KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

The most influential survivor account came from two Slovakian Jews, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, who had been deported to Auschwitz in 1942 and escaped on April 10, 1944. After they had crossed the Slovakian border, they found shelter in the Jewish community in Žilina and completed a sixty-page typed report on the camp. Translated into different languages, it offered a thorough analysis of the Auschwitz complex, outlining its development, layout, and administration, as well as conditions inside. Most critically, Vrba and Wetzler gave a thorough account of Auschwitz as a death camp, detailing the arrival of Jews from across Europe and the selections, gassings, and cremations. The sober tone and the mass of details made the report all the more devastating. Over the coming months, copies were distributed to influential figures in Slovakia and Hungary, and also reached the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, the Vatican, the U.S. War Refugee Board, and several Allied governments. Some conclusions featured prominently in the media in summer 1944, and in the United States, whole extracts of the report by Vrba and Wetzler were published a few months later.263

  Given the growing awareness of genocide in Auschwitz, some survivors and historians have since asked why the Allies did not bomb the killing facilities or the tracks leading up to the camp. “Why were those trains allowed to roll unhindered into Poland?” asked Elie Wiesel, who was fifteen years old when he was deported in May 1944 from Hungary to Auschwitz with his parents, his sisters, and his grandmother.264 In fact, bombing raids on Auschwitz had been considered for the first time back in 1941 by the British air force, following a request by the Polish government-in-exile. But such proposals only gathered momentum during the mass murder of Hungarian Jews, following urgent appeals from Jewish leaders in May and June 1944 to bomb Birkenau and the connected railway lines.265 Looking at the Allied response, the lack of urgency is palpable. The USSR showed hardly any interest in the so-called Final Solution, and although the western Allies were more engaged, its military leaders were focused on war strategy—charting the fastest route to victory—not on humanitarian missions. In the end, the pleas were turned down.266

  This does not mean that the Allies missed a major chance to halt the Holocaust in summer 1944. Railway tracks and yards were hard to hit and easy to repair, and trains could have been rerouted. And while a direct attack on Birkenau would have carried great symbolic weight, it might not have saved many lives. It would have been technically possible for heavy U.S. bombers to attack the site from around July 1944 (the IG Farben factory near Monowitz, which was seen as a military target, was hit for the first time on August 20), but by this time the vast majority of the deported Jews were dead. Moreover, the bombers’ inaccuracy makes it unlikely that the killing complex could have been hit without causing carnage in the adjacent prisoner compounds; this was a time before real “precision strikes.” But even if such an attack had succeeded, it is hard to see how it would have stopped the mass murder. The determination of Nazi leaders to exterminate the Jews would not have been deflected by bombs on Birkenau (in fact, SS men habitually blamed Jews for Allied air raids and sometimes attacked Jewish prisoners “in retaliation” after KL had been hit). No doubt the SS killers would have found other ways to continue their murderous mission.267 Indeed, they were already doing so. During the genocide of Hungarian Jews, as we have seen, the Auschwitz SS used not only gas chambers and crematoria, but also shootings and open pits; as the Nazi task forces had demonstrated in the Soviet Union in 1941–42, technically sophisticated facilities were not essential for genocide.

  Still, the prisoners who escaped from the KL to warn the world did not risk their lives in vain. Growing awareness of Nazi crimes could save lives. The shock waves caused by the account of Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, for example, probably helped to persuade the Hungarian regent Horthy to put an end to the deportations in July 1944.268 More generally, eyewitness reports by prisoners—those who had fled and those still inside—shaped the picture of the KL in the Allied nations. Articles and radio programs based on inmate testimonies helped to dispel some of the indifference and skepticism that existed. By November 1944, at the time the Vrba-Wetzler report was published, most Americans understood that the KL were sites of mass extermination.269 Crucially, reports in the Allied media fed back to the Third Reich, as well. By reading foreign newspapers and listening to enemy broadcasts—with millions secretly tuning in to the BBC—more and more Germans learned about the atrocities in Auschwitz and Majdanek.270 Foreign news even filtered back to the KL. The realization that they had not been forgotten by the outside world gave prisoners new hope, as well as greater determination to resist the SS.271

