KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  The demise of Auschwitz was epitomized by the closure of its gas chambers. Sometime in late October or early November 1944, the gassings inside the camp—the last of the Nazi death camps—stopped forever. Soon afterward, the demolition of the Birkenau killing complex began, and prisoners were forced to conceal any remaining ash and bone fragments.47 Some SS murderers were relieved that this part of their duties had come to an end. “You can well imagine, my beloved,” the chief SS garrison physician, Dr. Wirths, wrote to his wife on November 29, 1944, “how nice it is for me that I don’t have to do this horrible work anymore, and that it exists no more.”48 The inmates, too, recognized this as a momentous event. As he watched the crematorium walls tumble, Miklós Nyiszli recalled, he had a premonition of the fall of the Third Reich as a whole.49

  Why did the SS dismantle the Birkenau gas chambers? Many historians have pointed to a supposed Himmler order to stop the mass extermination of Jews.50 If such an order really existed, it was no more than window-dressing for Himmler’s plan to negotiate a secret peace with the west. In practice, the SS never abandoned the Final Solution, and in Auschwitz itself, murders of Jews and other prisoners continued, even after the gassings stopped.51 The true motives for abandoning the gas chambers were more pragmatic. Mass deportations of Jews were coming to an end because of Germany’s deteriorating military position, and the Auschwitz SS was keen to cover its tracks before the Red Army reached the camp.52 SS leaders wanted to avoid a repetition of events in Majdanek, where the gas chambers had fallen largely intact into Soviet hands.53 They also hoped to salvage the murderous hardware; many parts of the crematoria were dismantled, packed up, and shipped westward. The final destination was a top-secret location near Mauthausen, where the SS planned to rebuild at least two of the Birkenau crematoria; it also dispatched some of the Birkenau killing experts to Mauthausen. More than likely, this new complex, which was never built in the end, would have included gas chambers for further systematic mass murder.54

  As the Camp SS gradually prepared to abandon Auschwitz, it preemptively moved many inmates away, following the example of earlier evacuations. This was the main reason why the daily Auschwitz prisoner population almost halved in four months, dropping to seventy thousand by late December. Several compounds were closed down and dismantled altogether, including the huge “Mexico” extension (BIII) in Birkenau.55 In all, around one hundred thousand prisoners departed during the second half of 1944 from Auschwitz. Previously, the camp had been the final destination for countless prisoners; now the flow was being reversed. Some transports went north to Stutthof, as we have seen, but most went to camps farther west, away from the approaching Red Army. One of them was Gross-Rosen, the only other main KL in Silesia.56

  Gross-Rosen grew with breathtaking speed in the second half of 1944, following the almost daily arrival of prisoner transports from elsewhere. By January 1, 1945, it held 76,728 prisoners, briefly turning a backwater of the camp system into the second-largest KL; among them were more than twenty-five thousand Jewish women in satellite camps, most of whom had come from Auschwitz. Like Stutthof, Gross-Rosen now operated as a vast reception camp for prisoners from concentration camps farther east. Order started to break down as the overcrowded main camp descended into chaos. Conditions were worst in a new compound, built from autumn 1944 onward with barracks dismantled in Auschwitz. When winter came, the prisoners here were exposed to the bitter cold, as many huts were missing windows and doors; there were no toilets or washrooms, either, and the inmates waded through snow, mud, and feces. Conditions were no better across many of the remaining Gross-Rosen satellites. “Nothing can surprise me anymore,” Avram Kajzer noted in his diary in early 1945, after he witnessed two fellow inmates of Dörnhau satellite camp pounce on a bone, after it had been dropped by a guard dog, and then grill it over a fire to eat.57

  Flight from the Red Army

  On January 12, 1945, the Soviet forces launched a devastating offensive that forced the Third Reich to its knees. Tanks broke through along the vast Eastern Front, sweeping past Wehrmacht defenses, and advanced rapidly toward the German heartland. When the Red Army regrouped at the end of the month, the front line had been completely redrawn. The Third Reich had lost its last foothold in occupied Poland, as well as other vital territory—East Prussia, East Brandenburg, and Silesia—as millions of German civilians joined the retreating Wehrmacht in a desperate mass flight.58

