The priorities of the Camp SS become even clearer when looking at prisoners who did not work because they were too weak, because they had not yet been assigned a labor detail, or because of bad weather and job shortages. Since no ordinary prisoner (apart from the dying) was allowed to be idle, the Camp SS looked for other ways to occupy them. As before the war, some guards used pointless labor and abusive drills. But the SS also invented new forms of torment. In Sachsenhausen, it introduced so-called standing commandos for the unemployed and ill in autumn 1939, having already used “standing still” as a punishment before the war. Hundreds were crammed into barracks where they had to stand all day, with just a brief break at lunch. “We stood pressed together like sardines,” one former prisoner later wrote. For eight or nine hours, they were not allowed to move, talk, or sit; they could not even lean against the walls. Soon, every part of their bodies was aching. But any motion was out of the question: real or imagined infractions were swiftly punished by Kapos and SS.153
This was part of the wider escalation of Camp SS terror in the early war years, when deadly violence lurked all around. Among the spaces most closely associated with murder were the infirmaries and, above all, the bunker, which had long stood at the center of violence. But guards now killed almost everywhere, and crucially, they killed far more frequently. Previously, they had often stopped short of murder. Why was there no more holding back after the outbreak of the Second World War?
Executions
Shortly before midnight on September 7, 1939, a police car pulled onto the Sachsenhausen grounds. Inside, flanked by police officers and held in shackles, sat a muscular man with thick, curly hair. His name was Johann Heinen and he only had an hour left to live. Heinen, who looked younger than his thirty years, was a man who had known little good fortune in his short life. In the turbulent Weimar years, the trained metalworker had lost his job, and in the early Nazi years, he was locked away for his Communist sympathies. After his release, he had worked for the Junkers factory in Dessau, but shortly before the Second World War broke out, he was arrested once again, this time for refusing to dig a trench for German air defenses. His resistance proved fatal, as Nazi leaders decided to make an example of him. Having received the go-ahead from Hitler himself, Heinrich Himmler sent a telex to Heydrich in the early evening of September 7, 1939, ordering the immediate execution of the “Communist Heinen” in Sachsenhausen. The commandant alerted Camp Inspector Theodor Eicke, who was still in Oranienburg and rushed over. Heinen himself was informed of his fate after he arrived in the camp. He spent his last moments smoking feverishly and writing a farewell message to his wife: “Please be brave and think about our boy; you have to live for him. I think the hour is up soon. Please forgive that this letter is so rambling and incoherent. I think I am already dead.” Rudolf Höss, then the Sachsenhausen adjutant, led the prisoner to the industry yard, stepped back, and ordered three NCOs to open fire. Heinen collapsed immediately, but Höss stepped up anyway and shot him once more at close range. Afterward, the SS men walked to the officers’ mess. “Strangely, there was little conversation,” Höss recalled, “as everyone was caught up in his own thoughts.”154
The killing of Johann Heinen inaugurated a momentous new Nazi procedure. A few days earlier, on September 3, 1939, the day France and Britain declared war against Nazi Germany, Hitler had publicly announced that anyone undermining the home front would be “destroyed as an enemy of the nation.”155 He apparently reiterated this point privately to Himmler the same day, asking him to take any measures necessary to maintain security inside the Reich.156 Himmler quickly translated Hitler’s general wish into policy. In a typical case of working toward the Führer, to use a concept advanced by Ian Kershaw, he launched the regime’s execution program, with the KL as semiofficial execution sites for men (later also women) condemned without trial.157
The administrative basis for the new policy was laid in a directive by Reinhard Heydrich, on the same fateful September 3, 1939. Following their arrest of dangerous suspects, regional Gestapo staff were told, Heydrich’s office would decide on “the brutal liquidation of such elements”; it was understood that the victims would normally be killed in the nearest KL.158 But the new measure was not implemented as SS leaders had hoped. After four days, Heydrich sent an urgent telex to regional Gestapo officers, demanding that many more offenders be reported for execution. Just twelve hours later, Johann Heiden was shot in Sachsenhausen. However, Heydrich was still not satisfied. After two weeks, he cabled again, insisting that anyone guilty of dangerous acts—such as sabotage or Communist activities—had to be “mercilessly eradicated (that is, through execution).” Once more, Heydrich spoke openly to his subordinates. Only later, as Nazi murders mounted, did officials use camouflage language to cover their bloody tracks in internal documents.159
