Early Evacuations
By early September 1944, the German army appeared to be on the brink of defeat on the Western Front, following the Allied advance after the D-day landings in June. The military situation seemed increasingly hopeless and the popular mood in Germany hit a new low.18 Anticipating the loss of further territory, the WVHA now ordered the immediate evacuation of its two most westerly concentration camps. On September 5 and 6, 1944, the SS moved all 3,500 prisoners out of the Herzogenbusch main camp in the Netherlands; its small satellite camps were closed down, too.19 Natzweiler in Alsace was evacuated around the same time. Almost all 6,000 prisoners were deported from the main camp to Dachau between September 2 and 19, 1944; the SS also abandoned around a dozen attached satellites on the left bank of the Rhine, moving out a further 4,500 prisoners. But the Natzweiler complex was not finished yet, as its satellite camps on the right bank of the Rhine continued to operate. In fact, after the German army temporarily stabilized its position, several new satellites were added, and by early January 1945, the camp complex held some 22,500 prisoners. With satellites now turning around an extinct main camp, Natzweiler encapsulated the fragmentation of the KL system toward the end.20
Despite their speed, the western European KL evacuations in autumn 1944 proceeded in a fairly orderly fashion. The WVHA closed the camps well before the Allies arrived, which left sufficient time to move the vast majority of prisoners by train, the preferred SS mode of transport. Not only was it easier to guard prisoners on trains, compared to marches, but journey times were much shorter, too. Exhausting as these transports were, they did not cause mass death. “Apart from terrible fatigue, we arrived [in Ravensbrück] in a pretty decent state,” a former Herzogenbusch prisoner recalled. As a result, almost all inmates survived the early evacuations in the west.21
In the occupied east, events took a very different turn in 1944. Here, too, SS officials had anticipated the loss of camps and prepared for evacuations, hoping to deploy many of the prisoners elsewhere for the war effort. But these plans were often foiled by the size of the task—with five main camps and many dozens of satellites within reach of the Red Army—and the speed of the Soviet advance. Because German military resources were concentrated along the Western Front, the Red Army made dramatic breakthroughs, with the Wehrmacht suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties and losing huge swathes of land.22
In the General Government, the SS kept some control and took away most of its KL prisoners in time. WVHA officials prepared for the closure of Majdanek from late 1943 onward, moving thousands of prisoners out over the coming months. Most others followed in April 1944, when some ten thousand inmates were transported in boxcars to other camps such as Auschwitz. When the SS finally abandoned the main camp on July 22, 1944, with the Red Army closing in fast, it already stood half-empty. The SS left a few hundred sick inmates behind and forced the others, some one thousand or more, westward by foot and train; they were joined by another nine thousand prisoners from the last Majdanek satellites, including the large camp at Warsaw (which had lost its main camp status).23
Some of the Majdanek prisoners were taken to Plaszow, the other main camp in the General Government. But it, too, was soon abandoned. Once again, the Camp SS began its preparations early. Prisoners returned from the satellites to the main camp, which was the departure point for deportations. In late July and early August 1944, the SS then dispatched trains packed with prisoners from Plaszow to Flossenbürg, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Gross-Rosen, reducing the inmate population from over twenty thousand to less than five thousand. Thousands more left Plaszow in October 1944, which also saw the closure of its last satellite camps. When the regional higher SS and police leader finally ordered the complete evacuation of the main camp on January 14, 1945, there were only some six hundred prisoners left inside.24
By this time, the SS had also abandoned all three KL complexes farther north in the Baltic territories—Riga, Kovno, and Vaivara—though these closures unfolded in a far more hectic manner. Riga was closed down between summer and autumn 1944, with the evacuation of the main camp lasting until October 11, shortly before Soviet troops entered the city. During this period, some ten thousand prisoners were driven onto ships heading out to open sea, a prospect they had dreaded for months. Crammed belowdecks for days, the inmates were soon covered in sweat, vomit, and excrement. On arrival in Danzig, the starving survivors were put on barges and taken along the Vistula toward Stutthof, which rapidly filled up with inmates from abandoned concentration camps.25
