KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  From around autumn 1943, Konrad Morgen and several members of his team worked in Auschwitz to investigate SS larceny and fraud, following the aforementioned discovery of dental gold posted by a medical orderly.283 To stop Morgen’s investigation in its tracks, the Auschwitz SS leadership reminded its officials “one last time” that prisoner property—including gold and valuables—was out of bounds; all those who “sullied themselves with such a dirty deed” as theft would be kicked out and prosecuted.284 But corruption was too deeply ingrained to cease on command. After several months in Auschwitz—searching lockers and barracks, examining paperwork, and interrogating suspects—Morgen’s men arrested several people (twenty-three NCOs and two officers, according to a former investigator). Once more, however, the threat of draconian sanctions evaporated. Even major offenders got away with a few years of detention or less. Others were punished even more lightly. Franz Wunsch, for example, an NCO in the Canada storage area who was caught carrying stolen gloves, knives, cigarettes, and more, only received five weeks in solitary confinement.285

  The SS investigation in Auschwitz continued well into 1944. There was even talk of broadening its remit: in June, Morgen heard that Himmler would ask him to head a major inquiry leading “from Hungary to Auschwitz.” Apparently, the mass murder of Hungarian Jews in Birkenau, which had recently begun, yielded less bounty than the SS authorities expected, raising renewed suspicions of embezzlement; it is unclear, however, if this new inquiry ever got off the ground.286 Ultimately, the most high-profile victim of Morgen’s corruption investigation was the head of the Auschwitz political office, Maximilian Grabner. The role of political offices, which were closely involved in mass death and executions, grew sharply across the KL system during the Second World War, and nowhere more so than in Auschwitz, where its many tasks included the supervision of the crematoria and gas chamber complex. Grabner, who had joined the Camp SS from the Vienna Gestapo, carved out a powerful place for his office, almost independent of Commandant Höss, and became perhaps the most feared SS man in the camp.287 Using his privileged position, Grabner helped himself freely to the property of murdered Jews, sending home whole suitcases stuffed with loot.288 His schemes eventually caught the eye of Morgen’s investigators, and on December 1, 1943, he was removed from his post.289

  Grabner’s trial before the special SS and police court in autumn 1944 soon took an unusual turn, revealing the full absurdity of SS justice. Grabner was not only charged with corruption, he was the only Auschwitz SS man also to be indicted for arbitrary prisoner killings, outside the chain of command.290 To Grabner, this must have seemed like a preposterous accusation: Had he not acted according to the general principles of Nazi terror? Some of his old Auschwitz colleagues, called as witnesses, duly came to his defense. Rudolf Höss argued that Grabner’s deeds were hardly worth mentioning, in view of the daily mass murder all around the camp. One of Grabner’s former subordinates, Wilhelm Boger, went even further and is said to have exclaimed: “We have killed far too few for Führer and Reich!”291 Such radical sentiments were probably shared by Heinrich Himmler, who normally backed autonomous acts of Camp SS violence. Even on the rare occasion when he reproached individual SS officials for having gone too far, he was willing to accept that they had acted in the right spirit.292 Predictably, given Himmler’s views and the all-out terror in the KL, it was impossible to prove that Grabner had overstepped his authority. The trial against him was adjourned, amid general confusion, and never resumed.293

  Keeping Up Appearances

  The fanatical Wilhelm Boger spoke for many of his Camp SS comrades, in Auschwitz and elsewhere, when he described Konrad Morgen’s investigation as “a ridiculous theater.”294 And yet, most Camp SS officials did not feel like laughing, as Morgen’s commission was a potential threat; they relied on thefts and fraud as a second income and were in no mood to compromise their lifestyles. These men feared and hated Morgen and did their best to obstruct, sabotage, and undermine his team.295 It was surely no accident that, one day in December 1943, the Auschwitz barrack that held much of the evidence gathered by Morgen’s team mysteriously went up in flames.296

