KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  In the early war years, Gustav Sorge led a small band of Camp SS killers in Sachsenhausen, which acted as an informal death squad; an escaped prisoner, speaking to British agents, described Sorge as the “high priest” over life and death, “whose helpers and aides were constantly competing with each other in shameful and murderous deeds.” The group was largely made up of block leaders, the men who supervised prisoner barracks and labor details. As we have seen, only SS men committed to cruelty could make the grade as block leaders. The rest—judged by their superiors, like Sorge, as “too weak” and “too slack”—moved to less prominent posts or sentry duty; in early 1941, one Sachsenhausen block leader was even committed to a ward for mentally ill SS men because he was plagued by nightmares.189

  No single path led to the Sachsenhausen death squad. In all, there were perhaps a dozen men, mostly NCOs in their twenties. The youngest was Wilhelm Schubert, who had joined the Hitler Youth in 1931, aged fourteen. He volunteered for the Camp SS in 1936 in Lichtenburg, joined the Sachsenhausen Commandant Staff in spring 1938, and became a block leader the following summer, aged twenty-two. Mocked by his SS colleagues as immature and erratic, Schubert sought their acceptance by public displays of brutality. He was always quick to reach for his weapon, earning him the nickname “Pistol Schubert” among prisoners. True to form, when he was promoted to Oberscharführer in 1941, he celebrated by beating up prisoners at random and shooting at their barracks.190

  Perhaps the most feared member of the death squad was Richard Bugdalle, nicknamed “Brutalla” by prisoners. At twenty-nine years of age, he was slightly older than his colleagues when he became block leader in 1937. But, like them, he was a seasoned Nazi activist, having joined the SS in October 1931, and he was also a veteran of the KL. In Sachsenhausen, Bugdalle directed the notorious penal company. In contrast to Schubert, who became agitated when torturing inmates, the burly Bugdalle was calmness personified. His specialty was punching prisoners; a keen amateur boxer, he could kill with a few well-aimed punches in the ribs and stomach. “If a man had to be liquidated,” Gustav Sorge later testified, “Schubert and I always took Bugdalle with us.”191

  The men of the death squad sometimes acted on superior orders. But they also set themselves up as judge and executioner, condemning prisoners for any number of “crimes.” Several men were killed on arrival, after Sorge’s gang stepped up the long-established “welcome” procedures; others were hounded for weeks “with a view to slowly liquidate [them],” as Sorge confessed after the war.192 Some newcomers were murdered as suspected sex offenders or homosexuals.193 Prominent political prisoners and other opponents were targeted, too. After the Austrian state prosecutor Karl Tuppy—who had tried the Nazi murderers of the Austrian chancellor Dollfuss in 1934—arrived in Sachsenhausen on November 15, 1939, the SS went into overdrive. For about twenty minutes, Tuppy was battered in the political office. When the prisoner Rudolf Wunderlich was called in to drag the body away, he recoiled: “I had never seen anything like it. His face was gone. Just a piece of completely undefined meat, full of blood, cuts, the eyes completely swollen up.” He left Tuppy at the gate, where Sorge and Schubert took turns in beating him. He died later the same day.194

  The death squad pursued prisoners not just for who they were, but also for what they did in Sachsenhausen. Over a brief period in 1940, Sorge killed an inmate who did not greet him fast enough, one who had stumbled, and one who had left ink stains on a letter (the SS suspected a secret code). Anyone who challenged the SS—mostly new prisoners who did not know better—was in grave danger, too. When Lothar Erdmann, a distinguished former union official, arrived in autumn 1939, he was shocked by the violence. After he was beaten himself by Wilhelm Schubert, he dared to answer back: “What, you’re hitting me? I was a Prussian officer in the First World War and now have two sons at the front!” Erdmann was a marked man; mocked as “the officer,” he was battered for days, especially by Schubert and Sorge, until he could barely move. He died on September 18, 1939, around two weeks after his arrival in the camp.195

  Although the violence of Sachsenhausen guards built on prewar practices, their sustained campaigns of murder were greatly heightened by the war. The guards must have been encouraged by the introduction of a perfunctory SS court system in October 1939, which finally removed Camp SS men altogether from the grasp of the regular judiciary.196 Also, the dehumanization of prisoners by the spread of illness and starvation made it easier for the SS to treat its victims as “the scum of all scum,” as one Sachsenhausen block leader put it.197 Even more important was the escalating SS execution policy. The guards knew that their superiors pushed for the murder of individual prisoners, so why should they hold back?

