The rage of the SS extended to other prisoner groups, too, in addition to Poles and Jews. German-speaking Gypsies were often targeted during the early war years, partly owing to deep-seated prejudices among SS men (Rudolf Höss, for one, was convinced that Gypsies had tried to abduct him as a child). In Buchenwald, some six hundred Austrian Roma arrived via Dachau in autumn 1939. They faced extreme hardship and hunger, and around two hundred died during the first winter. Many had suffered frozen limbs and were brought for amputations to the infirmary; SS doctors had no hesitation about killing some with deadly injections. “None of my comrades want to go to the infirmary anymore, because no one comes back,” one young inmate told a fellow prisoner. “I think all of us Gypsies will die in Buchenwald.”270
The SS also selected some political opponents for “special treatment.” In the first half of 1941, the great majority of new arrivals in the Gusen subcamp were veterans from the Spanish Civil War. Among the other inmates, these men quickly gained a reputation for bravery and solidarity. This only confirmed the fears of the SS, who saw them as battle-hardened enemies and singled them out for the hardest punishment. In 1941, almost sixty percent of prisoners classified as “Red Spaniards” or “Spaniards” perished in Mauthausen; many of the 3,046 victims were murdered in the quarries. The steep steps the prisoners had to climb every day, with huge blocks of granite on their backs, resembled “a long cemetery,” one of the survivors wrote.271
Prisoner Relations
The dealings between different inmate groups became more strained than ever as conditions deteriorated. The basic principles of the camp pitted them against one another, and their backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences were too diverse to unite them against the SS. Many Polish prisoners, for example, felt hostile toward prisoners from Germany, the enemy nation. Their dislike extended even to dedicated opponents of the Nazi regime like German Communists. Many Poles despised them as atheists and, even more so, as friends of the Soviet Union, which had invaded the eastern half of Poland in mid-September 1939, under the ignominious Hitler-Stalin pact, and arrested, deported, or executed many tens of thousands of Polish civilians and soldiers.272
German prisoners, meanwhile, were not immune to Nazi racism, which tapped into a long history of chauvinism toward Slavs. In Neuengamme, a German Kapo warned newcomers about Poles: “We know that riffraff: lazy, dirty, and most of them also bread thieves.”273 Jews continued to suffer at the hands of some German inmates, too. In Sachsenhausen, Leon Szalet had briefly worked with political prisoners from the penal company. It was heavy building work and the forty-eight-year-old Szalet, new to the job, could not keep up: “My work colleagues used this to furiously insult me. I was lazy like all Jews, they screamed.” Then they beat Szalet until he collapsed.274
By no means were all German prisoners blinded by racism, of course. Szalet himself praised the Sachsenhausen camp elder Harry Naujoks for helping as much as he could, and he greatly admired his courageous block elder, another left-wing German prisoner.275 Other Polish and Jewish inmates received help from German prisoners, too. In the savage world of the camps, even small gestures meant a lot, and were still remembered decades later.276 Nonetheless, the friction between prisoner groups increased under the pressure of war.
