KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  The survivors included some twins spared for human experiments. Among them were Zdenĕk and Jiři Steiner. When the two boys surveyed the compound after the murders in March 1944, which had claimed their parents, it seemed eerily empty; all they saw were “flames flickering from the chimney of the crematorium.” The remaining inmates of the family camp were soon joined by thousands of new arrivals from Theresienstadt, following another wave of deportations in May 1944. But few of them would live for long, either. In July, following the selection of some 3,200 prisoners for slave labor, the remaining 6,700 inmates—mostly women, children, the elderly, and the infirm—were murdered in the gas chambers. In the eyes of the SS, the Birkenau family camp had outlived its purpose and was abandoned.109

  Some Auschwitz SS men felt uneasy about the eradication of the family camp. It was not unusual for guards to hesitate when it came to the abuse and murder of prisoners whom they had come to know personally.110 This was especially true for the Jewish children in Birkenau, many of whom had spent several months inside. During that time, individual SS men had developed a soft spot for them, bringing toys, playing football with them, and enjoying their theater performances. When the orders came through to liquidate the camp, a few SS staff apparently tried to intervene with their superiors to save the children.111 But they still carried out their murderous orders, leaving them full of self-pity about the difficult tasks they had to perform for the German fatherland in the Nazi-occupied east. It was a complaint that had been heard many times before.

  SS ROUTINES

  Early on Wednesday, September 23, 1942, WVHA leader Oswald Pohl and other senior SS officers, including his trusted construction chief Hans Kammler, arrived in Auschwitz for a day packed full of meetings and inspections.112 Just one week earlier, on September 15, Pohl and Kammler had met with Armaments Minister Albert Speer, who signed off on ambitious plans for the extension of Auschwitz (projected cost: 13.7 million Reichsmark), reflecting its increasing prominence in the Holocaust. The budget included more funds for the Birkenau killing complex, additional barracks, and other facilities. When all was done, Pohl expected Auschwitz prisoner numbers to reach one hundred thirty-two thousand, effectively quadrupling the current capacity.113 Pohl immediately informed Himmler about his deal with Speer, and then met him in person on September 19, once more accompanied by Kammler, to review some of the details.114

  During their visit to Auschwitz four days later, Pohl and Kammler talked over the plans with SS experts from the local construction office. This was just one of many items on their agenda. Pohl also chaired a large meeting with party and state officials to resolve thorny issues about the place of the camp within the wider local community. In addition to the never-ending problem of the camp’s water supply and waste disposal, the officials discussed the ongoing efforts to turn the city of Auschwitz into a model settlement. The architect Hans Stosberg offered some particulars about the SS neighborhood and received Pohl’s permission to build a leisure park for local residents not far from the camp.115 On the afternoon of September 23, 1942, Pohl then embarked on a lengthy tour across the SS interest zone itself, visiting the main camp, Birkenau, Monowitz, and other sites. Pohl’s trip took longer than expected and he returned just in time for a lavish dinner in the officers’ mess, serving the best beer and as much fish as the men could eat.116

  After the meal, Pohl spoke to the assembled senior members of the Auschwitz Camp SS. He thanked them for turning Auschwitz into the most important SS concentration camp, and reassured them that their work was no less important than frontline service in the Death’s Head divisions (to whom the Camp SS felt chronically inferior). Himmler’s orders for the KL were extremely important for victory, Pohl stressed, whatever the strain on individual officers. He was thinking, not least, about the mass murder of European Jewry, which he alluded to as “special assignments, about which no words have to be lost.” An inspection of bunker 2 in Birkenau had been on Pohl’s agenda during the previous afternoon, and he cannot have missed the dark plumes of smoke rising from the nearby open ditches, where the SS was burning corpses. Considering the so-called Final Solution, Pohl lauded his men for their dedication and their commitment to the cause.117 Straight after his speech, Pohl demonstrated his appreciation by offering a special reward. He approved the construction of a brothel for the Auschwitz Camp SS, the first of its kind, so that his men could seek some diversion after a long day of mass murder.118

