KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Fear sometimes turned into paranoia and panic, with apocalyptic visions of escaped criminals attacking defenseless civilians. In reality, most prisoners on the run were careful to stay out of sight. But this did not stop the rumors about hordes of dangerous prisoners on the loose, which fed on similar anxieties about marauding bands of foreign workers. Local officials and newspapers sounded hysterical warnings, and there was plenty of talk about looting, rape, and murder, just as there had been after the evacuation of Buchenwald.271 Galvanized into action, elderly men from the People’s Storm, youngsters from the Hitler Youth, small-time party officials, and upstanding members of the local community reported escaped prisoners to the authorities or joined in manhunts, typical for the decentralization of Nazi terror toward the end of the Third Reich.272

  Among the victims were prisoners who escaped from the train in Celle in the wake of the U.S. air raid on April 8, 1945. The following morning, German soldiers, policemen, and SS forces combed nearby gardens and woods, where most prisoners were hiding, and shot them at point-blank range. Local civilians took part, too. The massacre was masterminded by the local military commander, who claimed that prisoners were “plundering and murdering” all over town; in all, at least 170 prisoners were killed around Celle.273 In numerous other German towns and villages, too, fugitive prisoners were murdered with the help of the local population. It was “a real bloodbath,” one witness wrote after a similar pursuit, still stunned by the sudden killing frenzy that had come over some of his neighbors, who shot prisoners cowering in cellars, sheds, and barns.274

  Some locals also participated in massacres of prisoners still under SS control. This is what happened on April 13, 1945, in Gardelegen, a small town north of Magdeburg. Several prisoner treks had recently reached the area, which was almost completely encircled by U.S. troops. Arguing that the prisoners would pose a grave threat to the population if liberated, the fanatical young Nazi Party district leader in Gardelegen pushed for mass murder. He was supported by other locals, whipped up by stories of outrages committed by fugitive prisoners. On the afternoon of April 13, the prisoners were marched from army barracks in the center of town to an isolated brick barn outside. The killers—a motley crew of SS men, paratroopers, and others—used torches and flamethrowers to ignite the petrol-soaked straw inside the barn, and threw grenades. The barn was soon ablaze. “The screams by the men who were burning alive grew louder, as did the groans,” the Polish prisoner Stanisław Majewicz, one of around twenty-five survivors, later recalled. Those who tried to flee were cut down with machine guns. When U.S. troops reached the site on April 15, they found around a thousand charred corpses.275

  News of this atrocity rapidly spread through the U.S. press, and Gardelegen has become a symbol of Nazi war crimes. But it was the exception, not the norm. Few local leaders were as bent on mass murder as those in Gardelegen. Just some twenty miles away, for instance, another Nazi Party official protected a trek of five hundred prisoners in his village. And even in Gardelegen, only a small number of citizens actively participated in the murder of prisoners. Many more Germans, here and elsewhere, had little desire to tie themselves to a lost cause.276

  The KL and their prisoners always drew a range of responses from ordinary Germans. Popular opinion was never united, not at the beginning of the Third Reich, and not at the end, either. The wide spectrum of reactions was evident even in small villages like Oberlindhart. Most locals had watched in silence as the Buchenwald trek halted on April 26, 1945. A few called for mass executions; several others, among them the mayor, sheltered fugitives. The local drama continued even after the trek had left the village. Some fervent inhabitants denounced prisoners who had hidden in the barn of the Schmalzl family. But there was another twist: a local policeman took pity on the recaptured prisoners after they pleaded for their lives, and led them to a different farm, where they stayed until U.S. soldiers arrived the following day. They were finally free.277

  The End

  By early May 1945, even the most blinkered Nazi fanatic knew that the game was up. The Third Reich was in ruins, and many career SS men like Rudolf Höss felt that “with the Führer, our world has gone under, too.” Their last hope was Heinrich Himmler. As Höss and the other Camp SS managers prepared to meet their leader in Flensburg on May 3–4, 1945, they probably expected a final battle cry. Would Himmler offer them another fantastic vision to cling to? Or would he order them to go down in a blaze of glory? But there was no last stand. All smiles, Himmler, who had been frozen out of the new Dönitz government, breezily announced that he had no more directives for the KL. Before he dismissed his men with a handshake, he issued one last order: the officials should disguise themselves and go into hiding, just as he planned to do himself.278

