KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Above all else, the plunder in the KL reveals the murderous utilitarianism of SS managers. Everything had to be harnessed for Germany, they believed, including the dead—even in the face of cold economic logic. There was no profit to be made from human hair, after all, which had to be laboriously collected, dried, packaged, and shipped, only to be sold off at bargain prices: 730 kilograms of hair shaved off the heads of Majdanek prisoners between September 1942 and June 1944 netted just 365 Reichsmark, less than the value of a single gold cigarette case looted during Operation Reinhard.236 It was not enough for the SS to murder the Jews and steal their property; all traces of Jewish life had to be erased. Once the Nazi Final Solution was complete, nothing would be left behind: the dead turned to dust, their belongings into booty.

  Robbing the Doomed

  Corruption was a structural feature of Nazi rule, based as it was on patronage and nepotism.237 And it burgeoned at all levels during World War II. Inside Germany, a rampant black market developed as a result of shortages and rationing.238 Elsewhere, the Nazi plunder of Europe fueled personal corruption, with the Holocaust offering the greatest profits for the German occupiers, their foreign supporters, and local opportunists.239 The Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl later recalled that when he had first arrived in the camp in September 1942, local SS men had told him that “there was more money and stuff around than one could dream of, all there for the taking: all one had to do was help oneself.”240

  The Camp SS in the east made the most of these opportunities, lining its pockets with the riches of murdered Jews. Compared to the “gigantic corruption in Auschwitz,” wrote the Jewish survivor Benedikt Kautsky, who experienced several KL following his arrest in 1938 as a prominent Austrian Socialist, the regular thefts by SS men in older camps like Buchenwald were negligible.241 Some rank-and-file SS men became jealous of the riches amassed by their commanding officers, but corruption was all-inclusive; most Camp SS staff in the east were on the make.242

  The centers of corruption were Auschwitz and Majdanek, the two KL most closely involved in the Holocaust. SS men working near the crematoria, the storage rooms, and the ramps had the easiest access to money and valuables. Georg W., a sentry stationed near the Majdanek gas chamber complex, later confessed that he used to walk “over to the places where jewelry was lying” to take it. Ordinary SS members became wealthy overnight; an Auschwitz official by the name of Franz Hofbauer once pocketed ten thousand Reichsmark in a day. Even train drivers who had steered the deportation transports used to linger nearby—pretending to fix the train engine—after Jews had marched off to their deaths, in the hope of finding some discarded valuables.243 Living in an upside-down world, some perpetrators saw the Nazi Final Solution as their lucky break.

  The Camp SS in the east stole from registered prisoners, not just from new arrivals. Goods earmarked for distribution inside the KL were regularly sold for profit. In Plaszow, most prisoner rations were exchanged by the SS on the local black market, with the blessing of Commandant Göth, who liked to feed the meat intended for prisoners to his dogs instead. SS men also seized prisoner clothing. In Warsaw, for instance, the Camp SS sold underwear to local Poles, leaving the prisoners without a change of clothes.244 Although such deals with civilians were a profitable way for the SS to market stolen goods, most of its exchanges took place inside the KL, with prisoners.

  Each concentration camp had its own underground economy, where inmates offered pretty much anything up for sale. Black markets, vital in all the camps, gained added importance in occupied eastern Europe. Since conditions were more ruinous than elsewhere, survival turned even more on the prisoners’ ability to improve their lot through barter. They had to “organize” to stay alive, and the spoils of the Holocaust provided them with the opportunity to do so. In Auschwitz, the prisoners in the Canada Commando were the envy of the camp, because they had ready access to food and clothes—not just for their own use, but for barter on the black market. The members of the Birkenau Special Squad also used their unique position. The “dentist” Leon Cohen, for instance, traded golden teeth with an SS man for schnapps, chicken, and other food.245 Barter was always on the minds of prisoners, even if they had nothing to trade. As they walked around Auschwitz, they often kept their eyes fixed on the ground, hoping to see something—perhaps a button or a piece of string—that could be exchanged later.246