  10

  Impossible Choices

  One day toward the end of World War II, a few Dachau prisoners made a pact. Determined to show that there was an alternative to the usual strife between inmates, they would act like gentlemen; for a whole day, rough and selfish behavior would give way to civility and compassion, as if they still lived regular lives outside. When the agreed day came, the men tried their hardest to stay true to the ideal of common decency, starting with the scramble to dress, wash, and eat in the morning. By evening, all of them had failed, defeated by the harsh realities of the camp. “The beast inside humans gains the upper hand,” the Belgian resistance fighter and Dachau prisoner Arthur Haulot noted in his diary on January 19, 1945, after he heard about the experiment. “One does not with impunity live so long outside the norm.”1

  Although survivors drew many conflicting conclusions about the concentration camps after the war, they agreed that the inmates’ behavior could not be judged by ordinary standards. This had already been the accepted view inside the camps.2 The KL, many prisoners believed, had inverted conventional morality. There were times when charity could become suicidal, and deviance—including murder—could be just. Failure to understand this essential truth and adapt to the law of the camp would prove deadly.3 But what, exactly, was the law of the camp?

  Some inmates gave a stark answer: it was the law of the jungle. The conditions caused a relentless battle for goods and positions, they believed, and created an enormous chasm between a small elite, most of them Kapos, and the destitute mass that fought to the death for an extra piece of bread, bedding, or clothing. In this brutish vision, the other prisoners were rivals in the struggle for survival, locked into a war of all against all. Slowly dying in an infernal Neuengamme satellite camp in the last year of the war, an elderly Belgian prisoner wrote a despairing message to his son, himself gravely ill in the infirmary: “The camp is changing, there are only wolves among wolves!”4 This vision may be too bleak, when applied to the KL as a whole. But we cannot completely wish it away, either. However comforting it would be to cling to idealized images of a prisoner community united in suffering, the conflicts between inmates were all too real, and they turned all the more vicious the more lethal the KL system became.

  And yet, prisoner relations were not ruled by aggression and anarchy alone. There were some unwritten rules, for a start. Under the prisoners’ informal code, the theft of bread belonging to another was a sin. Saving bread required great self-discipline, as starving prisoners had to fight the temptation to devour their full ration. Every piece of stale bread was a symbol of a prisoner’s will to survive; and every theft was seen as an unforgivable betrayal, tantamount to treason. As a Neuengamme room elder told a group of new arrivals: “Stealing bread from a comrade is the worst kind of wickedness; he is stealing his life.”5 This ruling did not put an end to thefts, nor did it result in perfect justice, as some innocent inmates became victims of uncontrolled fury. Nonetheless, such thefts were generally seen as wrong and deserving of punishment.

  So there was a moral structure in the KL.6 Prisoners may have been unable to live by the same ethical code they followed outside, as in the case of the Dachau “gentlemen,” but they retained a sense of right and wrong within the warped world of the camps. Not everyone agreed on the same rules, of course, but there were lines most prisoners did not want to cross. Living by the
se basic rules was not just about survival, it was about self-respect as well. “I am straight with everyone,” Janusz Pogonowski secretly wrote to his family from Auschwitz in September 1942, “I have done nothing I need to be ashamed of.”7 Preserving dignity was almost impossible on one’s own, and Pogonowski credited two friends for helping him through a severe illness, supporting him materially and morally. It was thanks to them, he wrote, that his soul was “healthy, proud and strong.”8 Such mutual support among KL prisoners was not exceptional, as some observers suggest, but common.9 It took many different forms, from sharing food to political discussions, and undermined SS attempts at total domination.

  Some prisoners saw all such acts as resistance: survival itself was a “form of resistance,” Ágnes Rózsa wrote in her diary in early February 1945.10 Several scholars have taken a similar line, stretching the definition of resistance to cover all nonconformist acts in the KL. As the Italian psychologist Andrea Devoto memorably put it: “anything could be resistance, since everything was forbidden.”11 However, such an all-embracing definition blurs the lines between very different acts. Should we use the same term to describe a prisoner who sabotaged German munitions and a prisoner who fought for his own life, if necessary at the cost of others? Even a narrower definition of resistance can be problematic, when applied to the camps, since prisoners had no hope of working to overthrow the Nazi regime.

