Criminal trials also kept the KL in the public eye in the 1950s. The press still reported on proceedings, which now mostly concerned Kapos and low-level SS officials, such as Private Steinbrenner, the would-be murderer of Hans Beimler in Dachau, who was sentenced to life by a Munich court in 1952.117 Toward the end of the decade, in particular, individual cases gained extensive media exposure, stimulating more critical engagement with the camps. This included the trial of Gustav Sorge and Wilhelm Schubert. Both had survived the Siberian coal mines and returned to West Germany in 1956. But they were not among those Nazi perpetrators embraced on their return from Soviet captivity. Quickly rearrested, they were tried once more, under the spotlight of the national and international press, and sentenced to life (for a second time) in early 1959.118 Sorge died in prison in 1978, one of a few Camp SS convicts who faced up to the past (“We had lost our sense of right!” he once shouted at a psychologist). Schubert, by contrast, stayed true to his cause. Released in 1986, he built a shrine in his flat with an SS picture of himself surrounded by images of Hitler and other Nazi leaders; his funeral in 2006 drew a crowd of neo-Nazis.119
Popular attitudes in West Germany continued to change in the 1960s. This was due, in part, to the renewed interest in survivor memoirs. In 1960, the longtime chancellor Konrad Adenauer himself used the foreword to a memoir to criticize those compatriots who wanted to burnish the nation’s image by burying memories of KL horrors committed by Germans.120 Even more important were high-profile court proceedings that signaled a more systematic judicial approach, propelled by the creation of the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in 1958. Most significant was the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt between December 1963 and August 1965. In the dock stood twenty defendants, headed by two of the former adjutants (Commandant Richard Baer, arrested in 1960, died of a heart attack before the trial). The accompanying media storm, with almost one thousand articles in national newspapers alone, as well as programs on radio and television, caught the attention of most Germans. “Damn it!” one reader wrote to a Frankfurt paper in December 1964, “give it a rest with your reporting about Auschwitz already.”121
The West German proceedings resulted in imperfect justice, as perpetrators often benefited from the kind of legal protection they had denied their victims.122 The trials also produced imperfect history lessons. Media reports were irregular, in particular in mammoth cases like the trial of Majdanek staff, which opened in Düsseldorf in November 1975 and concluded five years and seven months later, setting a record for the longest and most expensive West German trial.123 What is more, the reporting only scratched the surface. This was most obvious, perhaps, in the continued treatment of defendants as an abnormal species. Here, the tone had been set by the Allied proceedings and the early West German cases, including the second trial of Ilse Koch—dubbed by the press as the “red-headed green-eyed witch of Buchenwald”—who was rearrested after her release from U.S. detention and sentenced to life in 1951 by an Augsburg court (she later suffered from mental illness, convinced that former KL prisoners would abuse her in her cell, and committed suicide in 1967).124
Popular reactions to the West German trials of the 1960s and 1970s were mixed; the Auschwitz trial, in particular, briefly galvanized the opposition to further proceedings against Nazi perpetrators. At the same time, however, the cases confronted the population with more detailed images from the KL than ever before and gave a vital impetus to pedagogical and cultural initiatives, often led by a younger generation, which did much to generate a more differentiated memory culture.125
By the 1980s, the distorted picture of the KL, as painted in the early Federal Republic, had developed many cracks. In particular, the myth of the invisible KL lost its power after local activists uncovered the myriad links between SS camps and the wider population. Historians and campaigners also began to turn a spotlight onto victim groups who had been obscured in public memory. Just as there had been prisoner hierarchies in the Nazi period, there were survivor hierarchies after the war. From the start, social outsiders—including homosexuals and Gypsies—were pushed to the bottom, by prevailing prejudices and also by former political prisoners determined to dissociate themselves from more unpopular victim groups. As early as 1946, some “asocial” and “criminal” survivors joined together to protest against their marginalization in a short-lived journal of their own. Suffering in the camps, they announced, should not be measured by the color of a survivor’s triangle. But they were not heard. Social outsiders were widely excluded from compensation and commemoration, and it took decades before they were recognized as KL victims.126
