KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  War and Slave Labor

  Heinrich Himmler liked to sing the praises of KL labor. His boasts about its contribution to the war economy became set pieces in speeches to senior Nazi officials in 1944. Typically, Himmler pictured the concentration camps as brutally efficient modern arms factories, with long hours and strict discipline; after listening to one of his speeches, Joseph Goebbels summed up Himmler’s approach as “pretty rigorous.” But the Reichsführer SS stressed that there was no reason to pity prisoners: though it was hard to believe, he told an audience of army generals in June 1944, inmates in his camps were better off than “many workers in England or America.” As for their output, the prisoners put in millions of hours each month, supposedly turning out a vast arsenal of high-tech armaments. Himmler was particularly proud of the underground missile and fighter plane factories, where “this race of subhumans produces the weapons for the war.” The startling successes were due, Himmler concluded, to the technical brilliance of the SS and the productivity of the prisoners, who worked twice as hard as foreign workers.23 None of these claims bore any resemblance to reality, though given Himmler’s capacity for self-delusion it is possible that he believed his own hype.

  Slave labor in the concentration camps was far less effective than Himmler claimed. Many prisoners were not employed at all, either because they were too sick or because there was no work; according to SS figures from spring 1944, more than one in four Auschwitz prisoners were either invalids or ill in infirmaries.24 As for the majority of working prisoners, they were much weaker than regular laborers. Food rations for KL inmates (and other Nazi prisoners) were cut once more in 1944, by central order of the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture, condemning more inmates to exhaustion and death; some prisoners now received no more than around seven hundred calories per day.25 WVHA efforts to improve matters remained largely cosmetic; empty words could not feed any prisoners.26

  The overall productivity of KL prisoners fell far behind the expectations of the SS and industry.27 True, some skilled and better-fed prisoners delivered outputs approaching those of other workers.28 But this was impossible for the great mass of inmates. Compared with that of regular German workers, their productivity reached an estimated half in industrial production, and even less in construction, perhaps one-third.29 And despite some exceptions, such as the Heinkel works in Oranienburg, concentration camp labor was not particularly cost-effective, either. Once all the overheads were deducted, it often came no cheaper than free German labor. But it was still useful: Why else would so many firms have pursued KL prisoners so energetically in 1944? The decisive factor here was not that prisoners came cheap, but that they were available, allowing state and private companies to take on additional arms and building projects.30

  Although it had secured a more prominent place for the KL system in the German arms industry by 1944, the mass exploitation of its prisoners came at a cost to the SS. Internal rivalries broke out within the WVHA, as Hans Kammler pushed aside Gerhard Maurer (from Office Group D) as the main manager of slave labor; in a new camp like Dora, it was Kammler who had the final say.31 Meanwhile, armaments minister Albert Speer extended his own reach over forced labor, culminating in a decree on October 9, 1944, that put him in charge of prisoner deployment. New requests for KL labor no longer went to the WVHA but to Speer’s ministry, a significant loss of power and prestige for the SS.32 Private industry chipped away at SS control, too, with managers traveling directly to concentration camps to select slaves. Above all, the managers wanted strong and skilled prisoners, ideally with some knowledge of German. “We were chosen like cattle on a market,” the Ukrainian prisoner Galina Buschujewa-Sabrodskaja recalled after Heinkel employees descended on Ravensbrück in late 1943: “They even forced us to open our mouths, and inspected our teeth.”33 An ambitious attempt by the WVHA to steer prisoner deployment by creating a modern machine-readable database in 1944, using punch-hole cards and number codes (the so-called Hollerith technology), was soon abandoned and did nothing to help the WVHA regain the initiative.34 The more the Camp SS became involved in the German war industry, the less control it had over its prisoners.

  What is more, the contribution of the camps for the war economy remained marginal, despite Himmler’s bombastic claims. In summer 1944, when German armaments production reached its highest output during the war, KL prisoners working in the arms industry made up no more than around one percent of the Third Reich labor force. To be sure, the SS presence was more marked in relocation projects.35 But most of these projects were strategically pointless even before they got under way; the move of war production underground was the last throw of the dice in a game that was already lost.36 The SS was the perfect partner for such a doomed plan. Undeterred by previous failures, SS leaders like Oswald Pohl still harbored delusions about their economic prowess.37

