KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  APOCALYPSE

  In mid-March 1945, Oswald Pohl embarked on a frantic tour to check on conditions in the KL, on Himmler’s orders. As he passed through a landscape littered with ruins, accompanied by Rudolf Höss and other WVHA officials, he must have realized that the end was near. But he did not slow the pace of his “breakneck tour,” as Höss called it; “as far as I could I visited every camp,” Pohl said later. In the end, he inspected half a dozen or more main camps within the prewar German borders.96

  The situation inside these concentration camps, now bursting with ravaged prisoners from recently evacuated sites, had lately deteriorated dramatically; during the first three months of 1945, the Buchenwald SS recorded more dead inmates than during all of 1943 and 1944 combined. Although some crematoria were running day and night, the bodies of the dead were mounting up fast. In Dachau, the Camp SS started in February 1945 to bury thousands of prisoners in mass graves, on a hill near the main camp, because the incinerators could not keep up anymore. So many prisoners were dying, Nico Rost noted in his Dachau diary on February 25, 1945, that the survivors did not have time anymore to mourn their friends.97

  Oswald Pohl witnessed all this carnage during his visits in March 1945. The worst camp, Pohl and his managers agreed, was Bergen-Belsen, where they saw masses of starving prisoners and corpses as Commandant Kramer led them through the grounds. The WVHA officials reacted by issuing various orders to the local SS, as they had done elsewhere on their tour. The hard-bitten Rudolf Höss offered practical advice about mass cremation, drawing on his own expertise. Pohl himself, meanwhile, gave worthless instructions about adding herbs, berries, and plants from nearby forests to the prisoner diet, and also used his last meetings with local KL officials, in Bergen-Belsen and the other camps, to discuss their evacuation plans, with mass murder still very much on SS minds.98

  The Race Between Illness and War

  Flossenbürg, January 5, ’45

  Dear Marianne! In this letter I will set out the whole truth to you for once. My health is fine. The life in the camp is dreadful. 1000 men in 200 beds. Manslaughter and whip—hunger are daily visitors. More than 100 kick the bucket every day—perish on the concrete in the latrine or lying outside. Beyond description the filth—lice a[nd] more … Talk to all [our] acquaintances about a donation of food—bread—cigarettes—margarine—spread. Your Hermann.

  This plea by the German Communist Hermann Haubner was smuggled out of the camp and eventually reached his wife. But it did not save him. Haubner died on March 4, 1945, one of 3,207 fatalities in the Flossenbürg complex in the final month before the camp was abandoned.99

  In the early months of 1945, the remaining concentration camps became disaster zones, including those that had so far been spared the worst. One immediate cause for the catastrophe was the huge rise in prisoner numbers. Overcrowding was nothing new, of course; Buchenwald had been packed to excess since 1942.100 But nothing prepared the camps for the rush near the end, which began with the mass transports from sites closer to the front line in the second half of 1944. Many KL complexes were completely overcrowded by the end of the year, only to be hit by the second wave of evacuations in early 1945. All camps in the heartland of the Third Reich now registered record figures. Buchenwald remained the largest complex of all, with 106,421 prisoners on March 20, 1945; around thirty percent of them were crammed into the main camp, with the rest spread across eighty-seven satellites, many of them no less packed.101

  The final few months came down to a “race between illness and war,” as Arthur Haulot put it in his Dachau diary on January 31, 1945.102 Would prisoners be saved in time by the Allies? Or would they perish from hunger and disease, like so many before them? Rations now dwindled to almost nothing. In camps like Ellrich, even bread, the staple of the prisoner diet, went missing. “It is dreadful, this hunger,” the Belgian inmate Émile Delaunois wrote in his diary on March 8, 1945, adding two weeks later: “There are only Muselmänner left!” Almost one thousand prisoners—nearly one in six—died in Ellrich in March alone.103