  Finally, there was the general eruption of violence during wartime. Hitler’s genocidal rhetoric and the brutal reality of German warfare from autumn 1939 made clear that a new era had begun, and the guards were bound to participate. Prisoners speculated that success on the faraway battlefields brutalized the Camp SS; as the German army vanquished its enemies abroad, guards felt empowered to do the same on the “inner front.”198 This echoes the view of some historians that extermination policy in the Third Reich was radicalized by the Nazi leaders’ elation over apparent victories.199 But just as some SS men murdered because they felt that the Third Reich was untouchable, others got carried away after setbacks and defeats; it is striking how often KL murders were committed in “revenge” for supposed attacks on Germany.

  Before long, local Camp SS men like Gustav Sorge claimed the right to murder on their own initiative. Although they knew that killings officially required authorization from above, the perpetrators were convinced that they did the right thing, as Sorge later testified in court: “We believed that we were helping state and leadership when we abused prisoners and drove them to their deaths.”200 To some extent, this was a self-serving lie; after all, Camp SS men sometimes tortured just for fun.201 Nonetheless, the killers did feel that they were realizing the general wishes of their superiors, as Sorge later explained: “Personally, I now believe that orders to act, in so far as they were given, were only meant to point lower-ranking officials in a certain direction, so that they would then try to act, of their own accord, as the top leadership wished.”202 In this way, SS killers saw themselves as working toward their leaders.203 The result was a lethal dynamic, with murderous orders from the top and local initiatives from below radicalizing each other and plunging the KL into a maelstrom of destruction.

  SCALES OF SUFFERING

  The odds for survival fell dramatically in the early war period. On some days, inmates in KL workshops produced nothing but coffins, just to keep up with all the dead.204 In 1938, the deadliest year before the war, around 1,300 prisoners had perished inside.205 In 1940, at least 14,000 prisoners lost their lives; 3,846 are known to have died in Mauthausen (around thirty percent of its inmate population), making it the most lethal KL at the time.206 Hunger and disease were the greatest killers—most of the dead were emaciated, haggard, and hollow-eyed—followed by SS violence and executions.207 Prisoner suicides shot up, too. In Sachsenhausen, twenty-six prisoners are said to have killed themselves in April 1940 alone; some died in a fit of despair, running into the electrified fence, and some had meticulously planned their demise. The other inmates soon got used to the presence of death; on occasion, they even ignored the corpses sprawled beneath their feet as they used the latrines. Pity was becoming an increasingly rare commodity in the early wartime camps.208

  Camp SS officers regarded the growing mountain of corpses with some concern. What troubled them was not their conscience, though, but the disposal of the bodies. In the prewar years, prisoner corpses had normally been taken to local morgues. This was no longer viable. Not only was it too time-consuming to store and transfer all the dead, the SS had no desire to advertise the lethal turn of the KL. The solution was simple—the SS would operate its own crematoria inside the camps. Although such plans had been mooted before, they were only rea
lized from late 1939 onward, in cooperation with two private contractors (Heinrich Kori GmbH and Topf & Sons). By summer 1940, all prewar KL for men were equipped with incinerators, and similar machinery was set up in new camps, too; the Auschwitz crematorium went into operation in August 1940.209 Other practical measures followed. From 1941, for example, registry offices were established inside the camps, so that fatalities could be recorded by SS men, not by regular civil servants outside; inevitably, the SS officials classed almost all prisoner deaths as natural or accidental.210

  There was no sure way to survive the KL during the war, but there were countless ways to die. Some groups were in much greater danger than others, however. Suffering inside the camps was never indiscriminate, and the gulf between prisoners became even wider during the early part of the war. The political and racial hierarchies imposed by Nazi rulers were crucial; in general, Poles were more likely to die than Germans, and Jews more likely to die than Poles.211 Gender was decisive, too, as the KL system remained a mostly male construct; at the end of 1940, female prisoners only accounted for around one in twelve inmates, and the fate of these 4,300 women was still very different from that of their male counterparts.212

