KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  The primary focus of police terror on the home front was not on Gypsies or German social outsiders, however, but on foreign workers; in summer 1943, more than two-thirds of all new Gestapo prisoners were foreigners, who were routinely suspected as troublemakers, subversives, and criminals. The growing number of foreigners living in Germany, which swelled because of the merciless pursuit of foreign labor by Fritz Sauckel, only intensified these fears. By the end of 1943, the total number of foreign civilian workers and POWs inside the Third Reich had reached a staggering 7.3 million, turning the Nazi vision of an ethnically unified “people’s community” on its head. The great majority of foreign workers came from Poland and the Soviet Union (especially from Ukraine), with hundreds of thousands more from western Europe, above all from France. Worst off were the hungry and exhausted men and women from eastern Europe, who had to wear special markers, resembling the KL triangles, to identify them in case they broke the draconian rules.

  The police habitually handed out brutal penalties. This was true, above all, for Poles and Soviets, whose punishment the compliant legal authorities now largely left to the police. There was no reason to worry about the millions of foreign workers, Heinrich Himmler assured SS group leaders in Posen on October 4, 1943, “as long as we come down hard on the smallest trifles.” Most alleged offenses were indeed trivial. Turning up late for work or disagreeing with a German superior was enough to be accused of “loafing” or “obstinacy.” The most common police sanction for supposedly grave offenses was a brief spell in a Gestapo camp (so-called Work Education Camps, or AELs, and Extended Police Prisons); these were harsh wartime additions to the Nazi landscape of terror, designed to discipline and deter “recalcitrant” workers through short but sharp detention. The most serious cases, however, were dealt with elsewhere: prisoners accused of sabotage, such as Sergey Ovrashko, and others regarded as especially dangerous, were dragged to the KL, which filled up with many tens of thousands of foreign workers in 1943. In this way, the SS gained more slave laborers and simultaneously increased the pressure on foreign workers outside to conform to Nazi demands. Punishment and deterrence went hand in hand.144

  Like Ovrashko, many Soviet foreign workers were still in their teens when they came to the KL. In Dachau alone, some 2,200 Soviet youths, aged eighteen or under, arrived in 1942. Their average age soon fell even further, after the German occupation authorities in the east dispatched ever-younger boys and girls for labor to the Reich. The police had no qualms about dragging these children to concentration camps, and in January 1943 Heinrich Himmler officially lowered to sixteen years the minimum age for committing Soviet forced workers.145 In practice, some were younger still. The Russian prisoner V. Chramcov, himself a teenager when he was forced to Dachau, recalled that one barrack had been packed with more than two hundred children, aged between six and seven.146 Some veteran prisoners looked on in horror. In his Dachau diary, Edgar Kupfer noted on April 11, 1943, that the “many little Russians in the camp” were “utterly miserable with hunger.”147

  The tentacles of Himmler’s terror apparatus also reached far beyond the borders of the Third Reich, pulling even more foreigners into concentration camps from abroad. As the war turned further against Germany in 1943, resistance across Nazi-occupied Europe intensified. So did the Nazi response. Himmler led from the front, insisting on overwhelming force. In northern and western Europe, he authorized selective assassinations of public figures as a form of “counterterrorism,” while his men ran wild in eastern and southeastern Europe, using antipartisan warfare as an excuse for blanket executions. When it came to locking up foreign suspects, Himmler often opted for his trusted concentration camps. The call for mass deportations of foreign resisters, deviants, and hostages to the KL became a reflex for him, and contributed to the sharp rise in prisoners from Nazi-occupied Europe. Among them were the so-called NN prisoners, held in almost total isolation. To discourage resistance in northern and western Europe, Hitler had ordered that some suspects should secretly be deported to Germany, never to be seen again by their families; they would disappear in “night and fog” (Nacht und Nebel, or NN).148

  The mass arrest of foreigners in 1943 left its mark on the KL system. In most camps inside the Third Reich’s prewar borders, German prisoners had still constituted the largest or second-largest inmate group in early 1943. Now these camps began to change. In Buchenwald, for example, the proportion of Germans among the inmate population fell from thirty-five percent to thirteen percent during 1943 (even though the number of German prisoners still rose by more than one thousand), while the share of east European prisoners increased correspondingly; on December 25, 1943, there were 14,451 Soviet and 7,569 Polish prisoners in Buchenwald, making up almost sixty percent of the prisoner population (37,221). By contrast, there were only 4,850 Germans, who were almost outnumbered by the 4,689 French, a prisoner group that had been virtually nonexistent one year earlier.149

  Hunting for Slave Laborers

  In late May 1942, Heinrich Himmler sent a word of warning to Oswald Pohl: it was important to avoid the impression “that we arrest people, or keep them inside [the KL] after their arrest, to have workers.”150 He may have been anxious about appearances, but Himmler had long resolved to grow the slave labor force inside his concentration camps. Economic considerations had already influenced the arrest of “work-shy” men back in the late 1930s, and by 1942, Himmler’s appetite for forced laborers had become ravenous.151

