KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  In the end, Majdanek never grew into a major hub for forced labor. The provisional compound was still far from finished in summer 1942. There were only two barracks for SS guards, the watchtowers were incomplete, and building material was scattered all over the grounds.275 Majdanek did not come close to its projected size. Most of the time, it held no more than around ten to fifteen thousand inmates, and none of them laid any foundations for German settlements in the east.276 SS progress in Birkenau remained slow, too. Only in March 1942, half a year after the initial construction order, had work progressed far enough for the surviving POWs to be transferred from their enclosure in the main camp to Birkenau. These Soviet soldiers now numbered fewer than one thousand, and most of them soon perished, too. In mid-April 1942, a young Jewish prisoner who had just been deported from Slovakia (a German puppet state) to Birkenau found the last remnant of the Soviet soldiers “in a terribly neglected state,” living on the “unfinished building site, without any protection against cold and rain, and dying in droves.”277

  Heinrich Himmler’s first bid for Soviet slave laborers ended in failure and misery. Rather than turning the KL into gigantic reservoirs of forced labor, the arrival of Soviet soldiers opened a new round of carnage in the camps. In spring 1942, when most of the remaining POW compounds were closed down—with the prisoners now officially classified as concentration camp inmates—no more than five thousand of the twenty-seven thousand Soviet soldiers who had arrived for forced labor in autumn 1941 were still alive.278 One of the survivors was Nikolaj Wassiljew, who was among the Auschwitz prisoners transferred to Birkenau in March 1942. Asked after the war about the fate of his comrades, Wassiljew gave a blunt answer: “Shot. Killed during work. Died of hunger. Died of illness.”279

  Taking Stock

  Looking at the KL in late 1941 and early 1942, a great deal had changed since the outbreak of the Second World War. While they were still recognizable as concentration camps, the system had undergone a major makeover in barely two years. In early 1942, there were thirteen main camps, not six, with four new ones in occupied Nazi Europe: Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Stutthof in Poland, and Natzweiler in France.280 Prisoner numbers had shot up, too, from just over twenty thousand to around eighty thousand, with most new prisoners coming from occupied Europe, above all from Poland and the Soviet Union. And while prisoners in 1939 might have imagined that their treatment could not get any worse, it quickly had. Nazi terror escalated during the war, inside and outside the KL. The camps’ towering death rate tells its own story, as do the weapons deployed by the SS. By 1942, the Camp SS practiced almost every conceivable form of murder: beating, hanging, shooting, starving, drowning, gassing, and poisoning.

  The pivotal year was 1941, as the concentration camps moved from the lethal conditions of the early war period to mass extermination, developing a dual function. As before, the Camp SS exploited, abused, and killed individual prisoners. But the camps now also became sites of systematic mass murder, with central programs to kill infirm prisoners and so-called Soviet commissars. Take Sachsenhausen, one of the model camps of the SS. During 1941, an average of around ten thousand regular prisoners were held here. Every day was torture for them, dominated by forced labor, drills, crammed barracks, hunger, illness, and extreme violence. Death from malnourishment and disease was common, especially among Poles and Jews. Still, the Camp SS had no plans to kill all these prisoners and the majority survived.281 The opposite was true for the ten thousand Soviet “commissars” who came to the camp between September and November 1941 and rarely lived longer than a couple of days; Sachsenhausen was an extermination camp for these men.

  Systematic mass killing turned to genocide in 1942, as the Holocaust entered the KL. But this change did not come out of nowhere. It is striking how many structural elements of the Holocaust had emerged inside concentration camps before the SS crossed the threshold to genocide. This included the deportation of victims straight to their deaths; tight transport schedules; the elaborate camouflage of mass murder, with fake showers and doctors’ offices; the use of poison gas, including Zyklon B; the construction of new crematoria, which were adapted, repaired, and extended to keep up with all the dead; the regular purges among prisoners to kill those “unfit for work”; the violation of prisoners’ bodies after death, with gold teeth broken out. All this predated the Holocaust. Even the selection of prisoners on arrival—sending the weaker ones straight to their deaths and working the others until they, too, perished—had been pioneered in autumn 1941, targeting Soviet “commissars.” Simply put: the essential mechanics of the Holocaust were in place by the end of 1941—a KL like Auschwitz was ready for the genocide of European Jewry.

  And yet, the mass murder of invalids and Soviet POWs was no dress rehearsal for the Holocaust. This would be reading history backward. These killings were driven by their own terrible logic, without the murder of the Jews in mind. Indeed, when the decision for these earlier killing programs was taken in spring and summer 1941, the Nazi regime had not yet settled on the immediate extermination of European Jews as state policy. No KL was designated as a place for killing large numbers of Jews until 1942. This shift came only after momentous decisions by Nazi leaders ushered in a new chapter in the history of the SS concentration camps, and the Third Reich as a whole.

