Unification in 1990 had a major impact on German memory culture, above all in former East Germany. Over the coming years, the national concentration camp memorials were stripped of GDR propaganda and remodeled, not least by commemorating the Soviet special camps. This process proved particularly painful in Buchenwald, where clashes between the new curators and the Socialist-led KL survivor association degenerated into a public row over the actions of Communist Kapos.138 But unification affected memory in western parts of Germany, as well. The suffering of German Communists and their fellow travelers, previously marginalized by the prevailing Cold War mind-set, gradually received greater recognition.139 Similarly, the fate of Soviet KL prisoners came into sharper focus, and they also finally received some compensation as forced laborers, following a second wave of German reparations (though this came too late for most).140
The end of the Cold War intensified public engagement with the Third Reich more generally, not least to assuage anxieties outside Germany about a possible resurgence of radical nationalism. Since the 1990s, the German government has taken an active lead in the commemoration of Nazi crimes, from the designation of the Auschwitz liberation date as the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism, to the construction of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the heart of Berlin. Similarly, the national government has started to support KL memorials directly, providing an important catalyst for changes in official commemoration.141 Previously neglected sites, like Dora (in the shadow of Buchenwald) and Flossenbürg (in the shadow of Dachau), have been remade in recent years; in Flossenbürg, the former prisoner kitchen and laundry—used commercially by a private company until the 1990s—now houses an exhibition about the camp.142 And new monuments and museums on the sites of long-ignored satellite camps and death marches make the immense spread of the KL system more visible.143 Even established memorials like Dachau have been redesigned once more in light of new research and changing public perceptions.
* * *
Dachau, March 22, 2013. It is a bright, cold spring day, much as it was exactly eighty years ago, when the concentration camp first opened. The site is easy to find, with plenty of signs pointing the way (until the 1980s, the city authorities kept its profile low). Anyone arriving by train can walk along a Path of Remembrance, adorned with multilingual panels, to the memorial. At the entrance stands a new visitor center, opened in a state ceremony in 2009, broadcast live, and attended by the Bavarian political establishment, which had long shunned the memorial. “We don’t forget, we don’t suppress, we don’t relativize what happened here,” the prime minister pledged. As prisoners did in the past, visitors pass through the doorway of the old SS gatehouse, following a path reopened in 2005 despite local opposition. The wrought-iron gates with the inscription ARBEIT MACHT FREI lead directly onto the roll call square, where several large visitor groups are gathered. It is a quiet day, like most Fridays, but there are still some 1,500 visitors. To the left of the square they see the two reconstructed barracks and the outlines of the others, bisected by the camp street that leads toward the crematorium. On the right stands the museum, overhauled in 2003. And straight ahead lie the offices of some thirty academic, archival, and pedagogic staff. Their task, the director says in a newspaper interview to mark Dachau’s anniversary, “is to tell the history of this camp free from all political slant.”144 The memorial has clearly come a long way. This is far from suggesting a sense of closure, though. Commemoration will keep on changing, here and at other former KL sites. Neither will the history of the camps ever come to an end. Blind spots remain. New sources, approaches, and questions will make us reconsider what we thought we knew; on March 22, 2013, for example, none of the historians in Dachau could pinpoint with certainty the building where it had all begun eighty years earlier.
In the same way, our search for deeper meaning in the KL will go on, even though efforts to extract a single essence are destined to come up short. As we have seen, the concentration camps meant different things at different times of Nazi rule. Even Auschwitz cannot be reduced to its genocidal function alone, as the SS also used it to destroy the Polish resistance and to forge a closer collaboration with industry. Neither was its place as the most deadly site of the Nazi Final Solution preordained. It emerged only gradually over several fateful months in 1942, at a time when hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been killed elsewhere; the path of Auschwitz to the Holocaust was long and twisted.145 And yet, the inadequacy of simple answers should not stop us from asking bigger questions about the nature of the concentration camps. The KL were patently products of modernity, for example, with their reliance on bureaucracy, transport, mass communication, and technology, as well as industrially manufactured barracks, barbed wire, machine guns, and gas canisters. But does that make them paradigms of the modern age, as some scholars have suggested, any more than, say, mass vaccination or universal suffrage? As the historian Mark Mazower pointedly asks: “What makes one choice of historical symbol … better than another?”146 Then there is the question of the camps’ origins. Of course, the KL were products of German history; they emerged and developed under specific national political and cultural conditions, and drew inspiration from the violent practices of Weimar paramilitaries, as well as the disciplinary traditions of the German army and prison service. But does that make them “typically German,” as some prisoners argued?147 It seems doubtful. After all, the men behind the KL system were far more invested in radical Nazi ideology than most ordinary Germans, who felt more ambivalent about the camps. More generally, the KL shared some generic features with repressive camps established elsewhere during the twentieth century. That said, their development still diverged from other totalitarian camps, raising perhaps the most important issue: How best to understand the course of the Nazi concentration camps?
