KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Perhaps Himmler’s most obsequious follower and ferocious executioner, Odilo Globocnik had cut his teeth as a violent young fanatic in the illegal Austrian Nazi movement. His brief reign as Vienna Gauleiter after the Anschluss ended ignominiously, mired in suspicions of corruption. But as he did with many “old fighters,” Himmler gave him another chance, and Globocnik grasped it eagerly. In late 1939, after he was posted to Lublin, he quickly made his name as a champion of radical anti-Jewish policy. Since autumn 1941, he coordinated the mass extermination of Jews in his district, a task later extended to the entire General Government. “Globus” (globe)—as Himmler jokingly called him—was delighted when his master ordered him in July 1942, after his trip to Auschwitz, to oversee the immediate annihilation of Jews in the General Government. “The Reichsführer SS was just here and has given us so much new work,” he gushed. “I am so very grateful to him, that he can be certain that these things that he wishes will come true in no time.” As Rudolf Höss recalled, Globocnik’s hunger for deportations to his death camps became insatiable: “He could never get enough.”19

  In the second half of 1942, the Holocaust unfolded with unremitting force inside the General Government. Train after train carried hundreds of thousands of Jews to Globocnik’s death camps. Few survived for more than a few hours; once they were crammed into the gas chambers, powerful engines started up, pumping carbon monoxide inside. The deportations were coordinated from Globocnik’s Lublin office. The death camps, meanwhile, were staffed with the experienced killers from the “euthanasia” program. Starting in autumn 1941, more than 120 T-4 veterans—mostly men in their late twenties and thirties—were transferred to the General Government to set up and run the new death camps. At the top stood Christian Wirth, a former police officer who had become the main troubleshooter during the “euthanasia” action. Wirth now used his murderous know-how as the local T-4 representative and inspector of the Globocnik death camps, earning himself the nickname “Wild Christian.” From summer 1942, as the Holocaust accelerated, he oversaw major changes in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, including the extension of the killing facilities, to ensure the smooth running of the genocide.20 The same aim was pursued farther west, in Auschwitz. Here, too, SS men were hard at work, refining and enlarging the machinery of death for the Holocaust.

  “Jews into the KL”

  In the early years of the Second World War, the concentration camps had stood on the sidelines of Nazi anti-Jewish policy; the present was largely about ghettos and forced labor camps, and the future about deadly reservations. Concentration camps, by contrast, were marginal. Even when the Third Reich began to move toward the systematic extermination of European Jews, there were no signs yet that the KL would become more prominent anytime soon. Their peripheral role was reflected in prisoner numbers: by early 1942, Jews made up fewer than five thousand of the eighty thousand KL inmates.21

  On January 20, 1942, a crucial conference took place in the leafy Berlin suburb of Wannsee. At lunchtime, a group of senior party and state officials gathered to coordinate the Nazi Final Solution, under the overall control of the RSHA. The meeting was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, who laid out the general direction. Some aspects were still in flux, but the overall aim was now clear: European Jews would be concentrated in the occupied east and murdered there, either straightaway or by working them to death. The vision of “annihilation through labor” was an important element of these plans. As Heydrich put it at Wannsee—according to minutes compiled by Adolf Eichmann, the RSHA desk officer who managed the deportations from western and central Europe—large labor gangs would be formed in the east for heavy road construction: “undoubtedly a large number of them will drop out through natural wastage.”22 Although the specifics remained vague, there was apparently no place for the concentration camps in these genocidal plans, neither as extermination centers nor as hubs for lethal labor. The KL were not on the agenda at Wannsee, and no representative of the concentration camp system had been invited to the gathering.