Tensions were exacerbated by the preferential SS treatment for selected German prisoners.277 Across the KL system, most of the coveted Kapo posts went to Germans, and the contrast between these inmates and the rest was stark. In the unforgiving winter of 1939–40, hundreds of Sachsenhausen prisoners died in outside labor details and freezing barracks. At the same time, privileged inmates like Emil Büge, who worked as a prisoner clerk, had a desk in a heated office. Together with the other German clerks, Büge enjoyed extra sandwiches, milk, and cigarettes, and celebrated the birthday of one comrade with cake and coffee, a delicacy most other prisoners only dreamed about.278
Not only did German Kapos enjoy better conditions, they often held the fate of foreign inmates and Jews in their hands. Take Johann Brüggen, a German political prisoner who terrorized two hundred men on a large Dachau building site in 1940, pursuing Jews with particular vengeance. One of his victims was Gerhard Brandt, a twenty-seven-year-old graphic designer who arrived in Dachau on May 24, 1940, and joined Brüggen’s commando a few days later. When Brandt fell behind, Kapo Brüggen was all over him, screaming “Dirty Jew,” “Jewish pig,” and “You’re not even human.” On June 5, 1940, the seriously injured prisoner was admitted to the Dachau infirmary; here, he confidentially described the torture he had suffered: “When I fell, Brüggen would always trample over my body. I was also beaten every day on the head and the face with a wooden cudgel. With his hands, too, Brüggen pushed into my face, so that I always bled very heavily from the nose. The handkerchief was so blood-soaked I could not use it anymore for drying off.” A few hours after he gave this account, Gerhard Brandt died.279
Kapo Brüggen was no exception; hundreds of German Kapos were guilty of violent excesses in the early war years. But the other prisoners did not see all such violence as taboo. Quite the contrary. There was widespread agreement that slaps and kicks were in order if a prisoner had stepped out of line. Emil Büge recorded such a case in winter 1939–40. One night, a Polish prisoner moaned and pleaded for water, and grabbed the covers of other inmates in his barrack. Tired of the commotion, a block service prisoner eventually hit the man with a truncheon. “We all approve that he is beaten,” Büge wrote, “and he duly becomes ‘sensible’ and no longer disturbs us.” In fact, the prisoner was dead. In the darkness of the night, no one had realized that he was no troublemaker; he was dying.280
This unknown Polish prisoner was one of many thousands of victims in the early war years, a period of change inside the KL. Many key features of the wartime camps emerged early on: bigger compounds, new camps outside the German heartland, masses of foreign prisoners, lethal living conditions, murderous everyday violence, and planned executions. The terror would intensify in later years, but it had started early in the war. And yet, even during the worst days, victims were still counted in their dozens, not hundreds or thousands. The transition from mass death to systematic mass extermination did not take place until spring and summer 1941, when Nazi leaders took the next steps on the road to genocide in the KL.
5
Mass Extermination
On the morning of Friday, April 4, 1941, two German doctors, Friedrich Mennecke, a dapper thirty-six-year-old, and the dumpy Theodor Steinmeyer, seven years older and sporting a crude Hitler mustache, arrived at Oranienburg train station and made their way to the nearby Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Except for their looks, the two psychiatrists had much in common. Ambitious and ruthless, they were both committed to radical racial hygiene and had risen at a young age to become asylum directors in the Third Reich, assisted by their early dedication to the Nazi cause (Steinmeyer had joined the party in 1929, Mennecke in 1932). During their half-hour walk, the two men, who would become firm friends, probably talked about their first trip to the camp on the previous day, when their superior, Professor Werner Heyde, had initiated them into a secret mission: they would examine around four hundred prisoners, selected by the Camp SS from among all the twelve thousand Sachsenhausen inmates.1
On arrival, Dr. Mennecke and Dr. Steinmeyer set themselves up in the camp’s infirmary to see the selected prisoners. The two physicians worked all day, interrupted only by lunch in the SS officers’ mess. They finished at 6:00 p.m., having each examined several dozen prisoners. Steinmeyer then returned to his hotel in Berlin, while Mennecke retired to a luxurious double room in the posh Hotel Eilers in Oranienburg. Buzzing with excitement, he fired off a letter to his wife. “Our work is very, very interesting,” he told her. At 9:00 a.m. the next day, after a good night’s rest and a rich breakfast, Dr. Mennecke met up again with Dr. Steinmeyer at Oranienburg station and returned to Sachsenhausen for more prisoner examinations, breaking off at lunchtime for the weekend. They resumed their duties on Monday
morning, when they were joined by a third psychiatrist, Dr. Otto Hebold. They worked even quicker now and on the following day, Tuesday, April 8, 1941, after seeing the last remaining eighty-four prisoners, they had completed their mission.2
