Some groups went beyond boosting morale and became survival networks. Political prisoners would share essential supplies and use their contacts to save others from punishing labor details or transfers to deadly camps. And just as before the war, well-placed captives watched out for comrades among new arrivals, to explain the basic rules and to protect them.42 This was another case of partial solidarity, with any benefits restricted to selected prisoners. Inmates from other backgrounds were often excluded as untrustworthy and undeserving; the basic principle, a former prisoner later explained, had been to “put the politicals first!”43 Sometimes this meant saving one inmate at the expense of others. Helmut Thiemann, a German Communist and Buchenwald Kapo, testified after the war that he and his colleagues had established a special ward in the infirmary just “for our comrades of all nations.” The Communist Kapos did all they could to help these prisoners, providing them with the best available medication. At the same time, Thiemann added, “we had to be ruthless” against others.44
The most extreme cases of “groupness” among political prisoners involved so-called victim swaps. This practice took place in several KL and has been documented most fully for Buchenwald. Here, Communist Kapos in the infirmary protected some comrades from human experiments by altering SS lists, substituting their names for those of other prisoners. This was how “we saved each other,” Thiemann’s colleague Ernst Busse testified after the war, so that “members of our underground organization in the camp could live relatively peacefully.” In the same spirit, Communist Kapos in the Buchenwald labor action office altered the composition of prisoner transports to satellite camps. They would spare comrades from transfer to a lethal camp like Dora, and dispatch prisoners considered as undesirable and inferior in their place, including criminals, homosexuals, and other social outsiders. “All these negative elements were selected by the national [Communist] groups,” the former prisoner clerk Jiří Žák testified in 1945, “which also identified the positive elements who under no condition were to go on transports.” Žák was not the only Communist who vigorously defended this practice after the war. “When I have the opportunity to save ten anti-fascist fighters,” Walter Bartel, one of the most senior Buchenwald Communists, insisted in an internal party investigation in East Germany in 1953, “then I will do it.”45
Not all political prisoners enjoyed the same protection, of course, since the inmates with the red triangle never formed a homogeneous group. Even among the most committed opponents of the Nazi regime there was plenty of tension. The long-standing antagonism between German Social Democrats and Communists was never fully overcome, while other ideological divisions were still more pronounced; French nationalists, for example, shared virtually no common ground with Soviet Communists. There was even strife within the same political factions. German Communists clashed among one another about divisive ideological issues, like the Hitler-Stalin pact, and about the correct tactics in the KL. Dissenters were swiftly accused of deviation and excluded from the collective. When German Communists in Ravensbrück learned that Margarete Buber-Neumann had been a prisoner under Stalin, they branded her a “Trotskyite” and cut her off. Buber-Neumann, for her part, thought that her adversaries were stuck in the past, in the “Communist cloud cuckoo land of 1933.”46
Believers
Early each morning, before the Auschwitz prisoners had to rise, Elie Wiesel and his father left their bunk and walked to a nearby barrack. Here, a small group of orthodox Jews met to say ritual blessings, sharing a pair of tefillin they had acquired on the black market. Jews faced the greatest obstacles to worship, as they were exposed to the most lethal SS terror. And yet, they found ways to affirm their faith. “Yes, we practiced religion even in a death camp,” Wiesel wrote later. “I had seen too much suffering to break with the past and reject the heritage of those who had suffered.”47
Observant KL inmates knew that it was all but impossible to fulfill their religious duties. They had to work during sacred times and break some dietary rules, and also missed prayer books and spiritual guidance from their leaders.48 Still they practiced their beliefs, as best they could, forming close-knit groups based on shared beliefs. The observance of Christian rituals was particularly widespread among Polish political prisoners, whose faith was often bound up with their national identity. They held secret Sunday services and even smuggled consecrated Hosts into the camps; at least one prisoner received the Holy Communion in the Auschwitz bunker, after others had lowered a Host, tied to a piece of string, to his cell window.49
Many inmates drew strength from religious devotion. Some groups formed close communities of faith, dividing almost everything; in some camps, for example, Jehovah’s Witnesses evenly split all the money and provisions sent by relatives. What is more, religious practices provided a lasting link to their pre-camp lives. And it helped them to find meaning in their suffering, seeing the camp as the culmination of centuries of persecution, or as a divine test of faith, or as penance for the sins of mankind.50 Some atheist inmates felt that the religious believers had an advantage over them, because their faith gave them a fixed point in the universe to unhinge the world of the SS, at least in their minds.51
But religious devotion also spelled danger. Prisoners were always at risk during prayer, even on the rare occasion when it was sanctioned. SS and Kapos repeatedly turned religious ceremonies into occasions for torture. In Dachau, they forced Catholic clerics to drink large amounts of sacramental wine (donated by the Vatican) and dished out special abuse during holy days; in all, close to half of the 1,870 Polish priests dragged to Dachau perished.52 Even if believers escaped such torment, the act of worship itself could put them at risk. Rising early for prayers deprived them of vital sleep, and fasting weakened them further, as did the adherence to other dietary rules; several orthodox Jews who tried only to eat kosher are said to have quickly died of exhaustion.53