  This was not a natural disaster but a man-made one, the culmination of years of Camp SS terror. Overcrowding was a direct product of Nazi policy. Likewise, the dramatic shortages of supplies were linked to the SS conviction that inmates, as proven enemies of the German people, did not deserve better. While prisoners were dying of hunger in spring 1945, the Camp SS itself still received regular deliveries of high-quality provisions, including liver pâté and sausages. After liberation, former inmates found SS warehouses piled high with food, as well as shoes, coats, mattresses, and medicine.104 Camp SS leaders showed little interest in systematically improving the prisoners’ plight, preferring once more to blame the victims. When Oswald Pohl was told in November 1944 that some SS officials had requested better clothing for inmates, he was furious. Instead of pitying prisoners, Pohl thundered, his men had better teach them how to look after their things, “if need be by a sound hiding.”105

  All the misery and despair ripped the fractious prisoner community further apart. Some camps descended into violent disorder. Starving prisoners ambushed inmates who carried food supplies to kitchens and barracks, only to be beaten back by others armed with clubs and sticks. Some did not stop short of murder, just for a bite to eat. On April 17, 1945, a group of Ebensee prisoners killed a thirteen-year-old boy, who had just arrived from another Mauthausen satellite camp, and made off with the loaf of bread he had been holding.106

  This boy was one of tens of thousands of KL prisoners who died soon after their transfer from another camp. After the horror of the trains and marches, the arrival at their destination had come as a relief to some.107 But not for long. Gravely weakened, these newcomers largely found themselves without protection and connections, exposed to the full force of SS terror. This is what happened to many of those Jewish men who made the march from Lieberose to Sachsenhausen in February 1945. They had survived the “Jew-shooting” in their abandoned satellite camp and the ensuing death march, often barefoot and frostbitten, only to perish in Sachsenhausen. Upon arrival, the SS conducted a mass selection and murdered some four hundred victims. Many more were left to freeze and starve in an isolated area of the camp. On February 12, 1945, Odd Nansen watched a group of them delving into garbage bins and fighting over the scraps. They were beaten back by German Kapos, but soon tried again, their skeletal bodies smeared with blood.

  When Nansen returned to his own Sachsenhausen barrack—tormented by his inability to help—he was greeted by a different picture. His fellow Norwegian prisoners still lived in relative comfort. They had enough food, thanks to the Red Cross parcels, as well as plenty of cigarettes, the unofficial camp currency. After their meals they settled down with a novel, talked, or played games, “unaffected by the death and destruction” outside, as Nansen noted. Some Norwegians saw the death struggle of the Jews from Lieberose as evidence of their depravity. “Those aren’t human beings, they’re swine!” one of them said to Nansen. “I’ve starved myself, but I could never sink to eating sheer filth!”108

  The prisoner community remained deeply unequal, as did the inmates’ survival chances. What was garbage to the prominent few was nourishment to the destitute, and not just in Sachsenhausen; when a German Kapo in Ebensee threw up in January 1945, because he had eaten too much goulash, a starved Russian prisoner devoured his vomit.109 The vast inequities were summed up on March 21, 1945, by Nico Rost, then a Kapo in the Dachau infirmary, who collected lists of prisoners who had died in the main camp. There had been no deaths among the kitchen staff, he noted, as they could help themselves to whatever they needed. Most German prisoners also survived, he added, because they held better posts and received more food. Likewise, there were few deaths in the barracks holding Czech prisoners and priests, who received food packages from outside. “But everywhere else,” Rost wrote, “bodies—bodies—bodies.”110

  Zones of Death

  The deadliest spaces were special compounds for invalids in main camps a
nd some satellites, where the SS left the doomed to die.111 The Camp SS could build on previous experience here: ever since conditions had worsened early in World War II, it had isolated invalids in special sites to hasten their death. From late 1944, SS officials stepped up this policy of death through deprivation, as a local solution to illness and epidemics in their overcrowded camps, not least after the option of deporting prisoners to die in Auschwitz had fallen away.112

  There were “shit blocks” for those depleted by diarrhea, lying in pools of urine and excrement. There were “death blocks” for typhus-ridden prisoners, sometimes surrounded by barbed wire to stop them from fleeing to other parts of the camp. There were “convalescent blocks,” where gaunt prisoners were sprawled among indescribable filth. And there were the infirmaries, which were often little more than waiting rooms for the dying; still, desperate inmates begged for admission, some of them collapsing just outside the entrances.113

  The largest zones of death were former quarantine compounds in main camps, which had grown rapidly during 1944, with many thousands of new arrivals temporarily housed in tents. Initially, the SS had used these compounds as transit camps, sending most inmates elsewhere for slave labor. But over time, it left more invalids behind, and as the prisoner population grew and disease spread, these spaces acquired a new function, as huge sites for isolating the sick and dying.

