KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  War and Retribution

  During the first weeks of the Second World War, the Third Reich was awash with rumors about Polish atrocities. Having blamed Poland for the outbreak of war, Nazi propaganda now accused Poles of gruesome war crimes, in another reversal of reality. From the first days of the invasion, German soldiers sent paranoid reports about ambushes by “snipers.” Such rumors spread fast, amplified by Nazi leaders.228 In particular, Nazi propaganda seized upon events in the Polish city of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg), where several hundred ethnic German civilians were killed in clashes with Polish forces in early September 1939 (German units, among them two Death’s Head battalions, later massacred large numbers of local Poles). For days, Nazi papers carried lurid articles and even fantasized about ritual killings. According to the Völkischer Beobachter of September 10, Poles had “cut off the left breast of an old woman, ripped out her heart, and threw it into a bowl, which had been used to catch her blood”; all this was illustrated with graphic photos of severed body parts.229 A few days later, Hitler himself stoked the flames further. In a frenzied speech in occupied Danzig on September 19, he claimed that Polish troops had butchered thousands of ethnic Germans “like animals,” among them women and children, and mutilated countless captured German soldiers “in a bestial way, gouging out their eyes.”230

  Many Germans bought into this atrocity propaganda and demanded swift retaliation.231 Poles taken to the KL felt the full force of public outrage. On September 13, 1939, when 534 Polish Jews were assembled at a Berlin railway station en route to Sachsenhausen, they faced a mob baying for the blood of the “Bromberg murderers” (in fact, the prisoners were residents of Berlin); more spectators waited at the station in Oranienburg, throwing stones and excrement.232 Much worse was to follow, as Camp SS men were itching for brutal retribution and hounded the Poles as soon as they arrived.

  The epicenter of KL violence was in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, which held the vast majority of Polish prisoners in the early months of war. The Buchenwald SS improvised, just as it had done after the 1938 pogrom, and forced the newly arriving Poles and Polish Jews into a compound next to the roll call square, cordoned off with barbed wire. This so-called special (or little) camp, set up in late September 1939, became an island of extreme suffering. Among the first prisoners were 110 Poles arrested in the border regions during the German advance. The fact that a few of them really came from Bromberg proved their death sentence. Labeled as “snipers,” the SS pressed them into a small cage of planks and barbed wire, where they slowly starved to death; by Christmas Day, all but two of the 110 men inside the cage were dead.233

  The other prisoners in the Buchenwald special camp were also fighting for survival. Exposed to freezing temperatures, hundreds of Poles and Polish-born Jews suffered inside a wooden barrack and four large tents. At first, the prisoners still had to work in the quarry. Jakob Ihr, who had been arrested in Vienna, remembered that the “despair was so great, after only a few hours, that a number of our comrades beseeched the SS to shoot them dead.”234 Labor was eventually halted in late October 1939, when a dysentery epidemic spread through the special camp. “The prisoners now dropped like flies,” another witness said after the war. Those who tried to escape to the relative safety of the main compound were whipped by the SS.235 The men in charge formed a terrifying double act. Hauptscharführer Blank, a Camp SS veteran, gained a reputation as a cold-blooded executioner, while his colleague, Hauptscharführer Hinkelmann, a violent drunk, channeled his energy into new forms of prisoner abuse. Apparently, he particularly enjoyed beating hungry prisoners during the distribution of the watery soup. On other days, Hinkelmann and Blank handed out no food at all.236

  The Buchenwald special camp was eventually closed down in early 1940. By then, around two out of three prisoners were dead.237 As the last survivors entered the main camp compound in January and February 1940, even longtime inmates, like the camp elder Ernst Frommhold, were shocked: “17-year-old boys barely weighing 50–60 pounds, not a gram of fat on their bodies, only skin and bones. Even today, I cannot understand how such emaciated men could still be alive, and yet they were.”238 In all, well over five hundred Polish-born Jews and three hundred Poles had died in the special camp.239