As this integrated history has shown, there was nothing inevitable about the trajectory of the KL. Looking at the horrors of the wartime years, it is hard not to see them as the inevitable conclusion of the early camps. But there was no direct trail from Dachau in 1933 to Dachau in 1945. The concentration camps could well have taken a different direction, and in the mid-1930s, it even looked as if they might disappear. They endured because Nazi leaders, above all Adolf Hitler himself, came to value them as flexible instruments of lawless repression, which could easily adapt to the changing requirements of the regime. The specific character of individual camps owed much to the initiative of the local SS. But these officials operated within wider parameters set by their superiors, and in the end, the KL acted much like seismographs, closely attuned to the general aims and ambitions of the regime’s rulers. The reason they oscillated so much was that the priorities of Nazi leaders changed over time, and as the regime radicalized, so did its camps.
Despite some sharp turns, however, the path of the concentration camps unfolded without sharp breaks. The successive stages of the camps might appear like different worlds, as we saw at the beginning of this book, but these worlds were connected nonetheless. The basic rules, organization, and ethos of the Camp SS were already in place by the mid-1930s, and remained largely unchanged thereafter. Similarly, pioneering SS programs of mass extermination, which claimed tens of thousands of infirm prisoners and Soviet POWs in 1941, left an important legacy for the Holocaust, including the use of Zyklon B in Auschwitz. The continuities between the different stages of the camps are personified by core SS professionals like Rudolf Höss, a man who learned about prisoner abuse in Dachau at the start of the Third Reich, graduated to systematic murder in Sachsenhausen early in the war, moved on to genocide in Auschwitz, and then oversaw the final slaughter in Ravensbrück. Throughout his career, new outrages broke new ground, and each transgression made the next one easier, inuring him, like other SS perpetrators, to acts that would have been unthinkable a little earlier. The KL system was a great transformer of values. Its history is a history of these mutations, which normalized extreme violence, torture, and murder. And this history w
ill continue to be written and it will keep on living, and so will the memory of those who were its witnesses, its perpetrators, and its victims.
APPENDIX
Tables
TABLE 1. Daily Inmate Numbers in the SS Concentration Camps, 1934–45
TABLE 2. Prisoner Deaths in SS Concentration Camps
Most figures are (often rough) estimates; the precise number of victims will never be known.
Sources: OdT, vol. 2, 27–30, 98–99; vol. 3, 65; vol. 4, 57; vol. 5, 339; vol. 6, 43, 95, 520; vol. 7, 24, 22, 45, 87, 26; vol. 8, 04, 34–42, 276–80; Piper, Zahl, 67; http://totenbuch.buchenwald.de; Schilde and Tuchel, Columbia-Haus, 5–57, 68; KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau (ed.), Gedenkbuch, 9, 13; http://totenbuch.dora.de; Klausch, Tätergeschichten, 292–94; Association (ed.), Mauthausen, 10; Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, 1248–1327; Hördler and Jacobeit (eds.), Lichtenburg; idem (eds.), Gedenkort; Kranz, “Erfassung,” 243; Strebel, Ravensbrück, 510; Helm, If; R. B. Birn to the author, March 28, 2014; D. Drywa to the author, April 8, 2014; F. Jahn to the author, May 6, 2014.
TABLE 3. SS Ranks, with Army Equivalents
Source: Zentner and Bedürftig (eds.), Encyclopedia, 753; Snyder (ed.), Encyclopedia, 280.
