KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  In addition to parcels, some prisoners received extra food from the German state, again at no extra cost for the SS. Although the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture had cut official prisoner rations substantially since early 1942, as Germany suffered a general food crisis, most prisoners did qualify for additional food allowances for heavy labor. However, these allowances were not handed out automatically, and local Camp SS officials were slow to complete the necessary paperwork (some of those who did kept back the extra rations). Eventually, more inmates received their due, though it is likely that most prisoners were left empty-handed.179

  SS leaders knew that efforts to improve conditions could not stop at the food supply. They would have to do something about all the gravely weak and ill inmates. In late 1942, Himmler complained to Pohl that far too many prisoners—some ten percent, by his count—were currently unable to work.180 In the past, the Camp SS had been quick to kill such invalids. These murderous reflexes were now more restrained, however, as SS leaders aimed to press prisoners who recovered back into work.181 In some camps, these considerations led to restrictions on local SS selections.182 Himmler also effectively abandoned the central program for murdering frail prisoners (Action 14f13), scaled down earlier. In the future, the commandants were told in spring 1943, all prisoners “unfit for work” would be exempt from selections by the doctors’ commissions (with the sole exception of mentally ill inmates). Instead of killing “bedridden cripples,” the Camp SS should force them to work, as Himmler had demanded for some time.183

  As for the medical treatment of the sick, Camp SS leaders called for a new approach, too. “The best doctor in a concentration camp,” Glücks insisted in late 1942, “is not the one who thinks he has to distinguish himself by inappropriate toughness, but the one who keeps the ability to work … as high as possible.”184 This demand resulted in at least one notable change: the SS staffed the KL infirmaries with more inmates who were trained doctors, bringing back another custom from the prewar camps. Soon, these prisoner physicians carried out most of the day-to-day duties. In contrast to their often inept SS superiors, they were highly qualified and secured some improvements for patients; the construction of new buildings and the enhanced provision of equipment and medicines also helped, at least in some camps.185

  Important as these changes were for individual inmates, they did not transform prisoner care as a whole. Any hygienic improvements were often negated by growing overcrowding, a direct result of the SS push for more slave laborers.186 The infirmaries continued to be characterized by desperate shortages, neglect, and abuse. Describing the hospital barracks in Sachsenhausen, a recently escaped prisoner wrote in summer 1944 that the “stench of rotting flesh, blood, and pus is unbearable.”187 The best care was reserved for a small number of skilled, well-connected, and privileged prisoners.188 By contrast, the SS still left most seriously ill inmates to die or murdered them outright. In particular, the practice of deporting dying prisoners to other camps continued, with Auschwitz replacing Dachau as the favored destination. Late on December 5, 1943, for instance, a so-called invalid transport from Flossenbürg arrived in the camp. The packed train included the corpses of more than 250 men who had died en route to Auschwitz. Many of the surviving 948 men, some weighing less than ninety pounds, were close to death. The SS threw the weakest onto the snow-covered ground, pouring water over them to hasten their death. The remaining men soon died, too; by February 18, 1944, just 393 were still alive.189

  But the WVHA did not abandon its overall ambition to bring down the death rate. And because the climate of cruelty inside the KL was another major cause of injury and death, the officials tried to curb some of the most blatant excesses. They cut back on the number and duration of roll calls (a frequent occasion for SS torture) and instructed local guards to leave prisoners in peace at nighttime, to allow them some more rest. The authorities also pressed for a reduction in corporal punishment and abandoned the infamous “hanging from a pole” (at least on paper).190 More generally, the WVHA reiterated its ban on rogue attacks on prisoners. Further reminders came from local Camp SS officers, some of whom openly rebuked and even punished violent guards.191

  Again, these measures showed some effect, although much of the day-to-day terror continued. Many local Camp SS officials lived in a world where the most heinous abuse of prisoner bodies was considered normal, even after death (in Buchenwald, SS men produced shrunken heads and objects made from tattooed prisoner skin). It is not surprising that SS veterans steeped in a culture of cruelty would resist even modest efforts from above to reduce the violence.192 Their immediate superiors often condoned their stance. Some local SS officers told block leaders to keep battering inmates, even as they asked them, with a wink, to sign the official undertaking not to touch any prisoners.193

