KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Only in April 1945, with much of Germany already occupied, did the SS finally surrender a more substantial number of its prisoners. Desperate for an agreement with the Allies, Himmler put his hopes in the well-connected Count Bernadotte, a nephew of the Swedish king. They met three times that month, the last time on the night of April 23–24, when Himmler made his offer to capitulate on the Western Front (Bernadotte was the emissary who relayed it to the Allies). To help his cause, Himmler let more KL prisoners go. At first, the main beneficiaries were Scandinavians: the Danish and Swedish Red Cross spirited away almost eight thousand prisoners, including those held in Neuengamme. Odd Nansen completed his last diary entry in Germany on April 20, 1945, on “the bus to freedom”; as the prisoners crossed the border to Denmark, they were greeted by thousands lining the streets, waving flags and handing out flowers, bread, and beer. Himmler soon agreed to free further prisoners. The man responsible for the extermination of countless women and children now extended his “charity” to a few female prisoners, among them pregnant and seriously ill women, as well as mothers with children. In the final two weeks of war, the Danish and Swedish Red Cross picked up around 9,500 women, largely from Ravensbrück. Another two thousand or more were put onto ICRC trucks and taken to Switzerland. Most of the saved women came from Poland, others from France, Belgium, and elsewhere. “The camp behind us is getting smaller and smaller,” the French prisoner Marijo Chombart de Lauwe wrote about her rescue from Mauthausen on April 22, 1945, “and I sit here with empty eyes, silent and dazed.” It took time before they understood that they really were free.173

  But releases remained the exception. The rescue of some twenty thousand men, women, and children in April and early May 1945 coincided with the suffering of hundreds of thousands more still trapped inside the KL system. When he made his tactical concessions, Himmler was determined to hold on to the great bulk of prisoners as bargaining chips for the elusive deal with the Allies—even if this meant the continuation of deadly KL evacuations.174 This strategy was most transparent in his approach to Jewish prisoners, whose fate was raised repeatedly during discussions with the Red Cross. Himmler had thought for some time that improving the conditions for Jews might boost his stock in the West.175 Now he took some symbolic steps. Around March 13, 1945, just before Pohl set off on his hectic tour of the last KL, Himmler apparently instructed him to tell commandants that the killing of Jews should cease. Himmler made similar promises to his foreign negotiation partners and talked to camp commandants directly about improving the treatment of Jews.176 But his disingenuous intervention came far too late to make any difference. In Mauthausen, for example, Jewish prisoners were still more likely to die than any other group, despite sudden orders to give preferential treatment to sick Jews.177

  Eager to buy credit in the West, Himmler was willing to let at least some more Jewish prisoners go. Rewriting his own genocidal past, he claimed to have always supported their orderly emigration from Germany. To prove his point, he agreed to release one thousand Jewish women from Ravensbrück to the Swedish Red Cross with immediate effect, following an extraordinary meeting on the night of April 20–21, 1945, with Norbert Masur, a representative of the World Jewish Congress who had come to Germany from Sweden, his safe conduct guaranteed by the SS.178 Himmler never went beyond such tactical adjustments, however.179 In general, he continued to regard Jewish prisoners as hostages for a deal with the West. “Look after these Jews and treat them well,” Himmler is said to have told the Mauthausen commandant Ziereis in late March 1945, “that is my best capital.”180

  Himmler’s hostage strategy also determined the fate of the remaining “exchange Jews” in Bergen-Belsen. Between April 7 and 10, 1945, just days before British troops reached the camp, the RSHA dispatched three trains with 6,700 Jews toward Theresienstadt, the last remaining ghetto, now redesignated as another exchange camp. Only one train reached its destination, after an odyssey of almost two weeks. The other two drifted for days through war-torn Germany like ghost trains, until they were liberated by the Allies; by then, several hundred prisoners on board were dead.181