  Foreigners in the Camp SS

  During his speech on September 23, 1942, Oswald Pohl praised the exemplary comradeship of the Auschwitz SS, firmly united under Commandant Rudolf Höss. But this was just an empty phrase: it was well known in the WVHA that there was plenty of friction within the Auschwitz ranks.119 The acrimonious tone was set by the unforgiving Höss himself, who clashed frequently with his men. His disdain remained undimmed after the war. Sitting in his prison cell in Krakow, he wrote withering pen-portraits of Auschwitz officials who had crossed his path, dismissing them as devious, duplicitous, or plain dumb.120 The loathing between Höss and some of his men was mutual. There was much bickering behind his back, with subordinates complaining about his cold, prim, and ruthless manner.121 Of course, the Camp SS had never been a band of brothers; the picture of close comradeship was always a projection of SS leaders, covering up conflicts between Guard Troop and Commandant Staff, between officers and rank-and-file. Still, the spirit of the Camp SS became ever more fractured as the war wore on, especially in occupied eastern Europe.

  The conflicts had much to do with personnel changes and shortages. Although the number of Camp SS men grew during the war, it never caught up with the huge expansion of the prisoner population. In March 1942, there had been around 11,000 prisoners and 1,800 SS men in Auschwitz (6:1). Two years later, there were some 67,000 prisoners and 2,950 SS personnel (23:1).122 The WVHA was well aware of the resulting strain on its staff. One solution was to reduce demands on them, by handing more powers to Kapos, by rationalizing procedures, and by using more guard dogs.123 The WVHA also tried hard to recruit new officials, especially for its expanding camps in eastern Europe. Expectations were low. Since he was no longer allowed to recruit men fit for frontline service as sentries, Camp Inspector Glücks was resigned to receiving “more and more physically disabled and cripples,” as he put it in 1942.124

  Some vacant posts in eastern Europe were filled with experienced KL staff from inside Germany; in Auschwitz, around a hundred SS men arrived in 1941 from other concentration camps farther west. Such transfers to the east promised rapid advancement, since the SS had to fill many senior positions. The NCO Hans K., for example, moved in spring 1943 from a lowly position in Sachsenhausen to become labor action leader in Riga.125 Nonetheless, many German KL staff resented such transfers. They complained about being stuck in primitive backwaters and saw their new posting as a punishment (there was some truth in this, as Camp SS managers often reassigned officials to the east as a disciplinary measure).126 Additional men arrived from Waffen SS divisions, including injured fighters and invalids, though not all local commandants welcomed these veterans with open arms. Rudolf Höss, for one, complained about Eicke dumping men on the camps for whom he had no use anymore.127

  The WVHA knew that it could never fill its needs with German nationals alone. Among the foreign associates of the Nazi regime during World War II were many tens of thousands of men who joined the ranks of the Waffen SS. As German losses at the front mounted from 1942, SS efforts to recruit from abroad redoubled, and before long, foreigners made up a large proportion of the Waffen SS.128 Many thousands of them became KL staff; often, they were dispatched to the camps after no more than two or three weeks’ perfunctory training.129 The vast majority of them hailed from eastern and southeastern Europe.130 Most were “ethnic Germans,” an amorphous term applied to those foreigners who were embraced by the Nazi authorities as part of the German people, though they were not normally German citizens. By autumn 1943, around seven thousand such “ethnic Ge
rmans”—around three thousand from Romania, the others largely from Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia—served as sentries in the SS Guard Troops, accounting for almost half of their total strength.131 In addition, the KL recruited so-called alien auxiliaries, who joined not the Waffen SS but the SS retinue. Among them were several thousand men—mostly Soviet POWs—who had gone through the notorious SS training camp in Trawniki near Lublin. Many of these Trawniki men had first served in Globocnik’s death camps and were later redeployed, after the closure of these sites, as KL sentries in the occupied east and inside the old German borders.132

