KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps
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Dr. Mennecke’s murderous mission to Ravensbrück highlights the ad hoc aspects of Action 14f13. At the same time, it marked a significant moment in the treatment of female prisoners. Previously, the women in Ravensbrück had been spared some of the most deadly SS excesses. Now they were included in the KL extermination policy, although some differences between the sexes remained. Proportionally, the Ravensbrück SS presented far more male prisoners to Mennecke than female ones, probably a reflection of the devastating conditions inside the small compound for men. This highlights another important element of the murderous program: its divergent impact on different prisoner groups. Once again, suffering in the KL was not equal.64
Extending Action 14f13
Did Ferdinand (Faybusch) Itzkewitsch have any idea—as he boarded a truck with ninety-two other Buchenwald prisoners in mid-July 1941—that he only had a few hours to live? A forty-nine-year-old Russian Jew who settled as a shoemaker in Germany after the First World War, Itzkewitsch had been held in Buchenwald since 1938, following a prison sentence for “race defilement” (he was convicted for his long-term relationship with his German partner). He had hoped in vain to be released and to emigrate, suffering untold horrors in the camp. But in a letter of June 29, 1941, he still tried to sound upbeat, telling his teenage son that “I am doing well, health-wise” and asking for a quick reply. He probably expected that he would soon leave the camp. Two weeks earlier, he had been among around two hundred prisoners selected by T-4 doctors (Itzkewitsch was presumably picked because of a physical disability). Many Buchenwald inmates had been alarmed by these examinations, after one of the T-4 doctors, Bodo Gorgass, had deviated from the usual script. As Dr. Mennecke noted when he came to Buchenwald a few months later, his coarse colleague “is said to have behaved like a butcher, not like a doctor, damaging the reputation of our action.” To calm the prisoners, Buchenwald SS men promised that there was nothing to fear, as the selected men would be taken to a recuperation camp. Not all inmates were fooled. But there were plenty who wanted to believe the lies; the weaker the prisoners were, the harder they clung to the SS fairy tales. In the end, many men who left Buchenwald in mid-July 1941, on two separate transports, must have still had some hope of being saved. But all of them, including Ferdinand Itzkewitsch, were gassed in Sonnenstein.65
As Action 14f13 continued, the wall of deception inside the concentration camps began to crumble. Some prisoners heard about the murders from SS men who could not bite their tongue.66 Several Kapos, meanwhile, learned the truth after the SS brought back the victims’ clothes and other possessions. Not long after the lethal transport of Ferdinand Itzkewitsch to Sonnenstein, Rudolf Gottschalk, a prisoner clerk in the Buchenwald infirmary, saw the SS return with dentures, spectacles, and crutches. Later Gottschalk was ordered to prepare death certificates for all the departed men. When he asked about their cause of death, the Camp SS doctor handed him a medical dictionary and said “just pick out what you need”; in Itzkewitsch’s case, he chose “pneumonia.”67 The news about the prisoners’ true fate quickly made the rounds in Buchenwald, just as it spread through other KL after the first transports. Many inmates were shocked. The Camp SS, they felt, had crossed a threshold. Prisoners knew their captors to be capable of heinous crimes, but few, it seems, had expected them to turn to systematic mass murder.68 From now on, no one volunteered for transports to the so-called sanatoria, as had sometimes happened in the past, and those who were selected desperately tried to get struck off the lists, though with little hope of success.69
Just as prisoners’ awareness of Action 14f13 grew over time, so did T-4 selections. In line with Himmler’s original orders, selections initially focused on sick, weak, and disabled prisoners—all those written off as unproductive. The victims’ national backgrounds varied from camp to camp, depending on the local makeup of the prisoner population. In Gusen, for example, Poles and Spaniards were in the great majority when the T-4 commission arrived in summer 1941, and consequently accounted for almost all the victims.70 Dachau, by contrast, still held a large number of German men, and they made up almost half of those selected to die by the T-4 doctors in September 1941.71
