KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Department D II managed KL slave labor, and as the camps’ economic significance increased, so did its status. Its remit was enormous: to oversee the deployment of prisoners across all concentration camps. The D II officials supplied prisoners for SS-owned enterprises, operating as the “labor exchange” of the SS economy, as one former manager put it. Later on, the Oranienburg officials allocated hundreds of thousands of prisoners to state and private industry. To keep track of its slave labor force, D II regularly collected data from the KL about prisoners no longer available for work—because of death, illness, exhaustion, or other reasons—and about the current deployment of their prisoners; executive summaries went to Glücks and Pohl.23

  Health matters in the KL were coordinated through department D III. Its officials liaised with Camp SS doctors—several hundred SS physicians worked in concentration camps at one time or another—by sending orders and checking reports; a monthly summary of prisoner illnesses and casualties by D III was presented to Pohl.24 Dr. Enno Lolling, the chief of D III, frequently traveled to the camps and initiated doctors into various killing programs that required their participation.25 Despite his tough demeanor, however, Lolling’s position was weak. He had the fewest staff in Office Group D, and his Oranienburg colleagues repeatedly encroached on his turf.26 What is more, his department held an outsider status inside the WVHA, because it also reported to the medical office of the Waffen SS (based in the SS Leadership Main Office), which provided the camps with equipment and medical supplies.27 The standing of D III was further damaged by Lolling himself. His superiors showed some goodwill toward him, but other Camp SS officials were less charitable about his abilities. To boot, a scandalous reputation preceded him. Stories about his morphine and alcohol addiction were legend, and he was said to suffer from syphilis. “He was so easy to deceive during inspections,” Rudolf Höss later wrote, “especially, as happened most times, when he had been plied with alcohol.”28

  The fourth and final department, D IV, dealt with administrative issues, including budgets and accommodation. Collaborating with Office Group B, it was also involved in the supply of food and clothes to Camp SS troops and prisoners.29 Initially led by Anton Kaindl, D IV was later headed by Wilhelm Burger.30 Born in 1904, Burger had trained in business and joined the SS in September 1932. Before long, he worked full time as an SS bureaucrat, eventually in the administration of the Death’s Head troops (his rise was not impeded by an ideological blot on his SS résumé: until his divorce in 1935, Burger had been married to a woman of Jewish descent). Following a spell with the Death’s Head division in the early war years, Burger moved to the KL. In June 1942, he became director of administration in Auschwitz, just as the camp turned into a major site of extermination. Burger proved himself there—he was one of the few senior officials to gain unreserved praise from Commandant Rudolf Höss, who commended his “organizational abilities,” “ruthless zeal,” and “hard will”—and after less than one year, on May 1, 1943, Burger was promoted to his new post in the WVHA.31

  This was no exceptional move: several SS officers gained senior positions in Office Group D after first serving in concentration camps. The most prominent was Höss himself, who left Auschwitz in November 1943 to head department D I. Known as “Rudi” to his colleagues, he was one of the zealous officials who often slept in the T-Building. As a hugely experienced practitioner of terror from the largest KL, Höss had much to offer the WVHA and became Pohl’s main troubleshooter.32 Conversely, many men from Office Group D moved in the opposite direction, with two senior managers leaving Oranienburg to take up the top position inside camps. Arthur Liebehenschel became commandant of Auschwitz (in November 1943), effectively swapping jobs with Höss, while Anton Kaindl became commandant of Sachsenhausen (in September 1942), next door to the T-Building. Senior posts within the WVHA may have been better remunerated, but Kaindl’s move still advanced his career. Little more than a year after his transfer, he was promoted to Standartenführer, climbing one rank above Höss in the SS hierarchy.33

  There were pragmatic reasons for moving SS managers like Kaindl from headquarters to the camps. KL staff were in short supply and it made sense to plug sudden gaps with experienced officers.34 However, the rotation of staff—which affected more than half of all the officers working in the Oranienburg T-Building—was about more than expedience.35 Oswald Pohl dreamed of “soldierly officials” who combined bureaucratic skills with experience on the battlefields of the Third Reich, and was keen to employ KL veterans as managers; many of his Oranienburg officials had served apprenticeships inside the camps.36 As for the men transferred from WVHA-D to the concentration camps, there was an expectation that they would prove themselves anew as “political soldiers” at the “front,” lest they become “comfortable, fat, and old” in their office jobs, as Theodor Eicke had once put it.37 Just like the terror experts in the RSHA, the Camp SS managers saw themselves as part of a “fighting administration,” wielding both pen and sword in the name of the SS.38