  Within days of the Wannsee conference, however, SS leaders changed their tune. The trigger, it seems, was their final acceptance that the grandiose settlement plans in the east would never be realized with Soviet POWs; too few had arrived in the KL, and too many of those who had were already dead.23 The SS now looked for replacements and soon found them: instead of Soviet soldiers, Jews would build the gigantic settlements. On January 26, 1942, just six days after Wannsee, Himmler telexed Glücks to outline the change in direction. Since no more Soviet POWs could be expected in the near future, Himmler explained, he had decided to send large numbers of Jews to the KL: “Get ready to accommodate 100,000 male Jews and up to 50,000 Jewesses in the KL within the next four weeks.”24

  The decision to substitute Jews for Soviet POWs was taken impulsively at the top of the Nazi state. On January 25, one day before he informed Glücks, Himmler had evidently discussed the use of Jewish workers with Oswald Pohl. Immediately afterward, Himmler had apparently raised his plan in the Führer’s headquarters. During lunch, Hitler ranted about the need to make Europe free of Jews: “If [the Jew] gets wrecked along the way, I cannot help it. I see only one thing: total annihilation, if they don’t go voluntarily. Why should I look at a Jew with different eyes than a Russian prisoner?” Soon after the meal, Himmler put Heydrich in the picture, calling him in Prague. The note for this call in Himmler’s office diary reads: “Jews into the KL.”25

  SS Camp Inspector Glücks and his men were caught unawares by Himmler’s new scheme. In recent weeks, the IKL had devised its own, far more modest plan to exploit some Jewish prisoners. After it became evident that the colossal designs for Majdanek could not be achieved with Soviet POWs, the IKL ordered other concentration camps on January 19, 1942, to send Jewish prisoners “fit for work” to Majdanek. Just one week later, however, Himmler’s sudden message that huge numbers of Jews were on their way from elsewhere forced a volte-face. The IKL managers in Oranienburg immediately abandoned the small-scale transports from other camps to Majdanek and focused instead on preparing the KL system for the mass arrival of Jews from outside.26

  But Himmler had jumped the gun when he announced the imminent influx of up to one hundred and fifty thousand Jewish prisoners. Not for the first time, his ambitions outstripped the SS abilities, and two months passed before the first transports got under way. During this time, several key decisions were made. One concerned the victims. Initially, Himmler had targeted German Jews for immediate deportation to the KL, but this plan was dropped.27 Instead, SS attention turned to Jews regarded as “fit for work” from two other countries, Slovakia and France.28 Meanwhile, the IKL confirmed the destination for the forthcoming mass deportations—Majdanek and Auschwitz.29 This was an obvious choice. Both camps had previously been designated for huge numbers of Soviet POWs; as Jews would replace them as forced workers, SS logic dictated that they would be taken to the same camps. In practice, Auschwitz became the primary destination for deportations of Jews from western and central Europe, because of its greater proximity, better transport links, and superior infrastructure.

  The new role of Auschwitz prompted the SS authorities to take two major initiatives toward the end of February 1942. First, it resolved to build a large crematorium in Birkenau, capable of disposing of eight hundred bodies in twenty-four hours. The plans for a big crematorium were not new. Back in autumn 1941, with an enormous new camp for Soviet POWs scheduled at the Auschwitz complex, SS planners had decided to erect a high-capacity crematorium in the main camp, in order to deal with the anticipated surge in prisoner deaths. This location was now changed to Birkenau, during a local inspection on February 27, 1942, by the SS construction chief Hans Kammler.30 Large numbers of Jewish prisoners were expected to arrive in Birkenau soon, and all would eventually die through “annihilation through labor.” Why haul their corpses all the way back to the main camp, Kammler must have thought, when they could be burned in Birkenau?

  Second, Auschwitz prepared for t
he mass influx of women, who were part of Himmler’s deportation plans. Himmler turned to his in-house experts in female detention in Ravensbrück. He visited the camp on March 3, 1942, and then briefed Pohl the following day, setting off a flurry of activity.31 On March 10, 1942, the IKL ordered two Auschwitz officers to head for Ravensbrück to “get acquainted with the running of a women’s concentration camp.”32 Soon after, Johanna Langefeld, the senior Ravensbrück camp supervisor, traveled in the opposite direction to oversee the new women’s compound in Auschwitz; she was later joined by more than a dozen female guards from Ravensbrück. When Langefeld arrived, the Auschwitz SS was already preparing the new compound for women, initially in blocks 1 to 10 of the main camp. On Höss’s orders, a wall was hurriedly erected to separate it from the men’s section.33 The scene was being set for the huge increase in female prisoners during the second half of the war.

