KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Despite its far-reaching changes, however, we must not exaggerate the impact of Pohl’s 1942 reshuffle. For a start, he was no more adept than his predecessors at imposing a fully coherent personnel policy. Some new commandants like Kaindl may have approached Pohl’s ideal of the soldierly official, but most did not. Indeed, many appointments were makeshift, the result of chance and connections.73 Just as in the early years of the Camp SS, there was a high turnover of staff. Some of Pohl’s commandants fell fast, proving themselves just as inept and corrupt as the men they had replaced. Wilhelm Gideon, for example, lasted barely one year at Gross-Rosen. Perhaps Pohl’s most unusual appointment, Gideon had been chief administrative officer in Neuengamme, and was the first such official to rise to commandant. He was also the last; more devoted to alcohol than to his job, Gideon was sacked in autumn 1943.74 Pohl proved no more sure-footed in his other appointments, with three commandants anointed by him at later dates—Karl Chmielewski, Hermann Florstedt, and Adam Grünewald—arrested by the Nazi authorities for violence and corruption.75 And far from provoking a rupture with the Eicke era, Pohl drew heavily from the “talent pool” filled by his old adversary. Most commandants who stayed on—experienced men like Höss, Koegel, Weiss, Ziereis, and Zill—had thrived during Eicke’s time; they were experts in terror, first and foremost, not in business. The same was true for new commandants. Even Anton Kaindl had been taken under Eicke’s wing back in 1936 and remained one of his closest associates until 1941.76

  In the final analysis, then, Pohl’s reshuffle was meant to refresh the camps, not to reinvent them. Clearly, Pohl wanted to pave the way for more effective slave labor. At the same time, though, he wanted to retain the spirit of the Camp SS and continued to put his trust in veterans of violence. In a pattern repeated elsewhere, Pohl expected radical change without making radical changes. More generally, his reshuffle was not just about economics; it was also about power.77 Pohl was a master of gesture politics and wanted to prove to Himmler that he would fight corruption and incompetence. Simultaneously, he gave notice to the Camp SS staff that he would be no pushover like Glücks. The message was understood, and by autumn 1942, Pohl’s authority over the KL had been cemented. As a piece of political theater, then, his reshuffle succeeded. As an economic initiative, it failed, for the concentration camps would never turn into significant hubs for the German economy.78

  SS Armaments Works

  Oswald Pohl was hoping to press more prisoners into the war effort. Previously, SS thinking had been dominated by visions of vast settlements, but these dreams were already fading fast when Pohl took control of the KL in spring 1942, punctured by the harsh reality of a war that would not end. True, SS leaders found it hard to let go of their dreams, which continued to offer relief from the growing gloom enveloping the Third Reich, just as Hitler later lost himself in architectural models of his imaginary cities when much of Germany lay in ruins.79 As a practical policy, however, the construction of huge new SS buildings in the east was losing its urgency. In the end, most plans remained in drawers, grim reminders of what might have been.

  The attention of SS leaders shifted from the future to the present, from German cities and settlements to weaponry. At a time when the entire German economy was gearing up for the war effort, the SS could not stay on the sidelines. There was widespread agreement among the Nazi elite, starting with Adolf Hitler, that the KL had to focus more intensively on arms production.80 Oswald Pohl was one of the greatest proponents of the new course. The priority, he confirmed to Himmler in late April 1942, was no longer the SS peacetime building projects; it was the increase of armaments.81 But how would this be done?

