KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  On the eve of the final evacuation, local Camp SS officials then decided the destiny of the remaining invalids. Many weakened inmates had perished over the preceding weeks and months. But the catastrophic conditions always created more Muselmänner, and their fate hung in the balance to the end. Individual Camp SS officials chose very different paths, just as their colleagues had done during earlier evacuations. Some forced the invalids to leave, providing that transport was available.226 Elsewhere, SS men left the sick behind as the camp was cleared. And there were also some final massacres, following Himmler’s maxim that no prisoners should fall into Allied hands.

  The treatment of invalids was only one of the dilemmas facing the local Camp SS. As they realized that camps like Buchenwald and Dachau could only be partially emptied, SS officials had to decide which prisoners to take with them. In Dachau, they began by assembling Jews, and later added Germans and Soviets. In total, 8,646 inmates left on April 26, 1945; almost half came from the Soviet Union, Jews made up more than a third, and Germans the rest.227 In Buchenwald, the SS started with Jews, as well, and then added others, among them Polish, Soviet, Czech, French, Belgian, and German inmates; more than half of the twenty-eight thousand prisoners who departed came from the “little camp.”228 Clearly, SS officials did not proceed at random during their selections for death transports. They targeted specific prisoners, especially those seen as high value or particularly dangerous, with Jewish “hostages” falling into both categories.229

  Prisoners did anything to avoid the final death transports. Having dreamed for so long about leaving the camps, they were now desperate to stay until the Allies arrived. During the partial evacuation of Buchenwald and Dachau, some prisoners tried to obstruct and delay the SS. But most defiance was easily broken. “With a handful of SS men one can force prisoners to do anything deemed necessary,” one Buchenwald inmate wrote despondently on April 9, 1945.230

  The mastery of the SS often ended at the camp gates, however. While it was still powerful enough to force prisoners out, it was unable to keep its transports on track. With the German transport system torn apart, trains constantly stopped or changed direction. Journeys that should have lasted a day took weeks, and the longer they lasted, the more prisoners died. When the remnant of a train that had left Buchenwald on April 7, 1945, with around five thousand prisoners on board reached Dachau some three weeks later, it was packed with more than two thousand dead (these were the corpses U.S. soldiers found as they first entered the camp on April 29). Elsewhere, SS guards pushed survivors out of trains that had got stuck in the middle of nowhere, and continued on foot. But with many roads no longer passable or cut off, treks often split or got lost. Prisoners felt as though they walked in circles, always escaping from the nearest Allied troops.231

  On the road, the SS transport leaders could expect no more guidance from their superiors. The communications network was collapsing, making contact with WVHA headquarters largely impossible. Soon, the WVHA disappeared altogether. Oswald Pohl left his office in Berlin in mid-April, shortly before the German capital was surrounded, and so did most of his men, including those in Office Group D; the last Camp SS managers, including Richard Glücks, fled from Oranienburg on April 20–21, 1945. After SS security guards locked the doors for a last time, the T-Building, the nerve center of the KL system since summer 1938, stood empty.232 And just as Germany was divided in late April, so, too, was the Camp SS. WVHA managers fleeing from Berlin split into two groups, one heading north, the other south, and quickly lost touch with each other.233

  With few exceptions, the final death transports were also supposed to move north or south, as the SS tried to hold on to its last prisoners.234 Initially, most transports headed for the remaining main camps. Likewise, Camp SS managers assembled in KL that were still operational. In the north, the rump of WVHA Office Group D set up a temporary base at Ravensbrück. Oswald Pohl, meanwhile, moved south (apparently on Himmler’s orders) and settled in his quarters on the Dachau plantation. Here he was joined by several other WVHA officers, including a few members of Office Group D and their families, as well as two former commandants, Richard Baer (Dora) and Hermann Pister (Buchenwald), and their staff. Just days before Dachau was liberated, Pohl presided over a last lavish supper for his men. Accustomed to an opulent life, he wanted to go out in style.235

