Few prisoners who arrived in Dachau on so-called invalid transports in 1942 lived for very long. Those who defied illness, hunger, and neglect were killed after SS selections, apparently by lethal injection.107 Another method of mass murder considered by the Dachau SS was poison gas. The construction of a gas chamber was under way since spring 1942, and its primary purpose, it seems, was the extermination of weak and sick prisoners, though it remains unclear whether this facility was ever put to use.108 Dachau would not have been the first KL to kill invalid inmates with gas; by autumn 1942, SS men in several other camps had already done so.109 The main target of these experiments with poison gas had not been Muselmänner, however, but Soviet prisoners of war, who began to arrive in the thousands from late summer 1941 onward.
EXECUTING SOVIET POWS
Early on June 22, 1941, German troops invaded the Soviet Union—Operation Barbarossa, the biggest and most devastating military campaign ever, had begun. German forces, more than three million men strong, initially advanced rapidly and left death and destruction in their wake.110 Hitler had long dreamed about this moment, picturing a decisive showdown with “Jewish Bolsheviks” that would determine Germany’s destiny. More than two months before the invasion, he told his generals to prepare for an all-out war of extermination.111 From June 1941, the German army realized Hitler’s order, flanked by specially trained SS and police killing units, such as the task forces. At the same time, the German authorities were drawing up plans for the long-term occupation of the Soviet Union, which were gigantic in scale and genocidal in intent, condemning many millions of civilians to death by starvation.112
There was no mercy for captured Soviet soldiers either. Hitler regarded them as no better than animals—dumb, dangerous, and depraved—and the German Army High Command decided even before the invasion that the conventional rules of warfare would not apply to them (in contrast to POWs on the Western Front).113 Entire armies of Soviet prisoners perished in German hands. “The more of these prisoners die, the better for us,” crowed some senior Nazi officials. In all, an estimated three to five hundred thousand Soviet POWs died each month between October and December 1941. Most of them wasted away in POW camps, starving and freezing to death in makeshift tents and muddy holes. Other Soviet soldiers were murdered elsewhere, including concentration camps, after the Nazi war of extermination entered the KL.114
Searching for Commissars
Hitler and his generals were obsessed with Soviet commissars; among all the enemies they saw lurking in the east, the commissar was one of the fiercest, an almost mythical figure. Nazi leaders were convinced that savage and fanatical commissars, as the personification of “Jewish Bolshevism,” would force their troops to fight to the end and commit untold acts of cruelty against German soldiers. To preempt such atrocities and to break the Soviet resistance, the German Army High Command on June 6, 1941, ordered the execution of all “political commissars” who acted against German troops. This order, which found widespread support among the fiercely anti-Bolshevik German officer corps, was applied very widely—on the battlefields and in the rear, against combatants and captives—and thereby contributed to the erosion of the boundaries between front line and occupied territory.115
Himmler’s police and SS apparatus was closely involved in the executions. To make sure that no commissars slipped through the net, the RSHA dispatched special police units to search for “politically unacceptable” Soviet prisoners in POW and labor camps. The list of suspects was as long as it was vague, including not just alleged commissars and party officials, but also “fanatical Communists,” “the Soviet-Russian intelligentsia,” and “all Jews.” After these enemies had been identified among the mass of POWs, Reinhard Heydrich ordered in mid-July 1941, they would be exterminated.116