  Seizing prisoners from other Nazi authorities was one way of boosting the KL slave labor force. Before the war, Himmler’s bids for regular state prisoners had been rebuffed. But the stance of the legal authorities relaxed after the appointment of the hard-liner Otto-Georg Thierack as Reich minister of justice on August 20, 1942. Desperate to shore up the standing of the judiciary—which had reached a low point in spring 1942, following a public broadside from Hitler—Thierack was willing to throw one of the last legal principles overboard: the rule that defendants sentenced by the courts served their time in state prisons. In a meeting with Himmler on September 18, 1942, Thierack agreed to hand over whole groups of judicial prisoners: those sentenced to security confinement, “asocial” German and Czech penitentiary inmates sentenced to more than eight years, convicts at the bottom of the Nazi racial hierarchy (that is, Jews, Gypsies, and Soviets), as well as Poles serving sentences of over three years. Brushing aside the rule of law, or what was left of it, Germany’s leading jurist condemned many of his own prisoners to death in Himmler’s concentration camps.

  The ensuing prisoner transfers accelerated the shift in power between legal and SS terror, and helped the camps finally to outstrip prisons. Although inmate numbers in the latter swelled during the war, too, they could no longer keep up with lawless terror; by June 1943, the KL prisoner population had grown to some two hundred thousand inmates, around fifteen thousand more than German state prisons. Himmler must have been gratified to overtake the much-maligned legal authorities. But this was now a secondary concern, overshadowed by his quest for more slave labor. Like Hitler, Himmler believed that the incoming state prisoners would be in great shape, having been pampered in plush prisons; working them to death in concentration camps could only benefit the SS.

  Deportations from German state prisons to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Neuengamme, and Sachsenhausen began in November 1942, and were largely completed late the following spring. In all, the legal authorities had handed over more than twenty thousand state prisoners. Most of them were German nationals, above all petty property offenders, while Poles made up the largest group of foreigners.152 Thousands more Polish state prisoners arrived in Auschwitz and Majdanek from prisons in the General Government (run by the police), following a Himmler order on December 5, 1942, that targeted long-term prisoners judged fit for work.153

  Himmler’s efforts to bolster his slave labor force became more frantic from late 1942, as Germany’s strategic position deteriorated. Following the encirclement of the Sixth Arm
y in Stalingrad and losses in North Africa, not even Himmler could ignore the whispers of impending defeat. War production became more pressing than ever, increasing demands on the RSHA (still in charge of arrests and releases) to deliver more slaves to concentration camps.154 Some of this pressure came from the WVHA, with Oswald Pohl insisting in a letter to Himmler on December 8, 1942, that many more prisoners were required for armaments production.155 Himmler reacted straightaway. On December 12, he attended Pohl’s wedding as the guest of honor and used the joyous occasion for a confidential chat about the KL.156 Only a few days later, Himmler issued an urgent order to Gestapo leader Heinrich Müller: by the end of January 1943, the police had to deliver some fifty thousand new prisoners to the concentration camps for slave labor.157 Müller grasped the significance of Himmler’s demand and exhorted his police forces that “every single worker counts!”158

  The result was a major police operation against Jews and foreign workers from eastern Europe. On December 16, 1942, Heinrich Müller informed Himmler about plans for the deportation of forty-five thousand Jews—thirty thousand from Bialystok district, most of the others from Theresienstadt—to Auschwitz. The great majority of them, he added, would be “unfit for work” (in other words, they would be gassed on arrival), but at least ten to fifteen thousand could be “set aside” for forced labor.159 Just one day later, Müller ordered mass transfers from German police jails and AELs, targeting Soviet workers and others of “alien blood,” who had been arrested for offenses against labor discipline. Müller hoped that this initiative would net at least another thirty-five thousand prisoners “fit for work” for the concentration camps.160 Meanwhile, Himmler pushed for even more prisoners. On January 6, 1943, he demanded that boys and girls arrested as “suspected partisans” in the General Government and the occupied Soviet Union should become apprentices in KL enterprises in Auschwitz and Majdanek. And just twelve days later, he responded to bomb attacks in Marseilles by calling for the deportation of one hundred thousand members of the local “criminal masses” to concentration camps, an outlandish target that speaks volumes about Himmler’s state of mind (in the end, some six thousand persons were arrested).161

  The manhunts in early 1943 led to a rapid rise in the KL prisoner population. In Auschwitz, the number of registered Polish inmates doubled, from 9,514 (December 1, 1942) to 18,931 (January 29, 1943). Even more significantly, the SS deported more than fifty-seven thousand Jews to Auschwitz in January 1943, a grim record not surpassed until the mass transports of Jews from Hungary in late spring 1944.162 Not only did the number of KL prisoners increase, but fewer were allowed to leave, as RSHA regulations for releases, already highly restrictive, were tightened further to retain more slave laborers.163