  Compared to most Camp SS men, Heinrich Himmler’s stance on corruption was more ambiguous. He always presented himself as a paragon of propriety. And he was instrumental in launching the investigation into the KL, following the Holocaust-related rise in larceny. Himmler personally approved Konrad Morgen as the head of the anticorruption force and continued to back him, despite opposition from senior Camp SS officials. As late as summer 1944, Himmler expressed his appreciation for the special SS and police court and asked for Morgen’s promotion to Sturmbannführer.297 At the same time, Himmler’s threat of unforgiving punishment for corrupt Camp SS men was empty; behind the scenes, he was reluctant to push for harsh sentences. Himmler also had no desire to broaden Morgen’s small-time operation, since he must have realized that a more systematic probe into SS sleaze would destabilize the entire KL system; after all, corruption was the glue that helped to hold it together. So why did Himmler support Morgen at all? Primarily, it seems, the investigation served a symbolic function. With other Nazi leaders only too aware of the allegations of corruption in the concentration camps, the Reichsführer’s willingness to castigate a few Camp SS offenders was offered as proof of the purity, rigor, and decency of the SS.298

  If Heinrich Himmler was two-faced about corruption, his chief of the KL system was even more duplicitous. Officially, Oswald Pohl and his WVHA managers had no choice but to back the campaign against theft and fraud.299 Pohl was even willing to sacrifice individual SS officers—especially if this strengthened his own hand, as in the case of Loritz. But Pohl balked at a more far-reaching investigation of the KL and repeatedly torpedoed the anticorruption drive, complaining that it undermined prisoner discipline and war production.300

  There was an obvious reason for Pohl’s obstructionism: like other SS leaders, he was hugely profiting from Nazi terror. Divorced in 1938, Pohl had remarried on December 12, 1942, in Himmler’s East Prussian headquarters (Himmler had handpicked the much younger bride, Eleonore von Brüning, a rich heiress).301 The couple enjoyed a feudal lifestyle. In Berlin, they occupied a large villa, “aryanized” from a Jewish woman who later died in Ravensbrück. The Pohls lived rent-free and made themselves comfortable in their new home; it was rebuilt by prisoners from Sachsenhausen, and five inmates remained permanently on hand as servants.302 Pohl joined the new Nazi nobility, which included other pompous leaders like Hermann Göring.303 To announce his arrival, he even made up his own coat of arms, depicting a knight’s helmet with closed visor and a proud horse on its hind legs.304

  Above all, Pohl fancied himself as a landed nobleman—he lied to Himmler, claiming that he came from a long line of farmers—and duly acquired not just one but two manors in the country. His wife had brought into the marriage a beautiful property in the Bavarian countryside, which was renovated by prisoners from Dachau, though the couple did not make much use of it until the closing stages of the Third Reich.305 Instead, they spent time on the Comthurey estate in northern Germany, with its vast grounds and roaring fireplaces. The estate was set up as a satellite camp of Ravensbrück, six miles or so away, with dozens of prisoners serving as slave laborers; some worked in agriculture, others waited on the Pohls, and still others landscaped the gardens and rebuilt the manor house, adding a sauna and other comforts. The bill for Pohl’s extravagance came to several hundreds of thousands of Reichsmark, paid for by the SS.306

  His growing property portfolio also included a splendidly appointed apartment on the Dachau SS plantation, which he used during his wartime trips to southern Germany (Pohl was no stranger to Dachau, having lived in the SS settlement with his first wife in the prewar years). He was a workaholic, but in Dachau, of all places, he sometimes relaxed. Lounging on a deck chair, he was served by prisoners, including a waiter wearing a white jacket; he also sampled meals prepared by his private cook and went on hunting trips, accompani
ed by his personal master of the hunt.307

  Oswald Pohl’s entire existence was enmeshed with the KL. To him, the camps were not remote abstractions. He lived and breathed them. During meetings and inspections, and during his charmed private life, he was surrounded by prisoners, violence, and death. The Dachau inmate Karel Kašák, who observed Pohl close-up, described him as a typical Nazi upstart who acted like “a god and emperor.” Setting an example for local Camp SS men, Pohl treated prisoners as his personal property and thought nothing of walking around in his dressing gown while ordering them to shine his boots.308 For him, prisoners were slaves to be exploited at will.

