KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  The situation was very different for most eastern European survivors. Inside the former camp compounds, Soviet inmates heard alarming rumors about what would happen to them, prompting a Dachau bulletin (run by loyal Stalinists) to issue an emphatic denial: everyone will be welcomed home “with care and love,” a Red Army captain promised. Even skeptics had little choice, however, as the western Allies, on whose territory most displaced Soviets lived, had agreed to repatriate them, even if it meant using force. Between spring and autumn 1945, tens of thousands of KL survivors arrived in Soviet filtration and assembly camps, where they were received with suspicion and hostility. Alleged cowards, deserters, and traitors were quickly drafted into forced labor or sentenced to the Gulag. “It is difficult for me to talk about it,” recalled a Ukrainian survivor of Dachau, who had been sent to the coal mines in the Donets Basin upon his return. “We survived the concentration camps and then some of our comrades died here in these mines.” Those who escaped punishment often faced prejudice in Soviet society and stayed silent about their experiences in the KL.33

  Eastern European Jews also endured great adversity after they returned from the camps. Within weeks of being freed, many tens of thousands had come home (most of them to Hungary).34 Their first goal was to find missing relatives, but all too often, hope turned to despair. Lina Stumachin, a survivor of several KL, walked back from Saxony to Poland as fast as her swollen legs would take her. “In my imagination,” she said later, “I saw my house, and those that I had lost would come back to me.” When she finally arrived in the spa town of Zakopane, where she had run a shop before the war, goats were grazing where her house had once stood. There was no sign of her husband or child, either: “I waited for long days and weeks for nothing.”35 There was little local support for survivors like Stumachin. The Nazis had eradicated traditional Jewish culture, together with most Polish Jews. Local Poles, meanwhile, often refused to return homes and other possessions they had taken over after the deportation of the Jewish owners (the same happened in Hungary and the Baltic States). A wave of anti-Jewish discrimination and violence soon drove many concentration camp survivors back to the west, mainly to the U.S. zone of occupied Germany, together with Jews who had sheltered on Soviet territory during the war.36

  Almost all foreign KL survivors who still lived on German soil in 1946 came from eastern Europe, and some stayed in permanent DP camps until well into the 1950s. Many were organized in survivor committees—mostly along national lines—that documented their suffering and promoted their interests. Among those resisting repatriation were thousands of Ukrainian and Baltic nationals who had no desire to live under Soviet rule. The same was true for some Poles from areas swallowed up by the USSR. Other Poles worried about the growing Communist domination over their country, which would eventually claim the lives of survivors like Witold Pilecki, who had played a significant part in the Auschwitz prisoner underground; arrested by the Polish secret police, he was executed in 1948 for his anticommunist activities.37

  Then there were those Jewish KL survivors without anywhere to return to. Most vulnerable were the children. Thomas (Tommy) Buergenthal was lucky, being reunited with his mother (herself a survivor of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück) in late 1946 in Göttingen, Germany. Many others never saw their parents again and stayed in orphanages. It was in one such home in Paris that Lina Stumachin worked, after she had left Zakopane and Poland for good. Looking after the orphans, she told an interviewer in September 1946, helped her to fill the emptiness in her life and to forget “that you once had your own home, your own family, that you once had your own child.” As for the future, she wanted to accompany the orphans to Palestine. Other Jewish DPs also headed there, especially after the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948; even here, though, they faced a difficult start to their new lives, overshadowed by the past, poverty, and the mistrust of earlier Jewish settlers. Of course, by no means all survivors were Zionists, and many thousands were admitted to countries like Britain and the United States; among them was Buergenthal, who arrived in New York in 1951, now aged seventeen, and embarked on a distinguished legal career culminating in his appointment to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.38