  In late April 1945, as the last main camps came into reach of Allied troops, some transports began to head for wholly imaginary sites. In the south, Nazi leaders like RSHA chief Kaltenbrunner dreamed of an impregnable Alp fortress on Austrian soil, with its own arms factories. Several Camp SS officials duly moved toward this make-believe site in Tyrol. Among them were Commandant Pister and his colleague Eduard Weiter, who had replaced Martin Weiss as commandant of Dachau. They fled from Dachau at the last moment on April 28 or 29, driving off in convoys loaded with food and alcohol. With Himmler’s blessing, prisoner treks were heading south for the Ötz Valley, too, where a testing facility for fighter jets was being built. If necessary, Himmler ordered, the prisoners would have to live in holes in the ground; in the end, few even made it onto Austrian soil.236

  The SS in northern Germany also had visions of a remote new camp.237 Camp SS leaders considered various sites, including German cities near the Baltic coast (Lübeck and Flensburg) and an island in the Baltic Sea (Fehmarn). There was even talk of taking prisoners to Norway, where the former Auschwitz camp compound leader Aumeier was setting up a camp staffed by guards from Sachsenhausen. Although there were no proper plans to speak of, a number of prisoner convoys duly headed toward the northern corner of Germany. Many were cut off by Allied troops, but the SS still assembled well over ten thousand prisoners from Neuengamme and Stutthof in Neustadt (outside Lübeck) at the beginning of May 1945. Most were held on board three ships (the freighters Athen and Thielbek, and the passenger ship Cap Arcona) in Neustadt bay. Inmates were crammed belowdecks without food, water, or air; each morning, the Soviet prisoner Aleksander Machnew recalled, they had to lift out the dead on ropes.238

  Meanwhile, many Camp SS leaders gathered farther north, in Flensburg, the fanciful “Fortress North” that became a magnet for the die-hard elite of the Third Reich. It was the seat of the German caretaker government around Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the fanatical military commander who became Reich president after Hitler’s suicide on April 30, 1945, and it drew the experts of Nazi terror, as well, including leading SS and RSHA officers. Senior WVHA staff arrived via Ravensbrück, after fleeing the camp around April 28, and were joined by other Camp SS veterans. It was an illustrious group. All department leaders of Office Group D were present—Rudolf Höss, Gerhard Maurer, Enno Lolling, and Wilhelm Burger—as was their nominal boss, Richard Glücks. Also gathered were several former commandants—Max Pauly (Neuengamme), Anton Kaindl (Sachsenhausen), Fritz Suhren (Ravensbrück), and Paul Werner Hoppe (Stutthof)—accompanied by some of their staff. Finally, there was Bertha Eicke and her family; as the widow of the legendary Theodor Eicke, she was as close to royalty as anyone in the Camp SS, and was looked after personally by Höss. What brought all of them to Flensburg was, above all, the presence of Heinrich Himmler, who had also made his way north and met his men around May 3–4, 1945. It was to be the final conference between Himmler and his Camp SS leaders.239

  Lethal Transports

  The final death transports of spring 1945 reproduced the suffering of earlier evacuations. Prisoners had no hope of respite on marches, even after treks pulled up for the night. Barns and sheds were so packed that sleep was often impossible, while those lying out in the open—in quarries, fields, or forest clearings—shivered in the cold and rain; there were frequent scuffles, as well, with stronger inmates stealing food and blankets.240 Occasionally, the Camp SS regrouped along the way in provisional compounds. The largest such site was set up on April 23, 1945, when the first columns of the Sachsenhausen death march stopped near a village called Below. Even the most primitive satellite camp was well equipped compared to the
Below forest. At least sixteen thousand men and women slept in muddy holes or tents made from branches. During the day, they huddled around fires or walked a few steps to forage for bark, roots, and beetles. It was days before prisoners received real nourishment, after trucks from the ICRC, which monitored the course of the death march, arrived with food parcels. The distribution of milk, canned meat, and fruit undoubtedly saved prisoner lives. But hundreds were dead by the time the SS resumed the march on April 29–30, 1945.241