Armed with Heydrich’s order, police commandos swarmed all over POW camps. The policemen briefly interrogated suspects about their identity and activities; if they did not get the right answers, the officials would turn to violence and torture. In addition, they used intelligence provided by prisoner informers who hoped to save their own lives. Grigorij Efimovitsch Ladik, for example, was betrayed by one of his comrades. Interrogated by his captors in a POW camp, Ladik admitted that he had previously lied about his background: “I gave a wrong account of my personal details because I was frightened that I would be recognized as a political leader and shot” (he was executed soon after). Such confessions were rare, however. Far more often, Heydrich’s policemen relied on guesswork and prejudice. Most of them did not even understand the term “intelligentsia.” But they did know how to abuse and humiliate their victims. Soldiers suspected of being Jewish, for instance, were forced to strip to determine if they were circumcised, sealing the fate of many Jews, as well as Muslims.117 After the policemen completed their selections inside a POW camp, they reported all suspects—sometimes more than twenty percent of all examined prisoners—for execution, with Jewish POWs, widely suspected of being synonymous with commissars, more likely to be murdered than non-Jews.118
The doomed men were isolated while the perpetrators awaited further instructions.119 Most of the victims were young, largely in their twenties, and came from a wide range of backgrounds. The vast majority were regular soldiers, including many peasants and industrial workers—a far cry from the satanic commissar of the Nazi imagination.120 To pick just one example: among a group of 410 Soviet POWs selected for execution, the Gestapo described only three as “functionaries and officers.” The rest were rank-and-file men; 25 were classed as “Jews,” 69 as members of the “intelligentsia,” 146 as “fanatical communists,” 85 as “agitators, troublemakers, thieves,” 35 as “escapees,” and 47 as “incurably ill.”121
When it came to the execution of “commissars” in the occupied east, the RSHA was rather relaxed; there were so many massacres, a few more hardly mattered. The only rule was that killings were carried out in some seclusion, away from the POW camps themselves.122 The situation was rather different inside the Third Reich, where the authorities had established additional POW and labor camps. So as not to alarm the German public, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller ordered on July 21, 1941, that selected commissars should be killed “inconspicuously in the nearest concentration camp.”123 Continuing the SS practice of camouflaging programs of mass murder, the new program was code-named Action 14f14.
The first Soviet POWs arrived in concentration camps in early autumn 1941. Most transports were rather small, consisting of around twenty prisoners or so; others were much larger, however, taking hundreds to their deaths. Many victims never even reached the KL. After weeks or months in German army camps, they did not survive the long hours shackled together inside freight trains; others collapsed during the march from railway stations to the camps.124 In Sachsenhausen, the deadliest such train arrived on October 11, 1941, from a POW camp in Pomerania, nearly two hundred miles away; out of some six hundred “commissars” on board, sixty-three had perished.125
The deaths during transports caused concern among the Camp SS, and in autumn 1941 a complaint by commandants that between five and ten percent of Soviet POWs were dead or dying on arrival reached Gestapo boss Müller. The commandants feared that the semipublic deaths of POWs would sully the SS reputation among the local population.126 These concerns were not entirely unfounded, for popular reactions were quite different from the whipped-up frenzy during the arrival of Polish “snipers” back in autumn 1939. Some ordinary Germans were shocked by the lethal treatment of Soviet prisoners. In November 1941, a German teacher wrote in his diary what he had heard about the arrival of Russians in Neuengamme: “They were completely starved, so much so that some fell off the truck and staggered limply toward the barracks.”127 Heinrich Müller was worried enough about public opinion to order an end to the transports of Soviet POWs who were, as he put it, “about to die anyway.”128 This did not save the “commissars,” of course. They had already been condemned. The only question was where they would die—in a POW camp, in tr
ansit, or in a KL.