  Wherever they lived, and however successful they became, the survivors bore scars that never healed. “No one came out as he went in,” wrote Eugen Kogon.39 Most noticeable were the physical wounds. Former prisoners left the camps marked by illness and infirmity, and most never regained their full strength. When Hermine Horvath, who had been dragged to Auschwitz and Ravensbrück as a Gypsy, was interviewed in January 1958, she explained how infections, frostbite, and medical experiments had left her unable to work. “I would like to start [my life] again from the beginning,” she said, “if only I could be healthy”; she died two months later, just thirty-three years old. Many other survivors died by their own hand, sometimes decades after liberation, like Jean Améry, shining a glaring light on the mental scars left by the KL.40

  The “memory of the offense” stayed with survivors for decades, Primo Levi wrote shortly before his own apparent suicide in 1987, “denying peace to the tormented.”41 Many were traumatized by what they had seen, what they had suffered, and what they had done. At the end of his anguished 1946 memoir, Miklós Nyiszli, the prisoner who had assisted Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz, swore that he would never again lift a scalpel.42 More generally, former prisoners often felt that their survival was somehow undeserved, given the deaths of so many others. They suffered from apathy and anxiety, and their condition was further aggravated by the limited mental health provision of the 1950s and 1960s. The doctors only diagnosed his physical problems, one survivor complained at the time, “but what I need is a person who understands my trouble.”43

  Former inmates bore the burden of the camps in different ways. Some dedicated their lives to the legacy of the KL, by commemorating them in survivor associations and publications, by becoming politicians to right society’s wrongs, or by pursuing the perpetrators. Barely recovered from his ordeal, which had left him close to death in Mauthausen, Simon Wiesenthal offered his services to the local U.S. commander on May 25, 1945, because “the crimes of these men [the Nazis] are of such magnitude that no effort can be spared to apprehend them”; this became Wiesenthal’s mission until his death sixty years later.44 Other survivors, too, helped to convict Camp SS men.45 Others again, like David Rousset and Margarete Buber-Neumann, spoke out against political violence and terror more widely, even though their vigorous campaign against the Soviet Gulag in the late 1940s and 1950s lost them many friends on the left, including fellow survivors.46

  Far more former prisoners withdrew into their private lives, returning to their careers, resuming their education, rebuilding families. Still, they often shared their experiences in private with other survivors (often spouses or close friends). This was true for several hundred Jewish children, almost all of them orphans, who were brought to Britain in 1945–46, settled there, and never lost touch. “We were better than blood brothers,” recalled Kopel Kendall (born Kandelcukier) more than five decades later. “That saved me.”47

  Finally, there were those who wanted to erase the camps from their mind. This impulse was forcefully expressed by Shlomo Dragon in May 1945, at the end of a long testimony about his time in the Special Squad. “I desperately want to return to a normal life,” he told Polish investigators, “and forget everything I experienced in Auschwitz.” Like Dragon, some survivors tried to repress their memories and focused only on the present, often burying themselves in work.48 But even when the past did not haunt them during the day, it came back at night. According to a 1970s survey of Auschwitz survivors, most of them frequently dreamed about the camps.49 Shlomo Dragon himself, who emigrated to Israel with his brother in late 1949, suffered from nightmares, too. Only after many years of silence, enforced by the stigma surrounding the Special Squad, did the two brothers begin to speak about the inferno of Birkenau.50

  Other survivors had to confront the
past in the courtroom, as they testified against their former tormentors. Not everyone had the will to do so. “If my nightmares could be used as evidence in court, I would no doubt be an important witness,” wrote one Auschwitz survivor in 1960, as he declined the invitation of a German court to testify.51 But many more did appear, driven by a desire for justice, as well as by a sense of duty, both to history and to the dead.52 The experience was harrowing. As soon as they stepped onto the stand, they had to relive the worst moments of their lives. Asked by a judge in 1964 whether he was married, Lajos Schlinger replied: “Well, I have no wife. She stayed in Auschwitz.”53 The pressure of the courtroom, heightened by skeptical judges, hostile lawyers, and brazen defendants, proved too much for some. During the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, one survivor leaped out of the witness box and hit one of the accused, who had tortured him during the Dachau seawater experiments. “This bastard has ruined my life,” he screamed as guards led him away.54 Former prisoners were also frustrated by their inability to recall crimes in sufficient detail. Most unnerving of all, though, was the outcome of many judicial investigations, especially in later years, when fewer cases came to court and sentences grew more lenient.55 This was not the kind of justice that inmates had imagined as they clung to their lives inside the camps.