  8

  Economics and Extermination

  Shortly after Heinrich Himmler put him in charge of the KL system, Oswald Pohl summoned the top Camp SS officials to a major two-day conference at his WVHA headquarters in Berlin-Lichterfelde. Brimming with confidence, Pohl used the meeting on April 24 and 25, 1942, to set out his agenda. His reign would be all about economics, he announced, with the immediate goal of kick-starting armaments production. The only way to reach this goal, he added, was to drive prisoners until they dropped: working hours would be unlimited and lunch breaks reduced to the bare minimum. “To attain the utmost performance,” Pohl concluded, “this action must literally be exhausting.” Underscoring the order’s importance, Pohl put the responsibility for its implementation onto the shoulders of individual commandants.1 But his message went beyond economics. He also wanted to impress and intimidate his new subordinates. Facing a gathering of Camp SS veterans—led by Richard Glücks, and including commandants of all fourteen main KL in existence at the time—he was keen to put down an early marker. And although some officials grumbled about his ascent, Pohl swiftly established himself as the overall head of the concentration camp system.2

  Pohl’s close ties to Heinrich Himmler—they corresponded frequently, and also regularly met up or talked on a secure phone line installed in the WVHA—strengthened his position; all Camp SS men knew that the Reichsführer held him in great respect. Pohl, in turn, was slavishly devoted to his younger mentor. He treated Himmler’s wishes as hallowed commands and lambasted anyone who dared to question them.3 Himmler was still the true master of the KL: no major initiative went ahead without his approval during the second half of the war. He received updates about prisoner numbers and deaths from the WVHA, and repeatedly demanded additional details.4 Himmler even found time for further inspections, making at least five trips to concentration camps in 1942.5 Such visits were not empty ceremonies; Himmler remained an exacting, stern ruler. When he arrived unannounced in Dachau on May 1, 1942, for example, and passed a prisoner detail on a vegetable patch that worked too slowly (to his mind), he jumped out of his car, bawled out the Kapo, the sentries, and the SS commando leader, and ordered the prisoners to continue until nighttime. Told that most of the inmates were priests, Himmler exclaimed: “These bastards shall work until they collapse!”6

  As the war dragged on, Himmler’s inspections and interventions grew less frequent. As a leading proponent of total war, he accumulated more and more power. Himmler became Reich minister of the interior (August 1943) and commander of the reserve army (July 1944), and his new posts absorbed much of his time.7 Yet he never forgot the KL, and continued to set their general direction. And as we will see, certain pet projects—such as human experiments and the exploitation of prisoners for the German war economy—still brought out the micromanager in him, stirring subordinates like Pohl to ever more radical initiatives.

  OSWALD POHL AND THE WVHA

  The absorption of the concentration camps into Oswald Pohl’s WVHA coincided with major shifts in the German economy. At the beginning of 1942, Nazi leaders stared into an uncertain future. The army had suffered a dramatic setback in the USSR, war production stagnated, and Germany faced an open-ended global war. To increase its armaments output, the regime took several significant steps, symbolized by two key appointments. In February 1942, Hitler installed his protégé Albert Speer as minister for armaments and war production, and in March 1942, he named the Thuringian Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel as the new general plenipotentiary for labor mobilization. Their fierce activism and ebullient rhetoric quickly made both men into major players in the German war economy.8

  This development spelled danger to Heinrich Himmler, who worried that Speer and Sauckel would push him aside.9 To keep his two rivals at bay, and away from KL labor, Himmler in early March 1942 hastily ordered the incorporation of the Camp Inspectorate into the recently established WVHA.10 Mindful of appearances, Himmler justified the restructure on economic grounds. Absorbing the camps into Pohl’s WVHA would guarantee the utmost exploitation of prisoners, harnessing “every last working hour of every person for our victory.”11 Hitler was persuaded, at least for now, and personally agreed to the expansion of armaments production in concentration camps.12