  To Himmler, the answer was obvious: it was time to establish the SS as an arms manufacturer. This quickly turned into another of his flights of fancy. By summer 1942, he was fantasizing about arsenals of high-tech weapons rolling out of factories “erected and run by us.” Himmler’s enthusiasm was contagious. His enforcer Pohl was equally optimistic that SS enterprises in concentration camps could undertake “armaments tasks on the largest scale.”82 Shortsighted though they were, even Himmler and Pohl saw that they could not go it alone, at least not at first; the SS needed help from private industry. Still, Himmler hoped to maintain ultimate control over such joint ventures, and insisted in spring and summer 1942 that all production take place in the KL. While he was prepared to accept (at least in theory) that private companies would retain economic supervision over shared enterprises, his general ruling was clear: arms manufacturers had to erect their factories inside his concentration camps.83

  Perhaps Himmler’s basic rule was a reaction to the first major collaboration between the SS and the armaments industry, which had quickly gone awry. On January 11, 1942, Hitler had signed off on a deal for the SS to participate in the construction of a light alloy foundry on the grounds of the Volkswagen (VW) works in Wolfsburg. On paper, this order put the SS into pole position, as Himmler was in charge of the “completion, extension, and operation” of the foundry, using “manpower from the concentration camps.” However, VW was unwilling to cede control on its home turf and the SS soon gave in. VW would run the factory, while the SS would merely supply and guard the prisoners. A new KL—tellingly named Arbeitsdorf (village of labor)—was set up for this purpose on the foundry’s building site, and in April 1942 hundreds of inmates arrived for construction work. But their hard labor proved pointless. Albert Speer had undermined the project since his appointment as armaments minister, not least because of its limited relevance for the war effort, and quickly used his influence over production planning and raw materials allocation to bring it down; the Arbeitsdorf camp closed within a few months. When the prisoners were withdrawn in October 1942, they left behind a half-completed and empty shell.84

  Himmler was unfazed by the failure of Arbeitsdorf. Frustrated that SS armaments production amounted to no more than “peanuts,” as he put it in September 1942, he pressed ahead with more joint ventures, though this time inside existing KL.85 Himmler was pursuing four key projects: the production of rifles in Buchenwald (working with the Wilhelm Gustloff company), handguns in Neuengamme (Carl Walther company), antiaircraft guns in Auschwitz (Krupp), and transmitters in Ravensbrück (Siemens & Halske). The SS was building all these factories, and Himmler expected them to provide supplies for the Waffen SS.86 He also tried to impress Hitler, dazzling him with tales of vast armies of slaves churning out weapons in the KL. “The Führer,” Himmler informed Pohl in March 1943, “counts so very firmly on our production and our support.”87

  By that time, the momentum behind the SS plans had already stalled. Still, Himmler and Pohl plowed on, determined to establish yet more KL armaments factories. To this end, they were even prepared to transform established SS businesses. In some concentration camps, DESt now moved into war production, gradually shifting from bricks and stones to weaponry. In Flossenbürg, its construction of fighter planes began in 1943, with Messerschmitt providing raw materials and technical training; forced labor in the quarry, meanwhile, the symbol of the camp since its inception, came to an almost complete standstill. In SS circles, the Flossenbürg project was hailed as a triumph—Pohl personally inspected the new factory—and it seemed to stick closely to Himmler’s blueprint: production took place inside the camp and was supervised (at least nominally) by the SS, which sold the finished goods to Messerschmitt at a profit.88 Such apparent successes made Himmler bullish about the significance of the SS economy, and he acted as its greatest cheerleader. In October 1943, he bragged to SS leaders about “giant armaments works” run by the SS in concentration camps.89 But this was just wishful thinking. In truth, the SS had failed to become a serious arms manufacturer.

  Among all the SS businesses in concentration camps, DESt was alone in turning to arms manufacturing, and even this move was partial and reliant on unsophisticated production methods. Many SS businesses remained largely untouched by the war. Peacetime production simply continued, despite an explicit order by the W
VHA in autumn 1942 to abandon all permanent KL labor details that were not engaged in work important or essential for the war effort. In several camps, even DESt still focused on building materials and other goods. The DESt factory in Berlstedt, for example, staffed by prisoners from nearby Buchenwald, actually stepped up its production of flowerpots, turning out nearly 1.7 million in 1943 alone. SS managers made absurd attempts to designate such work as indispensable, even passing off the production of porcelain as “war essential.” In reality, much of the SS output had little to do with the war effort, never mind high-tech weaponry.90 These shortcomings were plain to see, and in April 1943, Himmler suffered the indignity of being patronized by Albert Speer, who complained that the SS was wasting its resources.91

