KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Male and female prisoners from the privileged Canada Commando sort the belongings of murdered Jews outside the SS warehouses in Birkenau, May 1944. (USHMM, courtesy of Yad Vashem)

  Covert prisoner photograph from inside the Birkenau gas chambers documenting the open-air cremation of murdered Jews, August 1944 (State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oświęcim)

  SS photograph of so-called Special Squad prisoners inside Birkenau crematorium II or III in 1943 (State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oświęcim)

  On the morning of July 18, 1942, SS leader Heinrich Himmler (front row, left) inspects the IG Farben construction site in Auschwitz-Monowitz, led by the civilian chief engineer, Max Faust (center), and Commandant Rudolf Höss (right). (State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oświęcim)

  The head of the SS concentration camp system, Oswald Pohl (center), visits Auschwitz in 1944, accompanied by Commandant Richard Baer. Between them (in the background) is Karl Bischoff, the main SS architect of the crematorium complex. (USHMM)

  Majdanek guards celebrate a birthday in a Lublin dance hall and restaurant in March 1944. (Landesarchiv North Rhine–Westphalia, Rhineland division, RWB 28432/3)

  SS accommodation barracks in Neuengamme during the war: most regular guards lived regimented lives outside the barbed wire. (KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme)

  Slave labor for the war effort: directed by a civilian foreman, prisoners of the Farge satellite camp build a bombproof bunker for submarine production, circa 1944. (Staatsarchiv Bremen, collection Schmidt)

  Armaments Minister Albert Speer (center, right) and the Gauleiter of Upper Austria, August Eigruber (center, left), with prisoners of a satellite camp in Linz, 1944 (bpk/Hanns Hubmann)

  Covert photograph taken by a German civilian from his kitchen window in Cologne in October 1943. The prisoners came from Buchenwald and belonged to an SS Building Brigade clearing bomb damage. (NS-Dokumentationszentrum, Cologne)

  A prisoner from the Dora satellite camp pushes a cart toward the entrance of the deep tunnel system that housed V2 rocket production, summer 1944. (bpk/Hanns Hubmann)

  The dismal “little camp” in Buchenwald, captured in a covert photograph by a French prisoner in June 1944. Inmates slept in tents (center) or windowless stables (left); designed for around fifty horses, the stables held up to two thousand men. (Gedenkstätte Buchenwald)

  Inside a hut at a Kaufering satellite camp (photographed after liberation). The SS crammed prisoners into such vermin-infested huts, which were covered with grass and earth. (U.S. National Archives)

  A 1944 self-portrait of the young German Jew Peter Edel by the Auschwitz gate, illustrating how the camp had changed him. The caption reads “Who is this?” — “You!” — “Me?” — “Yes!” (State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oświęcim)

  A 1943 drawing by an unidentified Auschwitz prisoner depicting the powers and privileges of so-called Kapos (State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oświęcim)

  This covert photograph by a resident of a village on Lake Starnberg documents prisoners on a death march from Dachau on April 28, 1945. (akg-images/Benno Gantner)

  Prisoners in the Below forest in late April 1945, on a death march from the abandoned Sachsenhausen camp. In the foreground someone carries a Red Cross food parcel. (ICRC, courtesy of Willy Pfister)

  On April 30, 1945, a train with thousands of prisoners from the abandoned Leitmeritz satellite camp makes a stop in a Czech town, where locals defy the SS to distribute food and take pictures. (Museum of Central Bohemia, Roztoky u Prahy)

  Georges Kohn, aged twelve, pictured here during medical experiments in Neuengamme, was hanged on April 20, 1945. He was one of countless victims of last-minute Camp SS murders. (KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme)

  A U.S. soldier outside a train full of dead prisoners, soon after the liberation of Dachau. The prisoners had departed from Buchenwald some three weeks earlier. (USHMM, courtesy of J. Hardman)