  Even in defeat, the Camp SS leaders followed Himmler. Several men from Office Group D dressed in navy uniforms and took false identities. Gerhard Maurer became Paul Kehr, and Höss turned into Franz Lang. In disguise, Höss and Maurer, together with several other WVHA men, took jobs on small farms in rural northern Germany and initially evaded capture. Their former boss Richard Glücks, however, who had taken the jolly moniker Sonnemann (Sunnyman), had no hope of passing himself off as a farmhand. Glücks was a shadow of the sturdy figure he had been six years earlier, when he took over the KL system. His gradual loss of institutional power, evident not least in his increasingly rare meetings with Oswald Pohl, had been accompanied by a marked physical decline. Popping pills and drinking heavily, he was rumored to have lost his mind, and ended up in a German military hospital in Flensburg, more dead than alive. On May 10, 1945, just after the capitulation of the Third Reich, Glücks killed himself, biting on a capsule of potassium cyanide.279

  Glücks’s death was part of a wave of suicides that swept Germany in spring 1945. Nazi propaganda extolled suicide as the ultimate sacrifice. In truth, it was mostly fear and despair that led former Nazi officials to take their lives.280 The roll call of SS suicides was led by Heinrich Himmler, who killed himself on May 23, 1945, in British captivity, two days after his arrest. Among the other Camp SS officers who died by their own hand were Enno Lolling and the last Dachau commandant, Eduard Weiter.281 Most of the dead were hard-bitten veterans, though some had felt more ambivalent about the KL system, among them Hans Delmotte, the young Auschwitz doctor who had broken down during his first selection of prisoners.282 Like Himmler and Glücks, several Camp SS suicides used cyanide, which had been tested a few months earlier for this very purpose during a lethal prisoner trial in Sachsenhausen. A few others, like the Gross-Rosen commandant Arthur Rödl, departed in more dramatic style: a man with a long history of hands-on violence, Rödl chose a suitably gory death and blew himself up with a hand grenade.283

  Most Camp SS officers, however, wanted to survive the Third Reich. They may have talked about heroic sacrifice and kamikaze missions, but in the end, they scrambled to save their skins.284 The mass of SS guards did the same. In the remaining camps, the officials often stayed away from the compounds in the final days, plotting their getaway. When the moment came, they changed into civilian clothes and disappeared.285 Likewise, SS escorts on death transports tried to evade capture at the last moment; if there were no regular clothes at hand, they put on prisoner uniforms.286

  Before they made their escape, SS escorts had to decide the fate of the remaining prisoners on their transports. Some chose to kill. Early on May 3, 1945, for example, SS men ordered prisoners on a Buchenwald death march, which had reached a small forest near Traunstein in Bavaria, to line up and opened fire, killing fifty-eight men. Then the guards “threw away their weapons and made a quick getaway,” testified the only survivor, who had lain injured under two dead comrades.287 Elsewhere, SS escorts disappeared during brief stops or overnight, concerned only with saving themselves.288 When the survivors of a Sachsenhausen death march awoke on May 2, 1945, in a forest clearing outside a small village near Schwerin, with all guards gone, they were dumbfounded. “We could not comprehend it, not
believe it,” the Austrian Jew Walter Simoni recalled after the war.289 But the abandoned prisoners were not yet safe; they were “free people but not liberated,” as one survivor later put it, still in danger of falling victim to Nazi fanatics. Bewildered and exhausted, some dazed prisoners actually continued their aimless march, even without SS escorts.290 Only the arrival of the Allies finally put an end to the transports. We will never know how many prisoners gained their freedom in April and early May 1945 in German cities and villages, on trains, in forests, and on the open road, but their total number most probably exceeded one hundred thousand.291

