen, the camp grew more slowly than the SS had anticipated; the initial target figure of 2,500 prisoners was only approached at the end of 1943.91

  The final new SS concentration camp, located near Paderborn in Westphalia, was Himmler’s private folly. Devoted to mysticism, he wanted to create a spiritual home for the SS. He selected the renaissance castle Wewelsburg in Niederhagen, and from 1934 turned it into an enormous SS shrine. In May 1939, during a time of severe labor shortages in Germany, Himmler drafted KL prisoners to help with his pet project. Initially, they were held in a small labor camp on a hill opposite the castle, run as a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen, but on September 1, 1941, Himmler turned it into a main camp, called Niederhagen. On paper, it was a regular SS concentration camp. Given its specific focus, however, it remained the smallest of all the main camps, holding no more than around six hundred
prisoners in early 1942. And yet, it was no less lethal than other KL. Some prisoners died in quarries, others during the construction of the “crypt” (presumably designed for worshipping SS leaders) under the northern tower of the castle. In the end, Himmler’s eerie plan was never fully realized. In early 1943, as Germany diverted more and more resources to total war, even he could not justify the project anymore. The surviving prisoners were transferred elsewhere and the main camp closed down on April 30, 1943; in all, Niederhagen had existed for less than two years.92

  Despite its hurried expansion during the early war years, the KL system did not fragment. Before long, life inside the new camps largely resembled life in the old ones. There were structural reasons for this: all camps received orders and directives from the IKL and RSHA. And there were personal links, too. In all the five new camps, the first Kapos had arrived from Sachsenhausen, the springboard for the expansion of the KL system, and they quickly fitted into the routines they knew so well.93 Many of their SS masters, too, had breathed the air of the camps for years. Among the new commandants were ambitious young officers like Höss. SS leaders also gave another chance to veterans judged to have failed elsewhere, as in the case of Karl Koch. Another beneficiary was the first Gross-Rosen commandant, Arthur Rödl, who had previously held senior positions in Lichtenburg, Sachsenburg, and Buchenwald. Wherever he went, Rödl had offended his superiors; he was incompetent and barely literate, they complained, and had been promoted way above his station. Even Theodor Eicke regarded him as an embarrassment, but had been unable to get rid of him; as a highly decorated stalwart of the Nazi movement who had participated in the 1923 putsch, Rödl could count on Himmler’s protection. His promotion to Gross-Rosen commandant in 1941 would be his final opportunity to prove his worth in the Camp SS.94

  The new camps contributed to the spread of wartime terror. As we have seen, Auschwitz was designed to combat dissent and opposition among the Polish population. And three of the other new KL—Neuengamme, Gross-Rosen, and Natzweiler—had a political function, too. All three were located close to the German border and helped to subjugate occupied peoples. Neuengamme was situated near Denmark and Holland and grew into the most important camp in northwestern Germany; Natzweiler lay in territory recently annexed from France; Gross-Rosen lay in eastern Germany, between incorporated Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and already at the beginning some forty percent of its prisoners were Polish and Czech.95 And yet, the early wartime expansion of the KL system was not about terror alone. It was also about forced labor, with SS economic ambitions growing fast as the German army went from strength to strength.

  Bricks and Stones

  Following the crushing victory over France, Adolf Hitler fulfilled an old dream: he embarked on a brief tour of the country he had fought against more than two decades earlier, returning as the avenger of the traumatic German defeat of 1918. The highlight of his trip came on the morning of June 28, 1940, when his Mercedes motorcade entered Paris. The French capital glowed in the early summer sun as Hitler surveyed his new possessions, ticking off the tourist itinerary. He played the guide during his tour, impressing his entourage with details about history, art, and architecture he had gleaned from books. One of the sycophantic hangers-on was Albert Speer, who had been invited to share in his mentor’s triumph.

  Returning to his temporary headquarters that night, a euphoric Hitler ordered Speer to intensify the monumental plans for rebuilding Berlin and the other so-called Führer Cities (Hamburg, Linz, Munich, and Nuremberg), which had been put on hold after the war broke out. Hitler called it the “most important building project of the Reich,” lasting a full ten years. But why restrict himself to just a few cities? Germany would dominate Europe for centuries, Hitler believed, and needed to show a proud face to the world. By early 1941, he had designated more than twenty German cities to be remodeled, fantasizing about new streets and squares, theaters and towers.96

  The SS was just as eager as Speer to make Hitler’s wishes come true, and its cooperation with Speer’s office, inaugurated before the war, became closer than ever. Speer needed building materials, and the SS pledged to deliver through its company DESt. Speer was more than happy to bankroll it, and by mid-1941 he had made at least twelve million Reichsmark available to DESt, which grew into a midsize company.97 The main burden of the work would be borne by KL inmates. In September 1940, in a speech to SS officers, Himmler stressed that it was essential for prisoners to “break stones and burn stones” for the Führer’s great buildings.98

  The entire SS economy was expanding, not just DESt, and the early years of the war saw its greatest period of growth.99 It was still overseen by Oswald Pohl, who promoted several skilled managers to the top, more determined than ever to turn his ramshackle outfit into a professional operation.100 Not all the businesses relied on forced labor, at least not early on. Still, the exploitation of prisoners was the backbone of the SS economy, and because private industry was not yet showing any real interest, the SS had a more or less free hand over its inmates.101