Most Soviet “commissars” who made it to the concentration camps were executed within days. Unlike other new prisoners, they were not even properly registered. In the eyes of the Camp SS, there was no need; they were already dead. Most KL turned to mass killing in autumn 1941 and continued until the following spring or summer, when the German authorities officially rescinded the commissar order, for tactical reasons, and scaled down selections in POW camps; by then, forty thousand or more Soviet “commissars” had been dispatched to the concentration camps for execution.129 Almost all of them were men, with the women’s camp in Ravensbrück among the few untouched KL.130 The systematic mass extermination of Soviet “commissars” was a cataclysmic moment in the camps’ history, dwarfing all previous killing campaigns. For the first time, the Camp SS carried out executions on a vast scale. Sachsenhausen stood at the center of the slaughter: during a frenzied two-month period in September and October 1941, SS men executed around nine thousand Soviet POWs, far more than in any other KL.131
Death in Sachsenhausen
Sometime in August 1941, a group of leading Camp SS men came together for a secret meeting in the Sachsenhausen office of Hans Loritz, the longest-serving SS commandant. Loritz and some of his men were joined by Inspector Richard Glücks from the nearby IKL and his chief of staff Arthur Liebehenschel, who took the minutes. But all eyes were on the special guest of honor—Theodor Eicke.132 As commander of the SS Death’s Head division, Eicke had been involved in heavy fighting during the German attack on the Soviet Union and was wounded in Latvia on the night of July 6–7, 1941, when his car hit a mine.133 Recovering at his villa on the edge of the SS grounds in Oranienburg, Eicke had made the short trip to Sachsenhausen, where his former subordinates—who idolized him even more now that he was a decorated military commander—welcomed him with open arms. They also knew that he still had a direct line to Himmler. The Reichsführer SS regarded Eicke as one of his “most faithful friends” and met him twice in late summer 1941, just as the killing of Soviet commissars in the KL was getting under way. In fact, it was probably Himmler who had authorized Eicke to initiate the Sachsenhausen SS.134
At the meeting in Sachsenhausen in August 1941, Eicke took the floor to announce the program to murder Soviet POWs. Typically, Eicke presented the Third Reich as the victim of a subhuman enemy who had left it no choice but to strike back. Gustav Sorge, the leader of the Sachsenhausen death squad, later summarized Eicke’s speech: “In retaliation for the shooting of German soldiers in Soviet captivity, the Führer had approved a request by the Wehrmacht High Command and agreed to a retaliation action … by shooting prisoners, namely commissars and supporters of the Soviet Communist Party.” The words were given added weight by the reference to Hitler and by the wounds Eicke had sustained on the Eastern Front, still visible to all.135
After Eicke’s general introduction, the talk turned to practical matters. The Camp SS leaders apparently discussed various ways of mass killing, trying to surpass one another with ever more ingenious proposals.136 In the end, they chose a new method, which required the construction of a special execution chamber, and designated Sachsenhausen block leaders to carry out the killings; it seems that the men were inducted into their tasks that day, followed by a round of drinks to mark the occasion.137 The preparation for mass murder in Sachsenhausen quickly began. Supervised by SS men, prisoners from the joinery workshop turned a barn on the so-called industry yard into an execution barrack, using plans supplied by Commandant Loritz.138 Once it was completed, the SS made two trial runs, murdering a small number of Soviet prisoners.139 Then the apparatus went into full operation.
The first mass transport of Soviet “commissars” arrived in Sachsenhausen on August 31, 1941, from the Hammerstein POW camp (Eicke met up with Himmler on the same day). The transport was made up of almost five hundred soldiers, mostly from around Minsk, and included a large number of Jews. Thousands more men followed over the coming weeks.140 The new prisoners were confused and scared; far from home on enemy soil, they did not know where they were and what would happen to them. Despite their youth—some soldiers were no more than fifteen years old—many looked utterly worn out. They were clad in dirty and torn clothes, with trousers held up by string, and soiled bandages covering their wounds. Instead of shoes, many had rags on their feet or went barefoot.141
Some Sachsenhausen guards saw the endless procession of misery as proof of the prisoners’ savage nature. SS officials even took pictures for propaganda purposes (a practice established in the prewar camps); a few of the images were later reprinted in the SS publication The Subhuman, which pointed its readers to the “caricatures of human faces, nightmares that have become reality.”142 In reality, the SS men were the savages. Block leaders dished out brutal beatings and locked the prisoners into two bare barracks cut off from the rest of the camp by barbed wire. To increase the isolation, the windows were painted over.143
After the recent arrivals spent a grim spell in these isolation barracks, lasting no more than a few days, SS block leaders collected them, usually in small groups of a few dozen men, and drove them on canvas-covered trucks to the execution barrack, which was shut off from the rest of the camp by a wooden fence. Taking their cue from Action 14f13, the Camp SS left its victims in the dark until the end. Following a medical exam, the SS told the prisoners, they would be taken to a better place. But the victims went straight to their deaths. Inside the barrack was a large room, where the SS ordered all prisoners to undress, before leading the first man to an adjacent, smaller room, furnished like a doctor’s office; it looked like a small stage set, complete with medical instruments and anatomical charts. Here an SS man dressed in a white coat was waiting, posing as a physician. While he pretended to carry out a brief physical examination, he checked whether the prisoner had any gold fillings; those who did were marked with a cross (another practice borrowed from the “euthanasia” killings). Then the prisoner was led next door to an even smaller room, which resembled a bathroom with shower heads on the ceiling. An SS man ordered the prisoner to stand with his back against a measuring pole fixed to the wall. A small gap in the pole allowed another SS man—hidden in an adjoining booth—to aim his gun at the prisoner’s neck. Once the prisoner was in place, the killer received a signal and pulled the trigger. Judging by the gaping holes in the victims’ skulls, the SS used special dumdum bullets.