  The transformation of the Camp SS into a multinational force—most pronounced in the eastern European camps—hastened its fragmentation, with deep rifts between German staff and foreign recruits.133 All across the occupied east, German officials held their foreign helpers in barely concealed contempt, and it was no different inside the KL. German superiors widely regarded the new Camp SS recruits as simpletons, brutes, or potential traitors.134 The newcomers’ poor command of German was held against them as well, and resulted in numerous dismissals. Despite half-hearted appeals by SS leaders to treat the foreigners as comrades, regular German staff were not afraid to vent their frustrations. When SS Private Marschall, who worked in the Birkenau administration, was stopped one day by block leader Johann Kasaniczky, an ethnic German, at the entrance of the women’s camp and asked why he wanted to enter, he gave him a sharp dressing-down: “That’s none of your damn business, and you better learn to speak proper German first if you want to talk to me.”135

  Not surprisingly, foreign Camp SS men often felt alienated. For a start, many of them were not volunteers but had been drafted or pressed into SS service.136 Once inside the KL, they stood at the bottom of the staff hierarchy. In addition to the derision by their German colleagues, who occupied almost all positions of authority, they had few prospects of promotion. SS managers even canceled the leave of ethnic Germans, afraid that they would not return to the camps.137 Frustration must have been widespread among foreign guards, and in early July 1943, it boiled over among a company of Ukrainian sentries in Auschwitz. Not long after their arrival, fifteen of them escaped from the camp, armed with weapons and ammunition; the ensuing firefight left eight Ukrainians and three SS pursuers dead.138

  It is hard to gauge what all this meant for the prisoners. Foreign SS men generally joined the Guard Troops around camps and work sites, and therefore had less direct contact with inmates. Some of the sentries still committed acts of extreme violence; prisoners suspected that ambitious ethnic Germans wanted to prove themselves as “real Germans” through displays of violence.139 On the whole, however, foreign SS men may have acted somewhat less maliciously than most of their German colleagues.140 Some openly pitied the inmates and admitted their own dissatisfaction with the Nazi regime and their miserable duties in the camps.141 Prisoners were always delighted to see such cracks in the SS armor, not least because it raised their hopes of striking deals for extra food and privileges. Such illicit contacts were eased by the fact that foreign guards and prisoners often spoke the same language.142 A shared language could also be dangerous, however. In Gross-Rosen, an eighteen-year-old prisoner from Kursk, who had taunted a Ukrainian guard as a traitor, was hanged in front of all assembled prisoners; the aggrieved guard watched the execution from the front row.143

  Female Guards

  Foreign men were not the only new faces among the Camp SS. As more and more Jewish women were detained during 1942–43, SS managers dispatched German women as guards to all main camps in eastern Europe and to many satellite camps as well; some were veterans from Ravensbrück, while others had been hurriedly trained for their new roles. Although the SS still drew the line at admitting these women to the ranks (they were consigned to the SS retinue), and although the total number of female German guards sent to the occupied east was small (in Majdanek, around twenty women worked opposite 1,200 men), their influx changed the Camp SS. Many male veterans saw the arrival of armed and uniformed women as an affront to their all-male paramilitary ideals. The fact that some female guards did not back down in conflicts with male superiors only heightened the anger of SS men.144 Insubordination and ill discipline of female staff were punished frequently by male commandants, so strictly that the WVHA called for more restraint.145 Rudolf Höss spoke for many chauvinistic Camp SS men when he dismissed the new female colleagues as lazy, dishonest, and incompetent, running around the compounds like “headless chickens.”146

  Höss himself engaged in a particularly bitter dispute with the first senior supervisor of the Auschwitz women’s camp, Johanna Langefeld. In Ravensbrück, Langefeld had overseen the daily life of female prisoners. She expected similar powers in Auschwitz but met with strong opposition. In July 1942, Himmler waded into the row during his visit to Auschwitz, siding with Langefeld. But Höss had the last laugh, as Himmler’s order that a women’s camp should be led by a woman, assisted by a male SS officer, was torpedoed by Camp SS men. After all, Höss asked acidly in his memoirs, which male officer would subordinate himself to a woman? As for Langefeld, she was eventually ordered back to Ravensbrück and reprimanded by Pohl; in spring 1943, she was kicked out of SS service altogether and arrested.147