  THE FINAL WEEKS

  By early April 1945 the KL system was in turmoil, caught up in the general maelstrom of doom and defeat. Himmler’s kingdom of terror had shrunk fast since the start of the year, as the Allies penetrated deep into German territory; in all, the Camp SS lost some 230 satellite camps in the first three months of 1945.182 Meanwhile, chaos and death had spread through the remaining camps. Even their much-vaunted war production had ground to a virtual standstill because of shortages and air raids, which constantly sent SS and prisoners running for cover. “The siren has diarrhea,” a friend of Ágnes Rózsa joked in Nuremberg on February 19, 1945, only days before their camp was hit—one of several satellites destroyed by Allied bombs in the final months of war, causing yet more deaths.183 In all, perhaps one hundred and fifty thousand KL prisoners perished between January and March 1945, during the evacuations and inside the remaining camps, resulting in the first sharp fall in inmate numbers for many years.184

  But it would be a mistake to think that the Camp SS was finished. Although its grip was slipping fast, it had not yet lost complete control. And the size of its terror apparatus was still formidable. At the beginning of April 1945, the SS operated ten main concentration camps and almost four hundred satellites.185 Around thirty to thirty-five thousand SS officials served in these remaining camps.186 And although the prisoner population had plummeted, the KL still held an estimated five hundred and fifty thousand inmates, far more than one year earlier.187 These men, women, and children came from all across Europe, and most of them were held in satellite camps. Germans were in a smaller minority than ever, making up less than ten percent of the prisoner population.188 By contrast, Jewish prisoners had grown into one of the largest groups. Their numbers in concentration camps within the Third Reich’s prewar borders had increased rapidly in recent months, first with the transports of slave laborers to satellites, and then with the evacuations from the east. By early spring 1945, Jews made up perhaps thirty percent of the KL population.189

  Only in April and early May 1945 did the KL system finally collapse. During a dramatic five weeks, the WVHA disbanded, and Allied forces reached the remaining satellites and the last main camps: Buchenwald and Dora (April 11), Bergen-Belsen (April 15), Sachsenhausen (April 22–23), Flossenbürg (April 23), Dachau (April 29), Ravensbrück (April 30), Neuengamme (May 2), Mauthausen-Gusen (May 5), and Stutthof (May 9).190 In well over one hundred camps, the Allies found prisoners left by the SS, ranging from a handful of survivors in some satellites to fifty-five thousand in Bergen-Belsen. In total, an estimated two hundred and fifty thousand prisoners were liberated inside concentration camps during this period.191

  Most camps, however, were empty when Allied troops arrived. The SS had evacuated the great majority of satellites and also reduced the prisoner population in most main camps. In Neuengamme, virtually no inmates were left inside when British soldiers entered the vast compound.192 The deserted camps stood in sharp contrast to roads and trains outside, which were full of prisoners. Countless death transports crisscrossed the ever-shrinking Third Reich, often cut off from the remaining camps; tens of thousands of prisoners died before Allied troops reached them.

  Historians have offered conflicting assessments of these last death transports. Some depict the KL system as remarkably resilient, even at the end, with prisoner treks operating as small concentration camps on the move.193 Others argue that the transports should be viewed separately from the history of the KL, as a new stage of Nazi genocide.194 Ultimately, neither position is fully persuasive. There was nothing stable about the KL system in spring 1945; seeing the treks as mobile camps ignores the manifest differences from life inside.195 At the same time, the death transports are still very much part of the camps’ history. The transports were dominated by Camp SS men, after all, who were already accustomed to murdering prisoners for escaping or for losing their stren
gth. As for the prisoners themselves, their desperate physical state was a product of the camps, while the behavior they had learned inside, and the connections they had made there, proved invaluable on the road. In the final analysis, the death transports accelerated long-standing trends in the KL system. Its structure became even more dynamic, with prisoners perpetually on the move; perpetrators gained even more autonomy, killing with complete impunity; staff became even more diverse, as more men from outside were drafted in as guards; Kapos held even more sway, with some officially armed and co-opted as escorts; and terror became even more visible, with treks and trains moving all over Germany.196

  “No Prisoners [Must] Fall Alive into Enemy Hands”

  The mass evacuation of the KL in spring 1945 was no foregone conclusion. Amid growing panic, SS leaders considered several alternatives and sent contradictory signals to the bewildered local officials.197 The most radical idea was a last bloodbath, condemning all prisoners to go down with the Third Reich. At a time when Hitler preached that it was better to reduce Germany to ruins than to leave anything to the enemy, there was some loose talk among SS leaders and local officials of razing the camps, too, together with all those inside. But just as Hitler’s scorched-earth order was not implemented, the SS never came close to the total annihilation of all prisoners.198

