KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  The overall balance sheet of the SS economy in the early war years was mixed. State subsidies and cash infusions by Speer were always welcome, and the SS also gained from corporate scams.112 Turning more closely to the flagship company DESt, its quarries, heavily reliant on manual work, proved profitable. Above all, DESt benefited from the extremely cheap labor, since SS businesses paid the state no more than a nominal 0.30 Reichsmark per prisoner per day. It was cut-rate forced labor that made the SS quarries lucrative.113 Despite this competitive edge, other DESt enterprises filed losses. In particular, the SS continued to struggle with more complex technologies, with the calamitous brick works in Oranienburg posting bigger losses than ever.114

  Looking at Germany as a whole, the early wartime SS ventures remained insignificant. To be sure, they provided some materials for Hitler’s megalomaniac building plans. But DESt, like the whole SS economy, never delivered what it promised: production lagged behind targets, prisoners achieved only a fraction of the output of free laborers, and the quality of the stones remained inferior.115 By the summer of 1941, the SS was no closer to being a significant economic player than it was at the start of the war. While the economic turn of the SS had a negligible effect on the German economy, its impact on life behind barbed wire was dramatic, bringing more death and destruction than ever to KL construction sites and quarries.

  ROAD TO PERDITION

  “[If] I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image,” Primo Levi wrote in his memoir of Auschwitz, “I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be seen.” Such prisoners were still moving, but they were no longer alive, Levi added, “the divine spark dead within them.” Before long “nothing will remain of them but a handful of ashes in some nearby field.” Levi called these doomed prisoners, who died without anyone remembering them, the “drowned.”116 In the wartime KL, such men and women had been known by other names, such as “cripple,” “derelict,” or, with heavy sarcasm, “jewel.” Most common of all was a term used in Auschwitz and several other concentration camps—Muselmänner (sometimes Muselweiber for women).117

  The Muselmänner (Muslims) were the living dead. Exhausted, apathetic, and starved, they had lost everything. Their bodies were no more than bones and dry skin covered in sores and scabs. They could barely walk, think, or talk, and stared ahead with a hollow, blank gaze. Other prisoners dreaded them as a harbinger of their own fate, for it did not take much—a cold, a beating, a sore foot—to set a prisoner on the road to perdition. The yearning for food, which still animated the Muselmann early on, was the last sign of life to be extinguished. Some died while eating, their fingers gripping a last piece of bread.118 Life had lost its meaning for the Muselmann, and so did the camp’s survival strategies. Exercise, washing, mending, barter, and keeping a low profile—none of this was possible anymore. How could he follow orders he no longer heard? How could he obey rules he no longer understood? How could he march when his feet no longer supported him?

  In the years after liberation, the Muselmann has come to embody the horror of Nazi concentration camps, a harrowing and heartbreaking figure closely associated with the Holocaust and the final stages of the KL system.119 However, the doomed prisoners had actually appeared much earlier. From autumn 1939, conditions in the camps deteriorated to such an extent that thousands of prisoners joined the ranks of the dying. It was the early wartime period that gave birth to the Muselmann.

  Hunger and Disease

  The last thing new prisoners expected to see in concentration camps, after the brutal SS “welcome,” was flower beds. But during spring and summer, blooming flowers and well-tended lawns were everywhere, outside the barracks, around SS buildings, and alongside the main paths. In the early war years, the Camp SS still insisted on decorum and order, cladding the camps in a thin veneer of normality, both for themselves and for visitors. “Sometimes when I was thinking about the loving care the Gestapo henchmen lavished on these flower beds,” a prisoner who had come to Sachsenhausen in autumn 1939 recalled, “I thought I was going to go mad over it.”120

  The contrast between the blossoms outside the barracks and the misery inside could hardly have been greater. Once prisoners entered, they were often overwhelmed by a stench of dirty and diseased bodies crammed together.121 Although the SS continued to insist on barracks being cleaned, as part of the abusive drill that passed for education, this did little to overcome the often dreadful conditions.