  There was another side to the relationship between men and women in the service of the Camp SS, beyond spats and quarrels. The SS staff also enjoyed plenty of fun and banter, and just as in Ravensbrück and other mixed camps, romance blossomed in the eastern European KL. In Majdanek, the wooden barrack for female guards stood conveniently opposite the compound for male Guard Troops, and the official ban on illicit meetings could not put a stop to intimate liaisons. The young female guards enjoyed unusual liberties, compared to their more restricted lives back home (as did the few young women who had volunteered as SS telegraph and radio operators). In the end, four female guards ended up marrying SS men in Majdanek. There were also broken hearts, of course; one jilted Oberscharführer is even said to have attempted suicide in the Majdanek gas chamber.148

  Prisoners often talked about the private lives of the SS guards. This was more than idle gossip, since these entanglements could have serious repercussions for the inmates. After all, SS violence often carried a theatrical element, as we have seen, and such performances were particularly pronounced in mixed camps, with male and female guards trying to impress each other through terror. Female guards often showed added venom in the presence of male colleagues, keen to prove that they were as tough as the men. This gendered dynamic went the other way, too. In a working environment where a cold heart and an iron fist were seen as essential parts of the male anatomy, SS men were all the more determined to appear hard in front of the supposedly weaker sex. The chief of the Majdanek crematorium, Erich Muhsfeldt, one of the Camp SS experts in the disposal of corpses, often indulged in macabre jokes, waving body parts of corpses at passing female guards. Such acts could be described as monstrous deeds of a sadistic madman. Or they could be read differently: as an attempt to get a rise out of “weak” women and a demonstration of what passed for masculine strength within the Camp SS.149

  Camp SS men tried to demarcate some strictly male spheres. Traditionally, the use of firearms had been a male preserve, and this custom was jealously guarded in the KL. While uniformed female guards carried guns, too, social practice dictated that their use was left to SS men. In addition, female guards were excluded from the business of gassing and burning prisoners in Birkenau and Majdanek; apparently only men were thought to have the stomach for mass murder. Nonetheless, female guards in eastern European KL participated in selections and committed violent excesses—more so than in Ravensbrück—by slapping, hitting, whipping, and kicking the prisoners on a daily basis.150 Some of these assaults were so extreme that superior officers took the unusual step of issuing reprimands.151

  Violence

  Kurt Pannicke looked like a poster boy of Nazi propaganda. He was an attractive young man, tall and slender, with blond hair and blue eyes; the s
mall scar on his cheek only enhanced his dashing looks.152 Pannicke was also a drunken thug and a thief, a torturer, and a mass murderer. As SS camp leader in Vaivara and several of its satellite camps in 1943–44, he committed countless crimes. This NCO in his mid-twenties saw himself as omnipotent—one of his nicknames was “King of the Jews”—and he knew no limits. Here was a man who would chat casually with inmates and dish out privileges to his favorites, before murdering them. “I shoot my Jews myself!” he told the prisoners over and over again.153 Pannicke’s public persona as a god of virtue and vengeance may have been unusual, but his overall conduct was hardly exceptional. He was one of many young and lower-ranking Camp SS men who basked in their powers, erecting a regime of terror across the KL of occupied eastern Europe.

  Violence and murder were part of the daily Camp SS routine in the east. There were many forms of violence, with some, like slaps and kicks, far more common than others, such as sexual abuse. Still, there was sexual violence. In recent years, historians have become more alert to systematic sex crimes during ethnic cleansing and genocide, not least by German soldiers in the Nazi-occupied east.154 Inside the KL, too, some prisoners were raped by SS men, though other forms of sexual abuse were more widespread. Women were frequently molested upon arrival in the camps and during selections, as SS men—who were strictly forbidden to have intimate contacts with inmates—could always claim that they were just doing their job, such as searching for hidden valuables. In addition, there were cases where inmates engaged in intimate relationships with guards, in exchange for food and other privileges, although this carried considerable risks, not just for the prisoners but for the SS officials, too.155