The SS executions of Johann Heinen and two other men in September 1939 alarmed officials in the Reich Ministry of Justice, who learned about the killings through headlines in the press like: “Saboteur shot dead: There is no place in the community for people like that.”160 Such lawless executions challenged the judiciary’s hold over capital punishment and Reich minister Gürtner pleaded with Hitler to change course, arguing that the regular court system was perfectly capable of dispensing punishment without SS interference (indeed, the number of judicial death sentences shot up during the war, already reaching 1,292 in 1941).161 But his intervention backfired. When the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, raised the issue on October 13, 1939, Hitler not only took responsibility for the earlier killings in the KL, he ordered the execution of two bank robbers who had been legally sentenced to ten years in a penitentiary, in a much-publicized trial.162 SS executions were here to stay, and as the war got bloodier, Hitler condemned dozens more Germans convicted of sex offenses, theft, fraud, and arson.163
Registered KL prisoners fell under the new execution policy, too. Once again, Sachsenhausen was the testing ground. The first victim was August Dickmann, a twenty-nine-year-old Jehovah’s Witness and veteran inmate, who had resisted Camp SS pressure to declare his willingness to serve in the army. After his case reached Nazi leaders, Himmler ordered his execution, with Hitler’s agreement. In the early evening of September 15, 1939, all prisoners assembled on the roll call square where the commandant announced the death sentence and then screamed at Dickmann: “Turn around, you swine.” An SS commando shot him in the back and Rudolf Höss delivered the coup de grâce. As the SS had intended, the other prisoners—among them Dickmann’s brother, who had to put the corpse into a coffin—were terrified. But Himmler also had an eye on wider deterrence and once more sanctioned reports in German papers and on radio.164
Himmler also condemned prisoners when he visited camps, as he did in Sachsenhausen on November 22, 1939. After inspecting the bunker that morning, he ordered the guards to murder one of the inmates, the Austrian teenager Heinrich Petz, to whom he had briefly spoken. Petz had been involved in several highly publicized killings during car robberies—the fourteen-year-old was not charged because he was underage—and had recently been dragged to Sachsenhausen. The local Camp SS acted straightaway. In the yard of the bunker, Petz was told to walk toward the fence and was shot as he did so. Since this was no legal killing, the SS draped the youth’s body over the barbed wire to “pretend that it had been a failed escape,” as one of the perpetrators later admitted.165
Early on, some Camp SS men grumbled that such prisoner executions were not worthy of them. But before long, killings on the orders of Himmler and the RSHA were routine, although Rudolf Höss exaggerated when he claimed that he had “lined up almost every day” with his Sachsenhausen firing squad.166 Still, KL executions became so frequent that detailed guidelines were issued, fixing the procedures in writing.167 Normally, prisoners were executed out of sight, often at the shooting range, the bunker, or the infirmary. In exceptional cases, when the SS wanted to teach the others a lesson, all inmates had to watch.168 The job of hangman—tra
ditionally regarded as a dishonorable profession—was often left to specially selected prisoners, who were rewarded with cigarettes, and sometimes coffee, alcohol, or food.169
Once the Nazi leadership had designated the KL as execution sites for individual men, it did not take long before the policy was extended. From 1940, the Camp SS executed groups of Germans and foreigners, sometimes killing dozens of victims together.170 At times, these executions were coordinated across several camps. The first such bloodbath was committed in November 1940, when more than two hundred Poles were murdered in Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, and Auschwitz, on the orders of Himmler and Heydrich. Some of the dead had been regular prisoners, others had arrived only for their execution. The exact reason for this killing spree remains unclear, though it was clearly connected to Nazi occupation policy in Poland, which was shifting from open to more covert executions of opponents.171 Among the victims was the distinguished doctor Józef