  SS murders mounted up during these last transports. Because of the growing reluctance of ordinary guards to cover themselves in blood just before the German defeat was sealed, Camp SS leaders entrusted the task of killing stragglers to selected SS men stationed at the rear of death march columns. The so-called burial detail on one of the Flossenbürg death marches, for example, was led by none other than Erich Muhsfeldt, the former chief of the Majdanek and Birkenau crematorium, whom we last encountered waving body parts at female guards. Veteran SS men like Muhsfeldt, who had long become inured to murder, occasionally taunted and tormented the exhausted prisoners before shooting them.242

  The fact that many of the hardened SS killers were anti-Semites, and many of their victims Jews, has led some historians to describe the spring 1945 death transports as the last stage of the Holocaust: with the gas chambers closed, Jewish prisoners were now exterminated by other methods.243 There is no doubt that Jews made up a large proportion of KL prisoners on these death marches—somewhere between one-third and half—and a large proportion of the dead.244 And yet, the SS made no attempt to systematically kill all Jews during evacuations. This time, there were no genocidal orders from above; on the contrary, Himmler talked about Jews as hostages, which was one reason why they were more likely than most prisoners to be moved out of camps as the Allies approached. During the ensuing death transports, Jews were not treated fundamentally differently from the other prisoners.245 They often marched together and shared a similar fate. In fact, with prisoner numbers and uniforms mixed up or missing, and many Jews using the confusion of the final weeks—when files were lost or destroyed—to conceal their identities, it was often impossible to tell them apart from other prisoner groups anyway. In the end, survival depended primarily on luck and strength.246

  Even when the SS specifically selected Jews for separate transports, it was not necessarily as a prelude to mass extermination. Many escorts of the train of “exchange Jews” that departed from Bergen-Belsen on April 10, 1945 were demoralized elderly ex-soldiers, and they largely left the prisoners in peace. Some shared food and cigarettes with them, while the transport leader tried to find additional supplies along the way. At times, the guards even allowed prisoners to leave the train and wander alone through the countryside to search for something edible—utterly unthinkable during earlier KL evacuations.247

  All this leads to a crucial conclusion: the main purpose of the KL evacuations was not the murder of Jews or other prisoners.248 Although mass death through exhaustion, hunger, disease, and bullets was an inevitable result, it was not the end itself. When it came to mass extermination, the SS still had more effective means at its disposal, as it demonstrated to devastating effect during occasional last-minute massacres.249 Nonetheless, the transports proved lethal and many tens of thousands of prisoners died on German roads, trains, and ships during April and early May 1945—including some killed inadvertently by Allied forces, perhaps the most tragic chapter in the course of the evacuations.250

  Prisoner deaths by friendly fire had increased with the escalation of bombing raids in 1944, as the Allies attacked various German factories using slave labor. One of the most lethal attacks came on August 24, 1944, when a U.S. raid on the Buchenwald armaments works killed almost four hundred prisoners, including the former SPD chairman in the Reichstag, Rudolf Breitscheid. The SS also suffered more than one hundred casualties during the attack, including many relatives of SS men; Gerhard Maurer, the de facto leader of Office Group D, lost his wife and three children when a shelter was hit.251 Other main KL were bombed, too, as were some satellites.252 Prisoners had mixed feelings about these raids. They reveled in the vulnerability of their SS tormentors, and in the fact that Allied air supremacy would shorten the war. At the same time, they knew that their would-be liberators might kill them, as the bombs were blind to the difference between perpetrator and victim. When prisoners from the Dachau screw factory were hit in October 1944 by a hail of bombs, they thought “that this would be the end of us all,” Edgar Kupfer wrote soon after in his secret diary, recovering from a broken foot in the infirmary.253

  The threat to prisoner lives from the air increased in the first months of 1945, as Allied planes dropped more bombs than ever and low-flying aircraft began strafing soldiers and civilians. Among the targets was the notorious Oranienburg brick works, which were flattened on April 10, 1945, burying hundreds of inmates among the rubble. A raid on Nordhausen a few days earlier had claimed even more lives, killing 1,300 prisoners in the Boelcke death zone.254 Many more casualties came outside the KL. Evacuation trains were particularly vulnerable. On the evening of April 8, 1945, for example, a U.S. attack on the freight depot at Celle partially destroyed a long train, which had arrived with almost 3,500 prisoners from Neuengamme and Buchenwald; several hundred were killed, many more badly wounded.255