It would be wrong to paint the 1980s as a golden period. The Nazi past was still contentious in the Federal Republic and popular memory of the camps remained patchy. Few Germans fully understood the operation of the KL system or its dimensions; many main camps and almost all satellite camps remained obscure. There was also confusion over who had suffered inside and over who had run the camps, as one-dimensional perpetrator images persisted. Nonetheless, public memory had shifted significantly since the foundation of the Federal Republic. Above all, most Germans now accepted a moral obligation to commemorate the camps and their victims.127
It was a somewhat different story in the Austrian Republic across the border. Building on the myth of Austria as the first foreign victim of Nazi tyranny, the political and social elites evaded a full confrontation with Austria’s Nazi past until well into the 1980s. While the West German legal apparatus coordinated its pursuit of KL perpetrators, Austria went the other way and effectively abandoned prosecutions in the early 1970s. One of the last trials, against two SS architects involved in the construction of the Birkenau gas and crematorium complex, ended in a travesty of justice in 1972. Not only did the jury find the defendants innocent, it awarded them damages. Most Austrians ignored this case and others like it, leaving the national Communist newspaper to fume about scandalous judgments that turned Austria into a “sanctuary for Nazi mass murderers.”128
This chimed with the views of Communist leaders in the German Democratic Republic in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, who rarely passed up the chance to castigate others for letting Nazi criminals off the hook, all the better to burnish their own antifascist badge of honor. In reality, the number of trials in East Germany, extensive early on, had also declined sharply by the mid-1950s. GDR leaders wanted to move on, too, and released convicted criminals, while many former Nazi supporters were silently integrated into the new state. Prosecutions for KL crimes edged up again in the 1960s and became more coordinated, partly to keep step with West Germany. Among the defendants was Kurt Heissmeyer, the physician behind the tuberculosis trials on Georges Kohn and other children in Neuengamme, who had lived as a respected lung specialist in Magdeburg, tacitly protected by the local elites; he was sentenced to life in 1966 and died soon after. However, such proceedings were highly politicized and did little to stimulate a more direct confrontation with the Nazi past, as they gradually did in West Germany.129
Since the GDR proclaimed itself as the successor to the resistance against Nazism, concentration camps gained a central place in the national narrative. The Socialist Unity Party (SED) took ownership of their commemoration, drawing on self-glorifying accounts by Communist survivors like Rudi Jahn, who boasted in an early mass publication that Buchenwald had been a “headquarter in the fight to free Europe of Fascists.” The conversion of such hyperbole into official history was facilitated by the influx of former KPD prisoners into state positions (though none reached the highest offices of state, unlike in Poland, where the Socialist Józef Cyrankiewicz, a major player in the Auschwitz underground, became prime minister in 1947). As living embodiments of the antifascist spirit, former Communist prisoners held a special status and were expected to bolster the official version of the camps, popularized in a spate of memoirs in the 1960s and 1970s (alleged renegades, meanwhile, were written out). The approved GDR account of the camps was also ena
cted during ceremonies at memorials, above all at Buchenwald, which was transformed into a shrine to the Communist resistance.130
Sites of Remembrance
On September 14, 1958, the GDR political elite celebrated one of its most solemn acts of state: the dedication of the Buchenwald national memorial complex. By the following year, the new memorial, which reminded some critics of monumental Nazi architecture, already drew more than six hundred thousand visitors, including children on mandatory school trips. It encompassed burial grounds, pylons, a huge bell tower, and a sculpture depicting inmates standing tall against the SS—an allusion to the mythical self-liberation of Buchenwald, the fictional focus of the official Communist narrative, which discounted the decisive role of U.S. liberators. Further national memorials followed in Ravensbrück (1959) and Sachsenhausen (1961). All three sites sought to legitimize the East German state by celebrating international solidarity and the heroics of the Communist prisoners; just as resistance fighters had supposedly overcome Nazism in the camps, the GDR would defeat contemporary incarnations of Fascism. During his speech in Buchenwald on September 14, 1958, Prime Minister Grotewohl promised to “fulfill the legacy of the dead heroes,” a reference to the estimated fifty-six thousand victims of the KL. What he did not say was that another seven thousand or more prisoners had died in Buchenwald after the demise of the Third Reich, not as victims of the SS, but at the hands of the Soviet occupation forces.131