  Many more men, women, and children survived inside the last KL. During the final five weeks of the Third Reich, the Allies liberated an estimated one hundred and sixty thousand prisoners in main camps, most of them in Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Mauthausen-Gusen. In addition, Allied troops found an estimated ninety thousand prisoners in over one hundred satellite camps, in some cases even after the official German capitulation. The great majority of liberated satellites were small, holding fewer than one thousand prisoners. But there were also huge ones like Ebensee, where U.S. troops encountered an estimated sixteen thousand survivors on May 6, 1945. Among them were Dr. Miklós Nyiszli, who had arrived on the death transport from Auschwitz in January 1945, and the Czech interpreter Drahomír Bárta, a longtime inmate of the camp. When the first U.S. soldiers appeared in Ebensee, Bárta noted in his diary, they were greeted by “indescribable scenes of joy and ecstasy.”292

  The final moments of captivity were full of confusion. The prisoners had long been suspended in a state of nervous exhaustion, between hope of liberation and fear of SS massacres, stray bullets, and bombs. “All that has kept us going for three weeks is the rumor that the war will only last for two or three more days,” Ágnes Rózsa wrote on April 28, 1945, in the Flossenbürg satellite camp Holleischen, where she had arrived after the bombing of her old camp in Nuremberg. She endured another week of slave labor in a nearby munitions workshop, until it was hit by Allied bombs on May 3, 1945. Rózsa survived once more, but she was still in SS hands. “Our liberation is so close and so real,” she wrote the following day. “That makes the thought that we have to die at the last minute … even more unbearable.” When freedom finally came on the morning of May 5—with U.S. soldiers emerging from the surrounding forest—it came suddenly. Silence fell across the former farm that made up the Holleischen camp. Then there were shouts of “They are coming! They are here!” followed by wild screams from more than one thousand women inside.293

  On occasion, the transition from terror to freedom came in a more orderly fashion. In Buchenwald, SS Commandant Pister told the camp elder, the German Communist Hans Eiden, early on April 11, 1945, that he would hand the camp over to him. Soon after, a final command went out over the loudspeakers, ordering SS members to move out immediately. By now, U.S. troops were in the immediate vicinity; shots were ringing out as the SS fled, with the guards on the watchtowers the last to leave. In midafternoon, with the SS finally gone, prisoners emerged from hiding and went toward the main gate. Soon after, Eiden spoke over the public address system, confirming that “the SS has left the camp” and that an international committee of prisoners was in control. When the U.S. troops reached the main compound, a white flag greeted them on one of the towers.294

  In Dachau, too, U.S. soldiers saw a white flag when they arrived on the afternoon of April 29, 1945, though here the flag had been raised by anxious SS men, not the prisoners. Although Dachau was not the last concentration camp to fall, its liberation symbolized the destruction of the Nazi terror machine. It was more than twelve years since the SS had set up its first makeshift camp on the site. Since then, Dachau had changed its appearance many times over and gained multiple functions: bulwark of the Nazi revolution, model camp, SS training ground, slave labor reservoir, human experimentation site, mass extermination ground, and center of a satellite camp network. Dachau was not the most deadly KL, but it was the most notorious at the time, inside Germany and abroad. “Dachau, Germany’s most dreaded extermination camp, has been captured,” The New York Times reported on its front page on May 1, 1945. Of the more than two hundred thousand prisoners who had passed through the Dachau complex since 1933, at least fourteen thousand had perished in the final months from January 1945, not counting all the unknown victims, like those of the death marches that continued for several days after the liberation of the main camp.295

  The final hours in Dachau had been just as tense as in the other camps. By the morning of April 29, 1945, most SS men had fled, but the guards on the watchtowers still trained their machine guns on the prisoners. Detonations could be heard close by, planes roared across the overcast sky, and the howl of tank engines came and went. Then prisoners listened as small arms fire edged closer, with some guards shooting back. Finally, a U.S. officer, accompanied by two reporters, peered into the compound from the gatehouse and entered the empty roll call square. Within minutes, the square was bursting with ecstatic inmates, who embraced and kissed the liberators. “They grabbed us,” the officer wrote the following day, “and tossed us into the air screaming at the top of their lungs.”296