  At the other end of the scale stood mass releases. When it came to the evacuation of Nazi prisons, the Reich Ministry of Justice decided to free large numbers of inmates regarded as harmless.199 But such a measure was unacceptable to Himmler and his officers. Mass releases would have destroyed the founding myth of the KL as the bulwark against Germany’s most evil enemies. Ultimately, the RSHA only agreed to rather low-level releases, freeing several thousand political prisoners.200 A few thousand more German inmates were pressed into ragtag military formations, but despite the hopes of Nazi grandees like Joseph Goebbels, these reluctant, ill-equipped soldiers made no discernible contribution to the defense of the fatherland.201

  Yet another option was to abandon camps after selected prisoners had been moved out, leaving the great majority behind. There was some support for such an approach within the WVHA. After all, orderly mass evacuations were out of the question by spring 1945; the transport system was in meltdown and the last camps were bursting.202 Himmler briefly toyed with this idea, too, and when it came to the final evacuation of the Buchenwald main camp, he ordered that the remaining inmates should be left to the Allies.203 But he quickly changed his mind. On April 6, 1945, Commandant Pister received Himmler’s new order to abandon the camp with immediate effect. Buchenwald had to be cleared to a very large extent, Himmler demanded, by taking the prisoners to Flossenbürg.204 In the end, evacuation remained the SS default mode.205

  During April 1945, the Camp SS forced hundreds of thousands of prisoners onto transports, as it moved to abandon eight main camps and well over 250 satellite camps. Some SS officials yielded to pressure from local industry and municipal authorities, who wanted the SS to take away slave laborers before the Allies arrived, to wash their own hands of any association with KL crimes.206 Moreover, the SS principals saw good reasons for holding on to their inmates.207 Himmler himself still regarded prisoners—especially Jews—as pawns in his gambit for a separate peace.208 And the WVHA leaders still saw the KL as sites for vital armaments production. Refusing to accept the inevitable, Pohl and his managers worked frantically to keep the last factories running, while the relentless Hans Kammler hoped to make new miracle weapons; after the Dora underground complex was abandoned, Kammler wanted to produce antiaircraft missiles in another tunnel system, by taking blueprints, machines, and prisoners to Ebensee.209 From the perspective of fanatics like Kammler, the idea of leaving able-bodied slaves behind in abandoned camps must have seemed like sabotage.

  Most important, perhaps, SS leaders believed that they had to protect the German public. They remembered the scare stories of the 1918 revolution, when freed prison inmates were (wrongly) accused of terrible crimes.210 Fears of a recurrence appeared to come true after the evacuation of Buchenwald. Although the Camp SS had managed to force some twenty-eight thousand prisoners out of the main camp at the last moment, following Himmler’s revised orders, another twenty-one thousand were still left inside when U.S. troops arrived. Their liberation came as a great surprise to the German civilian authorities—the Weimar police president called the camp in the late afternoon of April 11 to speak to Commandant Pister, only to be informed by a gleeful inmate that Pister was no longer available—and the region was soon awash with reports of prisoners pillaging and raping the helpless population. These stories were largely baseless; years of pent-up fears among locals distorted minor incidents into atrocities. But there was no stopping the rumors, which even reached the Führerbunker in Berlin. Hitler was livid, and is said to have instructed Himmler that all KL prisoners who could march had to be forced out during evacuations.211

  Himmler was spurred into action. Around April 15, 1945, he held a meeting with Camp SS officers, receiving Richard Glücks and other senior figures on his special train. Pointing to the alleged atrocities in Weimar, he evidently ordered the complete evacuation of the remaining KL.212 Just a few days later, around April 18, 1945, Himmler reiterated his hard line in a telex to Flossenbürg, brushing aside any suggestion of leaving inmates to the Allies: “There is no question of handing over the camp. No prisoners [must] fall alive into enemy hands. The prisoners in Weimar-Buchenwald abused the population in the cruelest way.”213 Similar instructions appear to have reached other main camps at the time.214