  Destination Auschwitz

  Systematic mass deportations of Jews to Auschwitz began in late March 1942. The first RSHA train, carrying 999 women from Slovakia, arrived on March 26; the next transport from Slovakia, with another 798 women, came two days later. Then, on March 30, the first mass transport from France, holding more than 1,100 men, pulled up near the camp.34 The men on board had set off several days earlier, packed into dozens of freight cars with little food or drink; several died before the train reached its destination. Among those who arrived on the morning of March 30 was Stanisław Jankowski. Like many other Jews deported from France, the thirty-one-year-old carpenter was a Polish émigré. Jankowski had grown up in poverty in the city of Otwock, where he dedicated himself to the Communist movement. In 1937, he had traveled to Spain to fight in the civil war. Following the defeat of the Republican forces, his unit retreated over the French border in early 1939, where he was arrested. This was the beginning of more than two years of squalid internment on French soil, interrupted after Jankowski managed to escape from a camp in Argelès-sur-Mer and reached Paris. But he was quickly rearrested by the French police. First he was held in Drancy—a new internment camp for Jews in a Parisian suburb, from where the great majority of French transports to Auschwitz would depart—and later as a “hostage” of the German military authorities in Compiègne. It was here that Jankowski was isolated one day in March 1942, together with other Jewish prisoners, and told that he would be sent for heavy labor to the east.

  In Auschwitz, Jankowski and the other men marched in rows of five toward the main camp, driven forward by the sticks of SS men. They faced more violence inside the compound—including their first taste of SS “sport”—and received a pitiful portion of food. Then they went on the move again. Surrounded by SS men on horses, they marched in double time to Birkenau, dragging their wooden shoes through the marshy soil. At the gate of the new enclosure, SS men and Kapos armed with clubs were waiting for them. Several prisoners were beaten to death, Stanisław Jankowski recalled, so that “the next ones had to jump over them to run inside the camp.” Here, they assembled for their first roll call in Birkenau, exhausted, bleeding, and terrified, with mud all over their new uniforms. These uniforms held special significance. Just like the Slovakian women who had arrived a few days earlier, the Jewish men from France wore the clothes of the murdered Soviet prisoners of war. The Camp SS probably saw this as a convenient solution to the endemic shortages of clothing. But it also symbolized the fate of the new arrivals: they had come to Auschwitz to replace the POWs and, like them, they, too, would soon be dead. This symbolism was not lost on the Jewish prisoners themselves, who learned about the fate of Soviet POWs; there were even rumors that thousands of soldiers lay buried right underneath the Birkenau barracks that now housed the Jewish men.35

  In spring 1942, Auschwitz was still a long way from becoming the “capital of the Holocaust,” as the historian Peter Hayes has called it. To be sure, the camp was now involved in the emerging pan-European extermination program.36 But the number of Jewish inmates still lagged far behind the figures announced by Himmler back in late January. By the end of June 1942, after RSHA deportations had been going on for three months, sixteen transports from France and Slovakia had brought no more than around sixteen thousand Jews to Auschwitz.37 Also, none of these prisoners were supposed to be killed on arrival. They had been earmarked as forced laborers and the Auschwitz SS was meant to provide some minimal provision. Presumably, IKL managers were hoping to prevent a repeat of the rapid deaths of Soviet POWs; already a few months earlier, Arthur Liebehenschel had reminded commandants that “everything has to be done to preserve the Jews’ ability to work.”38

  The reality turned out very differently. Even if Auschwitz was not yet a full-fledged death camp, it was already deadly for Jews; it is likely that two-thirds or more of all Jewish prisoners newly registered in spring and summer 1942 were dead within eight weeks.39 Some RSHA transports were almost completely wiped out; three months after their arrival on April 19, just seventeen of 464 male Jews from Žilina (Slovakia) were still alive. Among the dead were some boys, after the Slovakian authorities had begun to include families in the deportations; the youngest victim was seven-year-old Ernest Schwarcz, who had survived for barely one month.40

  The Jewish men suffered dismal conditions, lethal violence, and draining labor in Birkenau. The local SS saw Birkenau as a camp for those condemned to die and oversaw a huge procession of death during spring 1942. The compound was still under construction and few of the primitive barracks were finished. Everything was caked in dirt and excrement, and even rudimentary facilities were lacking, as were medical supplies and food. Many Jewish men were forced into camp construction, though there was plenty of pointless labor, too. Prisoners who survived these rigors were shot, beaten to death, or killed in some other way, with selections of weak and unproductive inmates commencing in Birkenau around early May 1942.41

