KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps
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More generally, brutal “greens” like Bernhard Bonitz had no monopoly on violence. Jewish prisoners, for example, were often outraged when they suffered at the hands of others wearing the yellow triangle: “Aren’t you a Jew, like us?” Avram Kajzer challenged a Gross-Rosen supervisor, who punched him in reply.183 The focus on the “greens” has rather obscured the uncomfortable truth that Kapos from all backgrounds colluded with the SS and committed cruel excesses.
Neither did the Camp SS habitually favor “greens” over “reds.” Political prisoners had filled positions of authority since the birth of the KL, and this continued during the war. Important clerical posts largely went to politicals, for example, who were more likely to possess the requisite administrative skills, and “reds” also gained other influential positions, above all in Buchenwald, where German Communists held all key posts by 1943.184
The pragmatic approach of the Camp SS inflamed tensions between Germans wearing the red and the green triangles.185 In Dachau, the “reds,” who held the upper hand, helped to condemn “greens” to hard labor and human experiments, and restricted their medical treatment. One former prisoner recalled that when he sought treatment for edema in the infirmary, “red” Kapos beat him away, screaming: “Piss off, green swine!” Dachau political prisoners defended their actions as payback for the abuses some of them had suffered at the hands of “greens” in Flossenbürg, early in the war. These Flossenbürg “greens,” in turn, had justified their attacks as revenge for even earlier abuses by politicals back in Dachau.186 The spiral of violence seemed unstoppable, escalating the enmity between the two prisoner groups.
However, the significance of these battles for dominance has been exaggerated. Generally, the outcome only mattered to the small number of prisoners who stood to benefit. “Red” Kapos primarily fought for their own groups.187 Likewise, most benefits gained by “green” Kapos went to their confidants, excluding many others with a green triangle, even though they often shared the same barrack.188 All considered, it is likely that a larger number of prisoners benefited when the “reds” were on top.189 But this was, at best, a matter of degree, as the “groupness” practiced by senior Kapos with “red” and “green” triangles often made it difficult for the mass of ordinary inmates to tell them apart. German political prisoners, a Polish survivor of Auschwitz wrote in 1946, differed “in nothing” from the “greens” and were just as hated by the rest of the inmates.190
Wherever possible, the Camp SS encouraged conflicts over Kapo posts, which were fought with equal ferocity by prisoner groups lower down the order.191 The aim, according to Heinrich Himmler, was to “play off one nation against the other,” by putting a French Kapo in charge of Polish prisoners, or a Polish Kapo in charge of Russians. In the same way, the SS sometimes pitted German “reds” and “greens” against each other, to prevent any single group from gaining supremacy and to increase their dependence on the SS.192
Some prisoners had different ideas. In autumn 1942, the WVHA sent eighteen Sachsenhausen Communists—almost all of them senior “red” Kapos, including the camp elder Harry Naujoks—to Flossenbürg, because of “seditious activities.” Officially, these notables were supposed to be deployed for hard labor there, but the SS must have expected the dominant “green” Kapos in Flossenbürg to drive them to their deaths. Instead, the so-called criminals aided their survival, much to the surprise of the Communist prisoners themselves.193 Elsewhere, too, prisoners occasionally joined forces. In Buchenwald, for example, a key made by a “green” picklock gave “red” Kapos access to secret documents in an SS safe.194 More often, though, prisoners did turn against each other. As Karl Adolf Gross concluded in despair in his Dachau diary on June 9, 1944: “How easy it is for our mutual enemies to play the different colors off against each other!”195
Inside Infirmaries
The moral ambiguities of being a Kapo were felt most acutely, perhaps, by inmates serving in infirmaries. As the war continued, the Camp SS drafted in more and more prisoners as clerks, nurses, and doctors. Few posts offered greater scope for helping or harming other captives. Exhausted inmates besieged the KL infirmaries on most mornings, but Kapos normally only admitted those whom they expected to quickly recover. “For those I had to reject,” one Dora prisoner doctor wrote after the war, “this was usually a death sentence.”196 These doctors also participated in lethal selections, and since they were better qualified than most SS physicians and knew the patients better, their word carried weight.197 After assisting in his first selection in Auschwitz, Dr. Elie Cohen, a Dutch Jew, broke down; he later took part in further selections, though his sense of shame never left him.198 Some medical Kapos even gave deadly injections and participated in human experiments, as we saw in the case of Dr. Mengele’s assistant Miklós Nyiszli.199 In fact, almost all experiments required the help of prisoners. In Dachau, well over a dozen Kapos worked on Dr. Rascher’s gruesome trials, checking the equipment, making records, conducting autopsies, and selecting some of the victims.200