  Justice

  Prisoners often fantasized about revenge. Dreams of vengeance sustained them during their darkest days in the KL, and still gripped them in the face of death. Expecting to perish in the 1944 Special Squad uprising, one Birkenau prisoner expressed his regret that he could not “take revenge as I would like to.”56 After liberation, some survivors released their pent-up thirst for vengeance. In the first hours of freedom, they humiliated, tortured, and killed SS personnel, and defiled their corpses; in Dachau, a U.S. official watched an emaciated inmate urinate on the face of a dead guard.57 Since most SS staff had slipped away, however, it was hated Kapos who bore the brunt of mob violence. Many hundreds were battered, strangled, and trampled to death, including notorious figures like the former Auschwitz camp elder Bruno Brodniewicz. Fellow survivors felt that justice was being done; after all, the right to kill cruel Kapos had long been a basic law of the camp. “It was dreadful and inhumane, and still just,” Drahomír Bárta wrote about a massacre at Ebensee, which may have claimed over fifty former prisoner functionaries.58

  Despite the inmates’ suffering and habituation to violence, such revenge killings remained relatively rare.59 Many survivors were too weak, or found no targets for their fury; others, including some senior inmates, urged moderation. “We should not act as they [the Germans] acted toward us,” one Buchenwald survivor counseled, otherwise “we would have been just like them in the end.”60 Equally important was the restraint exercised by the Allied forces. True, some soldiers stayed on the sidelines early on, happy for prisoners to exact revenge. In the heat of the moment, a few went even further and shot SS men and Kapos; overwhelmed by the sight of the corpses on the Dachau death train on April 29, 1945, some U.S. soldiers executed the first SS men they met and then mowed down dozens more, lined up against a wall, before an agitated officer intervened.61 But this was an isolated incident. The Allies guarded the great majority of captured perpetrators and put a stop to further outbreaks of violence.62 The accused would be judged not by their victims, but by the courts.

  The punishment of Nazi criminals had been a major war aim, and the Camp SS was among the main targets in spring 1945. Soon after Allied troops had liberated the last large camps, American, British, and Soviet war crimes investigators arrived on the scene, and collected evidence for military trials. The most prominent court was established on a site that the SS had once revered—Dachau. In a highly symbolic move, the U.S. army turned the birthplace of the camp system into a center for war crimes trials (there were practical reasons, as well: the site was used since summer 1945 as a U.S. internment camp). Up to the end of 1947, the Dachau court prosecuted some one thousand defendants for KL crimes.63

  The first of these Dachau trials began on November 15, 1945, inside a former slave labor workshop. In the dock were forty men from KL Dachau, led by Commandant Martin Weiss. Designed to dispense swift justice, the court found all the defendants guilty in less than a month and sentenced the vast majority to death. They were convicted for participating in a “common design” to commit war crimes against enemy civilians and POWs since January 1942 (the date of the Declaration of the United Nations), a legal construct that made them liable even if there was no evidence for their involvement in individual killings. This served as the legal model for later prosecutions in Dachau, which included principal trials of staff from other main camps liberated by U.S. troops (Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, and Dora), as well as some 250 successor trials, mostly involving staff from attached satellite camps. Death sentences were carried out in Landsberg prison and the impenitent Commandant Weiss was one of the first to die, hanged in May 1946. “It is worth dying for your fatherland,” he wrote in a farewell letter to his infant sons.64