  Deals were made at all times and places. In many KL, the black market actually existed as a physical space. In Klooga, it was located in the lower hall, which started to resemble “a market fair in a shtetl,” as one Jewish inmate noted in his diary, where one could get milk, fruit, honey, cans of food, and much more.247 In Monowitz, it could be found in the corner farthest away from the SS barracks. Primo Levi recalled that it was “permanently occupied by a tumultuous throng, in the open during the summer, in a wash-room during the winter, as soon as the squads return from work.” Among the crowds were starving prisoners, who hoped to trade a small piece of bread for something better, or to exchange their shirt for food (prisoners who “lost” their shirts were invariably beaten by Kapos). At the other end of the scale were professional traders and thieves with access to the SS kitchens or storage rooms. The main currency among prisoners was bread and cigarettes, with prices for items in regular stock (such as the daily soup) fairly stable, while others fluctuated in line with supply and demand.248

  Most exchanges on the black market were made between prisoners. But their most prominent customers were SS officials, and the greatest riches inevitably ended up in their hands. After all, what good was a gold coin to a prisoner who was starving to death? Greedy SS men exploited desperate prisoners, who had little choice but to make deals. In Majdanek, where Jewish inmates were going mad with thirst, Lithuanian sentries gave them small cups of water in return for their clothes and shoes.249 SS men offered many other services, too, if the price was right, including transfers to privileged prisoner squads and delivery of secret letters. Some SS men also blackmailed prisoners, promising to spare them violence or death as long as they could pay.250

  The illicit encounters between SS and prisoners blurred the lines between them; for a brief moment, they were united by shared interests. But they were far from being equal partners. For a start, the SS staff often cheated prisoners. In one spectacular case, an SS man helped an Auschwitz prisoner to escape, only to shoot him point-blank after he had been paid for his services.251 Inmates who knew too much about SS deals were sometimes murdered as well, as were inmates who had resisted advances by corrupt SS officials. And if a deal went wrong, prisoners knew better than to name the guilty SS party; otherwise, the inmate was liable to be beaten to death or shot before he could make any more damaging revelations.252

  SS officials found plenty of uses for all their ill-gotten gains. On occasion, they shared the riches. The Auschwitz SS, for example, ran a secret account—replenished with tens of thousands of Reichsmark stolen from its victims—to pay for alcohol-fueled parties.253 Many more individual perpetrators smuggled their spoils out of the camps and posted them back home, just as Dr. Kremer had done. Local SS officers also relied on continual thefts to maintain their family’s lavish lifestyle in the occupied east. Dinner parties in Auschwitz would not have been the same without all the wine and delicatessen, the linen tablecloths and stylish evening dresses. But greed could be dangerous. When the wife of SS report leader Gerhard Palitzsch, who had lived in a house about five hundred yards outside the main camp, died of typhus in autumn 1942, prisoner rumors had it that she had been infected by lice from clothes stolen from the Canada depot. Following his wife’s death, Palitzsch himself lost his last inhibitions; he stole even more brazenly and forced himself on female guards and prisoners. His crimes eventually caught up with him and he was locked into the same bunker in which he had tortured so many inmates. Like other Camp SS veterans, he later got a second chance as the leader of an Auschwitz satellite camp, but Palitzsch was eventually kicked out of the SS and sent to the fro
nt (he died in Hungary in December 1944).254 His fall from grace was far from unique. He was one of a number of corrupt Camp SS men arrested in the second half of the war, during an SS campaign to restore the “decency” of Himmler’s black order.

  The SS Investigates Itself

  In summer 1942, the world of the Camp SS was briefly shaken from within, after two senior commandants were sacked for corruption. Sturmbannführer Alex Piorkowski, who had succeeded Hans Loritz as Dachau commandant, was suspended for orchestrating a major racket in the camp; Himmler promptly demanded that the SS courts take action against the sickly Piorkowski, who had already fallen out of favor before.255 An even more prominent casualty was Oberführer Hans Loritz himself, the highest-ranking KL commandant. Back in March 1942, it had come to light that several Sachsenhausen SS men had systematically embezzled food from the camp kitchen, storerooms, and gardens. Such thefts were run of the mill, and so was the response of Loritz, who quickly put a lid on the affair, blaming one of the prisoners. But this strategy failed, for once. A disgruntled SS man informed the Gestapo, pointing directly at Loritz: everyone in the camp knew the commandant to be the “greatest racketeer of all,” a claim backed by a long list of indiscretions. Meanwhile, an anonymous letter with further allegations—by the wife of a Sachsenhausen guard, as it turned out—was sent to Heinrich Himmler.256