  Himmler’s uncompromising stance was hardened, no doubt, by recent accounts of Camp SS crimes in the foreign media. There had been earlier exposés, after the Allies reached sites like Majdanek, Natzweiler, and Auschwitz, including the first films shot in abandoned camps, but the echo abroad had still been muted.215 Not so in April 1945, as graphic images from recently liberated camps flashed around the globe. The media attention initially centered on Buchenwald, the first SS camp liberated in spring 1945 with large numbers of prisoners still inside.216 Himmler was furious about these reports, which made a mockery of his ongoing efforts to paint himself as a humanitarian. During his meeting with the representatives of the World Jewish Congress on April 20–21, 1945, he complained bitterly about the Buchenwald “horror stories” in the foreign media. In the future, Himmler threatened, he might not leave any more prisoners behind.217

  This was not the final word, however, as the local Camp SS did not, or could not, implement Himmler’s order to the letter. Of all the main camps abandoned during the last three weeks of the war, only Neuengamme was almost completely cleared. In Flossenbürg, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück, by contrast, the Camp SS left some invalids behind.218 The same happened in numerous satellite camps.219 So not all Camp SS men had understood Himmler’s instruction—insofar as it reached them—as an automatic order to march all mobile prisoners out and kill the rest.220

  In the last remaining camps, meanwhile, which persisted into the final days of the regime, the SS really had nowhere left to send all its prisoners. As a result, the Dachau main camp was only partially emptied, with U.S. troops liberating some thirty-two thousand inmates on April 29. And when SS officials fled Mauthausen, a few days later, they left some thirty-eight thousand prisoners behind in the main camp and in Gusen.221 In the last satellite camps (over eighty), too, the SS staff left most prisoners inside as they slipped away in early May. Still, until the Camp SS ran out of options, it generally tried to implement a policy of total (or near-total) evacuations.

  The most striking exception to the rule was Bergen-Belsen, the only main camp formally turned over to the Allies. On April 11, 1945, Himmler authorized his representative, SS Standartenführer Kurt Becher, to leave the area around Bergen-Belsen to the British army. Perhaps Himmler wanted to make a grand gesture to the West, though he also had pragmatic reasons for abandoning the camp and its prisoners, since an evacuation would have run the risk of spread
ing typhus among the German population and troops. Following the conclusion of a local armistice, British forces rolled up to the main camp entrance on the afternoon of April 15, 1945. They were greeted by Josef Kramer—the only SS commandant not to flee—who officially handed over the camp. British soldiers were shocked when they entered. Despite desperate SS efforts to clear up the site, more than thirteen thousand bodies were strewn across the main compounds. Major Alexander Smith Allan recalled “a carpet of human bodies, mostly very emaciated, many of them unclothed, jumbled together.” During an uneasy period of transition, some SS men initially helped to administer the camp; they even shot at prisoners. But as the full scale of the crimes emerged, British officers disarmed and detained the remaining SS staff. “The first person I arrested was Josef Kramer,” Sergeant Norman Turgel said after the war. “I was very proud of being a Jew who arrested one of the most notorious gangsters in Nazi Germany.”222

  Abandoning the Camps

  By spring 1945, the SS officials were experts in preparing for evacuations.223 Often, they began by closing the satellites nearest to the front line, moving prisoners back to the main camp or to satellites designated as reception camps. Although the advance of the Allies frequently foiled these plans, and diverted prisoner transports elsewhere, some of the reception camps became vast sites. In the Neuengamme complex, the two camps Wöbbelin and Sandbostel took in almost fifteen thousand prisoners in April 1945; conditions inside were infernal and around four thousand inmates died before liberation. “We could smell the Wöbbelin camp before we saw it,” the regional U.S. army commander later wrote.224

  Another well-established SS routine was the eradication of incriminating evidence. Across the remaining camps, the officials destroyed documents, torture instruments, and other proof of SS crimes, including the gallows. The gas chambers in Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrück were dismantled, too, while prisoner corpses were hastily buried or burned. The aim was to make everything “look decent” before the arrival of the Allies, as the Ravensbrück commandant Fritz Suhren told inmates. In the Neuengamme main camp, the SS even forced prisoners to clean the barrack floors and windows, and paint some of the walls, expecting a coat of whitewash to cover years of barbarity.225