KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Similar motives stood behind the creation, later in 1941, of a third new camp in occupied eastern Europe, near a small village called Stutthof (Sztutowo), near Danzig. In contrast to Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau, a camp already existed here. The Stutthof camp, surrounded by thick forests, swamps, and canals, had initially been set up by a local SS unit on September 2, 1939, just after the German attack on Poland, to terrorize the local population. In early 1940, SS leaders briefly considered turning the site into a concentration camp. But after some discussion, Himmler decided against it. In autumn 1941, he changed his mind. During a visit on Sunday, November 23, 1941, he concluded that it should become a KL proper. His order was implemented in early 1942.235 The new camp was designated as a regional provider of forced labor for German settlements in Danzig and West Prussia. Because the plans were more modest than for Majdanek and Birkenau, Himmler was thinking of allocating fewer Soviet POWs than to the other two new camps; in late 1941, he proposed sending some twenty thousand men. Plans for a new compound on the site were duly drawn up in Berlin and sent to Stutthof in early March 1942, at a time when the building work in Birkenau and Majdanek was already under way.236

  It is worth pausing to reflect on the magnitude of Himmler’s plans for Soviet POWs. What he was proposing in autumn 1941 was the greatest shake-up of the KL system since the mid-1930s. He envisaged a colossal increase in prisoner numbers. At a time when the entire camp system held fewer than eighty thousand prisoners, Himmler wanted to add some two hundred thousand or more. The great majority would work in gigantic new camp complexes, towering over the existing KL. The main camp in Auschwitz (with some ten thousand prisoners, currently one of the largest camps) would be dwarfed by the attached new camp in nearby Birkenau.237 And with so many Soviet POWs earmarked for new camps in occupied Poland, the balance of the entire concentration camp system would tip sharply eastward. This focus on the east pointed to the new function of concentration camps: the colonization of German living space. Making prisoners perform productive labor was nothing new. Neither was their use in construction projects. But the plans in autumn 1941 were of a different order. Himmler envisaged an enormous program of forced labor, harnessing vast numbers of prisoners for a vital Nazi building program overseen by the SS. The KL would grow, the SS economy would grow, and Germany would grow. Once again, Himmler saw himself as acting in the best interests of both the SS and the nation.

  KL Graveyards

  On October 7, 1941, a freight train pulled up at a ramp near the Auschwitz main camp and slowly came to a halt. Inside were 2,014 men, the first Soviet POWs dispatched to the camp for forced labor. The doors were flung open and the prisoners, dazed and dirty, staggered out of the stifling carriages into the bright light, gasping for air. Among them was the twenty-eight-year-old infantry lieutenant Nikolaj Wassiljew from Moscow. “We did not know where we had arrived,” he said later, “and what kind of camp this was.” The SS guards soon showed them: screams and blows rained down on Wassiljew and the others. Some feared that they would be shot straightaway. Instead, the SS forced them to strip and jump into a vat filled with disinfectant. Wassiljew recalled that those “who did not want to jump were kicked and pushed in with sticks.” Then the bone-thin POWs had to crouch naked on the floor.238

  The newcomers had barely caught their breath when the Auschwitz SS ordered them to march to the camp. It was an icy autumn day, with frost on the roofs and patches of snow on the ground, and the Soviet soldiers were shivering with cold as they arrived inside the compound, where more SS men lay in wait. Some pointed their cameras at the POWs and took trophy photographs. Others battered the prisoners and then forced them to line up. There were further disinfections, which spread more terror, and also more disease since they were performed ineptly. “Then we were chased into the barrack[s],” remembered Nikolaj Wassiljew. The new POW section in the Auschwitz main camp consisted of nine completely bare blocks. “We remained without clothes for several days,” Wassiljew added, “we were always naked.” For warmth, the prisoners would huddle together in groups. The weakest leaned against the walls or lay on the concrete floors.239