  Putting the camps into Pohl’s hands made perfect sense to Himmler. Pohl was no stranger to the KL and had gained major influence over the previous years. And unlike the obscure camp inspector Richard Glücks, who hardly ever got an audience with Himmler, Pohl was a close confidant and SS notable, reflected in his promotion to Obergruppenführer, agreed on in a meeting between Himmler and Hitler on March 17, 1942. He had great ambitions and the WVHA seemed destined to become a major force under his leadership. Deeply committed to the cause—he claimed to be a “National Socialist before there even was National Socialism”—Pohl was single-minded, well connected, and politically astute, and had long cultivated a forbidding image; his subordinates marveled at his resilience and feared his temper. His second wife summed up her husband’s image, in a letter to Himmler, as “indestructible, robust, and utterly strong.”13 Clearly, Himmler hoped that other Nazi bigwigs would think twice before pushing Pohl around.

  Inside the WVHA

  The WVHA was a large outfit, with up to 1,700 officials in five main departments overseeing tens of thousands of workers across Europe. Its remit went far beyond the KL; as its name suggests, it was involved in all aspects of SS business and administration, from the acquisition of real estate to the provision of accommodation for SS troops. Nonetheless, all five WVHA departments had close links to the concentration camps. Office Group A dealt with personnel matters, budgets, and payrolls, and with the transfer of funds to individual camps. Among the duties of Office Group B was the supply of food and clothing. Office Group C, meanwhile, was involved in construction projects, including the gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz; it was led by SS Oberführer Hans Kammler, who was poised to become a dominant figure in the camp system. As for Office Group W, headed by Pohl himself, it oversaw SS enterprises such as the German Earth and Stone Works (DESt), which continued to rely heavily on KL slave labor; at its height in 1943–44, the SS economy included around thirty different companies, which exploited up to forty thousand camp inmates.14 The administrative heart of the KL system, however, was Office Group D, the former Camp Inspectorate, still based in the so-called T-Building in Oranienburg.

  Compared to the other WVHA offices, Office Group D was rather small.15 In early September 1944, it had no more than 105 employees. Among them were nineteen officers; the rest were auxiliary staff, like secretaries, telex and telephone operators, caretakers, and canteen staff, as well as drivers (Camp SS cars had their own registration numbers, running from SS-16 000 to SS-16 500).16 The atmosphere inside the T-Building reflected the martial values of the Camp SS. Officials normally wore boots and uniforms to work, and put in long hours, until six or seven o’clock in the evening, with some working well into the night; a few officers even slept in private rooms in the T-Building, probably after a meal and some drinks in the local Waffen SS mess hall (other officials lived in Oranienburg or nearby Berlin).17 Like most concentration camps, the KL headquarters were an almost exclusively male workspace. In September 1944, just one woman, a Frau Bade, was listed among the staff members; working as a personal assistant, she was also the only civilian emplo
yee and non-SS member.18

  Office Group D had four departments.19 Every two weeks or so, the four department heads would meet in the large office of Richard Glücks on the first floor of the T-Building. Glücks’s deputy Arthur Liebehenschel ran department D I, the so-called central office. Most of the correspondence went through this office. It collated statistics about prisoner numbers, transfers, releases, and deaths, and ruled on applications by commandants for official punishments of individual prisoners. Department D I also transmitted many other orders—from Office Group D, the RSHA, Pohl, and Himmler—to the KL, and kept some oversight of executions and systematic killings inside.20 For example, the officials in D I received the figures of Jews sent to Auschwitz, divided into those gassed on arrival and those selected for labor; Glücks regularly presented a summary of these figures to Pohl.21 The Nazi Final Solution was common knowledge among WVHA officials, and so were many other crimes: “down to the last little clerk,” Pohl testified after the war, “they all must have known what went on in the concentration camps.”22