  In the path of Soviet troops had stood three big camp complexes—Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, and Stutthof—which held over one hundred and ninety thousand prisoners in mid-January 1945, more than a quarter of all KL inmates.59 Earlier SS discussions about the full evacuation of these camps had involved the respective Gauleiter and higher SS and police leaders, who held significant sway over the evacuations.60 The WVHA had played a key role, as well. It was Oswald Pohl who had first ordered the Auschwitz SS to plan for retreat, and when he visited the camp one last time, around November 1944, he examined the blueprint drafted by his protégé, Commandant Richard Baer, with the regional party, police, and SS authorities.61 Back in Oranienburg, Pohl’s managers would decide on the final destination of prisoner transports from the abandoned camps.62 Still, they could not micromanage events from afar, given the rapid developments on the ground, and left most of the logistical details to local SS commandants and their officers.63

  Despite its preparations the SS was caught off guard when the massive Soviet attack came in mid-January 1945. Local Nazi leaders only added to the confusion, often refusing to give evacuation orders until it was too late.64 In Auschwitz, everything was thrown into disarray as the Camp SS abandoned ship. “Chaos; the SS in panic,” inmates scribbled on a note as guards rushed across the main camp to round up prisoners, hand out provisions, pack up goods, and destroy documents. Prisoner columns started to leave the Auschwitz complex on January 17, 1945, and within two days, more than three-quarters of all the remaining inmates were on the road. Some were in good spirits as they left Auschwitz behind; the last survivors of the Special Squad, for instance, hoped to evade the SS killers by blending into the treks. The great majority of inmates, however, were filled with dread as they departed, anxious about the snow, the SS, and the unknown. “Such an evacuation,” Polish prisoners wrote just as the first treks set off, “means the extermination of at least half of the inmates.”65 In the end, around one in four Auschwitz prisoners would perish during the transports.66

  Auschwitz was initially evacuated on foot, with prisoners marching westward. The two main routes, around forty miles long, led them to Loslau and Gleiwitz. On arrival, most survivors—among them Tommy Buergenthal, the young boy we met earlier—were crammed onto trains and taken farther inside the Reich. The largest group, an estimated fifteen thousand prisoners, was sent to the Gross-Rosen main camp, already utterly overcrowded and about to be evacuated, too.67

  Unlike Auschwitz, which was abandoned in a matter of days, the final evacuation of Gross-Rosen, 170 miles farther northwest, stretched over months. While the main camp and several dozen satellites were hastily given up in early 1945, the KL complex as a whole continued; because of the way the front line moved, several dozen Gross-Rosen satellites were still operational in early May 1945.68 Over in Stutthof, the final evacuation was equally protracted. The SS abandoned some thirty satellites during the second half of January 1945, marching many of the prisoners toward the main camp.69 The main camp itself was then partially evacuated on January 25 and 26, 1945. With the Red Army only thirty miles away, the SS led around half of the twenty-five thousand prisoners on a march to the Lauenburg region, some eighty-five miles farther west. On arrival, it put the survivors into makeshift camps, with virtually no food, water, or heating. When the SS abandoned the Lauenburg camps again, a few weeks later, and forced the remaining prisoners on yet another death march, it left behind hundreds of dead. Meanwhile, the Stutthof main camp was still open. Because of its isolated position, the Soviets had bypassed the area and did not take the camp until May 9
, 1945; by then, there were just 150 KL inmates left. Over the preceding weeks, many thousands had died, waiting in vain for the liberation that had seemed so very near. Among the victims was Inge Rotschild’s mother, who perished, just skin and bones, on her daughter’s thirteenth birthday.70