Between August 1945 and February 1950, Buchenwald had served as one of ten Soviet special camps on German soil. Red Army guards took over the Camp SS buildings, as they did in Sachsenhausen and Lieberose, which also became special camps. The old prisoner barracks filled up with new inmates, rounded up in ad hoc arrests and condemned by military tribunals or interned without trial. Most prisoners were middle-aged German men who had once belonged to the Nazi movement. But they were not detained as war criminals—few had been senior officials or violent perpetrators—but as alleged threats to the current Soviet occupation. They even included some former resisters against Nazism, like Robert Zeiler, a survivor of KL Buchenwald who found himself back inside the camp in 1947 on trumped-up charges as an alleged U.S. spy.
In general, there was nothing unusual about the temporary transformation of former KL sites into Allied internment camps. In the early postwar years, Dachau and Flossenbürg were used by the U.S. military, Neuengamme and Esterwegen by the British, Natzweiler by the French. But the western Allies quickly released most prisoners and held the remaining war crimes suspects under mostly adequate conditions. Not so the Soviet authorities, who neglected the special camps and their often harmless inmates. Indifference and ineptitude bred terrible conditions, with hunger, overcrowding, and illness resulting in mass death. Out of one hundred thousand prisoners taken to the three former concentration camps turned into Soviet special camps, well over twenty-two thousand perished inside.132
The use of former KL for Allied internment hampered early survivor efforts of on-site remembrance. In many camps, inmates had come together immediately after liberation to honor the dead. In Buchenwald, survivors held an impromptu service on the roll call square on April 19, 1945, gathering around a wooden obelisk (elsewhere, survivors built more permanent memorials). But the Buchenwald grounds were soon out of bounds, following the establishment of the special camp, and former inmates had to direct their commemorative efforts elsewhere. When the site was designated as a national memorial, in 1953, the initiative came not from survivors but from the SED, which elbowed the inmate association aside. By then, the appearance of the former concentration camp had already altered dramatically. Some parts had collapsed; some had been torn down; and some had been taken away by the Soviet troops and German locals, who departed with machines, pipes, and even with the windows of the crematorium. More alterations and demolition work followed to prepare the ground for the memorial and museum. By the time of the opening, much of the old camp was gone, replaced by the new GDR version of Buchenwald.133
KL memorials in other countries also reflected the commemorative concerns of the respective political authorities, who tried to stamp the dominant national narrative of the Nazi past onto these sites. True, survivor organizations played an important role, but the appearance of museums and monuments, and the speed of their construction, was largely determined by wider social forces.134 In Auschwitz, for example, a state museum opened in 1947 in the former main camp under the auspices of the new Polish government, and it has been expanded and revamped ever since (the grounds of the former IG Farben plant at Dwory, by contrast, belong to the Polish chemicals giant Synthos and remain off-limits to commemoration and conservation). For decades, public memory in Auschwitz was dominated by national Polish narratives. As the main memorial of the Polish People’s Republic, Auschwitz marked the patriotic resistance against Germany, national suffering, socialist solidarity, and Catholic martyrdom—themes that resonated with large sections of the Polish population. By contrast, the memory of Jewish prisoners, who made up the vast majority of the dead, was sidelined, as symbolized by the progressive decay of the Birkenau compound. Memory has become far more diverse in recent decades, linked in part to the fall of Communism at the end of the 1980s, though this did not put an end to political controversies over the memorial.135 Such commemorative conflicts were grounded in the history of the camps themselves. The KL system had always fulfilled multiple functions, allowing individual interest groups to emphasize separate elements in their narratives.