  Overcrowding was a massive problem early in the war. Buchenwald grew the quickest. In just four weeks, it virtually doubled in size, from 5,397 (September 1, 1939) to 10,046 prisoners (October 2, 1939).122 The inmate population in Sachsenhausen, too, nearly doubled before the year was out.123 All aspects of life were affected. Uniforms, soap, bedding, and more were in short supply. Barracks were packed, exceeding their already unviable maximum capacity by two or three times. Only later in 1940 did conditions in Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen ease, after their prisoner populations declined; in Buchenwald, the peak of 12,775 prisoners (October 31, 1939) was not passed again until spring 1943.124 Now it was other KL that absorbed the general rise in inmate numbers: the reopened camp at Dachau, the extended camp at Mauthausen, and new camps such as Auschwitz. These camps, too, were soon crowded, forcing more and more prisoners to fight over space to sleep, wash, and dress.

  The prisoners also faced starvation, as soups became thinner and bread portions smaller. While some shortages were caused by growing pressures on resources during war, the SS deliberately aggravated the situation. On September 1, 1939, the Sachsenhausen SS marked the outbreak of war with cuts to inmate rations, perhaps on orders from above; war meant sacrifice, and prisoners should be the first to suffer. The same reasoning informed the official rations set centrally by the Nazi regime in January 1940. KL prisoners (and inmates in state prisons) were now entitled to much less meat, fat, and sugar than the general public, even though they often worked much harder.125 To make matters worse, the prisoners received less than their due, as SS men and Kapos continued to siphon off supplies. Often, only the worst food found its way onto the tin plates of ordinary prisoners. As it arrived, a former Sachsenhausen inmate later testified, “the smell of foul vegetables filled the room”; some prisoners gagged and threw up.126

  Hunger haunted the barracks. Many inmates could only think about food, and some even fantasized about cooking the dogs of SS men. Often, prisoners talked about lavish meals, seasoning and frying imaginary steaks; inmates kept notes on these elusive dishes, collecting books of delicious recipes. Even their nights were marred by hunger. As he was lying in his Flossenbürg barrack one night in late 1939, Alfred Hübsch (a prisoner temporarily transferred from Dachau) dreamed about the butcher shop in his hometown; it was filled with sausages and the butcher told him: “Have a good look around; I’ll give you all the ones you want.”127

  Prisoners supported themselves as best they could. There was a burgeoning black market, while those with nothing to trade scavenged scraps of rotten vegetables and kitchen waste, risking food poisoning and SS punishment. Inmates who took from camp supplies were in even greater peril; in Sachsenhausen, a young French prisoner was battered to death in 1941 by an SS block leader for taking two carrots from a sheep pen.128 More and more prisoners, including inmates known as good comrades, stole from one another. Bread thefts became so common that block elders obstructed or patrolled prisoner lockers, and threatened brutal punishment. But hunger was sometimes greater than the fear of getting caught.129

  Starvation was often the beginning of the end. Exhausted prisoners quickly fell behind at work, and SS men, in turn, punished them as work-shy, pushing them even closer to their graves. In Flossenbürg, all “lazy” prisoners had to stay away from the big pots of soup as other inmates ate their fill. Only when the others had finished were the starved allowed to approach. A horrified Alfred Hübsch watched as the desperate me
n fought over the scraps, seemingly numb to blows and kicks by Kapos: “They used their spoons to scour the pots and their fingers to scrape the last bits of food from the sides.”130

  Emaciated prisoners were also more susceptible to illnesses, which spread fast in the early war years. Many prisoners already arrived in a poor state from workhouses, jails, and forced labor camps, as the police had few qualms about dropping ailing prisoners at the camp gates; in Sachsenhausen, the transports included an eighty-year-old blind Serbian man who, though he could barely stand upright, was classified as a dangerous habitual criminal.131 Whether they arrived healthy or not, almost all nonprivileged prisoners fell ill. Extreme malnutrition, in particular, had dire consequences for prisoners’ skin, tissue, and inner organs; hunger edema grew rapidly, as did large ulcers.132 Frostbite and colds were common, too, often followed by pneumonia. Conditions were already critical in the bitter winter of 1939–40, which covered Germany for months in frost and ice. Some of the barracks had no heating at all. Where there were stoves, prisoners tried to steal—or “organize,” as it was called in the KL—more wood. Others stuffed blankets or paper bags under their uniforms. But no matter what they did, they could not escape the cold and dreaded each new day. The Camp SS, meanwhile, did little to help and much to harm, holding back or withdrawing warmer clothes.133