  Even the most high-profile projects launched with SS involvement made little difference to the progress of the war. Despite the investment of hundreds of millions of Reichsmark and the abuse of tens of thousands of slave laborers, the huge IG Farben complex under construction in Auschwitz was never completed and failed to produce any synthetic rubber or fuel.38 Similarly, few projects of the Geilenberg Staff went past the initial stage. The first factories of project “Desert,” provisionally operational from early spring 1945, turned out an oily sludge that was useless for the remaining German tanks.39 And Dora never became the high-tech underground factory of Himmler’s dreams, either. The number of the much vaunted V2s manufactured, around six thousand by spring 1945, remained well behind schedule. And although the rockets killed thousands of civilians abroad and proved a potent propaganda tool inside Germany, their strategic impact was negligible. The uniqueness of the weapon lay elsewhere, as the historian Michael J. Neufeld has pointed out: “More people died producing it than died from being hit by it.”40 This verdict sums up the SS involvement in the war economy as a whole. Its main output was not fuel or planes or guns, but the misery and death of its prisoners.41

  Far more registered prisoners died in 1944 than during the previous year. The general conditions claimed countless victims, and the SS also extended its murderous selections (which had been cut back during the previous year), because the sick were seen as obstacles to effective war production and as threats to the health of other slave laborers. Many died inside satellite camps. Other victims returned to the main camps, after they had been worked to complete exhaustion, and perished in one of the fast-expanding sectors for the weak and ill.42 Or they were deported to their deaths elsewhere. In Mauthausen, where those isolated in the infirmary sector sometimes outnumbered all other inmates, the SS took a particularly radical step. It renewed its links to the Hartheim killing center, dating back to Action 14f13, and sent at least 3,228 Muselmänner to the gas chambers between April and December 1944.43 More commonly, transports of doomed prisoners went to other parts of the KL system. Deportations to Auschwitz, for example, now included weakened Jewish prisoners selected in satellite camps inside the old German borders.44

  In addition, two other main camps—Majdanek and Bergen-Belsen, both largely untouched by the economic mobilization for war—were designated for dying inmates from other KL. Majdanek had lost much of its purpose in November 1943, following the murder of its Jewish prisoners, and was used from December onward as a dumping ground for men and women from concentration camps inside the Third Reich. Some died en route, thousands more inside; in March 1944 alone, when around nine thousand prisoners were held in Majdanek, the SS registered more than 1,600 deaths.45 Bergen-Belsen took over from spring 1944 onward, as Majdanek prepared for evacuation in advance of the Red Army. By January 1945, some 5,500 sick prisoners from other KL—judged “an unnecessary burden on the industrial firms” that employed them, in the words of Camp SS leaders—had been taken to Bergen-Belsen.46 The first transport had arrived in late March or early April 1944 from Dora. The frail men, many of them with bandaged arms and legs, had been thrown into the trucks “l
ike sacks of coal,” according to one Dora prisoner; the screams started before the train had even pulled away. After their arrival in Bergen-Belsen, the survivors were left for days inside empty barracks without food or blankets. “We wasted away very quickly,” the French prisoner Josef Henri Mulin recalled later.47

  The Prisoner Population

  KL inmate numbers reached record heights in 1944, relentlessly pushed upward by Heinrich Himmler. He promised Kammler as many prisoners as he wanted and became obsessed with statistics charting the growth in inmate figures: Himmler’s mantra, Rudolf Höss recalled, became “Armaments! Prisoners! Armaments!”48 The camps just kept on growing, and even some of the smaller sites now expanded exponentially; the number of prisoners registered in Flossenbürg, for instance, grew more than eightfold, from 4,869 (December 31, 1943) to 40,437 (January 1, 1945).49 The momentum behind the camps’ expansion was only stopped by the Allied armies.

  Secret SS statistics reveal two major trends. First, after the balance of the KL system had tilted eastward from 1942, it now swung back again. As the Red Army gained ground, more and more camps in occupied eastern Europe closed down in 1944. Auschwitz was gradually emptied, too, and consequently lost its status as the biggest site. By January 1, 1945, the largest KL complex of all was Buchenwald, in the heart of Germany; 97,633 prisoners were registered there, compared to 69,752 in Auschwitz. Second, the sharp rise in female prisoners, which had begun with the mass deportations of Jewish women during the Holocaust, continued. By the end of 1944, there were almost 200,000 female KL prisoners (up from 12,500 in late April 1942), making up twenty-eight percent of the total prisoner population. They were distributed across the whole KL system. Back in 1939, female prisoners had been confined to a single purpose-built camp, Ravensbrück; now they were registered in every camp complex, except for Dora.50