  In Sachsenhausen, too, Polish-born Jews fared the worst in the early months of World War II. About a thousand men arrived between September and December 1939, some from Poland, but most from inside Germany itself. Around half of them came on the very first transport from Berlin on September 13, which had met with such public outrage. Among them was Leon Szalet, a middle-aged estate agent brought up in Warsaw, who had lived in Berlin since 1921. Just before war broke out he had made a daring bid to leave: he managed to board a flight to London without a visa on August 27, but was turned back on arrival by zealous British immigration officials. Two weeks later, he was greeted in Sachsenhausen by a mob of screaming SS men, who “jumped on us like wild beasts.” Szalet himself was beaten unconscious by one of the block leaders. In the evening of their first day, after hours of abuse, he and the other new prisoners fell on sacks of straw in their barracks. But few found any sleep: the horror of the past few hours and the dread of what would follow kept most of them awake all night.

  Leon Szalet and the other Polish Jews were held in the Sachsenhausen little camp, first established for “asocials” in summer 1938. As a special punishment, the SS had the barrack windows nailed shut with planks, an extreme form of isolation already familiar from prewar Dachau. There was no light and no ventilation. “Some men were close to suffocating,” Szalet recalled, “others literally died of thirst.” The SS forced prisoners who begged for water to drink their own urine. By September 29, when the action was called off after the capitulation of Warsaw, some thirty-five men had died.240 The torment of the others continued over the following months. Initially, Polish Jews only left their barracks for roll calls and “sport.” The rest of the time was spent inside, at the mercy of Kapos and SS block leaders like Wilhelm “Pistol” Schubert, who regularly raided the barracks at night. Among their many vicious games, SS men forced prisoners to fight each other for bread; those who refused were beaten or killed.241 Later, many of the inmates were pressed into forced labor. Their first destination was the Oranienburg brick works. “Our daily routine,” Leon Szalet wrote, “involved freezing, being chased, carrying snow or sand wrapped in our coats, stumbling, falling and being chased again.”242

  Before the Holocaust

  Soon all Jewish men in the KL were in mortal danger. In the first months of the Second World War, the SS still differentiated, directing its greatest fury against Polish Jews. But such distinctions soon disappeared, as the police extended its persecution of German Jews—suspected as supporters of the enemy—and the Camp SS extended its terror. “The struggle against the Jews,” the Sachsenhausen death squad leader Gustav Sorge testified after the war, “was a racial struggle.”243 Even the hearts of some guards considered humane hardened when it came to Jews. The Ravensbrück camp supervisor Johanna Langefeld, for example, was a fanatical anti-Semite and let Jewish prisoners feel her hatred.244

  A crucial moment came on March 9, 1940, when Heinrich Himmler banned all further releases of Jews; only Jews who held valid visas and could emigrate before the end of April would still be freed.245 The flow of releases of Jews, already small, became a trickle and then dried up altogether.246 One of the lucky few to escape at the last moment was Leon Szalet, thanks to the dogged persistence of his daughter, whom he had brought up alone, as a widower. In early 1940, the mood among Polish Jews in the camp had fluctuated between hope and despair. When Szalet heard that he might be released, some comrades could not hide their envy. When it looked as if his plans would fall through, one gleeful prisoner broke into a popular tune, changing the lyrics: “A ship leaves for Shanghai, and Szalet won’t be nigh.”247 But on May 7, 1940, he really was set free, to the surprise even of SS block leaders. After eight months in Sachsenhausen, he was sick, starved, and depressed,
and he never really recovered.248 But at least he escaped more SS torment. This was the fate of the Jews who were left behind, and now faced near-certain death.

  Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, which initially led the way in early wartime terror against Jews, claimed the lives of many Jewish prisoners; in Buchenwald alone, almost seven hundred died during 1940.249 Men accused of intimate relations with “Aryan” women, and marked on their files and uniforms as “race defilers,” were particularly vulnerable, as the combination of sex and race remained irresistible to the SS. On May 3, 1940, for example, Gustav Sorge beat and kicked to death an elderly Jewish prisoner who had just arrived in Sachsenhausen; as Sorge broke his victim’s bones, he screamed: “Oh, you swine, you’re a Jew and fucked our Christian women!”250 Like this inmate, many Jewish men died within days or weeks of their arrival. Those who survived a little longer carried the deep marks of SS excesses. Crushing forced labor was accompanied by extreme violence, wiping out several members of the same families. The Camp SS also continued to cut rations, holding regular “fasting days,” when Jews received no food at all, and occasionally banned all Jews from entering the infirmaries. Young and strong men soon looked old and infirm, and even the most resilient among them fell into despair. “In Sachsenhausen, I did not know whether I was still human,” the Polish-born boxer and mechanic Salem (Bully) Schott remembered. “I did not feel anything anymore, except hunger.”251