  In the end, other terms may help us to see the prisoners’ choices more clearly, though there are inevitable overlaps between the different categories. There was perseverance, which involved individual acts of self-preservation and self-assertion; there was solidarity, which was directed at the spiritual survival and protection of groups of inmates; and there was defiance, which included protests, and other planned and principled opposition to the Camp SS. Given the immense power of the SS, such direct challenges were rare, and they were not always unambiguous, either. Escaping from the camp, for example, might allow a prisoner to join the partisans or tell the world about Nazi crimes, but it might also condemn other inmates to death, under the SS policy of collective punishment.12

  COERCED COMMUNITIES

  Inmates had to be resourceful to stand any chance of survival during the war, developing what one prisoner called “camp technique.”13 They had to make the most of their existing skills, and acquire new ones, to gain life-saving advantages; a multilingual prisoner might get a privileged position as a translator, while a talented painter might sell his drawings for food.14 The perseverance of individual prisoners included rituals to preserve their pre-camp identities. For Primo Levi, his daily wash was less about getting clean—impossible in the filthy surroundings—than about staying human.15 Other prisoners found solace in religion. God had saved her from losing her mind, a Polish woman testified soon after the war, when she recalled her arrival in Ravensbrück in autumn 1944.16 Some prisoners also sought strength in art and the life of the mind, recalling old books, poems, and stories. In Ravensbrück, Charlotte Delbo swapped her bread ration for a copy of Molière’s Le Misanthrope, and then memorized the lines, a few each day. Silently reciting the play to herself “lasted almost throughout roll call,” she later wrote.17

  Important as individual perseverance was, however, no prisoner could get through the KL alone. The camps were social spaces and inmates always interacted with others. Their fate was shaped, to a large degree, by their place within what the Auschwitz survivor H. G. Adler has called the “coerced community.”18 Without solidarity, an Auschwitz Kapo told a group of new arrivals in late March 1942, they would all be dead within two months.19

  Some prisoner groups were created by the SS, others by common inmate interests and backgrounds. Some dated back to the prisoners’ pre-KL lives; others emerged inside. Some were loose and transitory; others were permanent and closed to outsiders. To complicate matters, prisoners always belonged to more than one group. Primo Levi, for example, was an educated, atheist Jew from Italy, and each of these aspects of his selfhood shaped his social relations in Auschwitz.20

  Companionship—whether based on sympathy or pragmatism, chance or shared beliefs—was vital for all prisoners. But it was a double-edged sword, since it created discord, as well. Relations between inmates thrown together by fate, like those who found themselves in the same barrack or work detail, often proved volatile. More generally, solidarity among some prisoners could cause conflicts with others. In the end, every prisoner faced the same paradox: how to lead a social life in the unsocial environment of the KL?21

  Families and Friends

  “We depended on each other,” Elie Wiesel wrote about the relationship with his father in Auschwitz; “he needed me as I needed him.” Sometimes they shared a few spoonfuls of soup or bread, and they gave each other moral sustenance, too. “He was my support and my oxygen, as I was his.”22 Wiesel was not alone. In the inferno of the camps, many prisoners formed close bonds with relatives, since trust was an essential element in their social relations. This was true, in particular, for Jews and Gypsies, who were frequently deported in large families.23 They had arrived together, and together they hoped to stay alive.24

  Other small survival networks, sometimes consisting of no more than a pair of prisoners, were made up of close friends.25 Many had already known one another before the camp. Hailing from the same towns or cities, their common past and culture provided common ground in the camps. Many more were joined together by shared experiences of Nazi terror, on deportation trains and building sites, in barracks and infirmaries.26 Her friendships with other prisoners had helped her to survive, Margarete Buber-Neumann later wrote, and she never had a closer friend in the camps than Milena Jesenská. She met the Czech journalist, who had been arrested after helping others escape from Nazi-occupied Czech territory, in Ravensbrück in 1940, and the two women quickly bonded. They were kindred spirits and often talked about the past (both had broken with the Communist movement), the present, and the future; Jesenská suggested that they should write a book about camps under Stalin and Hitler, to be called “The Age of the Concentration Camps.” In Ravensbrück, the two women cared for each other as best they could. When Buber-Neumann was thrown into the bunker, her friend smuggled sugar and bread inside. When Jesenská became gravely ill, her friend secretly visited her every day for several months.27