  The vast rise in prisoner numbers cannot be reduced to Himmler’s hunger for slave laborers alone. Just as in previous years, economic motives coincided with other matters of national interest, as defined by the Nazi regime. Police arrests broadly followed the pattern established in 1942–43. As defeat came closer, Nazi paranoia about the home front grew even more intense. There were further crackdowns on Germans suspected of criminal activity, defeatism, and subversion. In August 1944, shortly after the failed bomb plot on Hitler’s life, more than five thousand left-wing activists from the Weimar period, as well as some one-time officials of Catholic parties, were dragged into the KL as part of Operation Thunderstorm; some, like the sixty-six-year-old former SPD Reichstag deputy Fritz Soldmann, had already been tormented in the KL several times before.51 The police also focused on resistance activities by foreigners inside Germany and expanded its general assault on foreign workers: many tens of thousands were arrested in 1944 for “breach of contract” and often taken straight to concentration camps, in line with Himmler’s orders.52

  Outside the Third Reich, meanwhile, more people were rising up, and the German occupiers answered with extreme force; many resisters were murdered on the spot, and many more deported to concentration camps.53 Among them were several tens of thousands of men and women arrested inside France.54 Even more new KL prisoners arrived from occupied Poland, in the wake of the doomed Warsaw Uprising. The insurgency had been triggered on August 1, 1944, by the Polish Home Army, which hoped to drive the German occupiers out just before the seemingly imminent arrival of the Red Army. But the Soviet advance stalled, and the uprising was put down with extraordinary brutality by Nazi troops, who had long seen the city as the hotbed of Polish resistance. After nine terrible weeks, some one hundred and fifty thousand local civilians had been killed and much of Warsaw lay in ruins (among the dead were several hundred prisoners from the local KL, who had briefly tasted freedom during the uprising). As for the survivors, SS officials were determined to add them to their slave labor force; in mid-August, the SS dreamed of four hundred thousand extra prisoners for the concentration camps. In the end, an estimated sixty thousand men, women, and children were deported from the remains of Warsaw to the KL. Among them was a twenty-one-year-old seamstress (her name is unknown), who was forced out of her destroyed building in September 1944 with her husband and neighbors. After several days in packed cattle trucks, the men were dragged out near Sachsenhausen. “Families that were separated screamed and cried,” she recalled. Then the train took the remaining women and children to Ravensbrück, where some twelve thousand prisoners from Warsaw arrived in all.55

  Diverse as the KL population was, there was one prisoner group that grew faster than any other—Jews. In the course of 1944, the German authorities forced more Jewish men, women, and children to the KL than ever before. According to one estimate, almost two-thirds of all new arrivals between spring and autumn 1944 had to wear the yellow star. By the end of the year, more than two hundred thousand were registered as KL inmates; any Jews in German-controlled territory were now most likely held inside concentration camps.56 Among them were many Polish Jews who had survived outside the KL system until now. Tens of thousands came from abandoned forced labor camps, including the so-called Schmelt camps in Upper Silesia.57 Others arrived from the last ghettos. During the final liquidation of Lodz in August 1944, almost sixty-seven thousand Jews were deported to Auschwitz; around two-thirds were murdered on arrival.58

  Auschwitz also continued to receive deportation trains from the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe, as the RSHA pursued Jews who had so far escaped its clutches. Among the largest transports in 1944 were those from France, Holland, Slovakia, Greece, and Italy. One of these trains, which arrived late on February 26 from a camp in Modena, brought Primo Levi to Auschwitz, together with 649 other Jews; 526 of them were gassed on arrival.59 Further prisoners arrived from Theresienstadt. In May 1944, some 7,500 Jews, many of them old, orphaned, or ill, were deported to Auschwitz during a Nazi effort to put the ghetto into better light for the impending visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross; many thousands more, especially younger prisoners, followed in the autumn.60

  By far the largest number of Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1944 came from Hungary. After Hungary had distanced itself from its German partner, seeking a separate peace with the Allies, Nazi forces invaded the country in March 1944. The German occupation was a catastrophe for Hungarian Jewry, which had so far been spared from the Holocaust. German troops were accompanied by Adolf Eichmann and his team. Drawing on their experience with round-ups, deportations, and extermination, Eichmann’s men proceeded with great speed and efficiency. Mass transports began in mid-May 1944, and by July, when they were stopped after an intervention by the Hungarian regent Horthy, at least four hundred and thirty thousand Jews had been taken to Auschwitz.61