  In other camps, too, Jewish men lost all hope. In Dachau, the most feared site was a new extension of the plantation, called Freiland II, which was cultivated from spring 1941.252 Karel Kašák, a privileged Czech prisoner who worked as an illustrator on the plantation (the SS planned a book about the different plants), secretly documented the abuses: “21 March [1941]. [Commando leader] Seuss ordered the Jews to immediately take off their bandages from the infirmary, under which they have horrific wounds, and to work without them in the soggy and muddy ground. All 200 Jews are terribly miserable, shattered, abused, and utterly emaciated figures; 90 percent can barely keep on their feet.”253 Almost every day, there were murders or forced suicides on the plantation, as the following extract from Kašák’s notes illustrates:

  May 9 [1941]. Again a Jew shot in Freiland II. He started to run. The sentry told us that although he has instructions to shoot without warning, he shouted twice. The [prisoner] stopped and just exclaimed: “I want to go there” and fell after two shots … Again they have put a group of lifeless and unconscious Jews on the cart. Human flesh, the bodies of these sons of God, stacked like logs, arms and legs swaying limply—a horrendous picture that we witness daily …

  May 14. In the afternoon they again shot a Jew in Freiland II …

  May 15. Again a Jew shot. They threw his cap behind the sentry and the Kapo forced him with a truncheon to fetch it. Complete exhaustion has made [the Jewish prisoners] unrecognizable, like in a trance, with a far-away gaze …

  May 16. At nine in the morning two more Jews shot in Freiland II. They threw the exhausted men into the water and held them under water until they had almost lost consciousness, and definitely lost their minds, and Kapo Sammetinger hit them with the spade until he had forced them to cross the sentry line, whereupon they were immediately shot.254

  Dreadful as Dachau was, conditions were even worse in Mauthausen. This KL, which had not held any Jews in the prewar period, gradually filled up in the early war years, with almost one thousand Jewish men arriving in 1940–41. The vast majority of them were doomed.255 Most of the victims were Jewish men arrested in the occupied Netherlands. A first large group had been rounded up there in February 1941: after the German authorities and their local allies had met growing resistance to their persecution of Dutch Jews, Himmler ordered mass arrests in retaliation. Their initial destination was Buchenwald, where some 389 young Jewish men arrived as so-called hostages on February 28, 1941.256 “Unbearable conditions soon arose,” one of them testified later, and by May 22, 1941, over forty men had died. That day, almost all the survivors, some 341 men total, were forced on a train to Mauthausen on orders of the IKL; most likely, SS leaders had decided that they should die.257 The prisoners arrived in Mauthausen around midnight and the SS guards set upon them straightaway; within three months, more than half had perished. Most of them died in the quarries, crushed by rocks, beaten to death, or forced over the sentry line. Some committed suicide and threw themselves to their deaths, holding hands; on October 14, 1941, for example, the SS recorded that sixteen Jews had perished by “jumping [in the] quarry.” Whether they had been pushed or not, the SS men were guilty, a responsibility they bore lightly. When further transports of Jews arrived in Mauthausen, SS officials jokingly welcomed their new “battalion of paratroopers.”258

  By 1941, concentration camps had become death traps for Jewish prisoners. The sharp rise in the death rate, compared to the prewar years, owed much to the unrestrained rank-and-file guards. But their superiors were involved, too, and several prisoners reported that KL commandants had given explicit orders to kill Jewish prisoners.259 Clearly, the Camp SS was influenced by the general course of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, which turned far more lethal between 1939 and 1941, with the SS in the driving seat. Still, the transition to systematic murder came particularly early in the KL, well before Nazi policy as a whole moved in this direction. While the immediate extermination of European Jews had not yet been decided by early summer 1941, the death of Jews in concentration camps was an almost foregone conclusion by then.