  Managing the KL

  Immediately after the collapse of the Third Reich, the mighty Oswald Pohl fled from his wife’s Bavarian manor before U.S. soldiers could catch him. He set off on foot to northern Germany, at the other end of the country, where two daughters from his first marriage (both married to SS men) hid him.39 After British soldiers finally arrested him in May 1946, Pohl had another stab at escaping his past. Facing the gallows at his forthcoming trial at Nuremberg, he disowned any responsibility for the crimes in the camps. He had had little involvement, he protested, even after the KL system had come under his WVHA. Apart from labor deployment, which Himmler had asked him to supervise, it was Richard Glücks who had continued to direct “the whole internal operation”; this was why, Pohl added, the Camp Inspectorate had been left unchanged, except for its new name as Office Group D.40 Although some historians have since echoed this claim, presenting Pohl as a rather peripheral character, his self-serving account had little basis in fact.41

  Oswald Pohl was far more than the remote figurehead of the concentration camps. True, there were continuities in the operation of the KL system. Most of its managers came from the old Camp Inspectorate, among them Richard Glücks and three of his four department heads, who effectively continued their previous jobs in the WVHA.42 If we probe more deeply, however, a different picture emerges. Changing the doorplate of the T-Building from “Camp Inspectorate” to “WVHA Office Group D” was more than an exercise in rebranding. The camps really did become part of the WVHA, and Pohl their energetic leader. He may have left day-to-day matters to Glücks and his staff in Oranienburg, but Pohl’s fingerprints were all over the major decisions regarding the camps. His focus on camp labor certainly did not limit his engagement with other matters. After all, by the second half of the war, slave labor touched on most, if not all, aspects of the KL—in line with Himmler’s wishes, who urged Pohl to ensure the “total priority of labor.”43

  And so Pohl’s involvement stretched from medical matters to construction, from prisoner privileges to mass extermination. In addition to a constant stream of reports and statistics from Office Group D, Pohl held weekly meetings with Richard Glücks, and regularly saw other senior Camp SS managers.44 Pohl also summoned the KL commandants for face-to-face conferences; following the inaugural meeting in April 1942, they came together every few months in the German capital.45 Meanwhile, the physical distance between Pohl’s headquarters (in Berlin-Lichterfelde) and the T-Building (in Oranienburg) was bridged by telephone and a designated SS courier.46 All these contacts contributed to the gradual integration of the camp administration into the WVHA.

  Much as Pohl learned about the KL from his vantage point in Berlin, he was no born bureaucrat. Contrary to the image of the efficient desk-bound perpetrator, so popular among some historians of Nazi terror, SS managers like Pohl were often hands-on.47 Modeling himself as the ideal “soldierly official,” he went on the road to impose his vision, ruling on many local issues. His master Heinric
h Himmler drove him to ever more vigorous action, demanding in March 1943 that Pohl or Glücks should travel each week to a different camp to push everyone to work harder. “I believe that at the present moment we have to spend an enormous amount of time in person in the enterprises out there,” Himmler told Pohl, “to crack with the whip of our words and to help on the spot with our energy.”48

  These words were Pohl’s mantra. Like Eicke before him, he was always on the move and became a familiar face in many KL, from small satellites to huge complexes like Auschwitz, which he visited at least four times between April 1942 and June 1944.49 Local officials must have dreaded his arrival—like Himmler, he sometimes appeared unannounced—for Pohl was hard to please and quick to punish. He inspired fear in his men, just as Eicke had done, though far less affection. His memory was unforgiving and his zeal unsurpassed. Even the single-minded Rudolf Höss had finally found his match. During joint inspections, Pohl, who was in his early fifties, would hasten from one stop to the next, wearing out the younger man. “Having to join him on a business trip,” the weary Höss concluded, “was no pure pleasure.”50