After the body slumped to the floor, another door opened. Kapos from the crematorium commando appeared and dragged the corpse to the makeshift morgue in the barrack’s last room. Wearing rubber gloves, they ripped out gold teeth; any prisoner who still showed signs of life was finished off by an SS block leader. Later the Kapos threw the corpses into the oven of mobile crematoria, stationed just outside the barrack. Back inside the execution chamber, the perpetrators sprayed the floors and walls with a hose to wash away all the blood, tissue, and bone splinters. Then the next prisoner was led in. Some of them sensed that they would die. Many others were oblivious to their fate. Illness and exhaustion clouded their minds, and they were fooled by the SS theater. The SS also muffled the gunshot sounds. Not only was the killers’ booth soundproof, a gramophone played in the room where the other naked men were waiting. Cheerful tunes flowed through the barrack, the last sound a Soviet soldier would hear before he was shot from behind.144
The Sachsenhausen SS quickly became used to these assembly-line murders. Until mid-November 1941, when the operation was suspended because of a typhus epidemic, mass shootings took place several times a week. According to a former SS block leader, such actions lasted from early morning until late at night, with a prisoner being shot every two or three minutes, claiming around 300 to 350 lives a day.145 The Kapos worked nonstop, too, burning more than twenty-five bodies per hour at the crematoria.146 The smoke and stench soon spread outside the camp, alerting the local Oranienburg population. There was much talk behind closed doors about the murders and some bold children even approached passing SS men to as
k when the next Russians would be burned.147
One evening in mid-September 1941, after the neck-shooting apparatus had operated for around two weeks, the Sachsenhausen SS proudly demonstrated it to two dozen SS grandees.148 The visitors were led through the execution barrack and watched as several Soviet POWs were shot and then “thrown with great brutality onto heaps,” as one of the SS officers later testified. Among the visitors were Inspector Glücks and his staff, who toasted their murderous invention with alcohol. Also present was Ernst Grawitz, the SS Reich physician, who had long been involved in Nazi mass murder. Most important, Theodor Eicke once more graced the Camp SS with his presence, just before he went back to the Eastern Front. Eicke addressed the Sachsenhausen SS men, encouraging them to keep up their grisly work. The grateful men sent off their hero with cheers and presents, including three cakes and a card addressed to “Papa Eicke.”149
Before Eicke returned to the front, he also took leave from Heinrich Himmler, meeting him on the evening of September 15, 1941, just a few hours after Reich physician Grawitz had seen Himmler. There can be little doubt that the Reichsführer SS was updated that day about the Sachsenhausen murders.150 After all, SS leaders knew that Himmler was actively looking for new methods of mass extermination. The daily massacres in the occupied Soviet Union, where Jews were lined up and shot into mass graves, had revealed that not all Nazi killers could stomach the pools of blood, the piercing screams of the wounded, and the cries of those next in line.151 This had prompted Himmler to look for more humane ways of mass murder—more humane for the killers, that is. Grawitz or Eicke, or both, must have reported back to Himmler about the new Sachsenhausen method, which promised some “advantages” over conventional mass shootings. After all, the killers did not have to look at their victims when they pulled the trigger, and most victims went to their deaths unaware, without protest or panic.
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Page 37