  Forced prisoner labor bolstered the growth of the German Equipment Works (DAW), an SS enterprise that incorporated many of the camp workshops and produced a range of goods, from bread to furniture. Set up in May 1939, DAW came into its own during the war. By summer 1940, the workshops in Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald had been swallowed up, and by early 1941, some 1,220 prisoners worked for DAW in these three camps; numbers were set to rise sharply over the next years, as DAW expanded into the largest of all SS-run companies.102 Another major SS operation was the grandly titled German Experimental Institution for Nutrition and Provision (DVA). Founded in January 1939, it grew quickly during the war, too, spearheaded by the gardening and herb cultivation on the Dachau plantation, which became one of the largest work details inside the camp; in May 1940, some one thousand Dachau prisoners toiled here every day.103 The SS authorities had even bigger plans for agricultural production in Auschwitz (largely independent from DVA), keenly watched by Heinrich Himmler, who expected major breakthroughs for the German settlement of the east.104

  Himmler’s attention was soon diverted by an even more ambitious project in Auschwitz, a pioneering collaboration between the SS and private industry. In early 1941, the chemical giant IG Farben decided to build a vast factory by the Polish village of Dwory, a couple of miles from Auschwitz town. The company was primarily attracted by nearby natural resources and good transport links, though it also welcomed the availability of forced laborers from the local KL (at a rate of three or four Reichsmark per prisoner per day). Himmler jumped at the chance of cooperating with industry, hoping to advance the economic standing and expertise of the SS. After his first visit to Auschwitz on March 1, 1941, accompanied by Richard Glücks, he ordered the extension of the main camp, partly to provide more workers for IG Farben. Soon after, in mid-April of 1941, the first prisoner commando commenced work on the new IG Farben construction site, helping to erect the foundations for a vast factory complex aimed at the production of synthetic fuel and rubber. By early August 1941, more than eight hundred Auschwitz prisoners worked on the site, under terrible conditions, with numbers rising further in the autumn.105

  Enthusiastic as Himmler was about the budding chemical plant in Auschwitz, his main focus in the early war years was still on bricks and stones. In 1940, some six to seven thousand KL prisoners worked in six different DESt businesses daily; demonstrating his priorities, Himmler personally inspected all six sites in 1940–41.106 Building materials had been very much on the mind of Himmler and his SS managers as they established their new concentration camps. Neuengamme was all about bricks from the start. It had been set up as a satellite camp in December 1938 on the grounds of a disused brick factory, recently purchased by DESt, though the work did not really get off the ground before the war. Production was pushed ahead when Neuengamme became a main camp, and gained further momentum after the German victory over France; bricks were needed urgently, especially for
buildings in nearby Hamburg.107

  In Gross-Rosen and Natzweiler, the eyes of SS officers were drawn to granite, not brick. In Gross-Rosen, it was black-and-white granite that attracted their attention; DESt bought the quarrying works in May 1940, and the later decision to make Gross-Rosen a main camp was partially influenced by the expectation that this would increase output. In Natzweiler, too, the exploitation of KL prisoners in quarrying was part of SS plans from early on. The DESt work there was established after Himmler inspected the local quarry on September 6, 1940; apparently, Albert Speer had spotted some rare red granite that was perfect for the new German Stadium in Nuremberg.108

  Existing concentration camps were also affected by the SS building boom, with extra workshops, machines, and prisoners boosting DESt production. On Speer’s initiative, stone-processing works were set up from late summer 1940 in Oranienburg. Nearby, other prisoners from Sachsenhausen were still rebuilding the failed Oranienburg brick works. Himmler kept a close watch on progress, just as he did elsewhere; having promised massive deliveries of bricks to Speer, he inspected the troubled Oranienburg factory twice in 1940–41. In Flossenbürg, meanwhile, the SS developed an additional quarry from April 1941, following the example of Mauthausen. Here, quarrying had expanded for some time, especially after the creation of a new subcamp in Gusen, a couple of miles west of Mauthausen (officially operational from May 25, 1940). As a result, Mauthausen remained the largest of all the SS granite works, deploying an average of almost 3,600 prisoners across its three main quarries in July 1940.109

  The SS looked to prisoners to boost its output and DESt managers even championed the training of KL inmates as stonemasons. Following a meeting with commandants in Oranienburg on September 6, 1940, it was announced that the participating prisoners would be offered privileges such as money, fruit, and separate quarters. In addition, prisoners were to be lured by the prospect of freedom; if they did well, they had the “best prospects” of being freed before long.110 But these were empty promises. In practice, most bonuses were limited to cigarettes and extra rations. Moreover, hardly any prisoners benefited; by early 1941, fewer than six hundred inmates were training as stonemasons in the different KL.111 Nonetheless, the SS initiative was a sign of things to come. True, this was not the first time the Camp SS had offered rewards. But in the past such benefits were largely restricted to Kapos responsible for order and discipline. During the war, in recognition of the growing importance of forced labor, the SS was prepared to extend preferential treatment to some productive prisoners.