The daily rituals of orthodox Jews in particular created frequent flash points. Some prisoners saw the prayers as a disturbance, especially at nighttime, and accused religious Jews of passivity in the face of SS terror. “You can pray as much as you like,” Dionys Lenard told an imprisoned cantor, shortly before his escape from Majdanek. “I am going to act instead.”54 Other secular prisoners regarded all worship as perverse: how could one suffer in hell and still pray to God? Primo Levi was incensed when, after a selection in Auschwitz, he heard and saw the prayers of an elderly man in another bunk, who thanked God for sparing his life: “Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.”55 The feeling of incomprehension was mutual. A number of orthodox Jews were indignant about the others’ lack of religious fervor, and castigated them for questioning, complaining, or abandoning God.56
These clashes highlight, once more, the diversity of Jewish prisoners. Although they all wore the yellow star, they formed no unified community, even less so than before the war. The divisions—along religious, political, and cultural lines—became more pronounced, now that all Jewish prisoners had to fight for survival. In addition, there were new national and linguistic barriers; eastern European Jews often spoke Yiddish, which many assimilated Jews from the west did not understand. After many years inside the KL system, Benedikt Kautsky concluded: “One did not see much all-Jewish comradeship.”57 How could it have been different? After all, meaningful support was harder for Jews than for any other group. “We could not help anyone in material terms,” Dionys Lenard wrote in 1942, “because none of us had anything.”58 And yet, despite this existential pressure, many Jewish prisoners—including Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Ágnes Rózsa—joined forces with others and formed small support networks.
Notwithstanding the divisions among Jewish prisoners, some other inmates saw them as a cohesive group and an easy ta
rget. Jews lived in fear of dangerous encounters, especially with greedy and brutal Kapos. The widespread anti-Semitism among prisoners was palpable, with Kapos screaming abuse like “Dirty Jews have to be exterminated!” as they dealt out blows.59 Even decades after the war, the former German camp elder of a Neuengamme satellite camp, notorious for his excesses, was open about his motives: “On the whole, I did not like the Jews. In the camp, at least, they were bootlickers and smarmy.”60 But other factors were at play, too, not least the propensity of prisoners to look down on others who were even weaker.61
At the same time, Jewish inmates were not universally shunned. Many prisoners treated them in a measured way, ignoring occasional SS threats of punishment for anyone who was too friendly to Jews. In fact, some showed great consideration and courage, extending their compassion beyond their own immediate circle of confidants.62 In summer 1942, when the Ravensbrück SS punished Jews with a month-long cut in rations, another group of prisoners, led by Czech women, regularly smuggled some of their own bread into the Jewish women’s barrack.63 This was no isolated incident. In Auschwitz-Monowitz, Polish prisoners also occasionally gave some of their provisions to Jews. “They did not have much for themselves,” the Hungarian Jew George Kaldore recalled, “but they still shared.”64
Divided Nations
If one could listen in on conversations in the barracks, late at night near the end of the war, one would hear the prisoners whisper in any number of languages. Take the Buchenwald main camp: by the end of 1944, it held inmates from more than two dozen countries, including small groups from Spain (295 prisoners), England (25), Switzerland (24), and Albania (23). “One is surrounded by a perpetual Babel,” wrote Primo Levi.65 As the prisoner population became more international, nationality became ever more important in shaping this coerced community, bringing some prisoners together and driving others apart.66
National solidarity, based on a shared language and culture, could be life-saving for vulnerable prisoners. In addition, inmates occasionally celebrated their shared national traditions, singing folk songs and telling old tales. Most gatherings inside the barracks were spontaneous expressions of national belonging, after a long day in the camp, though there were organized concerts, too, as well as dances and plays.67 In addition to stirring the prisoners’ patriotic feelings, such performances offered a diversion from their bleak lives. In her Nuremberg satellite camp, Ágnes Rózsa set up a theater group with other Hungarian prisoners, who performed famous songs, as well as parodies of fellow inmates and guards.68 Reflections on the KL also found their way into prisoner music. Among the songs of Polish inmates in Auschwitz was “Gas Chamber,” set to the melody of a popular tango:
There is one gas chamber,
Where we will all get to know each other,
Where we will all meet each other,
Maybe tomorrow—who knows?69
Many acts of national self-assertion took place in an ambiguous area, tacitly tolerated by the SS. This was true, above all, for official cultural events, which carried multiple meanings for the different audiences. When Dachau prisoners put on a “Polish Day” in 1943, complete with choir, orchestra, and dancers, they smuggled patriotic messages into the performance. While the Polish prisoners took great pride in their subversive act, oblivious SS officers sat in the first row and clapped loudly, demanding an encore.70