  This is not to say that the Nazi Final Solution started earlier than we thought. Despite isolated calls by radical Nazi activists for deporting all Jews to the KL, the camps remained on the periphery of anti-Jewish policy in the early war years.260 Instead, the authorities relied on other sites of mass detention, setting up hundreds of forced labor camps and ghettos in Poland, Germany, and elsewhere; the largest ghetto in Warsaw held some 445,000 Jews by March 1941, suffering mass starvation, disease, and death.261 By contrast, the KL were reserved for selected Jews only, above all men seen as particularly dangerous criminals or terrorists. They were arrested for punishment and deterrence, as in the case of the Jews rounded up in the Netherlands, whose fate was common knowledge among the Dutch Jewish community.262 If the only “crime” of Jewish men, women, and children was being Jewish, however, they were far more likely to suffer elsewhere.

  Attacking Polish Prisoners

  On August 13, 1940, the daily routine in Mauthausen was briefly disrupted when two middle-aged Polish prisoners, Victor Lukawski and Franc Kapacki, slipped away from the Gusen subcamp. Escapes were still extremely rare, and after the guards realized that two men were missing, they ran amok. As collective punishment, all eight hundred prisoners (almost all Poles) in the escaped men’s work detail were forced to move heavy rocks in the quarry at running pace; those who broke down were battered by Kapos and SS. After they returned to the camp, they had to stand to attention all night without any food. The balance sheet of the day of violence was stark: in all, fourteen Polish prisoners died in Gusen on August 13, 1940. The two escapees met a gruesome end, too; they were dragged back a couple of days later and beaten to death.263

  From the beginning, the new Gusen subcamp had been earmarked as a “reeducation camp” for Polish prisoners. The first transport with 1,084 Polish men came on May 25, 1940, the day the camp officially opened, and others soon followed. In all, some eight thousand Poles, many of them members of the Polish intelligentsia, arrived in late spring and summer 1940, mostly from other KL like Dachau and Sachsenhausen. By the end of the year, more than 1,500 had lost their lives in Gusen, where the average monthly mortality stood at five percent.264 The inferno was overseen by SS camp leader Karl Chmielewski. A trained woodcarver from Hesse, he had come to the SS in 1932, after he lost his workshop during the Great Depression. He prospered after joining Himmler’s personal office, and in summer 1935, at the age of thirty-one, he was initiated into the Camp SS; he trained in the Columbia House camp under Karl Otto Koch, one
of the best teachers in cruelty, and in the following year he moved to Sachsenhausen, where he was groomed for higher office. Chmielewski’s moment came in 1940, when he was transferred to Gusen to command some sixty SS men. Under his reign, which lasted until late 1942, one in every two prisoners perished. A tall and strong man, Chmielewski led from the front, showing his men how the prisoners should be beaten, kicked, whipped, and killed. His superiors were duly impressed, with the Mauthausen commandant Franz Ziereis praising his “especially pronounced personal toughness.”265

  Murderous violence also surrounded Poles in the other KL, after prisoner numbers shot up in 1940–41. In Sachsenhausen, thousands of Poles were isolated in the little camp, now cleared of Jews and known as the “Polish quarantine camp,” where they were tormented like the Jewish prisoners before them.266 Extreme terror characterized the smaller camps, too. After a Polish inmate escaped from Flossenbürg in summer 1941, the local Camp SS made the other Poles stand to attention for three days and nights without food—perhaps the longest roll call in the history of the KL; some prisoners who fell unconscious were murdered by a Kapo, who forced a hose with running water down their throats.267

  Nowhere was the SS assault on Polish prisoners more deadly than in Auschwitz, where Poles made up the great majority of inmates in 1940–41. Prisoner numbers had grown rapidly after the camp was set up and so did the dead. The ingredients making up camp life were the same as elsewhere: violent and often senseless labor, never-ending roll calls, hunger, disease, and dirt. “In the camp, one lived from one day to the next, just to be still alive tomorrow,” Wiesław Kielar recalled.268 In its first twelve months, several thousand men died in Auschwitz, and things only got worse. During a twelve-week period from October 7 to December 31, 1941, SS bureaucrats recorded the dispatch of 2,915 prisoner corpses from the main camp’s morgue to the crematorium.269