The doctors departed from Sachsenhausen as suddenly as they had appeared, leaving behind the prisoners they had examined. Most of them were little more than skin and bones. “They were so weak,” Dr. Hebold recalled later, “they could barely stand upright”; many were unable to work and had been in the infirmary for some time, suffering from a range of debilitating illnesses. Others had been selected by the SS inside their barracks. One was Siegbert Fraenkel, a refined fifty-seven-year-old art and book dealer from Berlin. Fraenkel had made many friends among the other Jewish prisoners in the torturous standing commando, diverting them during their interminable days with talks about paintings, literature, and philosophy. “Through his lectures,” one inmate later remembered, “he gave us back a bit of dignified, human life.” The corpulent Fraenkel was still in reasonable health after more than five months in the camp. Still the SS presented him to the visiting physicians in spring 1941, presumably because of his deformed spine.3
The doctors’ examinations in Sachsenhausen were a short, sharp ordeal. For several minutes, they interrogated each inmate about his background, health, and family; repeatedly, local Camp SS officials intervened, adding further details about alleged misconduct and poor work performance. Worst of all was the uncertainty about what the doctors wanted. Under the extreme conditions of the camps, inmates were always second-guessing their captors, trying to read the SS runes, and the doctors’ visit to Sachsenhausen in early April 1941 was no different. The most persistent rumor, encouraged by the SS, was that the physicians selected infirm inmates for easier work in Dachau. Other prisoners suspected more sinister motives, though no one was sure. But after several weeks had passed without further incident, many prisoners must have forgotten all about their examination by the mysterious doctors. None of them knew that their fate had already been sealed.4
Dr. Steinmeyer, Dr. Mennecke, and Dr. Hebold were no ordinary doctors. They were veterans of the “euthanasia” action, the Nazi program for the mass murder of the disabled. These physicians had long broken their Hippocratic Oath and came to Sachsenhausen not to heal but to kill: they judged most of the prisoners they examined as “life unworthy of life,” as the doctors called them, and reported them to the headquarters of the “euthanasia” program.5 After the files had been processed there, a final list of names was sent back to Sachsenhausen. Early on June 3, 1941, exactly two months after Steinmeyer and Mennecke had first visited the camp, the SS assembled the first ninety-five victims in the infirmary. Here they were injected with a sedative and forced onto a large truck, covered with a tarpaulin. Another 174 prisoners followed on two further transports a few days later. Among them was Siegbert Fraenkel, the Jewish art dealer, who feared the worst. Shortly before he left Sachsenhausen on June 5, he told the camp elder Harry Naujoks: “It is obvious; we’re being treated like doomed men.” Fraenkel was right. The truck brought him and the others to Sonnenstein asylum in Saxony, where they were all murdered on arrival.6
These murders were no one-off. When he came to Sachsenhausen in April 1941, Dr. Mennecke knew that this trip was only the beginning of his lethal service in the KL. By the time Siegbert Fraenkel and the other Sachsenhausen prisoners were murdered two months later, Mennecke had already completed his next round of selections, this time in Auschwitz, and over the coming months he would travel to Buchenwald, Dachau, Ravensbrück, Gross-Rosen, Flossenbürg, and Neuengamme.7 Thousands of prisoners were killed as a result.
The year 1941 was when the KL moved from mass death to mass extermination. From early autumn, with the killing of infirm inmates still in full swing, the Camp SS embarked on an even more radical program, murdering tens of thousands of Soviet POWs. The concentration camps turned into killing fields and annihilation became a way of life for the perpetrators, inaugurating a new period in the camps’ history: for the first time, Camp SS men participated in the coordinated slaughter of prisoners on a grand scale.
KILLING THE WEAK
The Nazi “euthanasia” action had taken shape just before the outbreak of the Second World War, when Hitler authorized a secret program for the murder of the disabled. The men in charge were Hitler’s personal doctor Karl Brandt and Philipp Bouhler, the head of the Chancellery of the Führer. A marginal figure in the Nazi hierarchy, Bouhler saw mass murder as a chance to boost his standing, and entrusted the day-to-day management to his right-hand man Viktor Brack. Soon, the perpetrators had established an effective organization, working from headquarters in a Berlin villa on Tiergartenstrasse 4 (hence the code word of the “euthanasia” program, Operation T-4). German asylums were asked to submit special forms about their patients, with details about their condition. These forms were then dispatched to specially recruited doctors like Dr. Mennecke and Dr. Steinmeyer, who made the initial decision about the patients’ fate, cursorily reviewed by a senior physician like Professor Heyde. Their main focus was on the patients’ ability to work: anyone regarded as unproductive would be killed. But how?