  Pohl’s ascent over the KL system eclipsed Richard Glücks. To be sure, as the head of Office Group D, Glücks was still an influential figure, supervising the everyday operations and participating in personnel and policy decisions; in November 1943 he was rewarded for his long service in the Camp SS with promotion to Gruppenführer. But there was no doubt that Pohl was in overall charge, as even Glücks himself accepted.51 Crucially, Glücks’s position was also eroded from below by one of Pohl’s protégés, Gerhard Maurer, who joined Office Group D in spring 1942 to head department D II (labor action of prisoners). In the past, the Oranienburg managers had only paid limited attention to forced labor.52 But there was no overlooking Maurer’s new department, which grew into a dominant force, as did Maurer himself; in charge of camp labor until the end of the war, he became the most powerful man inside the T-Building.53

  In many ways, Gerhard Maurer was typical of the SS managers who thrived under Pohl: ambitious young men who combined experience of modern business administration with firm commitment to the Nazi cause, allowing them to harness SS economic activities for the Nazi national community.54 Born in 1907, Maurer apprenticed in business after leaving school and worked as an accountant. Like so many others, he drifted to the radical right as the Weimar Republic crumbled. Maurer signed up with the Nazi Party in December 1930, days shy of his twenty-third birthday, and joined the SS the following year. Soon after the capture of power, Maurer married his political beliefs and professional skills, first as chief accountant of a Nazi publishing house and then, in 1934, as a full-time SS official. Maurer never looked back. He rose through the burgeoning SS bureaucracy, gaining glowing reports along the way, and was poached in summer 1939 by Oswald Pohl for the new SS Main Office Administration and Business. He had reached one of the top managerial positions, with the rank of Sturmbannführer, by the time he moved to Oranienburg to take up his new post.55

  Although Gerhard Maurer came from outside the Camp SS, he was no freshman. His previous work had brought him into close contact with the concentration camps, and he hit the ground running in spring 1942; as Pohl’s point man, he was in a strong position to impose his will. Maurer accompanied Richard Glücks to the weekly meetings with Pohl, which were mostly about labor allocation, and he had direct access to Pohl at other times. Uncompromising, unflappable, and untiring, Maurer quickly gained the respect of other SS men in the Oranienburg HQ and inside the camps. He often spent half the week on the road, traveling from camp to camp, sometimes accompanied by other senior colleagues like Wilhelm Burger and Enno Lolling.56 In the KL, Maurer built up especially close relations with the labor action leaders, who now became powerful figures. These men were his local enforcers, and he regularly summoned them to Oranienburg for conferences to discuss new initiatives.57 Maurer also liaised with many outside agencies, including Speer’s ministry and private industry, cementing his status as the principal SS manager of forced labor. When Speer scheduled a central planning meeting for late October 1942, Pohl immediately recalled the indispensable Maurer from an inspection to Auschwitz, rather than send another SS official to the meeting.58

  The more intense the SS fixation on slave labor, the higher Maurer’s star rose over the KL system. Maurer was officially appointed as Glücks’s deputy in autumn 1943 (following Liebehenschel’s departure for Auschwitz), and the other Oranienburg officials knew that he was the real power behind Glücks’s throne. Compared to the dynamic Maurer—just thirty-four years old when he joined the Camp SS staff—the portly Glücks, almost twenty years his senior, seemed like a spent force. Even Glücks’s sidekick Liebehenschel saw that “the old man,” as he called him, was out of touch. For his part, Glücks was ready to take a backseat, though he still enjoyed the trappings of his job. Many of the key decisions, however, were now taken two doors down from his lavish room in the T-Building, in Maurer’s small office.59

  Pohl’s Commandants

  As the commandants fanned out from Berlin back to the concentration camps across Nazi-controlled Europe, following their inaugural conference with Oswald Pohl in late April 1942, they wondered what the new era would bring. All of them must have been struck by Pohl, who came across as a “brute force of nature,” in the words of Rudolf Höss; there was no doubt that Pohl was serious about changing the KL system.60 But none of the commandants could have foreseen just how soon they would be affected personally. Pohl was not content with remaking the Oranienburg HQ. He was determined to put his stamp on the individual camps, too, and in summer 1942, he made sweeping changes among the commandants, with Himmler’s approval. A minor restructure was already on the agenda, after several officers had become embroiled in scandal. Pohl’s ambitions went further, however, and when the dust had settled in October 1942, all but four concentration camps had a new commandant.

