KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps
Page 35
The dirt and disease in Dachau dented Himmler’s ideal image of the KL, even if his subordinates shielded him from the worst during his visit on January 20, 1941. Himmler’s vision was about all-out order and cleanliness, and filthy invalids had no place in it; they were a drain on resources, a health risk, and an economic liability. Many Camp SS men agreed. As one of them explained in early 1941, all prisoners “who cannot work” and all “cripples” posed a “colossal burden” for the KL.16 By then, Camp SS leaders must have realized that the decision to turn Dachau into a dumping ground for the sick had backfired. Not only had it turned the old model camp into a pit, the situation in the other KL was little improved. True, prisoner mortality had fallen temporarily after sick prisoners left for Dachau.17 But their numbers soon grew again, and by early 1941 all SS concentration camps for men were full of dying inmates.18 Something had to be done.
Around the time of his trip to Dachau, Heinrich Himmler settled on a radical solution: invalid prisoners would be systematically exterminated.19 Mass murder was already in the air. Across the Third Reich and its newly conquered territories, Nazi leaders and their followers were getting used to murder as a solution to all kinds of “problems,” from political resistance to mental illness. As for weak and sick prisoners in the KL, many SS men were more than happy to see them die. According to a former inmate, the views of Dachau SS leaders about invalids in 1940 could be summed up as follows: “Let them croak—then we’ll be rid of them.”20 In fact, as we have seen, some local Camp SS men had already started to go further, murdering some weak and sick prisoners on their own initiative. In another case of “cumulative radicalization,” such unauthorized and ad hoc killings by overzealous local Camp SS men must have given an added spur to the new centralized program of murdering the infirm, with Himmler reasserting his authority as the final arbiter over life and death.21
To implement his plan, Himmler turned to the T-4 killing experts. Rumors that the “euthanasia” program would be extended to the KL had circulated in Germany since 1940.22 But Himmler did not settle things until early 1941, during discussions with Bouhler and Brack from the Chancellery of the Führer.23 It was convenient for Himmler to latch on to the “euthanasia” action. Here was a well-oiled machine that had already delivered tens of thousands to their deaths. Moreover, Himmler knew that he could trust the T-4 officials, many of whom were SS veterans (including several former Camp SS men who had been transferred from Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald to T-4 in late 1939). Some he knew personally: Viktor Brack had once worked as Himmler’s driver and Werner Heyde had overseen prisoner sterilizations in the prewar KL.24 Once Himmler had made his decision, he moved fast. After a further meeting with Brack on March 28, 1941—and possibly the final go-ahead from Hitler himself—the operation began, and just one week later, Dr. Mennecke and Dr. Steinmeyer set to work in Sachsenhausen.25
It is significant that Himmler decided to outsource the first extermination program of his prisoners to the T-4 killers, rather than leaving it to the Camp SS. We can only guess at his motives. Perhaps Himmler wanted his SS men to learn from the T-4 professionals before they turned their own hands to large-scale executions. Or perhaps he worried that mass slaughter inside the camps themselves might trigger prisoner uprisings, whereas killing invalids in faraway “euthanasia” centers meant that the remaining inmates might be deceived about the murderous turn of SS policy.26
Selections
Local Camp SS officers were initiated into the program by their superiors, who told them about Himmler’s orders to kill the invalids and the infirm. Although the local Camp SS did not act as executioner, it still had a crucial role to play: picking out inmates for the T-4 selections. The most important task, the IKL stressed, was to single out those “who are no longer able to work” (echoing provisions of the “euthanasia” program); among those who were specially targeted, a senior Auschwitz official recalled, were “cripples,” “incurables,” and “infectious prisoners.”27
Although the IKL issued some quotas for the total number of prisoners to be presented to the T-4 doctors, local Camp SS men had plenty of leeway when it came to their initial selections. In Dachau, for example, the SS forced prisoners from the various labor details to assemble on the roll call square; Camp SS leaders then noted the names of particularly weak and emaciated men, as well as those with disabilities, such as missing limbs or club feet. The Dachau SS chose yet more prisoners from so-called invalid blocks and the infirmary, forcing some Kapos to cooperate. Walter Neff, a prisoner orderly on the Dachau tuberculosis block, later acknowledged that he had picked out bedridden prisoners.28