The murderers considered several methods. Initially, they thought about lethal injections. But this was soon abandoned in favor of a different approach. Apparently backed by Hitler, the fateful decision was taken to kill the disabled with poison gas. In late 1939–early 1940, the SS set up a trial gassing in a former jail outside Berlin. Several disabled men were locked into a sealed room pumped full of carbon monoxide; they died under the watchful gaze of the top brass of the “euthanasia” action. Before long, the newly recruited T-4 staff ran several killing centers (mostly converted mental asylums), each with a gas chamber. Mass gassings of patients from across Germany only ceased in summer 1941, on Hitler’s orders, following growing public anxiety about the killings, which had become an open secret (the murders continued less conspicuously inside local asylums). By this time, some seventy to eighty thousand people had been murdered inside gas chambers, the “unique invention of Nazi Germany,” in the words of the historian Henry Friedlander, that would become central to the genocide of European Jews. Its first victims, though, were patients from asylums, and they were soon followed by KL inmates.8
“Euthanasia” and the Camps
Heinrich Himmler must have been appalled when he stepped inside Dachau on January 20, 1941, some nine months after his last visit, to lead a delegation of senior SS officials and Dutch Nazis.9 Anxious Camp SS officers always tried to gloss over difficulties during his inspections, but there was no way of hiding that his favorite camp was in crisis. The problem, as far as the local Camp SS was concerned, had started several months earlier, when Camp Inspector Richard Glücks, faced with an ever-growing number of ill and weak prisoners across the KL system, had designated Dachau as a collection point for Muselmänner. Previously, individual camps had isolated the sick inside special zones. Now Glücks planned to relieve other camps by concentrating the greatest misery in Dachau.10 Following Glücks’s order, thousands of sick men had arrived in Dachau from late summer 1940 onward. Between August 28 and September 16 alone, four large transports left Sachsenhausen, bringing four thousand invalid prisoners (mostly from the standing commandos) to Dachau; in exchange, the Dachau SS dispatched up to three thousand healthier inmates in the opposite direction.11 Smaller transports also came from other camps. On October 24, 1940, for example, the Buchenwald SS sent a special train to Dachau; the SS described all 371 men on board as “ill prisoners and cripples” who were “unfit for work.”12
Dachau turned into a nightmare. Bodies of Muselmänner who had died en route were dumped at the train station. Those who made it into the compound lay sprawled across the roll call square or inside specially cleared barracks. They were emaciated, often with frostbitten hands or feet, and covered in lice, edema, and pus-filled wounds; passing SS guards were surprised when these half-dead men still showed signs of life, crying, w
himpering, and begging for mercy, or when they screamed in pain as others ripped off clothing that stuck to their scabs. Many suffered from acute dysentery and an infernal stench soon filled Dachau. The prisoner Alfred Hübsch vividly recalled the arrival of one of the “horror transports” from Sachsenhausen in early September 1940: “We saw dozens [of new prisoners] with excrement running out of their trousers. Their hands, too, were full of excrement and they screamed and rubbed their dirty hands across their faces. These soiled and sunken faces, with their protruding cheekbones, had something terrifying about them.” Too weak to walk and eat, many had come to Dachau only to die.13
In all, more than one thousand prisoners perished between September and December 1940; in four infernal months, around twice as many men had died in Dachau as in the seven prewar years. Then conditions got even worse. In January 1941, the month when Himmler visited, Dachau reached a new deadly record, as at least 463 prisoners lost their lives.14 At the same time, the camp was ravaged by scabies. An estimated four to five thousand men were infected in early 1941, almost half of the entire prisoner population. Many were isolated with no medical help, little food, and only bags of straw to sleep on. The prisoner Adam Kozlowiecki, a Polish cardinal who saw the sick on their way to their weekly bath, recorded their appearance in a secret diary: “Yellow skeletons with big, sad eyes. They looked at us. Some glances expressed a plea for help, others complete apathy.”15
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Page 34