  The persistence of local terror owed much to SS leaders. It would be wrong to imagine a simple clash between reformist WVHA managers and local SS torturers.194 The central orders for the KL in 1942–43 were by no means clear-cut. At the same time that the WVHA demanded better conditions and treatment, it pushed for the brutal exploitation of prisoners, despite the obvious contradictions. Oswald Pohl himself had set the tone in spring 1942 with his call for “exhausting” forced labor. Gerhard Maurer, Pohl’s slave driver, tried to realize this demand. In early June 1942, he repeated his master’s words, urging KL commandants to “utilize” the labor power of inmates to the “absolute maximum.” To this end, Maurer continued, prisoners had to work not only during the week, but all day on Saturdays and on Sunday mornings, too.195 It was doubtful whether this order brought any economic benefits; some private companies were unable to operate on Sundays, while utterly exhausted prisoners produced less, not more.196 The WVHA was undeterred, and in November 1943, Pohl reiterated the orders: “The extensive operations which are being carried on today and which are important for our warfare and decisive for victory do not permit under any circumstances that the net daily working time amounts to less than 11 hours.” In practice, prisoners often worked even longer, driven on by the local Camp SS.197 The result was more illness, injury, and death.

  A New Direction?

  Still, Oswald Pohl was triumphant. Prisoner fatalities inside the KL were falling fast, he boasted in a letter to Himmler on September 30, 1943; thanks to all the recent innovations, the WVHA had accomplished the mission set by the Reichsführer SS. The monthly death rate among registered prisoners had fallen steadily, Pohl announced, from eight percent in January 1943 to less than three percent in June. This was not simply a seasonal adjustment, he added, but a sharp decline in real terms (the figure for July 1942 had stood at 8.5 percent). To drive home his point, Pohl dazzled Himmler with statistics, graphs, and tables, all of which led to the same conclusion. Himmler was delighted by the good news—which reached him amid more military setbacks for the Nazi regime—and thanked Pohl and his men profusely.198

  Some historians have accepted Pohl’s claims wholesale, including his figures.199 But caution is in order: after all, Pohl was desperate to be seen to reduce prisoner deaths. Looking more closely, it is clear that his numbers do not quite add up. Not only did the Camp SS simply omit many deaths of registered prisoners from the official record, but Pohl’s figures did not even tally with other (higher) SS figures. There can be no doubt, in short, that more KL prisoners died than Pohl suggested.200 This is not to say, however, that the general trend he outlined was a fabrication.201 Prisoner mortality across the KL system really did decline; overall, inmates had a better chance of survival in autumn 1943 than eighteen months earlier.202

  This conclusion must be qualified, however, in three ways. First, the KL system was still lethal. Even though the relative death rate declined, total mortality increased in several camps in 1943, as the inmate population expanded. In the Auschwitz complex, for example, the estimated number of deaths among registered prisoners rose from sixty-nine thousand (1942) to more than eighty thousand (1943).203 Even though the basic conditions in A
uschwitz improved somewhat during this period—one Polish prisoner even suggested that “there was a huge difference between now and then”—they remained deadly. Hermann Langbein, a privileged prisoner with direct access to confidential SS statistics, later reported that the monthly inmate mortality in Auschwitz had fallen from 19.1 percent (January 1943) to 13.2 percent (January 1944). In other words, the SS had prolonged the suffering of prisoners, but most died all the same.204

  Second, there were enormous differences between camps. Far more prisoners lost their lives in occupied eastern Europe than farther west. According to the figures Pohl presented to Himmler, the most deadly concentration camp in August 1943 was Majdanek, where prisoners were ten times more likely to die than in Buchenwald.205 Even in established main camps within Germany’s prewar borders, however, conditions developed unevenly. In Mauthausen, the situation improved markedly and the annual inmate mortality halved, from an estimated forty-five percent (1942) to twenty-five percent (1943). By comparison, there were few, if any, improvements for the women in Ravensbrück or the men in Flossenbürg over the same period.206