  Soviet soldiers survey burned bodies at the Klooga satellite camp in Estonia. On September 19, 1944, shortly before the Red Army arrived, the SS had slaughtered the inmates and torched the camp. (USHMM, courtesy of Esther Ancoli-Barbasch)

  Dachau prisoners welcome U.S. troops on April 29, 1945 (photographed from a watchtower). (USHMM, courtesy of The New York Times)

  The liberation of a Bergen-Belsen death train near Magdeburg, April 13, 1945 (USHMM, courtesy of Dr. Gross)

  Bergen-Belsen on April 18, 1945, three days after the arrival of British forces. Thousands of survivors died here in the following weeks. (Imperial War Museums, London)

  Young survivors cook a meal in the Ebensee satellite camp two days after the May 6, 1945, liberation. (USHMM/U.S. National Archives)

  Survivors of Buchenwald leave the Weimar train station for a children’s home in France, June 1, 1945. One youth writes on the carriage: “Where are our parents? You murderers.” (Gedenkstätte Buchenwald)

  The execution of Rudolf Höss on the grounds of the former Auschwitz main camp on April 16, 1947 (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, Warsaw, GK-14-4-6-11)

  U.S. soldiers confront Weimar civilians with corpses near the Buchenwald crematorium, April 16, 1945—one of many explicit images to appear in the Allied press. (Gedenkstätte Buchenwald)

  Postcard of Dachau as a residential settlement for refugees, circa 1955–60. Next to the main road (bottom, right) are the former prisoner barracks used as apartments. (KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau)

  A Note About the Author

  Nikolaus Wachsmann is a professor of modern European history at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of the prizewinning Hitler’s Prisons and joint editor of Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories. You can sign up for email updates here.

  ALSO BY NIKOLAUS WACHSMANN

  Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany

  The Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933–1939: A Documentary History (joint editor)

  Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories (joint editor)

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Epigraph

  List of Maps

  PROLOGUE

  1. EARLY CAMPS

  A Bloody Spring and Summer

  Coordination

  Open Terror

  2. THE SS CAMP SYSTEM

  A Permanent Exception

  The Camp SS

  Prisoner Worlds

  3. EXPANSION

  Social Outsiders

  Forced Labor

  Jews

  4. WAR

  The Camp SS at War

  Road to Perdition

  Scales of Suffering

  5. MASS EXTERMINATION

  Killing the Weak

  Executing Soviet POWs

  Murderous Utopias

  6. HOLOCAUST

  Auschwitz and the Nazi Final Solution

  “Factories of Death”

  Genocide and the KL System

  7. ANUS MUNDI

  Jewish Prisoners in the East

  SS Routines

  Plunder and Corruption

  8. ECONOMICS AND EXTERMINATION

  Oswald Pohl and the WVHA

  Slave Labor

  “Guinea Pigs”

  9. CAMPS UNBOUND

  In Extremis

  Satellite Camps

  The Outside World

  10. IMPOSSIBLE CHOICES

  Coerced Communities

  Kapos

  Defiance

  11. DEATH OR FREEDOM

  The Beginning of the End

  Apocalypse

  The Final Weeks

  EPILOGUE

&nb
sp; Appendix: Tables

  Table 1. Daily Inmate Numbers in the SS Concentration Camps, 1934–45

  Table 2. Prisoner Deaths in SS Concentration Camps

  Table 3. SS Ranks, with Army Equivalents

  Notes

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Photographs

  A Note About the Author

  Also by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Copyright

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2015 by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Maps copyright © 2015 by Jeffrey L. Ward

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2015

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wachsmann, Nikolaus.

  Kl: a history of the Nazi concentration camps / Nikolaus Wachsmann. — First edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-374-11825-9 (cloth) — ISBN 978-1-4299-4372-7 (e-book)

  1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945) 2. World War, 1939–1945—Concentration camps. 3. Concentration camps—History—20th century. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Prisoners and prisons, German. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Atrocities—Germany. I. Title.

  D804.3 .W325 2015

  940.53’185—dc23

  2014031269

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