  Epidemics were rife, too, far more than before the war. Harmful contagious diseases such as scabies were widespread; in January 1941, at least one in eight prisoners in Sachsenhausen were afflicted.134 Filth and poor sanitation led to mass outbreaks of dysentery, which caused violent diarrhea and extreme dehydration. Many prisoners already suffered from hunger diarrhea and soiled themselves on a daily basis. Michał Ziółkowski, one of the first prisoners in Auschwitz, recalled that at night, sick prisoners who walked to the latrines defecated on others sleeping on the floor.135 Another constant threat was typhus, a typical disease of mass confinement; it spread through lice, and lice were ever-present in the concentration camps.136

  The main SS response to the growing misery in the KL was telling. Instead of pushing for improvements and allowing more than a fraction of ill inmates into infirmaries, the Camp SS created additional spaces to isolate the sick and dying in 1939–40.137 Individual barracks were reserved for prisoners with tuberculosis, open wounds, scabies, and other diseases. The inmates had their own names for these places: the dysentery barrack in Dachau was known as “shit block” and the block for invalids was called “cretin club.”138 Many healthier inmates—afraid of infection and deprived of sleep by the sick—welcomed this isolation. In fact, some of them had already taken similar measures on their own initiative, forcing sick comrades from shared dormitories into the freezing washrooms.139

  Conditions in the special areas for the sick were shocking even to veterans of the KL, who generally avoided going anywhere near them. The blocks, often empty except for beds or sacks of straw, were crowded with skeletal figures, whose long days and nights were occasionally interrupted by violent outbursts from Kapos. Worst of all was the gnawing hunger. It was no coincidence that the Sachsenhausen barracks for invalid prisoners, established around late 1939, were known as “hunger blocks.” Here, and in other spaces for the ill, the Camp SS cut back further on the small rations, hoping to speed up the process of “natural selection” among the sick.140

  Work and Death

  After setting eyes on the devil, Dante in his Divine Comedy finally leaves hell on the epic journey that will take him to the heights of paradise. First, though, he climbs through purgatory, where his guide, Virgil, soon draws his attention to an eerie procession of men, barely recognizable as human beings, bowed to the ground by heavy rocks. Even the one “who bore himself most patiently seemed, weeping, to say: ‘I can stand no more.’”141 The horrors conjured up in Dante’s medieval poem were a frequent reference point for KL prisoners (and even some SS men), and it was the infernal image of men carrying rocks that came to the minds of Buchenwald survivors, when they tried to explain the prisoners’ suffering in the quarries to their U.S. liberators. “Even the name of the stone quarry detail,” one of the survivors recalled, “was enough to fill the strongest men with the greatest fear.”142

  Prisoners everywhere dreaded the quarries.143 After the war, the Polish prisoner Antoni Gładysz still vividly remembered the day in 1941 when he was forced for the first time to climb down the precarious ladders into the Gross-Rosen excavation site. With three other prisoners, all wearing flimsy wooden shoes, he hauled heavy rocks through the grounds. “It was a dreadful day,” Gładysz recalled. “We injured our hands. We tried to support ourselves with our knees. We worked in a trance, almost unconscious, without thinking about the day’s end.”144 When the prisoners finally did march back to camp, they bore the signs of the quarry all over their bruised bodies.