  After SS units removed Horthy in mid-October 1944, the Nazis renewed their effort to deport the remaining Hungarian Jews. Trains were scarce now, as transport shortages started to bite, so tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children were forced on marches to the distant Austrian border. By the end of 1944, an estimated seventy-six thousand Jews had been driven toward Austria. Here, some survivors were forced to build fortifications, while others were taken to the KL. Among them was the teenager Eva Fejer, who eventually reached Ravensbrück. “At first,” she later said, “we thought we were coming into a decent camp, not least because we had been made to believe that it would be good as long as one behaved properly.” She soon learned the truth.62

  Nazi leaders and industrialists saw the Hungarian Jews as an important addition to the workforce. Even before the mass deportations began, there were plans—pushed forward by Hitler and Himmler—to send one hundred thousand or more as slave laborers to the KL inside Germany. In particular, the prisoners were earmarked for Fighter Staff relocation projects. When Albert Speer asked in a meeting on May 26, 1944, when these prisoners would arrive, he was assured by Kammler that the transports were already “on their way.” But before they reached the building sites inside the old German borders, these Hungarian Jews had to pass through Auschwi
tz. After all, the SS was only interested in slaves who could work; all those who were too young, old, or weak would be murdered.63

  The Murder of Hungarian Jews

  Auschwitz was never more lethal for Jews than in spring and summer 1944. Among the dead were many regular prisoners, including most inmates from the Theresienstadt family camp.64 The overwhelming majority of victims, however, had only just arrived. Huge numbers poured into Auschwitz—between May and July 1944, more Jews were deported to the camp than during the entire preceding two years—and nearly all came from Hungary. Their murder marked the climax of the Holocaust in Auschwitz, at a time when most European Jews under German control had long since been killed.65

  The man who oversaw the extermination of Hungarian Jews was a familiar figure in Auschwitz: Rudolf Höss, the old commandant. Around late April or early May 1944, shortly before the deportations started, Höss traveled to Hungary to meet his friend Eichmann at his temporary residence in Budapest (Eichmann, in turn, visited Auschwitz several times in spring 1944). The two men brooded over the deportation schedules to determine how many trains “could be dealt with” in Auschwitz, as Höss put it. In addition, Höss wanted to inform his WVHA superiors how many slave laborers they could expect, once those deemed unfit had been gassed. Höss conducted trial selections in Hungary, and concluded that most Jews had to die; at best, he estimated, twenty-five percent would be selected for labor.66

  Next, Höss traveled to Auschwitz, returning to the scene of his earlier crimes, and on May 8, 1944, took over temporarily as senior commandant of the Auschwitz camp complex.67 In view of the scale of the impending genocide, WVHA leaders had dispatched their most experienced manager of mass murder.68 In their eyes, the reappointment of Höss was all the more pressing because the position of the current senior commandant, Arthur Liebehenschel, had become untenable. Apparently, the reserved Liebehenschel had gained a reputation as a soft touch, though the immediate reason for his removal was a private drama.69 Back when Liebehenschel had worked in the WVHA, he had fallen for Richard Glücks’s secretary, who eventually joined him in Auschwitz after his divorce. But after Liebehenschel sought permission to remarry, his superiors learned a dark secret: early in the Third Reich, his fiancée had been arrested for a relationship with a Jew. Oswald Pohl was horrified. He dispatched his bullish adjutant Richard Baer to tell Liebehenschel to terminate the relationship. After Baer broke the news in the Auschwitz officer mess late on April 19, 1944, Liebehenschel sobbed and got drunk. Then he confronted his pregnant fiancée, who protested her innocence. Two days later, the love-stricken Liebehenschel, his eyes swollen from crying, told Baer that he stood by his lover, adding that the Gestapo must have forced her into a false confession all those years ago. There was no way back now for Liebehenschel, who had broken the SS racial code (by consorting with a suspected “race defiler”), its unspoken rules (by accusing the Gestapo of torture), and its social norms (by acting “anything but manly,” as Baer called it). Pohl swiftly removed Liebehenschel and after a brief stint as caretaker of the depleted Majdanek camp, he left the Camp SS embittered and sick.70