The primary reason for becoming “part of the system,” as one prisoner doctor put it, was the same as for other Kapos—survival. Despite the risk of infection, infirmaries were among the safest places of work for KL prisoners, above all for Jews. It was no coincidence that the death rates among trained doctors remained unusually low. “We were so terribly protected,” wrote Dr. Cohen, “we really lived a life apart.”201 As so often in the KL, survival came at a heavy price: propping up SS terror. A few months after his arrival with other Slovak Jews in April 1942, Ján Weis became a male nurse in the Auschwitz main camp infirmary. One day in autumn 1942, he had to assist an SS orderly in the routine murder of sick prisoners. As one of the doomed inmates entered, Weis was horror-stricken to see his own father. Afraid for his own life, he said nothing; he watched as the SS orderly gave “father the injection and [then] I carried him, my father, away.”202
Each day, Kapos had to make dreadful decisions in the infirmaries. Because resources were scarce, saving some inmates meant sacrificing others. “Should I rather help a mother with many children,” the Auschwitz prisoner doctor Ella Lingens-Reiner asked herself, “or a young girl, who still had her life in front of her?”203 Some Kapos made their choice on purely medical grounds. During SS selections, they tried to protect stronger prisoners by condemning weaker ones who might not survive much longer anyway.204 Other factors came to the fore, too, including the Kapos’ national background and political affinity. Take Helmut Thiemann, whom we encountered earlier, a committed Communist imprisoned in Buchenwald between 1938 and 1945. Justifying himself in an internal KPD document written immediately after the war, he argued that he had participated in the SS murder of other prisoners, in order to keep his position in the infirmary and protect Communists. “Because our comrades were worth more than all the others, we had to go along with the SS to a degree, in regard to the extermination of the incurably sick and invalids.”205
Many other medical Kapos made equally fateful judgments about the worth of individual prisoners. As the senior Kapo in Dr. Rascher’s Dachau station, Walter Neff effected “victim swaps” to save some men he regarded as deserving. In place of priests, for example, he put forward alleged pedophiles and other “lowlifes” (as he called them) for the trials. Such practices were contentious among the wider prisoner population, however, not least because some death sentences pronounced by Kapos were based on nothing more than rumor or personal antipathy.206 In view of their immense powers, it is hardly surprising that some medical Kapos lost their moral bearings.207
By contrast, other Kapos in KL infirmaries still saw themselves as healers. Dramatic improvements were beyond them, of course. But fighting against the odds and their own exhaustion—in the Birkenau women’s camp, one prisoner doctor cared for seven hundred patients in the winter of 1943–44—they did save lives, drawing on their medical skills, bravery, and ingenuity.208 They helped to bring down epidemic infections through strict regimens of disinfection, and protected
some prisoners from selections by hiding them inside the infirmaries.209
One extraordinary rescue was that of young Luigi Ferri, who arrived in Auschwitz with his grandmother on June 3, 1944, on a small transport of Jews from Italy. The SS initially overlooked Luigi and the eleven-year-old boy found himself alone in the Birkenau quarantine camp. SS men would have killed him within hours, no doubt, had he not come to the attention of the prisoner doctor Otto Wolken, a resourceful Jewish physician from Vienna. In tears, Luigi told his story, pleading for help. Dr. Wolken risked his life to protect the boy, whom he soon called his “camp son.” Despite repeated SS orders to hand the boy over, Wolken hid him in different barracks for over two months, helped by some confidants. Then, in mid-August 1944, Wolken bribed a Kapo in the political office to have Luigi officially registered. Although the boy could now move more freely around the camp, Wolken still had to protect him, hiding him during selections and letting him sleep in the safety of the infirmary. When Soviet troops reached Auschwitz in late January 1945, both Wolken and Luigi were among the small number of survivors.210