  Prisoner numbers across the KL system would have risen much higher still had it not been for the dreadful conditions, the murderous violence, and the systematic killings that decimated Himmler’s much-heralded workforce. According to incomplete SS figures, almost ten thousand registered inmates lost their lives in January 1943 alone.164 Mortality figures had apparently been even higher during the preceding months, and Camp SS leaders would no doubt have continued to ignore these deaths had the growing focus on war production not started to drive up the value of slave labor. For the first time in its history, the Camp SS came under sustained pressure to improve conditions. As the RSHA suggested in a biting letter to Pohl on December 31, 1942, what was the point of all the mass arrests if so many new prisoners died so quickly inside the concentration camps?165

  Reducing Death Rates

  Richard Glücks was not a man of many surprises. But on December 28, 1942, he delivered a stunning message to the Camp SS: Heinrich Himmler had ordered that prisoner mortality in the concentration camps “must absolutely become lower” (this phrase was lifted almost verbatim from Himmler’s order, sent two weeks earlier to Pohl). Glücks pointed to grim figures. Although some 110,000 new prisoners had arrived during the last six months (June to November 1942), almost 80,000 inmates had died during the same period, 9,258 after executions and another 70,610 from illness, exhaustion, and injury (Glücks did not include Jews gassed in Auschwitz on arrival, without registration). This huge death rate meant that “the number of prisoners can never be brought up to the [right] level, as the Reichsführer SS has ordered.” Consequently, Glücks decreed, senior camp doctors had to take all available measures to drive down “significantly” the number of deaths. This was not the first time Camp SS leaders had reminded their men that greater output required at least a minimum of care; but never before had such an order been made with such urgency.166

  Signaling its seriousness about raising living standards, the WVHA issued several further directives in 1943. In January, taking his cue from Himmler once more, Glücks made local KL commandants and administration leaders responsible for using all available means to “preserve the labor power of prisoners.”167 Oswald Pohl also weighed in, summing up his views in a long letter to commandants in October 1943. Arms production in the camps was already a “decisive factor in the war,” he fantasized, but to further increase output, the SS would have to look after its prisoners. In order for Germany to win “a great victory,” Camp SS officers had to ensure the “healthiness” and “well-being” of slave laborers in concentration camps. Pohl then outlined a range of practical improvements. To underline their importance, he announced that he would personally supervise their implementation.168

  After years of endorsing and escalating violence in concentration camps, senior SS officials in Berlin and Oranienburg now seemed to play a different tune, jarring to some guards raised in the school of violence. Of course, SS leaders had not undergone a sudden conversion from cruelty to compassion. His demands owed nothing to “sentimental humanitarianism,” Pohl reassured the commandants. It was a purely practical strategy, since the “arms and legs” of prisoners were needed to support the German war effort.169 The WVHA was not alone in rethinking its approach. As it dawned on Nazi leaders that the supply of labor power would not be limitless, other groups of forced laborers, too, could hope for some improvements of their conditions.170

  Since starvation was probably the greatest cause of death among registered KL prisoners, a better food supply was the most pressing task—as even Heinrich Himmler recognized.171 However, SS leaders were reluctant to distribute additional resources and instead promoted measures that came at no extra cost. Some were just an outlet for the eccentric ideas of Himmler, who fancied himself as a visionary nutritionist. Foremost was his preposterous plan to distribute onions and other raw vegetables, an initiative that would have caused more misery for inmates already suffering from intestinal infections.172 Drawing on expert SS advice, meanwhile, Oswald Pohl circulated his own proposals to the camps, full of banal cookery tips (“Don’t boil warm meals to death!”) and stern reminders to be thrifty (“There must be no kitchen scraps in the KL”).173

  Another initiative by Himmler proved more significant. In late October 1942, the Reichsführer SS had permitted prisoners to receive food packages from outside, reviving the old practice from the prewar camps. Soon, parcels arrived from relatives, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and some national Red Cross societies.174 Rare luxuries now found their way into the KL; packages by the Danish Red Cross included sausage, cheese, butter, pork, fish, and more. Such parcels were a blessing for inmates and they talked about little else; some even dreamed about the packages. In her secret Ravensbrück diary, the French prisoner Simone Saint-Clair recorded how desperately she longed for mail: “Never before have I waited like this for packages and letters!” Those who received regular supplies were less likely to suffer from edema, diarrhea, tuberculosis, and other illnesses. Helena Dziedziecka from Warsaw, another Ravensbrück prisoner, later testified that the parcels “kept us alive.”175

  But not every inmate benefited, far from it; there were always many more hopeful prisoners than parcels.176 For a start, the national Red Cross societies restricted th
e circle of recipients; in Majdanek, for example, packages by the Polish Red Cross went to Polish prisoners only. Moreover, the SS only passed on parcels addressed to individual inmates; prisoners whose names and whereabouts were unknown to welfare organizations and relatives—or who had no more relatives outside—went hungry. Meanwhile, SS staff and Kapos found a new opportunity for corruption and helped themselves freely to the packages; when Anna Mettbach, a German Gypsy in Auschwitz, received a parcel from her mother, she found the original contents replaced by rotten apples and bread.177 The local Camp SS barred whole groups of inmates from receiving food parcels altogether, above all Soviets and Jews. “All of us are very needy,” Edgar Kupfer wrote in his Dachau diary, “especially the Russians, because they get no parcels.”178