Among the inmates in Stutthof were thousands of Jewish KL prisoners from Kovno, which had been emptied even faster than Riga. All its dozen or so satellites were abandoned in July 1944, and so was the main camp. “Our fate is unknown. Our state of mind is terrible,” wrote Shmuel Minzberg, one of the prisoners, just before the evacuation. In all, more than ten thousand Jews were forced out of the complex in little more than two weeks, mostly onto trains and boats; perhaps a quarter of them survived until the end of the war. Before the SS men left Kovno for good, they razed the main camp. Supported by Lithuanian helpers, they burned or blew up the houses, killing hundreds of Jews hiding in bunkers; others were shot as they fled the inferno. Only a few survivors emerged from the ruins after Soviet troops arrived on August 1, 1944.26
The evacuation of the far-flung KL Vaivara, the most northerly Baltic camp complex, was the most protracted, spanning seven months. During an initial wave of evacuations in February and March 1944, the SS hastily abandoned some ten sites, including the main camp; on February 3, for example, hundreds of prisoners were rushed out of the Soski satellite camp with the Red Army no more than a few miles away. Prisoners often had to march for days until they reached satellites farther west, where conditions were appalling; in Ereda, sick prisoners were dumped into barracks in the marshes. “About twenty persons died every day,” one survivor testified a few months later, shortly before his own death. In mid-1944, the remaining inmates of the Vaivara complex faced a second wave of evacuations. As the Soviet summer offensive made swift headway, the front line was approaching once more. “All around us is noise, pilots are being shot at and do not relent, day or night. A lot of shrapnel over our heads,” the Polish Jew Hershl Kruk wrote in the satellite camp Lagedi on August 29, 1944, adding: “What is our destiny, it is hard to tell.” In the end, with Estonia virtually cut off from the rest of the German territory, the SS deported most Vaivara prisoners by boat toward Stutthof. After seven days at sea without food, one prisoner recalled, “we arrived in Danzig in terrible condition!”27
Murder in the Baltic
Sometime in late September 1944, Soviet troops reached Klooga, which had been the last operational Vaivara satellite camp. Inside were more than one hundred survivors, many of them in shock. “Are we free now? Are the Germans gone?” they asked incredulously. Some touched the red star on the soldiers’ uniforms to make sure that they were not dreaming. Only a few days before, these prisoners had been destined to die. Early on September 19, 1944, with Soviet troops just a few days away, the SS had forced the inmates of Klooga—around two thousand men and women—onto the roll call square and split them into groups. Heavily armed SS men then took the first group toward the forest; soon after, the others heard bursts of machine gun fire. Panic spread among the remnant, who now tried to flee. Most were slaughtered. Later that night, the SS departed from Klooga, illuminated by the fire of burning pyres and barracks, which had been torched to conceal the evidence of the crimes and to prevent Soviet troops from using the site; left behind were the few survivors who had managed to hide, sometimes among corpses scattered across the grounds and the nearby forest.28
This was not the only bloodbath in the Baltic region: one day earlier, several hundred prisoners of Lagedi, Hershl Kruk among them, were driven by truck to a forest clearing and executed.29 Although such massacres remained unusual, they mark a fundamental difference from the simultaneous KL evacuations in western Europe: in the east, and especially in t
he Baltic territories, mass death was part of SS calculations from the beginning. The chaotic circumstances were an important factor here; in Klooga and Lagedi, SS men had felt cornered by the rapid Soviet advance and, rather than leave the prisoners behind, resorted to mass killing before escaping.30 But these last-minute massacres had deeper roots in Nazi ideology. After all, the overwhelming majority of prisoners in the local KL were Jews, and their lives counted for little in the eyes of the SS, especially if they could no longer be exploited for forced labor.