  More and more transports arrived over the coming days, and the small POW enclosure was soon desperately overcrowded; between October 7 and 25, 1941, almost ten thousand Soviet soldiers were pressed inside, doubling the Auschwitz prisoner population in just eighteen days.240 All this was the result of Himmler’s deal with the army. Following the general agreement in late September, the High Command of the Wehrmacht had started to make good on its promise to hand over Soviet POWs. On October 2, 1941, it ordered the transfer of twenty-five thousand prisoners for labor inside the Third Reich; the ensuing transports to the KL started within days—mostly heading for Auschwitz—and were completed by the end of the month. An additional two thousand Soviet POWs were dispatched to Majdanek in the General Government.241

  The incoming Soviet POWs faced infernal conditions, not just in Auschwitz. In Sachsenhausen, they were also crammed inside empty barracks. There were “no beds, no cots, no chairs or tables, no blankets,” recalled Benjamin Lebedev, who arrived with 1,800 other Soviet soldiers on October 18, 1941. “We slept on the ground, our wooden shoes as a cushion.”242 In Gross-Rosen, the first arrivals were not even allowed inside their barracks and had to spend several nights outside; between two hundred and three hundred men are said to have lost their lives during the first night alone.243 In Majdanek, too, some Soviet POWs had to sleep out in the open, as there were not yet enough barracks; desperate for shelter, the prisoners dug holes in the hard ground.244

  In line with Himmler’s plans, the Camp SS soon pressed some of the POWs into forced labor. In Auschwitz, Soviet prisoners had to prepare the new Birkenau compound from autumn 1941 onward. They cleared woods, dug trenches, and dismantled old farmhouses to gather bricks for the new camp buildings. Toiling with their bare hands in icy temperatures, many prisoners collapsed and died. “They froze en masse,” a Polish resistance fighter wrote in a secret note; other POWs were shot or beaten to death during work. As the survivors dragged themselves back each evening from the Birkenau building site to their quarters in the main camp, they were accompanied by a cart that carried the corpses of their comrades.245

  The majority of Soviet POWs were too weak to work at all. In Flossenbürg, it took several months before the Camp SS deployed any of the 1,700 POWs who had arrived in mid-October 1941.246 In Gross-Rosen, the SS sent only 150 of the 2,500 Soviet men into the camp’s quarry, and even they produced almost nothing, as the local DESt office complained in mid-December 1941: “These Russians are in such bad physical shape that one can barely demand any labor from them. They are worse than the worst prisoners so far.”247 Having already suffered at the noxious hands of the German army, the Soviet soldiers were in a desperate state even before they entered the concentration camps. “I was already ill when I arrived,” recalled Nikolaj Wassiljew. “I had a kidney infection, pneumonia, and dysentery.” After a week in Auschwitz, he was moved to an infirmary for Soviet POWs, which resembled a morgue more than a hospital. There was almost no hope of treatment, with prisoner orderlies reduced to using toilet paper as bandages.248

  Most Soviet POWs joined the ranks of the dying—such were the conditions in most concentration camps. Many starved to death, since the Camp SS had reduced their rations well below those of other prisoners, until there was almost no food left at all; probably for the first time in the history of the KL, some inmates became so desperate they resorted to cannibalism. In Auschwitz, Commandant Rudolf Höss viewed the death struggle of Soviet soldiers like an anthropologist, as if it had nothing to do with him. “They were no longer human beings,” he wrote in 1946. “They had become animals, only on the hunt for food.” Some Camp SS men amused themselves by throwing bread into the POW enclosures, watching the frantic prisoners fight for every scrap.249 Starvation soon bred more illness.250 And epidemics were rampant, too; by late November 1941, half of all Soviet soldiers in Majdanek were suffering f
rom typhus and its aftereffects.251

  The Camp SS did not hesitate to kill ill, infectious, and weak Soviet soldiers, perhaps aware that Himmler approved such murders as a radical solution to epidemics and supply shortages.252 In Auschwitz, Nikolaj Wassiljew, who worked in the infirmary after his health had improved, witnessed a large SS selection among POWs in early 1942. Stripped naked, they had to run past SS men, sitting behind a table, who singled out the weakest ones. The victims were led, one by one, into the operating room and murdered by lethal injection.253 In other camps, too, SS men routinely murdered sick POWs (just as they started to murder other so-called invalids, too). In Majdanek and Mauthausen, for example, SS men responded to typhus outbreaks by killing large numbers of Soviet soldiers in autumn and winter 1941; murder was seen as the surest method of disease control.254