DEFIANCE
Defiance is rare in totalitarian regimes, and the KL probably provided the most barren grounds for its growth. During the war, the obstacles were almost insurmountable. Most prisoners were too exhausted to contemplate fundamental opposition to the SS. Meanwhile, those more privileged prisoners who could afford to think beyond their immediate survival had the least incentive for insubordination, because they stood to lose the most. Conflicts between inmate groups further undermined the scope for concerted action, and there was little hope for sustained moral or material support from the outside, either. Given the might of the SS, which tried to crush any seeds of protest, violent confrontations seemed senseless and suicidal. “Resistance is out of the question,” Janusz Pogonowski wrote in Auschwitz in summer 1942. “Even the smallest infraction of the camp rules has dreadful consequences.”211 Their inability to take the fight to the SS only increased the inmates’ sense of paralysis. They were soldiers “condemned to an unarmed martyrdom,” a Polish prisoner exclaimed during a secret memorial service for a dead comrade in Mauthausen.212 And yet, individual prisoners in every KL challenged the SS, at extraordinary risk. Although most of their acts have been lost to history, some have endured in the perpetrator files and the memories of survivors.
The Prisoner Underground
According to some survivor accounts, political prisoners formed powerful clandestine organizations based on international solidarity, which fought the Camp SS at every turn, saving inmates and sabotaging the war effort. Such depictions feed our craving for heroics by strong and unbowed prisoners, but they appear rather rose-tinted, in light of the huge barriers to opposition in the KL.213 To be sure, a few prisoners from different nations tried to work together, especially later in the war. However, their efforts inevitably remained limited; in Dachau, for example, a truly international inmate committee only emerged right at the end of the war. Organized opposition was restricted in size and scope, and even at its most daring, it only benefited a small number of prisoners. Many others did not even know that there was an underground movement in their camp.214
Among the most audacious acts of organized opposition was the rescue of individual inmates from certain death, by hiding them or giving them false identities. Such operations were dangerous and complicated, as we saw in the case of young Luigi Ferri.215 And under the laws of the camp, the rescue of one prisoner sometimes condemned another. In Buchenwald, German Communists helped to protect hundreds of children until the end of the war. Among them was the toddler Stefan Jerzy Zweig, barely three feet tall, whom they adopted as a symbol of innocent life (at the age of four, he would become the youngest survivor of the camp). When the boy’s name appeared on a transport list to Auschwitz, Communist Kapos managed to get it struck off. But the transport could not leave one prisoner short, so a Gypsy called Willy Blum was chosen to take Stefan’s place. The sixteen-year-old boy left Buchenwald on September 25, 1944, and later died in Auschwitz.216
The achievements and limits of collective defiance come into sharper focus still when looking at arguably the most spectacular KL rescue mission, also in Buchenwald. In summer 1944, the Paris Gestapo had dispatched a special transport to the camp. On board were thirty-seven Allied agents, among them hardened resistance fighters from France, as well as spies from Belgium, Britain, the United States, and Canada. When it became clear that these men faced execution, a few veteran Buchenwald inmates hatched an ingenious plan. Claiming that typhus had broken out in the agents’ barrack, the rescuers spirited away three prominent men—Stéphane Hessel (a French officer working for General de Gaulle), Edward Yeo-Thomas (one of the most intrepid British secret agents, code-named “White Rabbit”), and Henri Peulevé (another longtime British spy)—to the first floor of block 46, the isolation ward for prisoners with typhus, which was closed off from the rest of the camp by barbed wire. Here, they waited for some sick patients to succumb to the disease, so that the identities of the dead and the hidden spies could be switched. After several tense weeks, the three agents finally received their new names. “Thanks to your care, everything has come out all right,” Hessel wrote on October 21, 1944, in a secret note to Eugen Kogon, the German medical clerk who had masterminded their rescue. “My feelings are those of a man who has been saved in the nick of time. What relief!” To prevent the three foreigners from being recognized in Buchenwald, other Kapos quickly dispatched them to satellite camps.