  Before long, all of Dachau was in an uproar, with the news spreading fast across the compound. Even prisoners in the infirmary heard the revelry and began to celebrate. Among them was Edgar Kupfer, the intrepid chronicler of Dachau, who had become weaker and weaker in recent months. Now he watched from his bed as other sick prisoners struggled to their feet and went outside, or looked through the windows at the tumultuous scenes.297

  Soon Kupfer was joined by Moritz Choinowski, who had been treated in the Dachau infirmary a few weeks earlier for an ear infection. It was almost a miracle that the fifty-year-old Polish-born Jew was still alive. His ordeal in the KL had begun years earlier, on September 28, 1939, when the Gestapo took him from his adopted hometown of Magdeburg to Buchenwald. That afternoon, Choinowski had handed over everything—his money, documents, suit, hat, shirt, socks, jumper, and trousers—and become a concentration camp inmate. “I stood there naked and received a convict uniform,” he later wrote. His red-yellow triangle marked him out as a political prisoner (he had been an SPD supporter) and as a Jew. He survived the early war years in Buchenwald, despite several months in the lethal quarry and repeated corporal punishment (including three times “twenty-five blows”), and escaped the clutches of the murderous T-4 doctors. He survived his first mass selection in Auschwitz, soon after his arrival there on October 19, 1942, on a freight car with some four hundred other men from Buchenwald. He survived more selections over the coming two years in Auschwitz-Monowitz, at the height of the Holocaust, and also withstood more illness, starvation, and beatings, despite serious injuries. He survived the death transport from Auschwitz via the hell of Gross-Rosen, during which an SS bullet only just missed his head, hitting his ear instead, and arrived in Dachau on January 28, 1945. And he survived the final months of forced labor, even though he was now badly emaciated and sick, and contracted typhus, which claimed thousands of lives in Dachau in early 1945. Somehow Moritz Choinowski had survived all this, and on April 29, 1945, after more than two thousand days in the KL, he was free. “Is this possible?” he sobbed, as he hugged and kissed Edgar Kupfer in the Dachau infirmary. “And he cries,” Kupfer continued in his diary, “and I think about how he has suffered, and I cannot hold back my tears.”298

  Epilogue

  Liberation was a cathartic moment. Many inmates felt grief and rage for all they had lost, but also relief and euphoria. They were alive and the camps were gone. One could end the story here, with the embrace of Moritz Choinowski and Edgar Kupfer in Dachau encapsulating the suffering of prisoners and the hopes of survivors. But these hopes were often dashed, and this legacy of the camps is part of their history, too. In fact, some survivors never had any hope at all. Thousands of them were so sick they did not realize what had happened; as Choinowski and Kupfer hugged, prisoners nearby were dying and stared
straight past the U.S. soldiers.1 Others observed the jubilation with incomprehension. One teenage survivor of Dachau, who had lost his father only weeks earlier, recalled that he “watched the people sing and dance with joy, and they seemed to me as if they’d lost their minds. I looked at myself and couldn’t recognize who I was.”2 Among the more ecstatic survivors, meanwhile, the initial excitement quickly waned as they emerged from the depths of the KL.

  Take Moritz Choinowski himself. Released from an American-run hospital in Dachau in June 1945, he moved to a camp for displaced persons (DPs) and then, in early 1946, to a sparsely furnished room on the outskirts of Munich. For the next three years, he led a pitiful life. His body had been ruined by the camps; he could barely use his left arm and was in constant pain, not least from chronically infected scars left by SS whippings. Unable to work, he depended on welfare for his rent, food, heating, bedding, and clothes. “I have not received any shoes since 1946,” he pleaded with an aid organization in April 1948. He was all alone, assuming wrongly that his daughter and his ex-wife (their marriage had been annulled by a Nazi court because she was an “Aryan”) had died in a devastating bombing raid on Magdeburg that destroyed their home. His last hope was to join his brother in the United States, which appeared to many DPs like the promised land. Tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors headed for North America in the late 1940s, after the United States temporarily relaxed its immigration restrictions, and in June 1949 Choinowski boarded the navy ship General Muir to cross the Atlantic. After spending some time with his brother in Detroit, he moved to Toledo, Ohio, where he married another survivor in 1952. But he could not remake his old life.