  Third, the geographical imbalance of the KL system owed much to the different mortality rates of individual prisoner groups. In Majdanek and Auschwitz, the two biggest camps in the occupied east, Jews made up the largest prisoner group in 1943; and these registered Jewish inmates rarely lived for much longer than a few months, as the basic SS approach toward them remained unchanged—“annihilation through labor.” The Camp SS even extended this policy to some other inmate groups, notably state prisoners arriving under the agreement between Thierack and Himmler. By the end of March 1943, almost half of the 12,658 state prisoners deported since November 1942 were already dead. Most had survived for no more than a few weeks, pursued mercilessly by the Camp SS. In Buchenwald, for example, the monthly death rate of former state prisoners stood at a staggering twenty-nine percent in early 1943—compared to less than one percent among German “greens” (so-called professional criminals).207

  Even if the overall trend was less dramatic than the triumphant Pohl suggested, the KL system did become less deadly in 1943, as the WVHA initiatives showed some effect. While the impact of each particular measure was limited, their cumulative effect proved significant. The dramatic descent into squalor and death, which had begun with the outbreak of war in autumn 1939, was temporarily arrested and reversed. As we have seen before, the KL did not develop along a straight line. And they were not impervious to directions from above. Just as SS leaders in Berlin had escalated terror in the past, they could also rein it in. Some central orders took time to sink in and others were subverted and ignored, but the WVHA was able to set the general direction for its camps.208 Although they succeeded in lowering the death rate, however, the SS managers had no desire to transform the whole ethos of the camps. As a result, the main coordinates of the KL system—which rested on neglect, contempt, and hatred—remained largely unchanged.

  “GUINEA PIGS”

  Siegmund Wassing, a thirty-six-year-old Austrian Jew, arrived in Dachau in November 1941. Five months later, the former film technician from Vienna was condemned to the most dreadful death. On April 3, 1942, he was locked into a pressure cabin, inside a special truck stationed between two infirmary barracks, and wired up to machines measuring his heart and brain activity. Then the air was pumped out of the cabin, simulating a rapid ascent to a height of over seven miles. Within minutes, Wassing, still wearing his striped prisoner uniform, was sweating and shaking and gasping for air; after half an hour he stopped breathing, and SS Untersturmführer Sigmund Rascher, an air force doctor, prepared for the postmortem. The ambitious thirty-three-year-old Rascher had ordered the medical execution as part of a series of air pressure experiments, which had started in late February 1942, and also included simulated pressure loss and ejections from a height of up to thirteen miles. In all, several hundred prisoners were abused during the trials in Dachau; dozens died. But Dr. Rascher was upbeat. In a letter on April 5, 1942, just two days after the murder of Siegmund Wassing, he envisaged “entirely new perspectives for aviation.”209

  The recipient of this letter, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, who had authorized the experiments, was equally excited. So fascinated was he that he decided to see for himself, just as some air force and SS officers had done before him. With Oswald Pohl in tow, Himmler came to Dachau on the afternoon of May 1, 1942, and observed around a half dozen simulated ejections at high altitude; none of the prisoners died, apparently, but they cried and fainted, while the Reichsführer SS watched intently. Himmler left contented, but not before he confronted a few local SS men for making free with the coffee and cognac he had sent to the victims as a last meal.210

  It was around the time of Himmler’s visit to Dachau that human experiments proliferated in the KL. Although some trials had taken place earlier, they expanded greatly as Germany’s military fortunes declined. By 1942, SS leaders were grasping at projects that promised renewed hope, whatever their human cost, and treated the bodies of KL prisoners as commodities to be exploited for final victory—not just during slave labor, but also during experiments. Many of these trials, like the ones in Dachau, were explicitly conducted for the war effort. As losses at the front and at home grew, anxious officials looked to medical science to turn the tide. The abuse of KL prisoners was supposed to generate new treatments to save German soldiers from cold and hunger, injuries and epidemics, and to protect German civilians from infections and burns. “I thought it my duty to do everything to ensure this protection,” one doctor later said, trying to justify his part in the murderous experiments, “and to save the lives of thousands of Germans.”211

