Occasionally, KL prisoners also worked for small companies, local towns, and cities.171 Their presence grew from autumn 1942 onward, following Himmler’s decision to deploy the new SS Building Brigades to clear rubble and ruins. In their striped uniforms—long associated in the public mind with criminality—the prisoners were highly visible, as were SS abuses. The former inmate Fritz Bringmann recalled an unusual incident on the streets of Osnabrück in late 1942. As an SS man battered an unconscious prisoner, a woman stepped from the crowd that had gathered, placed herself before the prisoner, and berated the SS man; later that evening, the prisoners talked excitedly about this intervention as proof that there were still Germans “who had not forgotten the difference between humanity and inhumanity.”172
In the minds of the vast majority of Germans, however, the camps and their prisoners remained abstractions during the early years of the war. Direct contacts with prisoners were rare, as were references in the press; even the foundation of a large new camp like Auschwitz was suppressed in local and regional papers.173 Of course, the KL system was not altogether forgotten. It made occasional appearances in public speeches and popular culture. In the 1941 Great German Art Exhibition in Munich, for example, a large oil painting depicted dozens of KL prisoners—recognizable by their caps, uniforms, and colored triangles—who slaved in the Flossenbürg quarry (the painting was acquired for four thousand Reichsmark in Hitler’s name).174 Local Nazi bigwigs also still threatened “troublemakers” with the camps, so much so that Himmler issued a formal warning in summer 1942. The German people were too decent, he insisted, to put up with constant threats of such harsh punishment.175 And yet, most Germans still pushed the concentration camps to the backs of their minds, just as they had done in the late 1930s. When they thought about the inmates at all, they probably imagined dangerous criminals and other enemies of the state—an image so firmly entrenched by now that it often endured long into the postwar years.176
The role of the camps in the Nazi Final Solution did not fully penetrate public consciousness, either. To be sure, the secrecy surrounding the genocide in Auschwitz was never as complete as the perpetrators wanted.177 Knowledge must have been particularly widespread within SS circles. After Dr. Johann Paul Kremer participated in his first selection in September 1942, he noted in his diary: “It is not for nothing that Auschwitz is called the camp of annihilation!”178 Beyond the SS, some regular German soldiers witnessed the crimes in Auschwitz, and by 1944, several senior army officers were well aware that mass gassings were carried out here.179 Railway workers and other state employees gained insights, too. In January 1943, Germany’s top legal officials—who had kept some distance from the KL in the prewar years—toured the Auschwitz camp, led by Reich minister of justice Thierack.180 Many local civilians, too, had some knowledge of the mass murder in the nearby camp. Indeed, rumors spread across the whole region, though the main victims were sometimes thought to be Poles, not Jews.181 Through friends and relatives, and Allied radio broadcasts, word about Auschwitz carried inside the Reich. As for German Jews who had not yet been deported, the reports about the death of friends and acquaintances left little doubt in the minds of some that Auschwitz was “a fast-working slaughterhouse,” as Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary on October 17, 1942.182 Despite all this, Auschwitz was no household name across Nazi Germany. While many ordinary Germans had some general knowledge of the mass murder of European Jews in the east, they mainly heard about massacres and shootings, not about camps. Most Germans only learned about Auschwitz after the war.183
Such ignorance owed much to the Nazi authorities’ strenuous efforts to hush up KL crimes. Camp SS officials were banned from sending blood-soaked prisoner clothes by regular mail, lest a packet spill open, and from sending death notices to relatives of deceased Soviet forced laborers, after rumors about the high mortality in the camps had spread in the occupied east.184 In addition, the SS began to use a secret code for disguising the number of deaths recorded by camp registry offices, so as not to arouse suspicion.185 As for public gossip, the Nazi authorities probably regretted a Gestapo order of October 1939 that had encouraged the spread of “rumor propaganda” about hardships inside the KL to increase their “deterrent effect.”186 In fact, public talk about violence and murder was still punished. Loose-tongued Camp SS officials were let off most lightly, though even they sometimes faced imprisonment. Others were less fortunate. After a Hanover dentist, a Nazi Party member since 1931, told a patient in summer 1943 that he deplored the “medieval torture methods” in concentration camps and the murder of a million Jews, he was sentenced to death by a German court.187