  Such friendships were widespread in the microcosm of the camps. Many women became so close they even referred to each other as sisters. They formed surrogate families, with up to a dozen or so members, sharing food, clothing, and emotional support, and trying to protect each other from selections. Being a “camp sister” was a “very happy and invigorating feeling,” Ágnes Rózsa wrote in January 1945. “Whatever happens, we know we can count on each other.”28 It has often been suggested that female KL prisoners were more likely than men to form such intense friendships.29 But close companionship was not gendered. Primo Levi, for one, forged a deep connection with another Italian prisoner called Alberto, also in his early twenties. For months, they slept on the same bunk and they were soon “bound by a tight bond of alliance,” Levi wrote, dividing all additional food they could scrape together (they were only separated when Alberto left on the Auschwitz death march in January 1945, from which he did not return).30 Many male prisoners enjoyed similar friendships, and while some later felt embarrassed to talk about them, other men had no such hesitation, referring to “sleeping brothers” and “comradeship marriages.”31

  In the unforgiving climate of the KL, however, even the closest bonds could be broken, especially among ordinary prisoners, who were always exposed to the full force of the camps.32 There is no shortage of chilling images from the concentration camps, but few are as disquieting as those of friends and family robbing one another, and of sons denying their fathers when they pleaded for bread.33 More generally, mutual aid within small collectives, bound by a strong sense of solidarity, often brought harm to others, intentionally or unintentionally. Each set of prisoners primarily fought for itself, i
n what Primo Levi termed “we-ism” (as a collective extension of egotism) and what we might call “groupness.” The success of each individual group in gaining food, cigarettes, or clothing almost inevitably meant that there was less for others to “organize”; sometimes prisoner collectives even stole from one another.34

  Then there were all those prisoners who could not form any alliances. This was true, above all, for the Muselmänner, the lepers of the camps. These doomed men and women haunted the compounds like ghosts, though there was nothing unworldly about their presence, with their festering wounds and stinking rags. “Everyone was disgusted by them, nobody showed any compassion,” the Auschwitz prisoner Maria Oyrzyńska recalled. The others stayed away as far as possible, not just out of disgust but for their own self-preservation; because the Muselmann was always in the line of fire—stealing food, evading work, ignoring orders—others were afraid of being punished by association. And so the Muselmann died the loneliest death.35

  Most other prisoners knew that uniting with a small group of relatives or friends offered the best hope. Vital as these alliances were, they were always liable to be ripped apart by deportation, illness, selection, and death. After the slow death of his father, Shlomo, in early 1945 in Buchenwald, Elie Wiesel became indifferent to the hell around him: “nothing touched me anymore.”36 Margarete Buber-Neumann was equally devastated after Milena Jesenská’s death in May 1944: “I felt very near despair. Life seemed to have no further point.” In the end, she clung on to life, honoring the memory of her dead friend by writing the book about the camps they had talked about back in Ravensbrück.37

  Comrades

  The social ties between friends and relatives were rivaled by those emerging from shared beliefs that predated the camps and endured inside.38 Individual left-wing inmates were particularly close, perhaps even more so than before the war, and frequently arranged secret meetings; they discussed ideological questions, shared the latest news of the war (gleaned from newspapers and hidden radios), and observed working-class traditions by commemorating significant events and singing protest songs.39 Some other political prisoners proved equally committed to their cause. In Kaufering, the dreaded Dachau satellite, a few Zionists even put together an undercover Hebrew newspaper that called for unity among Jewish inmates and for the creation of a Jewish state.40 All such communal activities are best understood as self-assertion; together, political prisoners fought against the eradication of their pre-camp identities and drew strength from their collective convictions.41