Although every infirm prisoner was threatened by Action 14f13, some were more likely to be killed than others. Sick and weak “asocials” and “criminals” were specially targeted, it seems, perhaps because the SS saw their inability to work as confirmation of their “work-shy” nature.72 Criminality figured prominently on the official forms, and the T-4 doctors, who had already considered deviance an aggravating factor during earlier “euthanasia” selections in asylums, now appeared to apply similar rules to the KL.73 Summing up his impression of the inmates he had selected in Sachsenhausen in April 1941, Dr. Mennecke informed his wife that they were all, without exception, “‘antisocials’—to the highest degree.”74
The hunt for the infirm hit many prisoners at the bottom of the SS hierarchy, since they were generally in the worst state of health. This was true for social outsiders, and it was even truer for Jewish inmates, outcasts in all the concentration camps. Since the war began, Jews had swelled the ranks of the dying, and by 1941, only a few men with the yellow star were not injured, ill, or starving. Once Himmler launched Action 14f13, the weakest Jewish prisoners, and those with disabilities, like Ferdinand Itzkewitsch and Siegbert Fraenkel, were doomed.75 They were conspicuous not only because of their physical condition. T-4 doctors had already become used to racial mass murder, overseeing the killing of all Jewish patients during the general “euthanasia” program. When it came to the selection of invalids in the KL, a prisoner’s Jewish background must have often tipped the scale.76 Consequently, Jews made up a disproportionately large number of victims; forty-five percent of the 187 Buchenwald prisoners gassed in Sonnenstein in mid-July 1941 were Jews like Ferdinand Itzkewitsch, even though Jews only made up seventeen percent of the camp’s prisoner population.77
Still, during the initial T-4 selections in the concentration camps in spring and summer 1941, medical matters generally outweighed ideological ones. The fact that a prisoner wore a yellow, green, or black triangle—marking him as Jewish, criminal, or asocial—was an aggravating factor, but what counted above all else was his state of health, as we can see when looking more closely at the summer 1941 selections in Buchenwald: although Jews were far more likely to be picked out than most other prisoners, the T-4 doctors sentenced only a fraction—around six percent of all Jewish inmates, many of them elderly—to death.78 The other Jews in Buchenwald were left untouched by the killing program, though not for very long.
Sometime in autumn 1941, the leaders of Action 14f13 stepped up the murder of Jewish prisoners: from now on, almost all Jews in the KL would be assessed by the T-4 doctors.79 This new approach was no doubt linked to the recent escalation of general Nazi anti-Jewish policy; in summer 1941 Himmler’s SS and police units had begun to murder hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children in the occupied east, and the regime was closing in on Jews elsewhere.80 In turn, the terror against Jewish KL prisoners intensified, too. Several months before the Nazi regime embarked on the systematic extermination of European Jews, almost all Jews held inside concentration camps were regarded as candidates for the T-4 gas chambers.
The new priorities of T-4 doctors were revealed when they returned to Buchenwald for a second round of selections in November 1941.81 During their first visit, five months earlier, the doctors had only examined a small proportion of the prisoner population. This time, Dr. Mennecke told his wife on November 26, things were different. In addition to the regular selections, the doctors would determine the fate of 1,200 Jewish men—more than eighty-five percent of all Jewish prisoners in Buchenwald.82 To save time, the doctors abandoned the individual assessments of Jews. Mennecke explained that “none of them will be ‘examined’”; he would base his judgments solely on prisoner files.83 In the end, 384 Buchenwald prisoners were taken to the Bernburg gas chamber between March 2 and 14, 1942. Every single one of the
m was Jewish; in less than two weeks, more than a quarter of all Buchenwald Jews were murdered, setting the standard for future T-4 selections.84