  The worst disaster came right at the end of the war, on May 3, 1945. During a major British aerial attack on German ships around Kiel and Lübeck, several missiles hit the Thielbek and Cap Arcona in Neustadt bay. An urgent warning from the Swiss Red Cross that both ships held inmates had not been passed on in time. Prisoners who survived the explosions and fires on board froze to death or drowned; some were shot by British fighter planes. “I had already swum a little,” Anatolij Kulikow later testified, “but to keep swimming any farther was beyond my power.” He was saved by other prisoners in a lifeboat, some of the five hundred survivors of what may be the largest naval catastrophe in history, having claimed over seven thousand lives.256

  Ordinary Germans

  At around four-thirty on the afternoon of April 26, 1945, the concentration camps came to Oberlindhart, a sleepy hamlet amid the rolling hills of Lower Bavaria. Centa Schmalzl, a fifty-two-year-old housekeeper on her brother’s farm, was alone when a trek of around 280 prisoners slowly came into view, surrounded by a few dozen SS escorts. The agitated transport leader, an elderly SS man with a bright red face, told Schmalzl brusquely that they would stay for the night. He then demanded a bed for a woman he introduced as his wife and some food for his guards, who made themselves comfortable in the kitchen. Centa Schmalzl watched as the guards beat prisoners who begged for food. They also hit a local French laborer who tried to give water to the captives. After the SS had finally distributed a few potatoes among the starving prisoners, they locked them in a barn, though not for long. Following a nearby explosion, the panicking SS men forced them out again after midnight. Just before the column left, Centa Schmalzl heard shots from the barn. An SS man emerged and asked her to get rid of three corpses inside; the other prisoners marched away, disappearing into the night.257

  This trek was part of a death march that had left Buchenwald on April 7 with more than three thousand prisoners, mostly Jews from the “little camp,” and which had since split into different groups. Oberlindhart was one of countless crime scenes along the way, as the trek wound toward faraway Dachau.258 Similar scenes took place all over Germany in spring 1945. In streets, squares, and stations, local Germans were confronted with death transports from the KL: they saw the beatings, heard the shots, and smelled the dead. SS terror had become ever more visible since the spread of satellite camps in late 1943. Now it fully spilled into the open, as prisoners appeared even in remote corners like Oberlindhart.259

  The responses of ordinary Germans varied, as they had done during earlier encounters. One reaction was shock; even months later, some witnesses were unable to testify without breaking down.260 Occasionally, dismayed locals left f
ood and drink on the roads, or handed it directly to prisoners.261 Others aided those who had fled. There were plenty of escapes during the transports as desperate prisoners used the growing chaos to steal away, often at the spur of the moment.262 The prisoners were helped by the fact that many were wearing civilian clothing, after the WVHA had run out of prisoner uniforms months earlier.263 To succeed, the fugitives often needed local Germans to turn a blind eye or to offer shelter.264 On April 28, 1945, in a singular event in the history of the KL, some fifteen escaped prisoners even joined a local uprising by civilians in Dachau, the birthplace of the KL. Determined to hand over the town to U.S. troops without bloodshed, the small group of rebels stormed the town hall. SS men soon surrounded them, and although most rebels got away, six were shot dead.265

  Far more common than popular support, however, was silence. The few German helpers were far outnumbered by the silent majority, which stood by or looked away as transports passed through. Such passivity could conceal different emotions, as we have seen, including curiosity, indifference, and resignation.266 Above all, there was fear. Fear of the SS, which threatened locals willing to help prisoners and occasionally lashed out at them.267 Fear of guilt by association, because civilians wanted nothing to do with SS crimes as the Allies were about to arrive; when a guard dragged away an exhausted prisoner in a village near Oberlindhart, a local woman beseeched him not to shoot his victim right outside her house.268 And finally, there was the fear of the prisoners. The picture of KL inmates as dangerous criminals was firmly entrenched, and some locals openly vented their disgust, shouting “traitors!” “bandits!” and “bastards!” as treks passed.269 SS guards encouraged such hostility, reminding the locals: “These are criminals.”270