Marczyński, who had been deputy director of the Warsaw municipal hospitals. After the German invasion, he had joined the resistance and was arrested during a Gestapo action against the Polish intelligentsia. In May 1940, he was transported from Pawiak prison in Warsaw to Sachsenhausen. Six months later, on the morning of November 9, he was led out of his barrack, together with thirty-two other Poles who had arrived via Pawiak. Apparently, the men expected to be released. Instead, the SS wrote the inmate numbers on their foreheads, for easy identification of the corpses, and drove them to the nearby industry yard; after they had undressed, they were all shot. In the evening, the other Polish prisoners in Sachsenhausen held an impromptu memorial with prayers and hymns, singing quietly to avoid detection.172
Mass executions of Poles in the KL continued over the following months and years.173 Some inmates were executed as “hostages” for supposed crimes by Polish civilians.174 Others were already doomed when they arrived, sentenced to death by police summary courts. Operating in occupied Poland since 1939, these were courts in name only; they were really police tribunals beyond the law, handing out death sentences at every turn.175 The summary courts worked closely with the Camp SS, particularly in Auschwitz, where proceedings eventually moved inside the camp itself, so that the SS could execute the defendants straight after the farcical trials.176
Camp SS Killers
The execution policy had a profound impact on the local Camp SS. As state-ordered executions mounted, SS men on the ground felt emboldened to dispense their own brand of justice. Their moral compass was already defective, and once Nazi leaders had set the precedent of lawless executions, an upsurge in murderous initiatives by local Camp SS men was almost inevitable. Such unauthorized killings remained officially prohibited, to be sure, as SS leaders sought to keep a grip on the camps.177 But it was impossible to draw a line between “right” and “wrong” murders.
Some commandants led from the front, none more so than the indomitable Karl Otto Koch in Buchenwald, who oversaw a first unauthorized mass execution in autumn 1939. The background was the unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life on November 8, when a bomb planted by a lone resister detonated in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. It killed seven spectators on the spot, but Hitler escaped unharmed, boosting the belief in his divine mission (the would-be assassin, Georg Elser, was murdered in Dachau in 1945).178 Hitler was riding a wave of popularity at the time and many Germans were appalled by the attempt on his life.179 Few were more determined to exact revenge than the men in the Camp SS, who launched brutal attacks on imprisoned Jews. The claim that Jews were behind the attack—too far-fetched even for Nazi propaganda—was enough for obsessive anti-Semites to justify vicious assaults, exactly one year after the 1938 pogrom. In Sachsenhausen, SS men tormented Jewish men during the night of November 9 while Jewish women in Ravensbrück were locked into their barrack for a month, at the mercy of a particularly abusive female guard. “Our hearts raced as soon as she appeared,” one prisoner testified later.180
All this was overshadowed by events in Buchenwald, where so many Jews had already suffered before the war. On the morning of November 9, 1939, all prisoners assembled as normal for roll call. But it soon became clear that this was no normal day, for the SS forced the men back into their barracks. Then the Jews were ordered to return. Among them, the SS picked out a group of German and Austrian men, mostly in their twenties and thirties. The others went back inside, where they were isolated for days in complete darkness, without food and drink. Meanwhile, the selected men walked to the camp gate, where they waited anxiously while the SS guards—some still drunk from the previous night—commemorated the anniversary of the 1923 Nazi uprising. After a small parade, the SS returned and lost no more time. On orders of Commandant Koch, the twenty-one Jews were marched from the gate toward the quarry. When they reached flat terrain, SS men drew their weapons and shot the prisoners from behind; anyone who tried to run was quickly hunted down.181
This massacre was unparalleled. Never before had the local Camp SS murdered as many prisoners in broad daylight, and without any instructions from above. Perhaps the fanatical Koch felt entitled to act because his camp compound leader Rödl had been slightly wounded in the Bürgerbräukeller blast. Whatever Koch’s motives, he had no problems finding willing executioners among his Buchenwald men.182 And although his SS superiors were suspicious about the cover story he had concocted—that the Jewish prisoners were shot during a mass escape—an internal investigation came to nothing. Koch got away with murder.183