How did Mennecke and other T-4 doctors choose their Jewish victims in late 1941–42? Physical condition continued to play a part: many prisoners were elderly and infirm.85 But T-4 doctors also included a number of Jews who could still work.86 In these cases, the physicians were guided by other criteria. As Mennecke admitted after the war, he condemned some Jewish prisoners who had still been in reasonable health; their selection had nothing to do with medical matters and everything to do with racial policy.87
Dr. Mennecke’s thinking can be reconstructed from notes he made on the back of prisoner photographs (he was planning a publication on Nazi racial science). Recovered after the war, all the photos appear to show Jewish KL inmates, several of whom are known to have died in T-4 gas chambers.88 None of Mennecke’s comments referred to their health. Instead, he made copious notes on their anti-Nazi views, especially in the case of foreigners; “extraordinarily impertinent and spiteful comments about Germans,” he remarked in one case. Mennecke was even more exercised by “asocial” behavior, particularly by what he saw as moral deviance. Most Jewish women selected by Mennecke for his photo collection were accused of sex with German men (“race defilement with German soldiers, like on a conveyor belt”) and around half of them were labeled as prostitutes (“pure-bred Jewish whore with venereal disease”). He regarded these women with leering revulsion, cataloging their supposed promiscuity and degeneracy (“sexually impulsive and insatiable Jewess”). Mennecke applied his moral judgments to men, too; in Buchenwald, almost all Jewish men presumed to be homosexual were sent to the gas chambers.89 Finally, Mennecke took note of the Camp SS verdict on the prisoner’s conduct. Eduard Radinger, for example, a thirty-four-year-old tailor’s assistant from Vienna, was accused of “gambling, laziness, impertinence.” This may well have helped to condemn him to death, as Mennecke apparently placed a “+” next to his name. On March 12, 1942, after having spent almost three years in the KL, first as a “work-shy Jew” and later as a Jewish “protective custody” prisoner, Radinger was deported from Buchenwald to Bernburg, together with 104 other Jewish men, and gassed.90
The Camp SS Takes Charge
Not long after the extension of Action 14f13 in late 1941, the Nazi authorities cut it back. Dr. Mennecke, accompanied by other T-4 doctors, made his final trip to the KL in spring 1942, calling at Flossenbürg and Neuengamme; the last transport of victims left Neuengamme for the Bernburg killing center in June 1942. This marked the end of the operation in its original setup, twelve months after the first prisoners—Siegbert Fraenkel and the other men from Sachsenhausen—had been murdered.91 Inside a year, some 6,500 or more concentration camp prisoners had died in the T-4 gas chambers.92
The commandants were informed about the curtailment of Action 14f13 on March 26, 1942, in a secret communication. Arthur Liebehenschel from the IKL announced that the slaughter, which he referred to as “special treatment,” had to be scaled down. The general rules of the program had been disregarded, he claimed, with the SS presenting too many prisoners to the T-4 commissions. From now on, Liebehenschel stressed, only prisoners who were permanently unable to work should be sent to their deaths. All others—including the sick who could regain some strength—would be held back to “carry out the labor tasks given to the concentration camps.”93 At first glance, this apparent reversal of policy was caused by a recent shift in SS priorities; in spring 1942, Heinrich Himmler demanded that the KL make a greater economic contribution to the German war effort (chapter 8), prompting Camp SS managers like Liebehenschel to scramble to stay on message.
In reality, however, the demise of Action 14f13 was not about economics at all.94 Rather, the marriage of convenience between Camp SS and T-4 had come to an end. The focus of the T-4 organization had shifted to a far bigger program of mass extermination—the Holocaust. By spring 1942, many officials had already relocated to occupied eastern Europe, where they were in great demand for the new death camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka; in comparison, the murder of KL prisoners in the “euthanasia” killing centers inside Germany lost its significance.