  6

  Holocaust

  Shortly after three o’clock on the afternoon of July 17, 1942, a plane carrying SS leader Heinrich Himmler and his small entourage touched down at Kattowitz airport. Waiting on the ground were high-ranking party and SS officials, among them the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, who had busily prepared his camp for Himmler’s impending visit. Höss accompanied the SS leader and the other dignitaries on the drive south, heading for Auschwitz, where Himmler was formally welcomed over coffee in the officers’ mess.1 The whole camp complex had grown enormously since Himmler’s inaugural visit in spring 1941. The SS had greatly extended its local zone of interest. The main camp was also much changed and now included a makeshift section for thousands of female prisoners, who were poised for transfer to the huge new compound in Birkenau. Another major development was under way at the nearby IG Farben site, where a satellite camp (Monowitz) was being built. Most significant of all, Birkenau had recently become a camp for the systematic mass extermination of European Jewry.

  During his two-day visit, Himmler was given a comprehensive tour of the Auschwitz complex. He was keen to check on various economic ventures, both agricultural and industrial. To discuss his ideas about farming, the trained agronomist Himmler set time aside for the dynamic local SS director of farms, Joachim Cäsar, and he also visited agricultural projects, apparently stopping at a cowshed for a glass of milk poured by a prisoner.2 Himmler also toured the IG Farben building site. Though impressed by the modern construction methods, he was impatient for the production of synthetic fuel and rubber to begin. Not for the last time, he pushed the company to speed things up.3 Inside the main camp, Himmler inspected the overcrowded women’s compound and watched as one female prisoner was whipped during corporal punishment.4 He was standing not far from the camp’s crematorium, where the gassing of Soviet POWs had taken place back in autumn 1941. By the time of his visit, however, the center of mass murder in Auschwitz had already shifted, away from the main camp to the new extension in Birkenau.

  Well beyond the first nearly complete Birkenau prisoner sectors stood a couple of innocuous-looking farmhouses—a few hundred yards apart and hidden among the trees—that had lately been converted into gas chambers. Here, according to Rudolf Höss, Himmler closely observed the mass murder of a newly arrived transport of Jews: “He did not say anything at all about the extermination process, he just watched in silence.”5 The SS leader was a dispassionate observer, just as he had been during a massacre of Jewish men and women near Minsk, one year earlier.6

  But Himmler was not silent for long. On the evening of July 17, 1942, he attended a festive dinner with the leading Auschwitz SS officers—all in full
uniform—and made small talk about their jobs and families. Later he relaxed, during an informal get-together with Höss and his wife, and a few select others, in the modern mansion of the Nazi Gauleiter in a forest near Kattowitz, complete with golf course and swimming pool. Himmler was uncharacteristically lighthearted that night, even exuberant, though he avoided any direct references to the events of a few hours earlier. Still, the murder of European Jewry must have been on his mind and he even allowed himself a few glasses of red wine and a smoke. “I had never known him like that!” recalled Rudolf Höss.7 The following morning, back in Auschwitz, Himmler made a point of calling on Höss before his final departure. Visiting the commandant’s villa, Himmler was at his most affable and posed for the cameras with Höss’s children, who called him “Uncle Heini” (Höss later proudly displayed the pictures in his home).8 Perhaps he felt that such displays of civility were especially important in a place like Auschwitz, where his men were engaged in daily assault, plunder, and mass murder.

  The visit of the Reichsführer SS to Auschwitz coincided with major developments in the Third Reich. Since spring 1942, Himmler had been pushing for forced labor in the KL to redouble, reflecting the new Nazi priorities. Following the failure of the rapid offensive against the Soviet Union and the United States’ entry into the war, the regime faced a lengthy battle and had to urgently boost war production. For his part, Himmler had decided in early March 1942 that the entire KL system—previously only loosely integrated into the wider SS organizational chart—would become part of the SS Business and Administration Main Office (WVHA), with the Camp Inspectorate forming Office Group D. The WVHA was the newly created organizational and economic hub of the SS, led by the single-minded Oswald Pohl, who had now reached the top echelon of the SS.9

  But when Heinrich Himmler traveled to Auschwitz in July 1942, it was the Nazi Final Solution, not the SS economy, that was foremost in his mind. Himmler, the master of the KL, also oversaw the annihilation of European Jewry, which escalated in summer 1942. Just days before his trip to Auschwitz, he had met with Hitler and afterward pushed to speed up the genocide. And immediately following his inspection of Auschwitz, Himmler flew to Lublin to plot the extermination of Polish Jews in three new death camps in the General Government—Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. He visited Sobibor on July 19 and later that evening issued an order from Lublin for the rapid “resettlement of the entire Jewish population in the General Government”; except for selected forced laborers in the few remaining ghettos and camps, all local Jews had to be exterminated by the end of the year.10

  So Himmler’s trip to Auschwitz in July 1942 came at a crucial moment. Productive labor was becoming more important than ever, at the same time as the program of deportations and mass killings of Jews from across Europe got under way. Himmler’s visit touched on both aspects, as Auschwitz was a focal point for SS economic ambitions and a center of the Nazi Final Solution. Before he left the camp on July 18, 1942, Himmler told Höss to push ahead with the economic exploitation of prisoners and the mass gassings, with deportations set to increase month by month. At the end of their meeting, Himmler spontaneously promoted Höss to Obersturmbannführer, in recognition of Auschwitz’s significance for Nazi plans.11 But how had the camp become part of these plans in the first place? And what function did it and the rest of the KL system have in the Holocaust?