To control popular knowledge about the KL, the Nazi authorities continued to enforce stringent rules about prisoner access to the outside world. Letters, which could be posted at best every two weeks (many prisoner groups wrote less often or were barred altogether), were still rigorously controlled. They had to be written in legible German—shutting out most foreign prisoners—and any references to illness, slave labor, and camp life were strictly prohibited. Often, the inmates were even forbidden to mention the fact that they were in a concentration camp.188
Despite their enforced blandness, the letters still mattered to prisoners, as did the eagerly awaited replies they sometimes received; knowledge that their loved ones were alive proved a source of great strength. “I read [your letter] again and again,” Chaim Herman of the Birkenau Special Squad wrote in November 1944 in a final note meant for his wife and daughter in France, “and won’t part from it until my last breath.”189 Meanwhile, prisoners continued to subvert the SS rules. Some allusions—such as questions about how “Uncle Winston” was getting on—were so obvious that only dim-witted censors could overlook them. Other references were more subtle, requiring knowledge of foreign cultures. “Mrs. Halál [“death” in Hungarian] is very busy here,” Alice Bala wrote from Birkenau in July 1943.190 Some prisoners even managed to smuggle secret messages outside, in which they expressed themselves more openly. In his last letter from Auschwitz, written in April 1943, just three months before his death, twenty-year-old Janusz Pogonowski told his family that his best friend had recently been shot dead, and pleaded for more packages from home because “my current food situation is in a very bad way.”191 Messages such as this fed rumors on the outside about the concentration camps. Other details came from former prisoners, following their return from the camps.
Release and “Probation”
Hopes of KL inmates of being freed had faded as soon as war broke out. In autumn 1939, Reinhard Heydrich ordered that prisoners should normally not be released from protective custody during wartime. Exceptions may be allowed, he added, but police officials had to make sure that no committed political activists, dangerous criminals, or “particularly asocial elements” were freed.192 And just a few months later, as we saw, Heinrich Himmler put a stop to releases of Jews, an order implemented almost to the letter. According to top-secret SS statistics drawn up for Himmler, only a single Jewish inmate was released from Auschwitz between June 1940 and December 1942.193
And yet, there was no complete ban on prisoner releases. In 1940, for example, 387 women were discharged from Ravensbrück and 2,141 men from Sachsenhausen. This was only a small proportion of the prisoner population in these camps, but it was enough to keep alive the dreams of others trapped inside.194 Among the lucky few were individual German prisoners wearing green, black, and red triangles, as well as some foreign prisoners, including Czechs and Poles; one of the largest releases came on February 8, 1940, when one hundred professors from Krakow University were freed with Himmler’s agreement, following significant foreign pressure.195 Some released German men were drafted straight into the army. Since summer 1939, prisoners eligible for army service had been examined by military commissions inside the KL, and could be called up upon their release, to the disbelief of the new recruits themselves.196
Releases became even rarer from 1942 onward, as police fears about crime and i
nsurrection redoubled. According to SS figures, an average of around eight hundred prisoners a month were released from the KL system during the second half of 1942.197 At times, releases came to an almost complete standstill. In the first week of November 1943, for instance, just three of over thirty-three thousand Buchenwald prisoners were set free.198 Mass releases, meanwhile, rather common in the prewar KL, stopped almost altogether. One of the few exceptions was the quick release of former democratic functionaries rounded up in summer 1944 during Operation Thunderstorm. The police authorities let most of the prisoners go after a few weeks, following some popular disquiet and criticism, coming even from senior Nazi officials, about the seemingly arbitrary arrests of elderly Germans who had not been involved in any oppositional activities.199
Not all released KL prisoners actually won their freedom: several thousand men were sent to the Special Formation Dirlewanger, a notorious SS unit that turned some former prisoners into killers. The Dirlewanger Formation had been set up in 1940, after Hitler ordered the creation of a special unit of poachers held in state prisons for illegally hunting wild animals. In May and June 1940, dozens were transported for training to Sachsenhausen (more followed in 1942). The small force was led by its eponymous commander Oskar Dirlewanger, one of the most odious characters in the pantheon of SS villains, who had already attracted attention for his avid criminal appetite, which ranged from extreme political violence to embezzlement and sex crimes. As commander of his own SS unit, he now branched out into pillage, rape, and massacres, specializing in the killing of defenseless civilians in the occupied east.200