  As for the wider SS collaboration with the arms industry, none of the four pet projects pursued by Himmler came to much, hampered by changing military priorities and shortages of adequate machinery. In Ravensbrück, production expanded only slowly; in summer 1943, after one year, no more than six hundred female prisoners were toiling for Siemens & Halske. Elsewhere, the picture was even less flattering to Himmler’s ambitions. Rifle production in Buchenwald only got under way in spring 1943, on a much smaller scale than planned. In Neuengamme, the partial production of firearms began even later, with negligible results, while the production of antiaircraft guns in Auschwitz never even started.92 SS efforts to dominate their business partners ended in defeat, too, as it largely failed to wrest control over production in KL factories. The reason was simple, as Speer pointed out bluntly to Himmler: industrialists were “not keen to build up the SS as competition.”93 For his part, Speer, who had long backed economic ventures in the KL, threw his weight behind industry. While Himmler and Pohl were still dreaming about the SS production of weaponry, he dealt them a fatal blow.

  War and Satellites

  The future of concentration camp labor was determined not in spring 1942, when Oswald Pohl took over the KL system, but in autumn, at a time when only around five percent of prisoners were working for the war industry.94 And its future was determined not by Pohl but by Albert Speer, who was fast becoming one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich. During a crucial meeting on September 15, 1942, Speer outwitted Pohl. Blinded by Speer’s enticing (but empty) talk of a big SS armaments complex, the giddy Pohl stumbled into a major concession: he abandoned Himmler’s rule of moving all production into the camps and allowed that prisoners could be sent to armaments works elsewhere. Speer pounced on this concession and used it a few days later, during a conference with Hitler. After he persuaded Hitler that it would be impossible to set up substantial weapons production inside the KL—Speer highlighted the poor infrastructure—he received backing for the deployment of prisoners in established arms factories, without major SS influence.95 Instead of moving arms factories inside the KL, prisoners increasingly moved outside to factories owned by private and state industry. Appointed to strengthen the SS economy, Oswald Pohl had hastened its decline, loosening the grip over its slave labor force.

  Hitler’s basic decision in September 1942 was a catalyst for the growing cooperation between industry and the SS. From now on, the SS guarded more and more of its prisoners at new satellite camps near arms factories and construction sites. Previously, as we have seen, neither the SS nor industry had shown a burning desire to work together. The SS preferred to use its prisoners for its own schemes while industry preferred more flexible sources of labor. Ambitious projects such as Monowitz (IG Farben) and Arbeitsdorf (VW) had been the exception, not the rule, and further joint ventures had remained sporadic even during the early months of Pohl’s stewardship of the KL system.96 This began to change from late 1942, and so did the function, spread, and size of satellite camps. Though a few small sites had existed before, some going back to the prewar years, it was only now that the systematic spread of KL satellites (administratively attached to main concentration camps) started. The SS established a whole raft of new camps, largely near factories; by summer 1943, there were already around 150 satellite camps (up from around eighty at the start of the year). Some of their inmates worked for the SS, though many more worked for the war industry, often in manufacturing.97

  Many of the new satellite camps supplied forced labor for the aircraft industry, which faced particularly severe shortages. The two largest camps were connected to state-of-the-art factories run by Heinkel and BMW. The exploitation of Dachau prisoners by BMW had begun as early as March 1942, at its new factory for airplane motors in the Munich district of Allach. Prisoner numbers initially remained small, however, and inmates were transported back every evening to the main camp, some seven miles away. But in March 1943 the SS set up a satellite camp outside the factory gates, and within six months almost two thousand male KL prisoners worked in Allach, together with other forced laborers.98 Even bigger was the satellite camp at the Heinkel works in Oranienburg, just around the corner from Sachsenhausen, which became a model for the collaboration between the SS and industry. Here, too, the local Camp SS initially supplied only a small prisoner commando, which expanded rapidly after the establishment of a permanent satellite camp on site in September 1942; barely a year later, 150 prisoners had become over six thousand, producing all the parts for the biggest German bomber, the Heinkel 177.99