  While the U.S. court in Dachau was the most prolific, it was not the first Allied military court to convict concentration camp perpetrators. The earliest British case—against men and women accused of concerted war crimes in Bergen-Belsen—had been heard between September and November 1945 in Lüneburg. In the end, thirty defendants were convicted (fourteen were found innocent), of whom eleven were sentenced to death by hanging; one of those executed in Hameln prison on December 13, 1945, was Josef Kramer, the former commandant. Others followed over the coming months, as British military courts sentenced more perpetrators from main and satellite camps.65 French military courts also prosecuted KL crimes; one of these trials led to the execution in June 1950 of the former Ravensbrück commandant Fritz Suhren, who had lived under a false name in Bavaria until he was recognized by his former secretary.66 Soviet military tribunals, too, punished KL perpetrators. The most high-profile case was the Berlin trial of Sachsenhausen staff, which ended in November 1947 with life terms for fourteen defendants (the USSR had temporarily abandoned capital punishment), among them “Iron” Gustav Sorge and Wilhelm “Pistol” Schubert; within less than a year, six of the defendants, including the former commandant Anton Kaindl, had perished in Soviet labor camps.67

  In addition to Allied courts in occupied Germany, former Camp SS staff faced justice in Poland, which had been the major site of KL crimes. In fact, it was a Polish special court, set up by the provisional Communist government, that presided over the first trial and execution: in late 1944, five men from Majdanek were publicly hanged next to the former crematorium. After the war was over, more proceedings followed. Numerous cases came before special courts, including a trial in Gdańsk that ended in summer 1946 in the public hanging of Stutthof officials, with eleven former prisoners, dressed in their old uniforms, acting as executioners. The most high-profile cases came before the new Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow. On September 5, 1946, it condemned Amon Göth, the commandant of Plaszow, to death. On December 22, 1947, it convicted thirty-nine Auschwitz perpetrators; the twenty-three defendants who received the death penalty included Arthur Liebehenschel, Hans Aumeier, Maximilian Grabner, and Erich Muhsfeldt (Dr. Johann Paul Kremer’s death sentence was later commuted because of his advanced age). And on April 2, 1947, it sentenced the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, who had been tracked down the previous year on a remote farm by a British war crimes unit. Two weeks later, Höss stood on a scaffold erected at the former Auschwitz main camp and gazed beyond a group of spectators across the grounds of the concentration camp he had established almost seven years earlier. In a typically bold gesture, he moved his head to adjust the noose. Then the trapdoor opened.68

  Before Höss had left occupied Germany, as one of many hundreds of KL perpetrators extradited to Poland by the Allies, he testified before the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal for leading Nazi perpetrators. The concentration camps had already featured during the first of these trials against major war crimina
ls: Hermann Göring was charged with setting up the KL system, the former RSHA chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner with helping to run it, and Albert Speer with directing forced labor inside (the SS, meanwhile, was declared a criminal organization). One of the most poignant moments came on November 29, 1945, when U.S. prosecutors showed a one-hour film about KL atrocities. Some of the defendants seemed shocked, for the first time, while public sentiment against them hardened. “Why can’t we shoot the swine now?” one spectator exclaimed.69

  The camps occupied an even more prominent place in subsequent Nuremberg tribunals. In the IG Farben trial (August 1947–July 1948), senior managers stood accused of exploiting prisoners from Auschwitz-Monowitz. Although the proceedings demonstrated that the complicity for KL crimes extended deep into “respectable” German society, the punishments were mild, as the judges were inclined to see the defendants as errant businessmen, not murderous slave drivers.70 In the Doctors’ Trial (November 1946–August 1947), the human experiments took center stage. Several defendants were sentenced to death, among them Dr. Hoven, the bungling Buchenwald physician, and Professor Gebhardt, the man behind the Ravensbrück sulfonamide trials.71 Finally, there was the WVHA case (April–November 1947) against senior SS managers of the camp system. Most of them received lengthy jail terms, and one was executed—Oswald Pohl. Prior to his death in June 1951, Pohl converted to Catholicism (like Rudolf Höss and Martin Weiss) and published a remarkable tract about his religious awakening, remarkable not for its contrition, but its utter lack of insight.72