During 1943–44, around two thousand German KL prisoners joined the ranks of the Dirlewanger Formation, which grew into a larger SS force. They included so-called asocial and criminal prisoners (among them several homosexuals who had recently been castrated because of their “degenerate sex drive”). Not all of them were keen to exchange the familiar surroundings of the KL for the unknown dangers of the front. “By then, we had it reasonably well in the camp,” one veteran “criminal” prisoner later wrote, “and we could have just waited for the war to end.” Some were soon sent back to the KL; others went into hiding or joined the partisans. But the majority entered one of the Third Reich’s darkest areas, which erased the difference between victim and perpetrator. Having suffered for years as social outcasts in the camps, these men now fought for the Nazi cause and committed dreadful crimes, and yet remained subject to SS violence themselves. Dirlewanger deployed extreme terror against his men (Himmler spoke approvingly of “medieval” methods against “our camp ne’er-do-wells”), and deployed the former prisoners as cannon fodder. The “blood sacrifices” of “incriminated people,” Himmler believed, would spare the lives of a good few “German boy[s].”201
One of the casualties was thirty-five-year-old Wilhelm K. from Munich. A destitute father of five who had started poaching to support his family, he had been imprisoned in Dachau since 1942, following a prison sentence. Despite his Communist sympathies and his hatred of the SS, he saw no choice but to join the Dirlewanger Formation in summer 1944. “You and the children,” he wrote to his wife in a secret letter in late August, “need decent support and for the time being I have no other option but to join up, so don’t be angry, sweetheart.” Just a few weeks later Wilhelm K. was killed during the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, in which the Dirlewanger Formation played a savage part.202
In autumn 1944, the first political prisoners entered the ranks of the Dirlewanger Formation. Desperate to shore up German defenses, Himmler was now willing to deploy open enemies of the regime like German Communists, straight from the KL. The prisoners were rounded up through a mixture of false promises and coercion. Many were dismayed about their fate, as were fellow inmates who stayed behind. “I could have cried when I saw them like this,” Edgar Kupfer wrote in his Dachau diary after meeting former comrades dressed in SS uniforms, complete with the Death’s Head insignia. In mid-November 1944, almost eight hundred former KL prisoners arrived in Slovakia to join the Dirlewanger Formation. Most aimed to escape as soon as possible, and they succeeded faster than they could have hoped. Within a month, almost two-thirds had crossed over to the Red Army—probably the largest desertion by German troops up to this point in the war. But the euphoria about their flight from the SS was short-lived: most of the escaped German anti-Fascists ended up in Soviet forced labor camps, where many of them would die.203
Close Encounters
When Himmler told German generals on May 24, 1944, about the deportations of Hungarian Jews to the Third Reich, he insisted that ordinary Germans would remain oblivious. The SS would lock these prisoners away as invisible slaves in underground factories. “Not one of them,” Himmler pledged, “will somehow end up in the field of vision of the German people.”204 But the old SS policy of concealing KL sites—never entirely successful—was unworkable by 1944, thanks to the huge rise in inmate numbers and satellites. Whether Himmler wanted it or not, his camp system became enmeshed in the fabric of German society. In the Linz region, for example, the sprawl of the Mauthausen complex meant that there would eventually be one prisoner for every five inhabitants.205
The closest contacts came during forced labor, as most KL prisoners worked near, and under, German civilians. In Dora, the production of V2 rockets in summer 1944 involved five thousand concentration camp prisoners and three thousand German workers, many of them locals.206 One of the Dora prisoners, the French student Guy Raoul-Duval, later tried to summarize the attitude of these German workers:
Some of them were swine, some were good men, but most often they were stupid bastards, not really malicious but fierce, worn out by an interminable war,… terrorized by the police and the engineers, profoundly weary, and convinced of the inevitability of the Reich’s defeat, yet not resigned to believing the disaster was imminent, and thus continuing, out of habit, the pace they had acquired.207