  The mass deployment of KL prisoners for arms production required a rethink from both SS leaders and industrialists, as demonstrated in the case of AFA, Germany’s largest manufacturer of batteries (rebranded as Varta after the war). In 1941, the SS had floated the idea of using Neuengamme prisoners at the AFA factory in Hanover, which produced batteries for submarines and torpedoes. However, the stringent SS conditions—including the total separation of the prisoners from other workers—put off the firm, which still had sufficient workers anyway. By spring 1943, however, the situation had changed. After the supply of workers from labor exchanges had dwindled, AFA grew interested in KL prisoners. The SS, meanwhile, was more cooperative than before. Accepting the priority of production, it relaxed its rigid rules and allowed its prisoners to work with other foreign laborers. Chivied along by Speer’s ministry, both sides reached an agreement, leading to the creation of the Neuengamme satellite camp Hanover-Stöcken in summer 1943; it stood some four hundred feet away from the factory and held up to one thousand prisoners by autumn 1943.100

  In addition to satellite camps for war production, the SS established satellites for repairing war damage. Since 1940, selected prisoners (from KL and prisons) had had to defuse unexploded Allied bombs, on Hitler’s orders; numerous men were blown to pieces in front of their terrified comrades. As the air raids intensified, the German authorities drafted many more prisoners. Following a tour of devastated German cities in late summer 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered the urgent dispatch of mobile prisoner squads to clear up the debris. By mid-October, the WVHA had designated three thousand inmates from Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald. In close cooperation with Speer’s office and other Nazi agencies, these prisoners were stationed in barrack camps and converted buildings in several major German cities. They were forced to clear rubble, gather bricks, wood, food, and roof tiles, build air raid shelters, bury the dead, and rescue survivors. This work was exhausting and dangerous, but the SS and municipal authorities regarded it as a great success, paving the way for the expansion of these so-called SS Building Brigades, which formed some of the largest satellite camps in early 1943.101

  Although KL labor changed during 1942–43, this was still an experimental phase. It would be wrong to think that almost all prisoners now worked flat-out for the war industry or cleared bomb damage. These pioneering projects were just that, pioneering, and they were not yet representative of the KL system as a whole. By summer 1943, no more than an estimated thirty thousand of two hundred thousand prisoners worked in satellite camps; the vast majority of prisoners remained inside main camps and at the disposal of the SS.102

  There was a simple reason for the slow pace of change: the German ar
ms industry was still in no hurry to draw on KL labor. Industry managers saw numerous pitfalls of working with the SS. High levels of security and myriad rules could disrupt production; prisoners, widely regarded as dangerous enemies, might engage in sabotage and incite the rest of the workforce; or they might be too exhausted to work properly. As one leading industrialist put it in October 1942, after Speer suggested the redeployment of prisoners from the Mauthausen quarry: “I already looked at them myself; they are no use to me in coal mining.” In general, therefore, German industry still preferred other sources of labor power, such as foreign workers. Only after these sources began to dry up did it become more proactive, resulting in a scramble for KL prisoners from autumn 1943.103

  Even though the full impact of the new direction of concentration camp labor was not felt until later, the earlier developments were significant nonetheless. The groundbreaking cooperation with leading firms like IG Farben, Heinkel, BMW, AFA, and VW provided the blueprint for future agreements between SS and industry. So what did this emerging blueprint look like? The allocation of KL prisoners would be handled centrally by the WVHA, one of the main innovations made by Pohl in spring 1942, following a discussion with Himmler.104 Typically, companies submitted their requests for forced workers via the local commandants or via the offices of Speer, Sauckel, or Göring (some companies also contacted the WVHA directly). Gerhard Maurer and his men in Office Group D II, who would often meet managers of the interested firms, assessed all applications, and then presented their recommendations to Pohl, who made the final decision. If Pohl gave permission to proceed, local camp officials would work out the contractual details with company representatives. Once the WVHA had approved the contract and all preparations were complete, the prisoner deployment would begin.105