  The Ravensbrück Women’s Camp

  When Margarete Buber-Neumann arrived in Ravensbrück on August 2, 1940, she came to the end of an arduous journey that had begun six months earlier, and more than three thousand miles away, in the Karaganda Gulag. Born in Germany in 1901 into a bourgeois family, she had joined the KPD as a young woman. By the late 1920s, she had dedicated herself full time to the cause, working in the Berlin office of the Comintern magazine. Here she met her husband, Heinz Neumann, the high-flying editor of the incendiary newspaper Rote Fahne (Red Flag). When he fell from grace in the early 1930s, after internal party intrigues, Margarete followed him abroad. After moving like fugitives from one European city to another, they finally arrived in Moscow in early summer 1935. By then, the witch hunts were already under way. The Great Terror—fueled by Stalin’s obsession with spies and saboteurs—claimed a million or more victims in 1937–38, including thousands of German Communists. Having escaped the Nazis, they fell to their Soviet heroes instead. Among them was Heinz Neumann, jailed, tortured, and executed in late 1937. A few months later, his wife was arrested, too. Sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, Margarete Buber-Neumann was taken to Karaganda in the Kazakh steppe, one of the largest Soviet labor camps, where around 35,000 prisoners faced harsh labor under appalling conditions. In early 1940, she was suddenly taken back to Moscow, and soon farther to the west. The Soviet authorities, whom she had once revered, delivered her to the Nazis, as one of around 350 prisoners handed over between November 1939 and May 1941, during the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Many were released, once they had been pumped for intelligence. Not so Buber-Neumann. The Gestapo accused her of high treason and placed her in protective custody.213

  One of the prisoners to suffer both Stalin’s and Hitler’s camps, Margarete Buber-Neumann immediately saw glaring differences with the Gulag. Karaganda had been a vast complex of camps spread across an area as large as a midsize European country. Ravensbrück, by contrast, held around 3,200 prisoners in less than two dozen barracks, surrounded by a high wall with electrified barbed wire. Also, Ravensbrück was a camp exclusively for women, as there was still strict gender separation in the SS system. And Buber-Neumann was struck by the SS drills and exercises; everything was done with Prussian thoroughness, she thought. Painful as it was, such strict order also had its benefits. The new purpose-built barracks, with beds, tables, lockers, blankets, toilets, and washrooms, “seemed a palace” compared to the filth of Karaganda.214

  Unbeknownst to Margarete Buber-Neumann, Ravensbrück was also unlike other SS concentration camps at this time. The prewar delay in terror against female prisoners continued into the early war years, as SS leaders persisted with differential treatment. Heinrich Himmler still saw female prisoners as less dangerous than male ones, and more susceptible to reform.215 Obsessed with corporal punishment, Himmler demanded more than once that female prisoners should only be whipped as a last resort; he eventually ordered all such cases to be referred to him personally.216 Such interventions were less important for their specifics than for their message: women, as the “weaker sex,” should be treated with more moderation than men.

  Basic living conditions in Ravensbrück were considerably better than in other early wartime KL. Clothes and bedding were changed regularly in 1940, and there was just about enough food. Margarete Buber-Neumann, for one, was surprised by the size of her first meal, which included fruit porridge, bread, sausage, margarine, and lard. As for the treatment of the sick, seriously ill prisoners could still be taken to hospitals on the outside and some were released altogether.217

  Ravensbrück was also set apart by forced labor, which was hard, but not yet destructive. While many women worked in construction, there were no quarries or brick works, which claimed so many lives in KL for men. Instead, the Ravensbrück SS increasingly focused on the mass production of uniforms in large tailors’ workshops, since women were “best suited for this kind of work,” as one SS manager noted. Provisional production started in late 1939, spurred on by Himmler, and in summer 1940 the workshops became part of a newly created SS enterprise, the Company for Textile and Leather Utilization (Texled). Prisoner productivity almost reached civilian levels, and because female forced labor was even cheaper than men’s, Texled was probably the only SS business profitable from the start. The Ravensbrück tailors’ workshop produced some seventy-three thousand prisoner shirts between July 1940 and March 1941, as well as other garments, and for a long time, Texled remained the main employer in Ravensbrück. By October 1, 1940, almost seventeen percent of inmates worked for the SS company, rising to an all-time high of around sixty percent by September 1942. The women feared the SS supervisors and the hard work. But it was nowhere near as exhausting as building work; the workshops were partially mechanized, with sewing and knitting machines, and prisoners were sheltered from the elements.218