  In early 1945, the KL system was in perpetual motion. Fleeing from the Red Army in January and February, the SS had forced more than one hundred and fifty thousand prisoners out of Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, and Stutthof (several Sachsenhausen satellites were affected, too).71 When Camp SS officials assembled these transports, the first prisoners were those “fit for work”; as a general rule, probably originating with Himmler and Pohl, these inmates were destined as slave laborers for other KL.72 Less clear was the fate of invalids. Just as during the earlier evacuations in the east in 1944, there were no definite orders from the top, it seems, leaving the initiative to the local Camp SS. If transport was available, officials sometimes cleared the entire camp, forcing all sick prisoners onto trucks, carts, or trains. Elsewhere, especially in more remote satellites, SS men conducted selections shortly before the treks departed, and murdered the weakest inmates.73

  One of the largest massacres took place during the evacuation of Lieberose, a Sachsenhausen satellite camp that mainly held Jews from Poland and Hungary. On February 2, 1945, around 1,600 prisoners departed on foot toward the main camp, more than sixty miles away. Another 1,300 or so stayed behind. Their fate had been sealed in a telex a few days earlier, probably by the Sachsenhausen commandant, which had ordered the execution of the infirm. There was no shortage of SS volunteers. “Come on, let’s go,” one sentry said. “We’re going Jew shooting, and will get some schnapps for it.” The slaughter lasted for three days. There was some desperate defiance, with one prisoner stabbing the camp leader in the neck. But there was no way out. A few survivors, hidden under discarded uniforms and shoes, were later pulled out by another group of SS men and lynched.74

  However, murder was not the SS default mode during the KL evacuations of January and February 1945. The officials were just as likely to leave exhausted prisoners behind as to kill them. During the partial evacuation of the Stutthof main camp in January 1945, for example, Commandant Hoppe issued written instructions that prisoners who were “sick and unable to march” should stay put; thousands of them watched as the others walked away.75 In Gross-Rosen, too, the SS left hundreds of sick prisoners behind in satellites.76 Some officers shied away from last-minute murders for fear of Allied retribution.77 Elsewhere, they simply ran out of time, surprised by the speed of the Red Army. Inside the deserted SS barracks, survivors later found signs of the hasty retreat: glasses filled with beer, half-eaten bowls of soup, board games abandoned midway.78

  The Red Army liberated well over ten thousand prisoners in early 1945. Most of them, around seven thousand, were in the Auschwitz main camp, Birkenau, and Monowitz.79 Here, more than a week had passed between the departure of the death marches and the arrival of the Soviets, who lost well over two hundred soldiers during battles in the vicinity of the camp complex. It was an extraordinary period of peril and promise for the remaining prisoners, the final chapter of their suffering, with the ending still unwritten. Dr. Otto Wolken later described these final days as probably his most difficult in more than five years inside concentration camps. After most of the Auschwitz sentries had left, around January 20–21, the remaining prisoners became more audacious, cutting holes into the barbed wire, moving across different compounds, breaking into SS storerooms. The inmates tried to rule themselves; they looked after the sick, made fires, and handed out food. But it was too early to celebrate. An exuberant Soviet prisoner, who drunkenly fired into the Birkenau night sky after he found some beer and weapons, was tracked down by a German patrol and shot. A group of French prisoners who had moved into the SS dining hall was also murdered. There were other threats, too, in addition to Nazi killers, including cold, hunger, and disease. And yet, the great majority of prisoners survived until January 27, 1945. When the first Soviet soldiers appeared at the gates of Birkenau, some prisoners ran toward them. “We hugged and kissed them,” Otto Wolken said a few months later, “we cried with joy, we were saved.”80

  Elsewhere in the Auschwitz complex, however, fate took a last terrible twist. On the same day Birkenau was liberated, SS terror struck in the satellite camp Fürstengrube, just twelve miles farther north. The Camp SS had abandoned the compound eight days earlier, leaving some 250 sick prisoners to fend for themselves. On the afternoon of January 27, 1945, with survival already in sight, a group of SS men suddenly entered the camp and slaughtered almost all the inmates. Only some twenty prisoners lived to see the Red Army arrive; they had come through the last massacre in Auschwitz.81