This high-wire act could have failed at any moment. It required enormous courage and quick thinking by several powerful Buchenwald Kapos, working together despite personal antipathies and political differences. They tricked SS officers, forged records, stole documents, hid the agents, and even injected one of them with milk to simulate high fever. The risks paid off: all three agents survived. However, an operation such as this pushed organized resistance to the edge and had to remain the exception. The other thirty-four Allied agents who had arrived in Buchenwald together with Hessel, Yeo-Thomas, and Peulevé were all shot or hanged in September and October 1944. As Eugen Kogon wrote, “there simply was no possibility of rescue under the prevailing circumstances.”217
While the obstacles in the way of rescue often proved insurmountable, it was easier for underground movements to collect evidence about Camp SS crimes. The clandestine groups in Auschwitz, led by Polish soldiers and nationalists, were particularly successful in this respect, after they established links to the Polish resistance outside; extraordinarily, one of the inmates involved, Lieutenant Witold Pilecki, had let himself be arrested by the German authorities, under a false name, to join the prisoner underground in the camps. Using their outside contacts, the Polish prisoners smuggled important material out of Auschwitz, including maps and statistics, as well as reports on SS perpetrators, executions, medical experiments, living conditions, and mass killings. The conspirators even got their hands on SS documents, such as transport lists. “You should make full use of the two original lists of people who were gassed,” Stanisław Kłodziński wrote on November 21, 1943, from the camp to a contact in the Polish resistance: “You might send them to London as originals.”218
To gather material about the Nazi Final Solution, the prisoner underground in Auschwitz needed the help of Special Squad members, who witnessed the daily mass murder close-up. Getting evidence out of the strictly guarded zone of death around the crematoria meant “risking the life of the entire group,” one of them, Salmen Lewental, wrote in 1944; but he felt compelled to tell the world about the Nazi crimes “because without us nobody will know what happened, and when.”219 The most daring operation came in late August 1944, when one Special Squad prisoner, helped by others, documented the murder of Lodz Jews with a hidden camera. Concealed inside the gas chamber of Birkenau crematorium V, he photographed the burning of corpses in pits outside; later, he stepped in the open air to capture other victims as they undressed among the trees; four of the images ha
ve survived, smuggled out of Auschwitz within days, and they remain some of the most poignant testaments of the Holocaust.220
Like other acts of prisoner defiance, the efforts to document KL crimes were extremely courageous. After all, prisoners knew that the SS was hunting everyone engaged in subversive activites. In fact, SS officers even conjured up plots where none existed. “He saw a seditious act of sabotage in every triviality,” an SS man from the Auschwitz political office later said about his former boss, Maximilian Grabner.221 Often, the SS alarm was raised by denunciations from fellow prisoners, as local commandants built up a network of informants (acting on WVHA instructions); the Sachsenhausen SS alone is said to have used almost three hundred “stoolies.”222 Suspects were dragged to the bunkers and tormented by SS men from the political office. And although the evidence they gathered was often negligible, they demanded extreme punishment; when the Dora SS got wind in autumn 1944 of an alleged plot to blow up the tunnel, it tortured hundreds of innocent prisoners and eventually executed over 150 Soviets, as well as some German Kapos, among them four former Communist camp elders.223
The authorities were equally uncompromising when it came to suspected sabotage, another SS obsession. Sanctions were swift and severe, even for harmless acts. A joke could cost a prisoner’s life, as could purely symbolic acts; in Dora, the SS once strung up a Russian prisoner for allegedly urinating into the body of a V2 rocket.224 The SS even twisted acts of desperation into sabotage, executing prisoners for using parts of their bedsheet as gloves or socks.225 In this way, most prisoners were forced into submission. Although they generally hated working for the enemy, there was no widespread obstruction in the KL. “I would have never committed sabotage,” a former inmate summed up the feelings of many, “because I wanted to survive.”226