Notes
Abbreviations
AdsD
Archiv der sozialen Demokratie
AE
Allgemeine Erlaßsammlung
AEKIR
Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche im Rheinland, Düsseldorf
AEL
Arbeitserziehungslager (Work Education Camp[s])
AfS
Archiv für Sozialgeschichte
AG
Amtsgericht
AGFl
Archiv der KZ-Gedenkstätte Flossenbürg
AGN
Archiv der KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme
AHR
The American Historical Review
AM
Archiv der KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen
APMO
Archiwum Państwowe Muzeum w Oświęcimiu
AS
Archiv der Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen
ASL
Archiv der Stadt Linz
BArchB
Bundesarchiv Berlin
BArchF
Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv
BArchK
Bundesarchiv Koblenz
BArchL
Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg
BayHStA
Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv
BDC
Berlin Document Center
BGVN
Beiträge zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung in Norddeutschland
Bl.
Blatt (folio)
BLA
Bayerisches Landesentschädigungsamt
BLHA
Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv
BoA
Boder Archive online
BPP
Bayerische Politische Polizei
BStU
Behörde des Bundesbeauftragten für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR
BwA
Archiv der Gedenkstätte Buchenwald
CEH
Central European History
CoEH
Contemporary European History
CSDIC
Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre
DaA
Archiv der Gedenkstätte Dachau
DAP
Der Auschwitz-Prozeß (DVD-Rom)
DAW
Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke GmbH (German Equipment Works)
DESt
Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH (German Earth and Stone Works)
DH
Dachauer Hefte
DJAO
Deputy Judge Advocate’s Office
DM
Deutsche Mark
DöW
Stiftung Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes
DP
Displaced Person
DV
Dienstvorschrift
EE
Eidesstattliche Erklärung
EHQ
European History Quarterly
ERH
European Review of History
EV
Einstellungsverfügung
FZH
Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte, Hamburg
GDR
German Democratic Republic
Gestapa
Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt (Secret State Police Office)
Gestapo
Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police)
GH
German History
GHI
German Historical Institute
GPD
German Police Decodes
GStA
Generalstaatsanwalt
GStA PK
Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz
HGS
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
HHStAW
Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv
HIA
Hoover Institution Archives
HIS
Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung
HLSL
Harvard Law School Library, Nuremberg Trials Project
HSSPF
Höhere SS und Polizeiführer (Higher SS and police leader[s])
HStAD
Landesarchiv NRW, Abteilung Rheinland
HvA
Hefte von Auschwitz
ICRC
International Committee of the Red Cross
IfZ
Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich
IKL
Inspektion der Konzentrationslager (Inspectorate of Concentration Camps)
IMT
Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal
ITS
International Tracing Service
JAO
Judge Advocate’s Office
JCH
Journal of Contemporary History
JfA
Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung
JMH
The Journal of Modern History
JNV
Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, Rüter and de Mildt (eds.)
JVL
Jewish Virtual Library online
KB
Kommandanturbefehl
KE
Kleine Erwerbungen
KL
Konzentrationslager (Concentration Camp[s])
KOK
Kriminaloberkommissar
KPD
Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (German Communist Party)
Kripo
Kriminalpolizei (Criminal Police)
KTI
Kriminaltechnisches Institut (Criminal Technical Institute)
LaB
Landesarchiv Berlin
LBIJMB
Leo Baeck Institute Archives, Berlin
LBIYB
Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook
LG
Landgericht
LHASA
Landeshauptarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt
LK
Lagerkommandant(en) (Camp commandant[s])
LKA
Landeskriminalamt
LSW
Landesgericht für Strafsachen, Wien
LULVR
Lund University Library, Voices from Ravensbrück online
MdI
Minister/Ministerium des Innern (Minister/Ministry of the Interior)
MG
Manuscript Group
MPr
Ministerpräsident (Minister president)
MSchKrim
Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie und Strafrechtsreform
NAL
National Archives, London
NARA
National Archives, Washington, D.C.
NCA
Nazi Conspiracy, Office of U.S. Chief Counsel (ed.)
NCC
The Nazi Concentration Camps, Wachsmann and Goeschel (eds.)
&n
bsp; NCO
Noncommissioned Officer
n.d.
no date
ND
Nuremberg Document
NGC
New German Critique
NKVD
People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs
NLA-StAO
Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Staatsarchiv Oldenburg
NLHStA
Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv
NMGB
Nationale Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Buchenwald
NN
Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog)
NRW
Nordrhein-Westfalen
NYPL
New York Public Library
ODNB
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Page 88