  Among the worst such compounds was the “little camp” in Buchenwald, set up two years earlier in windowless horse stables separated from the main camp by barbed wire. By early April 1945, it held eighteen thousand prisoners. Many had only recently arrived from evacuated camps, in a state of shock and exhaustion. The misery of the adjoining main compound—vermin, disease, and starvation—was magnified in the “little camp,” and between January and April 1945, around six thousand prisoners died inside. Among them was Shlomo Wiesel. His son, Elie, later said that Buchenwald, which had promised to be an improvement on Birkenau, turned out to be much the same: “At first, the little camp was almost worse for me than Auschwitz.”114

  There were so many Muselmänner by the beginning of 1945 that the Camp SS designated entire satellite camps as collection sites; SS men sometimes called them “bite-the-dust camps.”115 In January 1945, for example, the Dora SS set up a satellite camp in the deserted garages of the Boelcke air force barracks on the edge of Nordhausen, not far from the main camp. There was no shortage of dying men and the new camp filled up fast; in less than three months, around twelve thousand Dora prisoners were forced inside, many of them survivors of the Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen evacuations. The weakest ones—unable to walk, stand, or speak—were left to die in one of the two-story garages; the concrete floors inside were hosed down, once in a while, to wash away some of the blood and feces. Prisoners soon called the Boelcke camp a “living crematorium,” and for good reason. In the weeks before U.S. troops reached the camp on April 11, up to one hundred men died every day; in all, more than three thousand perished. Another 2,250 dying prisoners were herded into boxcars, one day in early March 1945, and sent away, never to be seen again. Their destination was Bergen-Belsen, which had become the largest zone of death in the KL system.116

  Belsen

  In the early months of 1945, veteran inmates of Bergen-Belsen watched in dismay as endless rows of cadaverous men, women, and children marched toward their compounds. Transport after transport brought more prisoners, whole armies of “wretched figures,” as Hanna Lévy-Hass, who had been held there since the previous summer (following her arrest as a resistance fighter in Montenegro), wrote in her diary in February 1945. In just eight weeks, the camp more than doubled in size, from 18,465 prisoners on January 1, 1945, to 41,520 on March 1, and peaking at around 53,000 on April 15, the day British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen.117 And as the camp grew, so did chaos, disease, and death, with devastating speed.

  Set up as a camp for “exchange Jews” selected for possible prisoner swaps by the Nazi authorities, Bergen-Belsen had since taken on several new functions, putting it on the road to disaster. From spring 1944, as we have seen, the Camp SS used it as a holding camp for sick and dying men from other KL. Then, in summer 1944, it established a transit compound for thousands of women en route from occupied eastern Europe to German satellite camps. Around 2,500 of them stayed behind in Bergen-Belsen. Among them were two young German Jews, fifteen-year-old Anne Frank and her older sister, Margot, who had been deported from Auschwitz in late October 1944, where they had arrived several weeks earlier on the last RSHA train to leave the Netherlands (after evading the Nazi authorities for two years in a hideout in Amsterdam, together with their parents and four others). In Bergen-Belsen, the sisters were initially crammed into the tents of the transit compound, which offered no shelter against the cold and rain. After a storm blew several tents away on November 7, 1944, the Camp SS moved the women into barracks inside the “star camp.”118 By then, the situation of the so-called exchange Jews was sharply deteriorating, too. Although they were still held separately, the SS started to treat them like the other KL inmates. “The regimen in the camp gets worse every day,” Hanna Lévy-Hass wrote in December 1944. “Have we not already reached the nadir of our suffering?”119

  Much worse was to come, as mass transports in early 1945 completely overwhelmed the camp. While WVHA officials continued to use Bergen-Belsen as a destination for half-dead men from other KL, they also turned it into a reception camp for evacuation transports, initially from eastern camps like Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen, and later from camps deep inside the Reich, too.120 On April 11, for example, a train came from the recently abandoned Dora satellite camp Woffleben. Around 150 prisoners had died during the weeklong journey (another 130 men escaped). Some 1,350 survivors were herded into Bergen-Belsen. One of them was Émile Delaunois, whom we met earlier. Just before the evacuation of Woffleben he had vowed “to do anything to regain my freedom as soon as possible.” He did survive the last days in Bergen-Belsen, only to die shortly after liberation.121