Following the SS preparations, the T-4 doctors traveled to the camps, alone or in small groups. After the inaugural trip to Sachsenhausen in April 1941, the physicians visited most other camps, including Auschwitz (May 1941), Buchenwald (June and November–December 1941), Mauthausen (June–July 1941), Dachau (September 1941), Ravensbrück (November 1941 and January 1942), Gross-Rosen (January 1942), Flossenbürg (March 1942), and Neuengamme (April 1942).29 In all, a dozen or more T-4 doctors were involved.30 They were led by the senior medical “euthanasia” experts, Professor Werner Heyde and Professor Hermann Nitsche, who occasionally participated in the selections themselves. The others were mostly veterans from the T-4 program. Previously, men like Dr. Steinmeyer and Dr. Mennecke had visited mental asylums to select patients to die. Now they came to the camps.31
On arrival, the T-4 doctors were met by senior members of the local Camp SS—the commandant, his adjutant, or the camp physician—who briefed them about SS preparations.32 The T-4 physicians, who could move freely around the compound, sometimes demanded to see more prisoners than the SS had picked. The doctors’ power was a potential cause of friction with local Camp SS chieftains.33 But in practice, their relationship was largely cordial. They worked together and sometimes socialized, too, going for walks around the grounds to aid their digestion after lunch in the SS officers’ mess.34
During their selections, the T-4 doctors briefly studied the prisoner files. Then they completed a registration form for each inmate, which had been prepared by the SS, using the standard criteria developed for the “euthanasia” program. Most questions concerned the prisoner’s condition, asking about “Diagnosis,” “Main Symptoms,” and “Incurable Physical Ailments.”35 Normally, the doctors also took a cursory glance at the inmates, just as Dr. Mennecke and Dr. Steinmeyer had done in Sachsenhausen. One at a time, the prisoners, often undressed, were paraded before them; those unable to walk were carried. The doctors scribbled some notes on the forms; occasionally, they would also ask inmates about their background.36 Then the doctors turned to their next victims.
The selections were swift—like a “conveyor belt,” Dr. Mennecke noted in Dachau—and sped up as T-4 doctors gained experience. By November 1941, Mennecke needed less than three minutes to pass judgment on a prisoner, down from an average of eight minutes back in April. “The work is going with a real swing,” he informed his wife.37 Apparently, the T-4 doctors only spared a few of the prisoners they saw. It is not clear what swayed them, though it is likely that some First World War veterans were among those given a temporary reprieve.38 In the end, the decision by Mennecke and his colleagues came down to a snap judgment they entered into a box on the bottom left-hand corner of the form.39 The fate of each prisoner was determined by a quick stroke of the pen: “+” meant death, “-” meant life.40
The forms were reviewed by officials at T-4 headquarters in Berlin, who approved the final list of victims.41 This list was then dispatched to one of three “euthanasia” killing centers (Hartheim, Bernburg, or Sonnenstein) that liaised with the respective KL to organize the prisoner transports.42 When the day came—often several months elapsed between selections and transports—Camp SS men accompanied the prisoners to the killing centers; the Mauthausen SS used a Mercedes omnibus and two yellow postal buses to ferry the victims to their deaths.43 The prisoners’ departure was reported by telex to the IK
L in Oranienburg, which kept abreast of the whole operation.44
By the time the death transports arrived at the killing centers, many prisoners on board were suspicious and scared; the smell of burning flesh that sometimes hung over the institutions added to their alarm. As local T-4 staff took over from the SS men and checked the paperwork, some prisoners lied about their health or background, hoping that this might help them. A few others tried to run, only to be wrestled to the ground by SS men. There was no way out. Soon, the prisoners were led away, supposedly to the showers. After they had undressed and entered the gas chamber, the T-4 staff locked the door and pumped poison gas inside, from carbon monoxide steel cylinders supplied by IG Farben. Some victims began to vomit, shake, or scream, and struggled for air. After several minutes, the last ones fell unconscious, and some minutes later all were dead. After a while, the gas chamber was ventilated and the bodies dragged out by T-4 staff. They burned the corpses in an adjacent crematorium, but not before ripping out all gold fillings (prisoners had been marked before they went to their death). The gold was sent in batches to T-4 headquarters, which arranged for it to be melted down and sold on. According to one former official, this more or less covered the costs of the killings. The murder machine was self-financing, as victims paid for their own extermination.45