Such murderous convictions had guided the Camp SS already during its preparation for evacuations in the Baltic area. In the months before the Red Army reached the different KL, local SS officials stepped up their selections of weak and sick prisoners: Why save inmates who had little value as slaves and would only be a burden during transports? Children were targeted on the same grounds, and over a frenzied few weeks in spring 1944, Camp SS men murdered several thousand boys and girls; in the Kovno main camp, the action was preceded by a children’s party, organized as camouflage by the local commandant. The ensuing deportations were accompanied by dreadful scenes. Parents screamed and pleaded, as the SS dragged the children away. Some joined their children on the trucks, holding hands as they drove to their deaths; other families committed suicide before the SS could part them. Parents left behind were inconsolable. After Wilna prisoners returned from work to their satellite camp one evening in late March 1944, and found that the SS had deported the children, they “did not eat, did not drink and did not sleep,” wrote Grigori Schur, who lost his son, Aron. “In pitch-darkness, the Jews cried for their children.”31
SS murders in the Baltic region continued to the end. In the Riga complex, the last selections in summer 1944 were coordinated by the senior camp physician Dr. Eduard Krebsbach, an SS veteran who had first participated in the mass killing of invalids in 1941 in Mauthausen. Krebsbach and his helpers conducted trials of the prisoners’ strength—forcing them to sprint and jump over obstacles—and then condemned the weakest two thousand to die.32 The SS carried out similar crimes in other Baltic camps. During the “ten percent selections” in the Vaivara complex—as survivors dubbed them, referring to the proportion of prisoners selected to die—the perpetrators loaded the victims onto trucks in July 1944 and later returned with their SS uniforms splattered in blood.33
Prisoners who survived the selections and massacres in the Baltic KL headed away from the front line. Unlike the evacuations in the west, these poorly equipped and frenzied transports claimed many more lives in 1944. Hundreds of prisoners must have starved or suffocated on trains and ships.34 Even worse were the marches across roads, fields, and frozen swamps, which killed several thousand more. The first deaths came as early as February and March 1944, when inmates of abandoned Vaivara satellites like Soski stumbled through the ice and snow; some froze to death, some were shot by panicking SS officials, some were thrown alive into lakes or the sea.35 More death marches in eastern Europe followed in summer 1944, including one that left Warsaw on July 28, just days before the doomed uprising. Early that morning, the great majority of inmates—some four thousand or more men (almost all of them Jews)—hurriedly set off, surrounded by guard dogs, SS, and soldiers. The sun was beating down on the bedraggled men, some of whom were barefoot. Their mouths became so dry that they could barely swallow the little food they had left; prisoners licked the sweat off their faces, but this only made their thirst more intense. “We prayed to God for rain,” Oskar Paserman recalled in 1945, “but none came.” Soon the first prisoners broke down; those who lagged behind were shot. After marching some seventy-five miles, for more than twelve hours each day, the survivors reached Kutno, where they were crammed on a train. Just 3,863 prisoners were still alive when it pulled into Dachau five days later; at least eighty-nine men had perished inside the cattle trucks.36
The early KL evacuations have long been ignored, overshadowed by the larger death marches in the final months of the Third Reich. But they form an important part of the history of the KL, and contrary to the views of some historians, they anticipated the horrors still to come.37 They often began with a preparatory phase. During this period, the Camp SS packed its property and loot, and oversaw the partial dismantling of barracks and other equipment. Just like retreating SS units elsewhere, it also tried to destroy the evidence of its crimes: bodies were dug up and burned (sometimes by a special SS unit), together with any incriminating documents. In addition, the authorities reduced the size of the prisoner population through transports or through systematic murders.38 Then, when it came to the final abandonment of the camp, the SS forced most of the remaining prisoners out, using different means of transport. Much depended on the military situation. In the west, the SS had planned ahead and moved its prisoners by train. In the east, the SS was often caught out by Soviet advances and hastily marched its prisoners away, or tried to murder them all, as in Klooga. This was one reason why the early evacuations proved so much more deadly in the east; the closer the front line came to a KL, the greater the danger for those prisoners still left inside.39
The Last Autumn in the East