  AUSCHWITZ AND THE NAZI FINAL SOLUTION

  Auschwitz has long been the symbol of the Holocaust. The Nazis murdered almost one million Jews here, more than in any other single place. And only in Auschwitz did they systematically kill Jews from all across the continent, deported to their deaths from Hungary, Poland, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Croatia, Italy, and Norway. In part, Auschwitz was so lethal because it operated so much longer than other killing sites. In late spring 1944, when the three death camps in the General Government had long closed down again, Auschwitz was only just beginning to reach its murderous peak. And after Soviet troops finally liberated the camp in January 1945, much of the infrastructure of murder remained on-site, in contrast to Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where the traces of genocide had been carefully concealed. This is one reason why we know so much more about Auschwitz than about the other death camps. Another is the abundance of testimony. Several tens of thousands of Auschwitz prisoners survived the war and many of them told their story. By contrast, hardly anyone left the other death camps alive, since they functioned purely as extermination sites; only three survivors ever gave testimony about Belzec.12

  In view of Auschwitz’s preeminence in Holocaust memory, it is worth recalling once more that the camp was not created for the annihilation of the Jews. Nor was this ever its sole rationale. Unlike the single-purpose death camps in the General Government, Auschwitz was always a site with multiple missions.13 What is more, it was incorporated late into genocide. Contrary to some suggestions, it did not become a death camp for European Jews as early as 1941.14 This function gradually emerged during 1942, and only from summer of that year did the camp play a more prominent role.

  Death Camps in the General Government

  The genesis of the Holocaust was lengthy and complex. The days are long gone when historians believed that it could be reduced to a single decision taken on a single day by Hitler. Instead, the Holocaust was the culmination of a dynamic murderous process, propelled by increasingly radical initiatives from above and below. During World War II, the Nazi pursuit of a Final Solution moved from increasingly lethal plans for Jewish “reservations” to immediate extermination. There were several key periods of radicalization. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked one such moment, as mass shootings of Jewish men of military age soon grew into widespread ethnic cleansing, with daily bloodbaths of women, children, and the elderly. At the end of 1941, some six hundred thousand Jews had been murdered across the newly conquered eastern territory.

  By then, the Nazi regime was already moving toward the extermination of European Jewry as a whole. Autumn 1941 saw the first systematic mass deportations from Germany to the east, following Hitler’s decision to remove all Jews from the Reich. Even though most of these victims were not yet murdered on arrival, it was clear that they would not live for long. At the same time, the slaughter of Jews expanded beyond the Soviet Union to Serbia and parts of Poland. Meanwhile, plans were made for several regional gassing facilities on occupied Polish and Soviet soil, targeting eastern European Jews, especially those judged “unfit for work.” Chelmno, in the Warthegau (the western Polish territory incorporated into the Reich), was the first such death camp to start up, on December 8, 1941. Within four months, more than fifty thousand people, mostly Polish Jews from the Lodz ghetto (some forty miles away), were murdered here in gas vans. Farther east, in the General Government, construction of the first stationary extermination camp in Belzec (Lublin district) began in early November 1941, followed by the establishment of a second death camp in Sobibor (also Lublin district) from February 1942.

  It was around this time that the genocidal program was being finalized. From late March 1942, deportations from western and central Europe slowly expanded, with the first transports of selected Slovakian and French Jews to occupied Poland. SS managers started to prepare a comprehensive plan for Europe-wide deportations, which was launched from July 1942. Meanwhile, the killing in eastern Europe intensified, too. In the occupied Soviet Union, ghetto clearances and massacres were stepped up, and in occupied Poland, too, more and more regions were pulled into the inferno. The perpetrators moved with great speed, emptying one ghetto after another. According to Nazi figures, of the two million Jews who had once lived in the General Government, just three hundred thousand were still alive at the end of 1942.15

  Most Jews murdered in the General Government in 1942 died in the three new death camps. Mass extermination in Belzec started in March, followed by Sobibor in early May; around the same time, construction began on a third camp, Treblinka (Wa
rsaw district), in the north of the General Government, which was set up primarily for the murder of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto and operated from late July.16 In the historical literature, the mass extermination of Jews in the General Government is commonly referred to as “Operation Reinhard,” and these three death camps as “Reinhard camps,” after a Nazi code word chosen in memory of Reinhard Heydrich (assassinated in summer 1942).17 However, this terminology is misleading. The Nazi authorities did not restrict the code name “Operation Reinhard” to Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, but also applied it to the extermination of Jews and the plunder of their property at the SS concentration camps Auschwitz and Majdanek (the two KL operating simultaneously as death camps).18 Despite their shared history, however, the three new death camps in the General Government did exist independently from Auschwitz and Majdanek (and the rest of the KL system), and to signify this distinctiveness, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka will be referred to here as the “Globocnik death camps,” after the SS and police leader in Lublin district, Odilo Globocnik.