  The Camp SS had long seen the quarries as particularly torturous, and the RSHA agreed. In 1940, with Himmler’s blessing, it divided the KL for men into three groups (mirroring the stages system for individual prisoners in early camps, which had been abandoned by Eicke). Each group of camps would hold different prisoner types, based on their “personality” and “threat to the state.” Men judged “definitely reformable” would be taken to camps in stage 1 such as Dachau and Sachsenhausen (which had no quarries). Camps in stage 2, like Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, and Neuengamme, were reserved for “more heavily damaged” men who were, however, still “reformable.” The lowest rung, stage 3, was to accommodate “heavily damaged” men, especially those who were “asocial and criminally recidivist” and therefore “barely reformable.” Initially, there was only one such camp—Mauthausen, which had the largest and most lethal quarry. A former Mauthausen guard later admitted that in practice, stage 3 meant that inmates were “not intended to leave the camp alive”; among the prisoners, the camp became known as Mordhausen.145

  On paper, the SS took the new classification scheme seriously.146 Its actual impact was limited, however. From the beginning, a camp’s grade was no true guide to conditions inside. In 1940, for example, more than twice as many prisoners lost their lives in Sachsenhausen (stage 1) than in Buchenwald (stage 2).147 Later on, the scheme lost all relevance: although Auschwitz was officially categorized as a stage 1 and 2 camp, it had by far the highest death rate of all KL.148 In the end, other factors—such as the colors of the inmates’ triangles—were far more decisive in determining their fate than the camp’s official classification.

  Still, the attempt to create a hierarchy among the camps gives an intriguing insight into the thinking of SS and police leaders in the early war years. In the first place, they evidently responded to the growth of the KL system by trying to differentiate more clearly between individual sites. More surprising, perhaps, was their continued emphasis on prisoner reform. This was not about propaganda, as the classification of camps was kept secret. Rather, the officials were deceiving themselves: they still wanted to believe that the camps had another function, beyond terror. In reality, this pedagogical mission was even more fanciful than before the war. Any new skills prisoners learned were about naked survival—how to endure lashes without losing count; how to make a small piece of bread last for days; how to conserve energy by pretending to work hard.

  Backbreaking physical labor characterized all KL in the early war years, whether they had quarries or not. Building work was most prominent, and threatened exhaustion, torture, and death. In new camps like Auschwitz, nearly all prisoners were forced into construction, erecting their own camp; they built the paths they walked on, the roll call squares they stood on, the barracks they slept in, and the fences separating them from the outside world.149 Construction work was not limited to the new camps, of course. There was hectic activity at the older ones, too, as prisoner numbers expanded. The Camp SS was forever building and rebuilding, with prisoners paying the price. Many of the around 1,800 inmates who died in Mauthausen between December 1939 and April 1940, for example, lost their lives during the constructi
on of the new Gusen subcamp. As a Gusen prisoner noted in a secret diary on March 9, 1940: “Nothing special. Here, the dead are no news, they appear daily.”150

  In Sachsenhausen, a daily average of two thousand men worked on the construction of the brick works in 1940, still the most feared detail in the camp. Many prisoners were forced to demolish the failed old factory, a massive task that claimed hundreds of lives. Other inmates were erecting a new subcamp in Oranienburg to cut out the daily march from the main compound (it opened in late April 1941). Yet more inmates worked at the few furnaces which now produced bricks. Finally, there were the nearby clay pits, dubbed “hell inside hell”; prisoners had to stand up to their knees in water and mud, and shovel clay onto carts. “In ancient times,” concluded the German political prisoner Arnold Weiss-Rüthel, “the slaves of the pharaohs erected the pyramids under much better conditions than Adolf Hitler’s slaves did the Oranienburg brick factory.”151

  While the economic ambitions of the SS shaped the general direction of forced labor, they did not make it any more efficient. Most local SS men still showed little interest in output. In their eyes, the camp remained, first and foremost, a battleground against enemies of the Nazi state. This was evident in all the petty rules designed to torment prisoners during work. In Gusen, for instance, inmates had to toil without gloves and coats in 1939–40, despite the bitter cold, and were barred from coming near the fires lit by SS and Kapos.152