Among the minority of German civilian workers described as “swine” by Raoul-Duval would have been those supervisors who basked in their powers. They did not even have to lay hands on prisoners; more often than not, they used Kapos as their enforcers. Still, some supervisors joined in themselves, especially in construction camps, where prisoner lives came particularly cheap. Occasionally, the violence became so pervasive that managers issued written prohibitions to their staff: if prisoners stepped out of line, employees should report them instead of beating them.208 Denunciations to the SS were indeed frequent and could result in swift punishment—as in the Hanover-Misburg satellite camp, where a Belgian and a French prisoner were summarily executed in early 1945 after a German worker complained to the Camp SS supervisor that his sandwich had been stolen.209
There were also German civilian workers who came to the aid of prisoners, providing food and other supplies (though this did not stop them from acting more obediently on other occasions).210 Some of these Germans acted out of self-interest, making profitable deals with desperate prisoners on the black market.211 Others were moved by kindness. The stench of the camps did not rub off on everyone who touched them; just as some workers hardened over time, others softened as they came to know individual prisoners.212 A few even defended prisoners against SS suspicions. When the Auschwitz SS accused a Jewish inmate of sabotage because he had ruined precious metal parts by drilling to the wrong depth, his German foreman explained the incident away as an innocent mistake by an otherwise “reliable worker.”213 Most famously, and most exceptionally, the German businessman Oskar Schindler helped to save hundreds of lives, by securing better working conditions for Jewish prisoners in his metal wares and munitions plant, and by protecting them from extermination, first at the Plaszow satellite camp Zablocie (established on the grounds of his factory), and then, following the relocation of the business and many of its prisoners in autumn 1944, at a new satellite camp in Brünnlitz in Moravia (attached to Gross-Rosen).214
Beyond terror and support, there was distance and detachment. These were no dou
bt the most common reactions among the civilian workers. “In fact, we are the untouchables to the civilians,” Primo Levi wrote about his encounters with German workers around Monowitz.215 Uncomfortable about the prisoners’ proximity, many civilians tried to ignore the wretched figures in striped uniforms; they literally learned to overlook the inmates. At Gandersheim, Robert Antelme once cleaned the floor in an office full of local men and women. “I did not exist for them,” he later wrote. One of the men shifted automatically as Antelme picked up a piece of paper next to him. “The German pulled back his foot, in the way you shoo away a fly from your forehead when asleep, without waking up.” Only one woman could not look away; she stared at Antelme and became increasingly agitated. “I weighed on her, I made her lose her composure. Had I brushed against the sleeve of her blouse, she would have been sick.”216
Such anxieties were fed by prejudice toward members of enemy nations in general and KL prisoners in particular; in the eyes of many German workers, the sight of the shaven-headed and disease-ridden prisoners simply confirmed the stereotypes of Nazi propaganda. The Camp SS added fuel to the flames, warning civilians that the male prisoners really were dangerous criminals and the women prostitutes ravaged by sexual disease.217 Cultural differences, with the bulk of foreign prisoners unable to speak German, only heightened suspicions. Linguistic barriers were not insurmountable, however. At the Continental rubber works in Hanover, where German civilians worked next to political prisoners in the production of gas masks, the hatred of dictators provided common ground. “Hitler Scheiβe,” some German workers said. “Stalin Scheiβe,” came the prisoners’ reply.218
Any such collusion was strictly outlawed, of course. Managers warned employees that private conversations with prisoners were forbidden, on Himmler’s personal orders; all those who broke the rule would themselves end up in protective custody.219 These threats were mostly about deterrence, no doubt, but the authorities did back them up with occasional sanctions: a number of German workers really were arrested for talking to prisoners.220 Even harsher punishment—including detention in Gestapo camps—hit German civilians caught smuggling letters for prisoners or giving them food and drink. As early as February 1942, the Sachsenhausen commandant Hans Loritz informed his officials that he had recently handed over to the Gestapo several civilian workers guilty of such offenses. The remaining workers, Loritz insisted, had to “regard each prisoner as an enemy of the state.”221 In turn, many civilians learned to keep their heads down.
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Page 68