  The Reichsführer SS promptly initiated an official investigation. Amid the endemic corruption it exposed—with prisoners forced to make carpets, paintings, vases, furniture, and even a sailing boat for Loritz—perhaps the most damaging revelation concerned a villa under construction near Salzburg. Back in 1938, Loritz had bought a large piece of land in the sleepy village of St. Gilgen on the Wolfgangsee, and ordered prisoners to build his dream house there, complete with terraced gardens and water features. By the time Loritz came under scrutiny in 1942, most of the work was done, and his wife and sons had already moved in, watching from the windows of their new villa as prisoners put on the finishing touches.257 Asked to explain himself, Loritz protested in June 1942 with great pathos that his honor as an SS officer was being sullied, laying bare the inordinate sense of entitlement of Camp SS officers; Loritz simply could not understand why he, of all people, was pulled up for conduct that was tolerated elsewhere. He was not even the only Camp SS leader who liked to live large on the Wolfgangsee. Not far from his home on the lake, KL prisoners were building another private residence, for Arthur Liebehenschel from the WVHA.258

  So why did the SS leadership move against Loritz in summer 1942? During the second half of the war, when hardships for many ordinary Germans grew, the Nazi leadership became less tolerant of corruption in the ranks, concerned that criticism of crooked officials could erode the already brittle popular mood. In spring 1942, Hitler announced that leading figures of the regime had to demonstrate an exemplary lifestyle, and in summer 1942, Himmler acknowledged that corruption cases caused outrage among the wider public (though his own family continued to live in considerable luxury).259 In this spirit, Himmler decided to make an example of Loritz, whose transgressions had become known beyond Sachsenhausen.

  WVHA chief Oswald Pohl had his own reasons for cracking down on Hans Loritz. Following the recent incorporation of the KL system into his domain, Pohl was keen to establish his authority. And what better way to demonstrate it than to sack a man like Loritz, a stalwart of the Camp SS since its early days and a protégé of Pohl’s old rival Theodor Eicke?260 At the same time, Pohl used the opportunity to present himself as incorruptible, which may account for his theatrical sacking of Alex Piorkowski; apparently, Pohl ordered the Dachau commandant to Berlin and demoted him on the spot, even though he had no authority to do so, completing Piorkowski’s humiliation by stripping him of his ceremonial dagger, the very symbol of virility among the SS.261

  But SS leaders like Pohl were reluctant to tackle the real roots of corruption. Although the WVHA knew that a large number of concentration camp guards were guilty of misconduct, few allegations were taken seriously.262 And even cast-iron cases like the ones against Loritz and Piorkowski were only pursued cursorily, perhaps because they did not become all-too-widely known beyond SS circles. Though Himmler eventually threw Piorkowski out of the SS, the threat of criminal proceedings was not followed up.263 As for Loritz, he kept his SS rank and was redeployed to a new post, setting up a network of forced labor camps in Norway; his family, meanwhile, continued to live in the villa on the Wolfgangsee.264

  Heinrich Himmler was still conscious of appearances, however, and in 1943 he sanctioned another, more concerted push against corruption, triggered by the investigation of another Camp SS veteran, Karl Otto Koch. Koch was one of the most prominent prewar commandants, but his career went off the rails during the war, and his fall would be the most spectacular of any Camp SS official. Spared by Himmler in late 1941, following his first arrest for corruption, Koch was given another chance as commandant of Majdanek, as we have seen. But he soon failed again. On the night of July 14, 1942, more than eighty Soviet POWs fled the camp, climbing over the barbed wire and disappearing into the night. To cover up the ease with which these prisoners had vanished, Koch ordered the immediate execution of dozens of Soviet POWs who had stayed behind, informing his superiors that the slaughtered men had participated in the mass breakout. He also tried to shift the blame for the escape, denouncing the provisional state of the camp, the poor quality of the guards, and the two hapless sentries at the scene, one of whom was the appropriately named Gustav Schlaf (his surname translates as “Sleep”). Unimpressed, Himmler, who visited Lublin days after the escape, ordered on July 25, 1942, that Koch be recalled and investigated for negligence by the SS courts. Koch moved back to his old Buchenwald home to await the outcome. In the end, the case against him was dismissed, though he was not reinstated.265

  Koch soon found himself in more trouble. In March 1943, Himmler visited Buchenwald and was surprised to find Koch and his wife still living in the opulent commandant’s villa. Himmler asked for the “tired and lazy” Koch, as he called the man who was just three years his senior, to be kicked out and sent to the front.266 His order had not yet been implemented when further evidence for Koch’s corruption came to light, prompting Himmler to sign off on a new investigation. Koch’s villa was searched the next day, and on August 24, 1943, he was arrested together with his wife, Ilse, and taken to the Gestapo prison in Weimar.267