  Pohl’s shake-up started further down the Camp SS hierarchy, when the WVHA ordered individual camps in early May 1942 to report long-serving SS block leaders for relocation.61 The resulting rotation of low-level staff disrupted set routines and old cliques, as the WVHA had evidently intended. In Sachsenhausen, for example, the death squad was broken up and several members moved to another KL (only a few indispensable experts in torture and death stayed behind).62 Others left the camps altogether, after SS leaders stepped up transfers to the Death’s Head division, which had suffered huge losses during ferocious fighting on the Eastern Front since early 1942.63 Among the Sachsenhausen block leaders who departed for military training were Wilhelm Schubert and Richard Bugdalle. Schubert later fought in Poland, Hungary, and Austria. Bugdalle, by contrast, did not last long as a soldier. He was unable to control the violent urges that had served him so well in the camps, and was thrown in an SS prison camp for beating up a commander who had found fault with his military salute.64

  The Camp SS entered a major period of flux under Pohl, as new staff joined and experienced men moved on. Although all ranks were affected, it was his summer 1942 reshuffle at the top of the KL that caused the greatest upheaval. Of fourteen commandants, five were kicked out of the Camp SS altogether. In addition to Piorkowski (Dachau), Loritz (Sachsenhausen), and Koch (Majdanek), Pohl also sacked Karl Künstler (Flossenbürg) and Arthur Rödl (Gross-Rosen); a sixth commandant, Wilhelm Schitli, left after the closure of the Arbeitsdorf KL. Of the remaining eight commandants, four kept their old jobs—Hermann Pister (Buchenwald), Franz Ziereis (Mauthausen), Rudolf Höss (Auschwitz), and Adolf Haas (Niederhagen)—while the remaining four were transferred to a different KL: Martin Weiss moved from Neuengamme to Dachau, Max Pauly from Stutthof to Neuengamme, Egon Zill from Natzweiler to Flossenbürg, and Max Koegel from Ravensbrück to Majdanek. Finally, five SS officers were newly appointed as camp commandants: Fritz Suhren (Ravensbrück), Wilhelm Gideon (Gross-Rosen), Anton Kaindl (Sachsenhausen), Paul Werner Hoppe (Stutthof), and Josef Kramer (Natzweiler).65 When the KL commandants assembled for their
next conference with Pohl in Berlin, it became clear just by looking around the table how much had changed since April 1942.

  The scale of Pohl’s reorganization is not in doubt; but what about its significance? After the war, Pohl claimed it was all down to his kindness: he had wanted to establish a more humane spirit, he said, by removing “roughnecks” educated in “Eicke’s school.”66 No credible historian would buy this tale of compassion. But the depiction of the reshuffle as a break with the Eicke era has gained some traction, as has the argument that Pohl was aiming to mobilize forced labor by appointing better managers.67

  Pohl clearly had high hopes for his five new commandants. They were comparatively young men, thirty-seven years old on average, and had all previously served in the Camp SS. Josef Kramer, for example, had gained almost all his professional experience inside, serving on the Commandant Staff of six different concentration camps between 1934 and 1942.68 Three of the new commandants had belonged to the Death’s Head division, with both Hoppe and Gideon wounded at Demjansk in 1942.69 They could boast some administrative skills, too, none more so than the new Sachsenhausen commandant, Anton Kaindl, the chief administrator in the Camp SS (as the former head of WVHA-D IV). Kaindl was a manager through and through, and with his round, horn-rimmed glasses, the slight man looked a breed apart from beefy thugs of the prewar years like Hans Loritz. Born in 1902, Kaindl had served for twelve years in the Weimar army as an accountant and paymaster. In the Third Reich, he put his skills into the service of the SA and then Pohl’s SS Administration Office. In 1936, he joined Eicke’s staff and soon became chief administrative officer of the Death’s Head troops. He took the same post in the Death’s Head division in autumn 1939, before returning to the Camp Inspectorate some two years later. Pohl had long admired Kaindl’s organizational talent and hoped that he would bring it to Sachsenhausen in 1942.70 Likewise, Pohl’s vision of productive KL influenced his dismissal of commandants.71 With Germany’s victory no longer a foregone conclusion, incompetence became a threat to the war effort. Koch’s time was up after he messed up one time too many, leaving Majdanek in a shambles. Künstler, too, finally had to go. A chronic drunk, he had failed to mend his ways, and when news of yet another bacchanalia at Flossenbürg made the rounds, SS leaders lost patience; a failure like Künstler was out of step with the Pohl era.72