  Camp SS men also executed Soviet POWs on political grounds, even though they had been sent for work. Within weeks of their arrival in October 1941, the RSHA, still obsessed with the danger of commissars, had dispatched Gestapo commissions to concentration camps to root out supposed enemies hiding among the new arrivals. In Auschwitz, Gestapo officials screened all Soviet slave laborers, and selected one thousand “fanatical communists” and “politically unacceptable [elements]” for execution; the Camp SS shot and gassed the victims from late 1941 onward.255

  The line between Soviet POWs who came to concentration camps for forced labor and those who came for execution became ever more blurred. In November 1941, Heinrich Himmler even agreed to temporarily exempt “commissars” from execution if they were fit for work. From now on, the local Camp SS could pick out physically strong men from execution transports for labor in quarries; soon these prisoners would be dead, too, but not before the SS had harnessed their last strength.256 This was an early appearance of the concept of “annihilation through labor,” which SS leaders were also considering as a weapon against Jews, and which would claim countless lives in the KL over the coming years.257

  But this was still in the future. Back in autumn and winter 1941, the Camp SS gained almost nothing from the suffering of Soviet soldiers who arrived as slave laborers. The scale of death was stunning. In Majdanek, hardly any of the two thousand Soviet POWs were still alive in mid-January 1942.258 In Auschwitz, too, the young soldiers “dropped like flies,” as Commandant Rudolf Höss noted. Around eighty percent—some 7,900 men or more—were dead by early January 1942, less than three months after the first transport had reached the camp; the worst day came on November 4, 1941, when 352 Soviet POWs died in Auschwitz.259 The mass death of Soviet soldiers in late 1941 was not confined to the KL in the occupied east. In Sachsenhausen, almost thirty percent of Soviet POWs are said to have perished within their first month inside (not counting “commissars” executed in the neck-shooting barrack).260 And in Gross-Rosen, just 89 out of 2,500 Soviet POWs were still alive on January 25, 1942.261

  At the time, the local Camp SS saw these deaths, which far exceeded all previous Camp SS records, largely as a logistical problem. This was true above all in Auschwitz, which claimed the lives of more Soviet slave laborers than any other KL. The Auschwitz SS initially struggled to identify all the dead, as army tags were lost in the chaos of the POW enclosure and numbers written on bodies quickly rubbed off. To prevent cases of mistaken identity, the SS took a drastic step. From November 1941 onward, Soviet slave workers had their prisoner number tattooed onto their skin. A special metal stamp was punched into the prisoner’s chest, with ink wiped into the wound; the men were so weak they were propped against a wall, lest they collapse under the blow of the stamp. The notorious Auschwitz tattoo was born and later extended to most inmates in the camp (no other KL used tattoos, though some had used ink stamps in the past).262

  The Auschwitz SS also searched for new ways to dispose of the dead. The existing crematorium in the main camp could not burn all the dead POWs, and as corpses were piling up all over the enclosure, a sickening smell of decomposing bodies began to spread through the camp and beyond. On November 11, 1941, the recently appointed head of the Auschwitz SS building office, Karl Bischoff, sent a cable to the camp’s furnace supplier in Germany: “Third incinerator urgently needed.” Because it would take months before the new oven was installed, the Camp SS in the meantime decided to dump the bodies in ditches in Birkenau, hastily dug by other POWs. Birkenau became a vast graveyard for Soviet soldiers.263

  Himmler Thwarted

  In autumn and winter 1941, a gulf opened up between Himmler’s megalomaniac plans for the mass deployment of Soviet POWs, which envisaged their exploitation for gigantic German settlements, and the reality inside his concentration camps, which was all about death. Even a few Camp SS men were alert to the apparent contradictions of SS policy. Their doubts were summed up by a Sachsenhausen official, who asked himself out loud: “So have these people come here to die or to work?”264 As an advocate of “annihilation through labor,” Himmler’s answer would have been “both.” But in the case of the Soviet POWs who arrived for slave labor in October 1941, the SS succeeded only in part; the soldiers were annihilated all right, but long before most of them could be exploited. The RSHA warned the Camp SS not to confuse POWs arriving “for labor deployment” with those destined “for execution.”265 Not all local SS men could see the difference; after all, Nazi propaganda had long painted all Soviet soldiers as dangerous subhumans.266