  Death on the Road

  No one knows how many KL prisoners died during the evacuations of early 1945, on icy roads and crammed trains, in ditches and forests. It must have been several tens of thousands, among them an estimated fifteen thousand men, women, and children from the abandoned Auschwitz complex.82 Although popular memory of these evacuations is dominated by death marches, most of the way to the KL farther inside the Reich was covered by rail. Conditions on these trains were immeasurably worse than during earlier evacuations from western camps such as Natzweiler. All the horrors of the KL were packed into the train carriages. With rolling stock in short supply, the German authorities used lots of open freight cars, which offered no protection against the elements. The suffering was greatly prolonged by all the delays. Although most trains eventually reached their destination, they often crawled for days along the congested and crumbling German railway network.83 One of the deadliest transports left the Auschwitz satellite camp of Laurahütte on January 23, 1945. The train moved excruciatingly slowly, often forced to a complete standstill, and when it finally reached Mauthausen almost a week later, around one in seven prisoners on board were dead.84

  For most of the prisoners, the ordeal of the evacuations did not begin on the trains, however, but on preceding death marches, which claimed the majority of victims in early 1945. The prisoners had received little food before they left. One Auschwitz survivor recalled that she got a tin of beef and two inedible loaves of bread. This was supposed to last for several days, but the starved had often devoured everything before they set off.85 Soon prisoners were so exhausted that they walked in a trance; sometimes even friends no longer recognized each other.86 But the marches did not erase all distinctions between captives. Some small support networks endured, with close friends and family helping each other as best they could, while those who walked alone were often the first to fall. Privileged prisoners also fared better, just as they had done inside the KL. Healthier and better fed, they wore proper shoes and warm clothes, while others staggered along in rags and wooden clogs, and soon collapsed.87 Dispatched by Oswald Pohl to monitor the KL evacuations in the east, Rudolf Höss found it easy to chase the trail of individual treks: he just had to follow the dead.88

  The death rates of the marches varied greatly, depending on factors such as available supplies and distances covered.89 While illness and exhaustion were probably the main killers, shootings were endemic, too. Anyone suspected of escape was fair game, according to SS rules, even prisoners who had merely stepped out to defecate by the side of the road.90 And although SS directives gave no clear guidance on the treatment of the sick, their murder was common practice, too. Most victims died a lonely death, felled by SS bullets after they had lost touch with the main column, though there were some large-scale massacres, as well; during a march from the Auschwitz satellite Blechhammer, for example, the SS loaded the sick onto sledges and blew them up with hand grenades.91

  Few of the killers were senior Camp SS officers, as most of the local top brass had already made their getaway. Despite their talk of standing tall against the Soviets, high-ranking Nazis made a habit of fleeing first. Rudolf Höss recounted bitterly that the Auschwitz commandant Richard Baer had saved himself in a comfortable SS limousi
ne, with plenty of time to spare.92 Other commandants, too, hurried away, leaving the supervision of the marches to their underlings. Many of them were NCOs who had risen to senior positions inside satellite camps. But these transport leaders could not be everywhere along the stretched columns, which meant that the decision to pull the trigger was often made by regular guards. “In practice each guard decided for himself who to shoot,” one testified after the war. Some of these executioners were women, breaking one of the last gendered taboos of the Camp SS. But the great majority were men, including some elderly soldiers who had only recently joined.93

  Fear of the Red Army drove many of these perpetrators in early 1945. Soviet troops were wreaking terrible revenge against the German population during their advance, and the Third Reich was awash with stories of massacres, skillfully exploited by the Nazi propaganda machine. Many ordinary Germans saw these crimes as payback for atrocities in the KL, which had “shown the enemy what they can do to us if they win.” The guards themselves, meanwhile, were determined to keep ahead of the Red Army. If frail prisoners slowed the treks down, and if screams, slaps, and kicks could not drive them forward anymore, they used their guns.94 The guards’ desire to save their own necks prompted the largest massacre during this period of KL evacuations. In late January 1945, a death march of around three thousand Stutthof prisoners (mostly Jewish women) arrived in the town of Palmnicken in East Prussia. Trapped by the Baltic Sea on one side and the advancing Soviet troops on the other, the SS, eager to escape, escorted the prisoners to the nearby coast and mowed them down with machine guns; wounded survivors drowned or froze to death, their corpses washing up for days on local beaches.95