  Less than two miles away, Jewish women in the Auschwitz main camp also faced a dreadful fate in spring 1942. They made up the great majority of prisoners in the new women’s compound, which rapidly grew in size. Provisionally run by the Ravensbrück administration (only in July 1942 was it organizationally integrated into the Auschwitz complex), it soon outstripped its parent camp. By the end of April 1942, over 6,700 women were held in Auschwitz, compared to around 5,800 in Ravensbrück; within a month, Ravensbrück had been surpassed by the hastily improvised site in Auschwitz—an early sign of the Holocaust’s impact on the wider SS camp system. More female prisoners arrived over the coming months, leaving the Auschwitz compound hopelessly overcrowded; by late June 1942, the SS had erected additional wooden barracks, squeezed between the old stone ones.

  The women’s compound was a sanitary disaster. Dysentery, pneumonia, and open wounds were widespread, and typhus was on the rise, too, as were injuries sustained during heavy labor in agriculture and construction. Many sick and weak women were selected for extermination; some were gassed, others injected with phenol. The ensuing mass death of women in Auschwitz was unprecedented in the history of the KL. By the time the surviving women were transferred to the new sector BIa in Birkenau in August 1942, perhaps one-third of the fifteen to seventeen thousand women who had been forced into the main camp since late March were dead.42

  A Regional Killing Center

  The Holocaust started to change Auschwitz. The camp complex grew and prisoner numbers soared, from around 12,000 in early January 1942 to around 21,400 in early May, and included thousands of women.43 But Auschwitz was not transformed overnight; mass death, after all, had already marked the camp before, especially from autumn 1941, when Soviet POWs arrived and the extension in Birkenau was planned. And Auschwitz was still rather peripheral for the Holocaust in spring 1942. Its route to genocide took several months, with three key steps along the way. The first was the start of RSHA mass deportations from late March 1942, as we have just seen. The next one followed just a few weeks later.

  In May 1942, Auschwitz became a regional death camp for the systematic slaughter of Silesian Jews.44 Just as no
nworking Jews from the Warthegau were being killed in Chelmno, Silesian Jews selected as unfit for work were killed in Auschwitz.45 The Auschwitz SS now applied both elements of the Nazi Final Solution—immediate extermination and murderous forced labor—depending on where prisoner transports came from: “unfit” Silesian Jews would be murdered on arrival, while other Jews would be registered as regular inmates and worked to death. Again, such a parallel policy had precedents, mirroring the lethal approach of Auschwitz SS men to Soviet POWs in autumn 1941.46

  The details of the development of Auschwitz into a regional Holocaust killing center remain shrouded in uncertainty. Original documents are missing, and postwar testimonies by key players like Rudolf Höss and Adolf Eichmann are inconsistent and inaccurate.47 What is known is that Eichmann repeatedly visited Auschwitz to coordinate the so-called Final Solution. He built a close relationship with his “dear comrade and friend” Höss, whom he admired for his “exactness,” his “modesty,” and his “exemplary family life.” The taciturn Höss recognized Eichmann as a kindred spirit, too, addressing him with the informal “Du,” and after a long day’s work, inspecting the camp or driving to one of the new buildings, these two zealous managers of mass murder would relax in each other’s company, smoking and drinking heavily, followed by a joint breakfast the next morning.48 It is likely that Eichmann first visited Auschwitz in spring 1942, probably in March or April. The RSHA deportations from France and Slovakia—which he masterminded—were getting under way, and he appears to have traveled to the camp to confer with Commandant Höss about these transports and about the next moves. Eichmann probably told him that transports of Jews, selected for immediate extermination, would soon arrive from Upper Silesia.49 This was just one of many meetings, of course. Over the coming months, Eichmann held frequent conferences with Höss and senior Camp SS managers, prior to mass deportations, to determine the “capacity” of Auschwitz; “after all,” Eichmann explained years later, the Auschwitz SS had to know “how much human material I was planning to send.”50