  Most important of all, physical violence was less endemic and lethal than in the KL for men, as the Ravensbrück guards exercised a far less brutal regimen. True, the top posts were occupied by uncompromising Camp SS men, such as Commandant Max Koegel. A grizzled war veteran and right-wing extremist, Koegel had come to Dachau as a guard in April 1933 and never looked back. Before Ravensbrück had even opened, he had already demanded the construction of a large cell block in the new camp to break the defiance of “hysterical women,” as he put it.219 But the leading female officer in Ravensbrück was cut from a different cloth. Johanna Langefeld, the senior camp supervisor, had not signed up with the Nazi Party until her late thirties, in 1937. From a deeply religious family, she worked in social care and the prison service before joining Lichtenburg in 1938. In contrast to Koegel, Langefeld really did see reeducation as an important goal and opposed some of his more violent initiatives. This mattered, because Langefeld set the tone inside the camp and did not push her female guards to excesses.220 While most new female guards quickly got used to slapping prisoners, or even kicking them, they rarely went further in the early war years.221 Their behavior was influenced, no doubt, by the fact that the state execution policy, which had boosted violence levels in the KL for men, was not initially extended to Ravensbrück; the first execution of a woman did not take place until February 1941, apparently, and only in 1942 did such killings become the norm.222

  As a result, almost all women survived Ravensbrück during the early war years. Over two years (1940–41), around one hundred female prisoners lost their lives—less than two percent of the prisoner population and a fraction of the deaths in KL for men; only in 1943 did the Ravensbrück SS feel the need to establish its own crematorium. The contrast between the sexes was plain to see even inside Ravensbrück itself. From April 1941, a separate compound for men was set up here, to supply forced labor for the extension of the camp. This was an important development
in itself; in the future, more and more camps would become mixed, though male and female prisoners were still held in separate compounds. By the end of 1941, around one thousand men had arrived in the new Ravensbrück subcamp, where conditions soon resembled the other KL for men; in the last three months of 1941 alone, more than fifty male prisoners died here. Proportionally, about as many men died in Ravensbrück in a single month as women did in two years.223

  In many ways, the women’s camp in Ravensbrück was still stuck in the prewar period; for the inmates, the real break came not in 1939, but 1942. This is not to say that the camp was unaffected by wider developments. Living conditions deteriorated after the outbreak of war. Food cuts, combined with the freezing temperatures, caused widespread illness during the first winter, and with some 6,400 women arriving in 1940–41, many barracks were overcrowded.224 Then there were the daily hardships and humiliations. The local SS established a particularly degrading ritual on arrival, when women had to undress, shower, and endure a bodily examination; many were also shaved. Any “feeble attempts at modesty had to be abandoned,” Buber-Neumann wrote. These assaults on women’s bodies and their gender identities—“with our bald heads, we looked like men,” another prisoner noted in her diary—had not been common before the war. The trauma was greatly intensified by the presence of SS men, who ogled the naked women, made lewd remarks, or slapped them.225

  Like in the other KL, there were scales of suffering within Ravensbrück, too. German political prisoners enjoyed some benefits; their barracks, for example, were often less packed. Meanwhile, Polish women, who replaced German “asocials” as the largest prisoner group in 1941, initially faced added discrimination; in the infirmary, some SS doctors apparently refused to see prisoners who could not speak German.226 And Jewish women—around ten percent of the prisoner population (1939–42)—remained at the bottom of the hierarchy, singled out for the worst labor and abuse.227 In these respects, at least, Ravensbrück moved in line with general SS terror, as the abuse of Poles and Jews escalated across the whole of the KL system in the early war years.