  The Bergen-Belsen SS hastily reassigned compounds and added new ones, including a subcamp on the grounds of nearby army barracks. Even so, the site was hopelessly overcrowded. The composition of the prisoner population changed, too. Most of the new prisoners were female, turning Bergen-Belsen into the only wartime camp (apart from Ravensbrück and Stutthof) that held considerably more women than men. And it was no longer a camp almost exclusively for Jews. Although Jews were still by far the largest group—accounting for around half the inmates in mid-April 1945—they were joined by prisoners from other backgrounds, among them many political prisoners from Poland and the Soviet Union.122

  “What takes place here is the most horrendous in world history,” the noted Dutch lawyer and Zionist leader Abel Herzberg wrote in his diary on March 17, 1945, more than a year after his arrival as an “exchange Jew.”123 Even before new prisoners glimpsed the horror that awaited them in Bergen-Belsen, they could smell it. A stench of decay and death—sickeningly familiar to prisoners from camps like Auschwitz—enveloped the compounds during the final weeks. “We are all full of lice, everything is dirty, filthy, and full of crap,” sixteen-year-old Arieh Koretz, another “exchange Jew,” noted in his diary on February 8, 1945. Thousands of inmates soiled themselves, and the whole camp, a prisoner doctor later said, came to resemble one huge latrine. At night, inmates faced more agony, with cold winds sweeping through broken roofs, windows, and doors. The barracks were often bare—no lights, straw sacks, covers, stoves, chairs—except for the mass of prisoners, dead and alive.124 Disease was raging, too, with a devastating typhus epidemic gripping the camp. The greatest killer of all was hunger. “I have been working for five days now without bread,” the twenty-four-year-old Dutch Jew Louis Tas wrote on March 25, 1945. “Last night insane hunger and dreams of food,” he added the next day. There were Muselmänner everywhere, so emaciated that their bones made up more than half of their body weight.125

  The prisoners’ hope of survival vanished fast. “I am il
l again and have given up all hope of getting out of here,” Abel Herzberg wrote on March 7, 1945. “I am afraid of the pain, of the death-struggle.”126 Each morning, prisoners threw the bodies of those who had died the previous night out of the barracks, though not before they had ripped clothes and valuables from the stiff bodies. The corpses were then flung on trucks or carts, which dumped the dead in different corners of the camp; toward the end, prisoners were just left lying wherever they had died.127

  Never in the history of the KL did so many prisoners die as fast of disease and deprivation as in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945. During this one month, when the camp held an average of around 45,500 prisoners, some 18,168 lost their lives.128 Among the dead were Anne and Margot Frank. During their last days, the two sisters, ravaged by typhus and dysentery, had been huddled under a blanket in one of the infirmaries. When a friend found them there, she pleaded with Anne to get up. But Anne, who had been looking after her dying sister, just replied: “Here the two of us can lie on a bunk, we are together and have peace.”129

  Camp SS leaders had not planned the Bergen-Belsen disaster. They expected weak prisoners to die, to be sure, but not at this rate.130 As the situation spiraled out of control, Commandant Josef Kramer sent a frank letter to the WVHA on March 1, 1945, warning that conditions were “untenable.” Shortages of supplies and massive overcrowding were causing a “catastrophe.” Kramer demanded beds and blankets, as well as trucks to pick up food and equipment for delousing.131 But his appeal rang hollow. Kramer was at pains to present himself as a responsible official, not just to his SS superiors but to future Allied judges, as well.132 Previously, he had betrayed little of the urgency expressed in his letter to the WVHA. In fact, as a veteran Camp SS officer and radical anti-Semite, he had brought more suffering to the camp after his arrival in early December 1944. And when the full tragedy unfolded, Kramer and his men mostly watched from the sidelines, not least to protect themselves from disease. During March 1945, the sight of SS officials became rare inside the Bergen-Belsen compounds. “There are no more roll calls. Also no work,” Abel Herzberg wrote on April 1, 1945. “There is only death.”133