  And so the death of Soviet POWs continued. When the Sachsenhausen block leader Martin Knittler, a seasoned killer from the camp’s neck-shooting barrack, was informed one day in November 1941 that nine Soviet slave laborers had perished, he replied: “What? Only nine deaths today? We’ll see to that.” Knittler then ordered the remaining Soviet soldiers, who had just showered, to stand for hours outside their barrack in the freezing cold. The next day, thirty-seven of them were dead.267 SS men like Knittler could rationalize their murders as economically beneficial. Following Nazi social-Darwinist thinking, the lethal conditions they helped to create led to a natural selection; those Soviet soldiers who survived would be the fittest and hardest workers.268

  Camp SS leaders in Oranienburg were well aware of the slaughter of Soviet slave laborers. But Richard Glücks and his men were neither surprised nor alarmed.269 In fact, they fostered the lethal atmosphere inside the KL. When it came to the construction of new barracks, Arthur Liebehenschel had been implacable from the start. The Soviet POWs, he announced in mid-September 1941, had to be housed “in the most primitive manner.”270 What this meant becomes clear when studying the SS plans for the new camp at Birkenau, drawn up in mid-October 1941. Disease and death were built into the plans, which envisaged 125,000 POWs packed into 174 barracks; the surface space allocated to each prisoner was, appropriately enough, the same size as a coffin. Seven thousand prisoners were supposed to share a latrine hut and 7,800 prisoners a wash hut. These provisions were worse, far worse, than the standard design for concentration camps. But in the eyes of SS planners—who subscribed to Himmler’s views of Soviets as resilient “human animals”—they were just right.271

  At first glance, the treatment of Soviet POWs in late 1941 seems baffling: Why were so many men, who had been earmarked for KL slave labor, pushed to their graves? From the perspective of the SS, however, these murders were less contentious. The deaths would have raised concerns only if the lives of Soviet slave laborers had held any real value. They did not. Underlying the murder and neglect by the Camp SS was the conviction that the twenty-seven thousand soldiers who had arrived in October 1941 were just the vanguard; far more Soviet POWs would follow and take the place of the dead. Caught up in the hubris of Nazi domination, the Camp SS counted on an infinite surge of Soviet prisoners.272

  But the reinforcements did not come. Not long after the SS had staked a claim on captured Soviet soldiers, Hitler made a decisive intervention. On October 31, 1941, faced with growing labor shortages, he ordered the mass deployment of Soviet POWs for the general German war effort; soon, SS claims were sidelined by
the more urgent demands from state and private industry. What is more, there were far fewer captives than expected. Never again did the Wehrmacht take as many prisoners as it did in the early months of Operation Barbarossa. Afterward, the blitzkrieg predicted by Hitler’s cocksure generals turned into an unceasing war of attrition. The German advance stalled outside Moscow, followed by the first major counteroffensive in December 1941. By then, most of the captured Soviet soldiers were already dead or dying, victims of the fatal conditions in Wehrmacht compounds and the merciless hunt for “commissars.”273 Himmler’s huge wave of Soviet POWs never hit the concentration camps.

  As a result, his grandiose plans for the expansion of the KL system—with the giant new camps in Birkenau and Majdanek as the main base for Soviet soldiers—failed to materialize, at least in the way he had intended. On December 19, 1941, SS buildings supremo Hans Kammler sent Himmler a sobering update about progress in Birkenau and Majdanek. Hard as he tried to apply a positive gloss, Kammler conceded that the construction of both camps—now projected at one hundred and fifty thousand prisoners each—was well behind schedule; so far, only twenty-six barracks had been built in Majdanek, and fourteen in Birkenau. The main problem, apart from subzero temperatures and shortages of building material, was the sheer lack of manpower. As conceived in autumn 1941, the building project relied on the influx of huge numbers of Soviet soldiers. But the POWs who had arrived so far were of no use to the SS. The plans to make the POWs build their own barracks, Kammler admitted, had to be dropped, because the prisoners “are in such a catastrophic physical state that it is currently not possible to contemplate a successful labor deployment.”274