The Camp SS, meanwhile, did not need the T-4 killers anymore. In recent months, SS men had proven themselves as professional mass murderers in their own right, with Muselmänner among their prime targets. While thousands of weak and sick prisoners were being selected for the T-4 gas chambers, local Camp SS men had started to murder many more on the spot during the second half of 1941.95 Previously, such SS murders of invalid inmates inside the KL had been sporadic. Now they became systematic and soon superseded Action 14f13. Although some more prisoner transports still went to the external T-4 gas chambers later in 1942, before they closed down, most murders now took place inside the concentration camps.96
Why did local Camp SS men embark on mass executions of infirm prisoners, in parallel to the coordinated T-4 program? Partly because they could. Their initial experiences during Action 14f13 had taught them that it would be safe to move to executions inside the KL. Fears about prisoner unrest had proved unfounded; the T-4 selections continued without a hitch, despite the growing prisoner awareness of the murders. Also, the local Camp SS must have seen practical benefits; murdering Muselmänner inside the KL meant no more doctors’ commissions, deportations, and delays. Furthermore, SS men believed that they had the right to kill. Once Himmler had sanctioned the mass murder of the infirm by launching Action 14f13, the local Camp SS saw little reason to hold back. The dynamic had been the same in autumn 1939, when Himmler’s central execution policy set off a spate of local killings. Once again, radical actions taken at the top of the SS state triggered a radical response from below, ratcheting up terror inside the camps.
The scene of the first Camp SS massacre of Muselmänner was Buchenwald. Following the arrival of two prisoner transports from Dachau in July 1941, Buchenwald SS men felt overwhelmed by infirm inmates and feared that some of the newcomers carried infections. The local SS decided to kill the invalids, and rather than wait for the return of the T-4 commission, went ahead on its own. Several hundred exhausted prisoners were isolated in the infirmary, as suspected carriers of TB, and murdered by an SS doctor with lethal injections.97
Other concentration camps followed suit during the second half of 1941. SS men in different camps explored different killing methods, as the spirit of lethal experimentation became all-pervasive. In Gusen, for example, hundreds of weak and emaciated prisoners were killed during so-called “bathing actions.” Directed by the terrifying camp leader Karl Chmielewski, the Gusen SS forced the prisoners under freezing showers for thirty minutes or more; some drowned in the standing water, others succumbed to hypothermia, with the screams of the dying men echoing across the compound.98 Camp SS men elsewhere used other ways to murder the infirm, with lethal injections—either intravenously or straight into the heart—emerging as the SS favorite. The main drug of choice was phenol; when it was unavailable, SS doctors often injected air instead. The Ravensbrück camp doctor Rolf Rosenthal recalled that, when he witnessed the lethal injection of a female prisoner after his arrival in January 1942, he was told that “this was always administered when people were very ill and incurable.”99
By 1942, the systematic murder of exhausted, weak, and ill prisoners had become a permanent feature of the KL. Sometimes local Camp SS officials would pick their victims within days of arrival.100 More commonly, the prisoners were pulled out during regular selections in infirmaries. Doctors played a major role here, just as they had done during Action 14f13; but this time it was Camp SS physicians who sent the prisoners to their deaths, not outsiders like Dr. Mennecke.101
Although the mass murder of Muselmänner was decentralized, it was sanctioned and probably encouraged by senior IKL managers. Previously, the Oranienburg officials had insisted on steering such killings—as during Action 14f13. But in view of the growing number of sick prisoners, they m
ust have concluded that managing all murders was impossible and relaxed the rules. According to an internal SS document, camp doctors were now authorized to kill “on their own initiative” those prisoners who were “incurably ill,” “ridden with epidemics,” or “suspected of suffering from an epidemic disease.”102
To retain some central control, Camp SS managers in October 1942 revived the plan of turning Dachau into a collection camp for “physically weak prisoners who are not fit for use”; this time, all these prisoners were slated for extermination.103 Over the coming weeks and months, many Muselmänner from other KL arrived in Dachau to die.104 Some perished in transit.105 The most appalling transport arrived on November 19, 1942, with several hundred men on board. It had set off days earlier from Stutthof and the prisoners, crammed into cattle cars, had received almost no food since. When the doors opened at the Dachau SS compound, dozens of corpses lay inside. The dead were dumped inside the camp, together with the soiled survivors, some so starved that their shoulder blades protruded like wings. Even the cruelest SS block leaders “turned away in disgust,” Karel Kašák wrote in his notes. Dozens of the new arrivals are said to have died within hours; at least one of them was killed by an SS guard, who stepped on his throat until he suffocated.106