  The case against Koch was led by an arrogant young SS jurist named Konrad Morgen, who spent several months in Buchenwald from summer 1943, gathering incriminating material. Born into a poor family in 1909, Morgen had worked his way up to university to study law. He briefly served in a regular Nazi court, and then pursued a career in the SS, joining the newly established SS Main Office for legal matters as a judge in 1940. Sent to the General Government, Morgen gained a reputation for tackling SS corruption and deviance, and following his transfer to the RSHA in late June 1943, on Himmler’s personal orders, he took charge of the Koch case.268 After the war, the canny Morgen testified against some former Camp SS men, portraying himself as a tireless campaigner for law and order. Several historians have fallen for this pose, as did some judges.269 But his postwar testimony was self-serving, riddled with omissions and brazen lies.270 Konrad Morgen had been a committed SS officer. During his investigation of Koch, he condoned RSHA executions, the killing of prisoners in medical experiments, and the murder of supposedly sick and infectious inmates. His main aim was not to stop prisoner abuse but to root out personal corruption (and other cases of insubordination).271 In short, Morgen was no champion of common decency, but a crusader for Himmler’s peculiar brand of SS morality, which tried to exorcise any blemishes from the uniforms of “virtuous” SS killers.

  While Koch stood at the center of Morgen’s investigation, which spanned the former commandant’s reign over both Buchenwald and Majdanek, many other SS men were soon implicated, too. For example, Morgen found that almost all NCOs under Koch in Majdanek had become “com
pletely corrupt,” openly stuffing valuables into their pockets. In the end, though, only close associates of Koch were prosecuted.272 Among them was Hauptscharführer Gotthold Michael, who was accused of running some of his master’s fraudulent operations, as well as stealing prisoner property for his own use, including valuable leather suitcases.273 A more senior defendant was Hermann Hackmann, who had risen in the slipstream of his patron Koch to adjutant in Buchenwald and camp compound leader in Majdanek, in a typical example of Camp SS nepotism. Hackmann was sentenced to death by an SS court on June 29, 1944, for persistent theft, but the judgment was not carried out and he was released after half a year in Dachau to fight against the advancing U.S. troops.274

  Meanwhile, the case against Karl Otto Koch dragged on. Himmler had authorized the use of torture to break those who might know about SS corruption, and in March 1944 Koch was forced into a partial admission of guilt—the blind support from his superiors had turned him into a megalomaniac, he said—only to recant his confession.275 Koch’s trial finally began in September 1944 before an SS and police court in Weimar, but it was quickly adjourned and only resumed on December 18, 1944. Ilse Koch, who had been accused of involvement in the corrupt dealings, was found not guilty. But her husband was sentenced to death. SS leaders hesitated to carry out the sentence. Then, in early April 1945, just before the war ended, Koch was taken from the Weimar police jail to Buchenwald and executed by an SS firing squad. In a final gesture of bravado, he refused a blindfold, clinging to the macho spirit of the Camp SS to the very end.276

  A Judge in Auschwitz

  As evidence for large-scale corruption in Buchenwald mounted up in 1943, Heinrich Himmler authorized the extension of the internal SS investigation into several other KL.277 By early 1944, a few dozen officials were working under Konrad Morgen, who led the investigative teams, and a special SS and police court had been established to deal with the more complex cases.278 The reach of the corruption probe was limited, however, and Morgen’s team investigated no more than half a dozen concentration camps.279 Much of the focus was on the occupied east, where the ready availability of “Jewish property” had resulted in “familiar manifestations of corruption,” as Morgen wrote in 1944.280 A number of Camp SS men were arrested, including two commandants. Hermann Florstedt, who had led Majdanek since November 1942, had initially been praised by his superiors for turning the camp around after Koch’s chaotic reign. By and by, Florstedt turned out to be no less crooked than his predecessor, and in autumn 1943 he was arrested on suspicion of embezzlement, among other charges. His case never came to court, though, and in late March 1945 he was still held on remand in a Weimar police jail; his subsequent fate remains unclear.281 In Plaszow, meanwhile, Commandant Amon Göth—notorious for his lust for gold—was arrested in September 1944, but like Florstedt, he was never sentenced by the SS.282