When twelve-year-old Inge Rotschild arrived with her parents in Stutthof, in the summer of 1944, she had already spent what seemed like an eternity in Nazi ghettos and camps. Deported as German Jews from Cologne to Riga in late 1941, Inge and her family had later been sent to the satellite camp Mühlgraben. It was here that she lost her nine-year-old brother, Heinz, killed in April 1944 during the SS selections of children in the Riga KL complex. A few months later, Inge had been forced onto one of the crowded ships that took the surviving prisoners toward Stutthof, where she would remain until February 1945.40
As we have seen, Stutthof emerged as the main destination for prisoners from the abandoned Baltic KL. Inge Rotschild was among more than twenty-five thousand Jewish inmates arriving from these camps in the second half of 1944. Thousands of them, mostly men (among them Inge’s father), were soon transported westward for slave labor in satellites like Mühldorf and Kaufering. Many of the women and girls stayed behind. They were joined between June and October 1944 by well over twenty thousand Jewish women from Auschwitz, which was going through the preparatory stages of evacuation. Stutthof changed dramatically as a result, highlighting another effect of KL evacuations: not only did they lead to the closure of camps, they transformed the remaining ones, as well.41
One only has to look at the size of the prisoner populations. Stutthof had always been a second-rank KL, holding no more than around 7,500 prisoners in spring 1944. Just a few months later, however, in late summer 1944, it had grown to more than sixty thousand (the SS staff also expanded, following the arrival of guards from the abandoned Baltic KL). The new inmates were mostly Jews, and mostly women. Many of them were sent to Stutthof satellites; between June and October 1944, the Camp SS set up nineteen camps for Jewish prisoners, where they lived under the most primitive conditions, often in tents. Back in the main camp, some 1,200 prisoners or more were crammed into barracks that had previously held just two hundred; prisoners even slept in the latrines. Everything was scarce, not just space. “There were no facilities for washing,” Inge Rotschild testified later, “and within a few days we were completely covered with lice.”42
There were frequent selections in Stutthof, Inge added. Indeed, from summer 1944 local Camp SS officials stepped up the systematic murder of weak, elderly, sick, frail, and pregnant prisoners, just as they did in the Baltic KL. The Stutthof SS initially saw this as a radical solution to the overcrowding of the main camp, where the number of disease-ridden inmates was growing daily, with even more “unfit” prisoners returning from satellite camps. But increasingly, the local SS also used murder to ready the camp for a possible evacuation, preemptively killing those considered a burden for transports (following the example of the Baltic camps).43
Several thousand victims of Stutthof selections, largely children and their mothers, were sent by train to Birkenau. Others were murde
red in Stutthof itself, especially after the closure of the Birkenau killing complex in autumn 1944. It was around this time that the Stutthof SS began to use a small gas chamber to murder Jews (as well as some Polish political prisoners and Soviet POWs) with Zyklon B. However, the main weapons of the Stutthof SS were deadly injections and shootings. Report leader Arno Chemnitz operated a neck-shooting apparatus in the crematorium, which was modeled on the one he had observed as a block leader in Buchenwald during the 1941 murder of Soviet “commissars.” Another Stutthof SS man later described the aftermath of a routine execution of fifty or sixty women: “I did not look closely at the corpses, but I saw drying pools of blood on the floor, also bloodstained faces of corpses and I remember a blood spattered door frame.”
Many more Stutthof inmates succumbed to the catastrophic living conditions. Corpses multiplied quickly inside the barracks; some inmates woke up pressed against the cold bodies of those who had perished during the night. In autumn and winter 1944, a typhus epidemic ravaged the camp, the third and worst such outbreak to hit Stutthof. It eventually forced the SS to suspend mass executions, and on January 8, 1945, Richard Glücks placed the entire camp under quarantine for almost two weeks. By this time, around 250 prisoners perished each day, and the dying continued until the camp was evacuated.44
Life in the other remaining eastern KL was also overshadowed by the prospect of evacuation in autumn and winter 1944. SS preparations were most intense in the biggest site of all, Auschwitz. Material and machines were moved out, as we have seen, and the families of SS officers finally tore themselves away from their opulent homes (Frau Höss and her children left in early November 1944). SS officials left behind in Auschwitz became increasingly nervous as the front edged closer. Would they manage to escape in time? Would local resistance fighters attack the camp from outside? 45 Would the Soviets get there first? Such fears intensified when SS men heard Allied broadcasts on the BBC in autumn 1944, which named several notorious Auschwitz officials and warned that anyone involved in further bloodshed would be brought to justice. As the mood among the Auschwitz SS darkened, some staff lost their appetite for plunder and excesses.46
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Page 77