Doctors as Murderers
Like other T-4 doctors, Friedrich Mennecke reveled in his role. It has sometimes been suggested that enthusiastic henchmen like Mennecke led double lives to cope with their grisly deeds. Mass murderers in the camps and loving husbands at home, they are said to have erected an impenetrable barrier between professional and private lives.46 Nothing could be further from the truth in Mennecke’s case, as his copious correspondence reveals. Whenever he was away from home, he bombarded his wife with postcards and letters; like an obsessive bookkeeper of his own life, no detail was too small to ignore, from his bowel movements in the morning to his choice of dessert wine after dinner.47 The letters dating from his time in the camps show that SS Hauptsturmführer Mennecke saw no reason to deceive his wife, who, like him, was a committed National Socialist. He even joked about his murderous mission: “Let the next happy hunt begin!!” he scribbled one morning in November 1941 as he set off for Buchenwald.48 Far from drawing a line between his work and private life, Mennecke pleaded with his wife to join him—and she did, more than once, accompanying him on his trips to Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Gross-Rosen.49
Friedrich Mennecke took great pride in his work, which allowed him to rub shoulders with eminent doctors and senior Nazi officials; he proudly informed his wife whenever his superiors praised him.50 And he was fiercely competitive, rejoicing whenever he managed to finish more forms than his colleagues (“He who works fast saves time!”). Throughout his time in the KL, Mennecke did not suffer any obvious pangs of conscience, sleeping soundly and eating well. If anything, the selections of starving prisoners seemed to whet his appetite. “This morning, we worked really hard again,” he reported about his stint in Buchenwald on November 29, 1941. By eleven o’clock, he had completed seventy forms and felt hungry. He walked over to the SS canteen and devoured “a huge meat dumpling (not a burger), salted potatoes and cabbage, plus sauce.”51
His verbosity aside, Dr. Mennecke cut no exceptional figure among the T-4 physicians. Mass murder seems to have come easy to them. Like Mennecke, the others saw the killings as an opportunity—an important step for the Third Reich and an important step for their own careers. What is more, they did not have to execute the death sentences they signed, quickly moving on to the next KL. The general atmosphere during these trips was friendly and collegial, as the T-4 men often shared the same hotels and socialized, drawing on their expense accounts. From the outside, they must have appeared like salesmen on a business trip. And this impression was not entirely wrong; it was just that their business was death.
The mood of T-4 doctors was particularly buoyant in early September 1941, when they met in Munich for their biggest mission yet, in nearby Dachau. The situation inside was largely unchanged since Himmler’s visit in January: no other KL held more sick and dying men. This was why, presumably, the camp was only targeted now, after the murderous operation was fully up and running.52 In late summer 1941, the Dachau Camp SS selected two thousand prisoners to be presented to the T-4 commission; many of them had arrived on “invalid transports” from other camps. To guarantee the speedy examination of these prisoners, T-4 managers mobilized at least seven physicians, headed by Professors Heyde and Nitsche themselves; the latter was determined to make the most of his trip to southern Germany and brought along his wife and daughter, who went on an excursion to the Alps. The T-4 officials, meanwhile, paid a preparatory visit to Dachau on September 3, 1941. Because the SS had not yet completed all its paperwork, the doctors stayed only briefly and took the rest of the day off. Dr. Mennecke, Professor Nitsche, and a few others took advantage of the sunshine and strolled along the scenic Lake Starnberg. They did some more sightseeing back in Munich, before moving on to dinner. Afterward, the group split; most doctors went to the movies, while Mennecke and his friend Steinmeyer carried on drinking in a popular wine bar. The next morning, the group went back to Dachau to begin the selections.53