  KL Experiments

  Human experiments accompanied the rise of modern medicine, in Germany and beyond. Firm regulation was a long time coming, but after several scandals shook the Weimar Republic, the German medical authorities in 1931 drafted pathbreaking guidelines for research on humans, banning any coercion of test subjects as well as experiments on dying persons and those endangering children.212 Just a few years later, however, physicians in the KL threw out these fundamental rules. The first trials using prisoners, which took place before the outbreak of the Second World War, were still small-scale and comparatively harmless.213 Once Germany was at war, however, the SS supported potentially lethal tests, with events at the front influencing many of these experiments.

  Probably the first such experiments took place in the Sachsenhausen infirmary, where two Camp SS doctors poisoned dozens of prisoners with mustard gas between October and December 1939. The order had come from Himmler, gripped by widespread hysteria about possible chemical attacks on German troops, which awakened traumatic memories from the Great War. To determine the effectiveness of two potential remedies, the Sachsenhausen doctors applied mustard gas onto the arms of prisoners, causing burns that spread all the way up to the neck; in some cases, the doctors infected the wounds with bacteria. In the end, the drugs they tested turned out to be useless. The doctors conceded as much in their final reports, forwarded to Himmler by SS Reich physician Ernst Robert Grawitz, who had personally observed the trials.214

  Many more experiments followed over the coming years, above all during the second half of World War II. In all, doctors abused more than twenty thousand prisoners from over a dozen KL during the war; several thousand of them died.215 As the number of victims swelled, WVHA managers became concerned about the possible impact on forced labor and asked individual camps in late 1942 how many workers were being lost to the experiments.216 The doctors, meanwhile, covered their tracks, describing the deliberate infection of prisoners with viruses and poison as “vaccinations.”217 Occasionally they slipped up, however, and spoke their minds, calling their victims “guinea pigs” and “rabbits”—terms appropriated, with gallows humor, by some of the victims themselves.218

  Heinrich Himmler presided over these experiments, probably with Hitler’s backing.219 Although this was no centrally coordinated progr
am, with many of the most radical initiatives coming from below, Himmler held the keys to the “guinea pigs” and insisted that no KL experiments go ahead without his say-so.220 Scientists with personal connections like Sigmund Rascher, whose wife was a close acquaintance of Himmler, could appeal to him directly.221 Another route led via the Ahnenerbe, Himmler’s pseudoscientific research institute. Originally set up to uncover the mythical roots of the Germanic race, it drifted into military research during the war, and facilitated the supply of KL prisoners for various experiments.222 A third path went through SS Reich physician Grawitz, who became a more influential figure during the war and took control of all SS medical services in 1943. Despite Himmler’s repeated attacks on the professionalism of his chief physician, Grawitz proved himself no less enthusiastic about experiments in the camps than his boss, for whom he evaluated applications from scientists.223

  Himmler was an obsessive micromanager of medical torture, devouring reports and suggesting bizarre new treatments. He was dazzled by science and easily captivated by radical schemes of supposed experts, especially when they chimed with his own worldview. The sacrifice of worthless subhumans in the KL would save the lives of German soldiers, he argued, and anyone who objected to this was a traitor. In Himmler’s mind, war justified any means, and he opened the door to many lethal experiments, with Dachau emerging as one of the main centers.224

  Himmler’s Favorite Doctor

  The history of human experiments in Dachau is closely linked to Dr. Sigmund Rascher, whose murders in the air pressure cabin were the first in a series of often deadly trials. Born into an affluent family in Munich (his father was a doctor, too), he had qualified in 1936 and served as a physician in the air force from 1939. His rapid rise thereafter owed little to his political activism (he only joined the SS in 1939), and even less to his abilities as a physician. Rather, Rascher was propelled by his ambition and his equally determined wife, who made the most of her contacts with Himmler. With the patronage of the Reichsführer SS, who always had time for young firebrands promising scientific breakthroughs by unorthodox means, he became the doyen of human experimentation in Dachau.