This is evident in Mauthausen, too, where a vast memorial park has grown along the road to the former camp. Starting with a granite monument dedicated to French freedom fighters in 1949, more than a dozen national memorials followed, each mirroring aspects of public memory prevailing in the sponsoring state. As for the Austrian authorities, they opened a memorial in 1949, encompassing some restored KL buildings (though most prisoner barracks were sold off and dismantled). In keeping with the official Austrian account of the Nazi period, the memorial was primarily designed as a site of national martyrdom, with a Catholic chapel in the former laundry and a stone sarcophagus on the roll call square. A museum was not added until 1970, with an exhibition focusing on Austrian victimhood. Since then, commemoration in Mauthausen has changed, reflecting the growing engagement with the past since the 1980s. Memorials for forgotten victims have been added, remembering homosexuals (1984), Roma (1994), and Jehovah’s Witnesses (1998), and a more nuanced history of the camp is told in a new visitor center (2003). Popular interest has sharply risen, with the number of visiting Austrian students expanding from just six thousand (1970) to over fifty-one thousand (2012).136
The memorial landscape in the neighboring German Federal Republic has also shifted since the early postwar years. The long and rocky path can be best illustrated by the development of Dachau, the birthplace of the KL system. Following the end of the U.S. military trials, the Bavarian authorities turned the former prisoner compound into a housing project for ethnic German refugees from Eastern Europe (other KL sites became DP camps, too, among them Bergen-Belsen and Flossenbürg). The Dachau prisoner barracks were used as apartments, the infirmary as a kindergarten, and the delousing block as a restaurant, later called “At the Crematorium.” For years, the history of the KL was obscured by the settlement, and between 1953 and 1960 there was not even a rudimentary museum on the site. Most locals ignored the camp in their midst, or distorted its history. The Dachau mayor, who had already served as deputy mayor during the Nazi years, told a journalist in 1959 that many inmates had been rightly detained as criminals. Local politicians around other KL sites were equally reluctant to face the truth. In 1951, the Hamburg mayor opposed plans for a French memorial in Neuengamme, because “everything should be done to avoid opening old wounds and reawakening painful memories”; instead, the former KL grounds were used for decades as a prison, built with bricks from the Neuengamme SS works.
Only in the 1960s did Dachau become a major site of remembrance. Under pressure fr
om survivors’ organizations, the Bavarian state finally relocated the residents from the camp grounds, with the last ones leaving just before the opening of the state memorial in spring 1965. As elsewhere, this process was accompanied by major changes to the site. Against the wishes of survivors, the authorities razed many of the remaining KL buildings, leaving behind a vast, clean, and barren area. Fresh foundations indicated where the barracks had once stood. Around the former roll call square, two newly built huts were meant to illustrate everyday prisoner life and a museum charted the rise of Nazism and the history of the camp. This was still a partial history, though, foregrounding political prisoners. The same applied to a new monument on the square, erected by the main survivor association, which included a chain with colored triangles worn by different inmate groups: red (political prisoners), yellow (Jews), purple (Jehovah’s Witnesses), and blue (returned emigrants). The colors denoting social outsiders, however, were all missing: there was no black (asocials), green (criminals), pink (homosexuals), or brown (Gypsies). At the far end of the site, meanwhile, several new buildings sprang up, with a large Catholic chapel and convent, a Jewish monument, and a Protestant church aiming to give religious meaning to the prisoners’ suffering. The expanding Dachau memorial attracted more and more visitors, and by the early 1980s, annual figures had risen from around four hundred thousand (1965) to nine hundred thousand. The growing visibility of the site generated some hostility among local politicians, who still preferred to gloss over the past. Their opposition only abated from the 1990s, when Dachau and other German KL memorials entered a new phase of commemoration.137
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Page 87