Inside Dachau, the T-4 doctors acted professionally, corresponding to their self-image as men of Nazi science. To deceive the prisoners about their ultimate fate, they put on a farce, just as they had previously done in other camps. They approached the inmates calmly and politely, in deliberate contrast to the Camp SS. One T-4 official even made a show of chastising a young Dachau block leader for his brutality, to the amazement of onlooking prisoners. The doctors behaved in “a very odd and completely unprecedented” manner, Karel Kašák wrote in his secret notes in September 1941—perhaps the beginning of a better life for the prisoners, he speculated.54 Such hopes were raised further after the T-4 doctors promised the selected prisoners that they would be taken to a camp with light work and better conditions.55 This chimed with claims by Camp SS men, who also painted a rosy picture of transfers to sanatoria, hospitals, and recuperation camps.56 All these lies were designed to make the doomed prisoners compliant. Just as during the general “euthanasia” action, the plan was to leave the victims in the dark until the moment they were killed; even the gas chambers were disguised as washrooms, complete with tiles, benches, and showerheads.57
It was not just the prisoners who were deceived. The whole operation was shrouded in secrecy to prevent the spread of public rumors of the kind that had disrupted the general “euthanasia” program.58 In line with this covert nature, T-4 doctors like Mennecke received most of their instructions during face-to-face meetings and telephone calls.59 Meanwhile, SS officials inside the camps had to sign a written pledge to keep silent about the operation.60 There was no more open talk of murder in the internal correspondence either, as there had been during the first KL executions in September 1939. When it came to the mass murder of invalid prisoners, the officials used a code name, Action 14f13 (insiders immediately recognized its significance: on Camp SS paperwork, the prefix “14f” always referred to the death of prisoners).61 Naturally, the rule of secrecy applied to the victims’ relatives, too. Camp SS doctors sometimes wrote letters with fake medical details, adding condolences about the sudden deaths and assurances that everything had been done to save the deceased (there was no such subterfuge in the case of Jewish prisoners; here, a curt notification of death was considered enough).62
Despite these provisions, Action 14f13 did not proceed as smoothly as the perpetrators planned. There was plenty of improvisation and confusion, as the following example of selections in Ravensbrück shows. On the afternoon of November 19, 1941, Dr. Friedrich Mennecke—seen by his T-4 superiors as the concentration camp specialist—arrived in the town of Fürstenberg near the camp. He came straight from Berlin, where he had met with Professors Heyde and Nitsche to confirm his itinerary for the coming weeks. After dropping off his suitcase in a local hotel, Menneck
e walked to the camp and briefly talked with the adjutant, who told him that the SS had identified a total of 259 prisoners for the examination. Afterward, Mennecke discussed the next steps with Commandant Max Koegel over coffee and beer in the SS mess hall, and then strolled back into town.
Early the next day, Mennecke called Heyde in Berlin to tell him that he would carry out his assignment without the help of other T-4 doctors. He then returned to Ravensbrück and examined the first ninety-five women, who had to appear naked before him. He also held another meeting with Koegel and the camp doctor, convincing them that a further sixty to seventy prisoners should be included. All seemed to be going according to plan, and Mennecke was even more pleased with himself than usual as he returned to his hotel. But later in the evening, he was surprised by the arrival of two colleagues who brought news from Berlin: T-4 leader Viktor Brack had given instructions for a vast two thousand prisoners to be examined in Ravensbrück—around one in every four inmates. Mennecke immediately dispatched a letter to his wife to complain about the administrative chaos. “Nobody cares if that many [prisoners] actually fall under the general guidelines!” he grumbled.
Next morning, the three physicians went to Ravensbrück for a meeting with the commandant about the new directives. Before the expanded selections really got started, however, Heyde called and ordered the two doctors, who had only just arrived, back to T-4 headquarters. The two men were furious and Mennecke, who worked alone again, also fumed about the “height of Berlin incompetence.” One day later, on November 22, 1941, Mennecke received yet another call from the headquarters, informing him that Heyde now expected the Ravensbrück Camp SS to prepare the paperwork on some 1,200 to 1,500 prisoners by mid-December—the fourth target figure in three days. He dutifully passed the message to Commandant Koegel during a final meeting on Monday, November 24, 1941, before leaving for Buchenwald. By then, Mennecke had examined almost three hundred women. Once the Ravensbrück SS had picked out the additional prisoners (including men from the local subcamp), Mennecke returned on January 5, 1942, to finish the job. He selected hundreds more to die, completing 850 forms in little more than a week. The first transport left the camp in the following month, probably for the killing center in Bernburg.63