Commandant Koch, already drunk with power, soon became fully intoxicated, selecting more and more prisoners for execution. Among his victims were dozens of new arrivals who somehow caught his roving eye. One was killed simply because Koch had met him before in other KL. “Now this bird won’t follow me around anymore,” Koch joked. Others were murdered for disciplinary offenses or because they knew too much about SS corruption. The condemned men were taken to the Buchenwald bunker, run by Oberscharführer Martin Sommer. It is easy to see why Sommer became the unofficial camp executioner. A longtime Nazi activist (he had joined the NSDAP in 1931, when he was just sixteen years old), Sommer was a man of exceptional cruelty. He dispensed the official punishments like whipping, and took part in other outrages, starving and choking prisoners, sexually abusing them, and crushing their skulls; on some days, he later admitted, he had dished out more than two thousand beatings in the bunker. Although Sommer was not the only Camp SS man to graduate with ease from torture to murder, his cold-bloodedness was remarkable even among the SS; after his deadly deeds, he sometimes slept in his office, with the prisoner’s corpse stowed under his bed.184
Among Sommer’s victims were some well-known prisoners. Perhaps the most prominent was Ernst Heilmann, the former Prussian SPD leader. Just as he had foreseen, his suffering came to a terrible end soon after the outbreak of the war. On March 31, 1940, after almost seven years inside the camps, Heilmann was called to the Buchenwald bunker, where he was murdered a few days later. Some of Heilmann’s comrades suspected that he had been denounced by a fellow prisoner for some infraction and avenged his death by murdering the alleged traitor. The climate of the camp was becoming more severe among the prisoners, too.185
The lethal atmosphere, with all the official and unofficial executions, was highly contagious for the local Camp SS. From 1940, more and more SS men turned murderers. Take an officer like Rudolf Höss. Having participated in sanctioned executions in Sachsenhausen from September 1939, he soon initiated his own killings. On January 18, 1940, a freezing winter day, Höss ordered the prisoners from the “standing commandos”—more than eight hundred of them—to assemble outside. An icy wind was blowing over the roll call square, and after several hours, the camp elder Harry Naujoks asked Höss for mercy. In his autobiography, Naujoks describes how he had used the expected military address: “Camp Leader, request permission to dismiss [prisoners].” When Höss did not respond, Naujoks tried again, more urgently: “Camp Leader, the people are finished.” Höss replied: “They are not people but prisoners.” Whe
n he finally called off the action, later in the day, the shivering prisoners huddled around stoves in the barracks. Others were carried to the infirmary. Left behind on the snow-covered square were the corpses of the dead, with many more weakened prisoners dying over the next few days.186 The Camp SS had long regarded invalids as a nuisance, but Höss went much further than he would have dared before the war. And he was not an outlier. Elsewhere, too, SS men began to systematically kill selected ill inmates, using lethal injections and other methods, at a time when casual murders in the concentration camps escalated.187
The Sachsenhausen Death Squad
It was during the early months of the Second World War that Gustav Sorge, the twenty-eight-year-old deputy report leader in Sachsenhausen, became a mass murderer. Sorge had killed before, shooting his first inmate soon after joining the Camp SS in Esterwegen in late 1934. His education in the school of violence had continued over the coming years, but only during the war did he turn to mass killing. Unlike some of his fellow SS guards, Sorge had been no underachiever; he had done well in school and trained as a metalworker. Like a disproportionate number of Nazi killers, he had grown up as an ethnic German abroad after his Silesian hometown fell to Poland after the First World War. He was infused with radical German nationalism in his early teens and finally left for Germany in 1930, where he was further embittered by his unemployment. Sorge threw himself into the Nazi cause, joining the NSDAP and SA in 1931, aged nineteen, and the SS in the following year. Although he did not appear brawny, with a puny physique and high voice, he became a feared bruiser in the street brawls of the dying days of the Weimar Republic. It was during one such fight against Communists that he gained the nickname “Iron Gustav” (after a German celebrity of the time), which he later carried as a badge of honor in the KL.188
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