Despite such moral victories, most national prisoner groups did not form close unions. They might have shared the same letter on their uniforms (indicating their country of origin), but issues which had divided fellow countrymen on the outside did not suddenly disappear inside.71 National discord was most intense, perhaps, among those who wore the letter “R”—prisoners classified as Russian. This term typically covered all prisoners from within the huge territory of the Soviet Union, and hid a great many ethnic and political differences. Above all, there was the antagonism between Russians and Ukrainians, reflecting their often hostile relations back home. Many captive Russian soldiers remained committed to the Moscow regime and branded Ukrainian inmates as traitors and collaborators. For their part, many imprisoned Ukrainian forced laborers saw the Russian POWs as henchmen of Stalin’s regime, which had repressed their indigenous nationalism and killed several million Ukrainians through its lethal policy of forced collectivization.72
To make matters worse, many Soviet prisoners faced blanket hostility by prisoners from other countries, who denounced them as loafers, thieves, and murderers. Such sweeping judgments were rooted in age-old prejudices, pointing once more to the importance of habits and convictions formed prior to the KL.73 Other prisoners often felt a sense of superiority over supposedly primitive inmates from the east, and were anxious about Soviets bringing disease into the camps. The pressures of daily survival only exacerbated such fears; on the whole, it is hard to imagine a place less conducive to conquering national stereotypes than the KL.74
With Soviet prisoners condemned toward the bottom of the prisoner hierarchy, confrontations with better-off inmates were inevitable. One explosive issue was the uneven distribution of food packages, a constant source of envy and conflict within the prisoner community. In Sachsenhausen, starving Soviets surrounded the blocks of Norwegian prisoners, who enjoyed an abundance of Red Cross parcels. The emaciated men begged for scraps and scoured the floor for crumbs. The Norwegians tried to beat them away. “They’re like flies, you can’t wave them off, they come back, encamp, and lie in wait for anything that may fall from our luxurious repast,” one of the Norwegian prisoners wrote in his diary in autumn 1943. The average Norwegian, he added, treated these prisoners “worse than he would a dog at home.”75
If Soviets were depicted as brutal and base, the reputation of Germans, who stood near the top of the ladder, was no better. The “dead and the living,” three Polish survivors of Auschwitz wrote in 1946, had “boundless contempt and hatred for the Germans.”76 This hostility was rooted in the long-standing antagonism between Germany and its European neighbors, which had greatly escalated after the rise of Hitler; many Polish prisoners saw conflicts with German inmates as a continuation of their struggle against German occupiers outside.77 The privileges of some German inmates sparked resentment among foreigners, too, as did their casual arrogance. Most noxious was the power wielded by German Kapos. Many foreigners saw abuses by these Kapos as proof of the evil of the entire German nation, erasing the difference between German prisoners and perpetrators. “It does actually seem as if they were all alike, prisoners, SS, or Wehrmacht,” one foreign inmate noted in Sachsenhausen in October 1944.78
Germans and Soviets were not the only ones who faced hostility. Pretty much every national group was mocked, feared, or despised by another, and accused of greed, brutality, and craven submission to the SS. Many French prisoners felt contempt for Poles, for instance, who often returned the sentiment in kind.79 Relations between Polish and Soviet prisoners were even worse, reflecting the poisonous relations between both countries. When Wiesław Kielar was appointed as a clerk in a block of Soviet POWs in Auschwitz-Birkenau, he did not hide his hostility; his Soviet charges, in turn, answered each of his orders with a curt “Fuck off!”80
The SS was no passive observer in all of this. Not only did it create the general conditions that pitted inmate groups against one another, it deliberately exacerbated national hostilities. It bolstered the position of German prisoners, offering them benefits like powerful Kapo posts; such favoritism went so far that some Germans were spared the transfer to a lethal KL like Auschwitz altogether.81 The SS also fanned the flames between other national groups. Having put prisoners in charge of administering corporal punishment (in place of SS men), Heinrich Himmler ordered in summer 1943 that Poles should hit Russians, and Russians should hit Poles and Ukrainians. Rudolf Höss summed up the thinking of SS leaders with customary cynicism: “The more numerous the rivalries and the fiercer the struggles for power, the easier the camp can be led. Divide et impera!”82
Elites
The
gulf between prisoners grew wider and wider as the war continued. Social differences were at their greatest, Margarete Buber-Neumann recalled, in the final year before liberation:
Crowds of children hung around the blocks of the better-off prisoners begging for food, whilst ragged, half-starving figures rummaged in the waste-bins for scraps of food. Other prisoners were well dressed and well fed, according to their influence in the camp. There was one woman who might have been strolling along the streets of the West End as she took the greyhound of the SS Camp Leader out for exercise.83
Each concentration camp had an elite of privileged prisoners, no more than around ten percent of the population, and admission to this exclusive club depended on an inmate’s position in the internal hierarchy, which was determined by myriad factors such as ethnicity, nationality, profession, political beliefs, language, age, and time of arrival in the camp.84 The specific hierarchies differed from camp to camp, and they shifted over time, as new prisoners arrived or SS priorities changed. And yet, there were some certainties. Skilled workers generally stood above unskilled ones; Jews largely found themselves at the base and Germans at the top; and experienced inmates held an advantage, since seniority translated into know-how and connections, both of which were crucial for cheating death.
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Page 71
