KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (103 page)

Neither did the uprising interrupt the mass extermination of Jews in Birkenau. The burned-down crematorium IV had been out of commission since May 1943, and the Camp SS continued to use its other facilities, gassing an estimated forty thousand men, women, and children after the uprising, in a lethal spurt
lasting little more than two weeks. Among the dead were thousands of Jews from Theresienstadt. Although the SS preserved the ghetto to the very end, it deported most inhabitants to Auschwitz in autumn 1944, where the majority were murdered on arrival. The last Theresienstadt transport came on October 30; of the 2,038 men, women, and children on board, the SS sent 1,689 straight to their deaths, in
what may have been the last mass gassing in the history of the camp.
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The Birkenau uprising throws a light on the terrible dilemma of violent opposition in the KL. Prisoners knew that a revolt would most likely result in their own deaths. Few were willing to take this risk. In general, only those who knew that they were about to be murdered were ready to fight; this was the courage of the doomed
in the face of certain death. “We have given up hope that we’ll live until the moment of liberation,” Salmen Gradowski wrote, not long before his death during the uprising of October 7, 1944.
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By contrast, inmates who still had hopes of survival, however small, shied away from suicidal rebellions. This was why the main underground groups in Auschwitz decided against joining the armed revolt
in autumn 1944, leaving the Special Squad feeling abandoned and alone.
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The uprising remains a powerful symbol of prisoner defiance, and much of our knowledge of the events comes directly from survivors of the Special Squad. When the SS abandoned the Auschwitz camp complex in mid-January 1945, some one hundred Special Squad prisoners were among the tens of thousands forced westward. Somehow,
almost all of them—including Shlomo Dragon and his brother Abraham, and Filip Müller—survived until liberation.
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Such good fortune was the exception, however. The final months of the KL system were among the most lethal, bringing death to several hundred thousand registered prisoners. The closer these men, women, and children came to freedom, the more likely they were to die in the concentration
camps.

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Death or Freedom

On Sunday, February 25, 1945, Odd Nansen followed his usual routine. Since his deportation to Sachsenhausen as a political prisoner almost one and a half years earlier, the forty-three-year-old Norwegian had visited the camp’s infirmary on most weekends. Usually he came to help fellow countrymen, but this time he headed straight for one of the youngest patients, a ten-year-old
Jewish boy called Tommy, who had been born in Czechoslovakia in 1934, after his parents’ emigration from Nazi Germany. Tommy was all alone. Separated from his mother and father in Auschwitz in 1944, he had only recently arrived in Sachsenhausen. Nansen had first met him in the infirmary on February 18 and was greatly touched, wondering how a child who had witnessed unimaginable suffering
could still be so sweet-natured. Looking at Tommy that day, with his large eyes and his infectious smile, Nansen felt as if an angel had descended into the depths of Sachsenhausen. He desperately missed his own children in Norway and resolved to watch over Tommy, bribing the infirmary Kapo to save the boy from selections. When Nansen came back to visit the following week, on February 25, he brought
rare treats like sardines. And as he sat beside the boy, Tommy told him about the evacuation of Auschwitz.

The Camp SS had forced Tommy out of the Auschwitz complex on January 18, 1945, with most of the remaining inmates. Staying close to two other boys from the Birkenau children’s barrack, he had joined an endless procession of prisoners dragging themselves westward. Everything was covered in
snow and ice, and the roads—littered with dead horses, burned vehicles, and mangled corpses—were submerged by waves of German soldiers and civilians fleeing from the Red Army. Tommy saw many prisoners perish along the way, and soon felt that he, too, would die.

After six months in Birkenau, Tommy was bone-thin, and the boots his mother had left him offered little protection against the winter.
More than once, he thought about giving up. Still he pushed himself forward. After three interminable days, Tommy and the other survivors finally reached Gleiwitz, the German border town where Nazi forces had staged the phony attack by “Polish” troops that marked the beginning of World War II. Here they were forced onto an open railcar. At first, Tommy was pressed so tightly against the adults that
he could hardly breathe, but later death thinned their ranks. The creeping cold tormented Tommy’s frozen feet. He had little to eat but snow, trying to imagine that it was ice cream. “And I cried terribly,” he told Nansen. After more than ten days, the train arrived near Sachsenhausen. Tommy was soon taken to the main camp infirmary, where two of his toes, black with frostbite, were amputated.
“Poor little Tommy, what will become of him?” Odd Nansen thought as he wrote down Tommy’s story.
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The young boy was one of thousands of Auschwitz prisoners who entered Sachsenhausen in early 1945.
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Other concentration camps inside the prewar German borders also filled with prisoners from abandoned KL nearer the front line. Faced with the relentless Allied advance, the SS closed camp after camp,
forcing hundreds of thousands to leave on foot, trains, trucks, and horse-drawn carriages. The deadly treks led through what was left of Nazi-controlled Europe, sometimes winding over hundreds of miles.
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The KL system broke apart rapidly, just as it reached its zenith: climax and collapse went hand in hand. Despite some disruption by the war in 1944, which led the SS to close several main camps
and dozens of satellites, its terror apparatus had still been going strong at the end of the year. On January 15, 1945, the eve of the evacuation of Auschwitz, the SS registered a record number of 714,211 KL prisoners in all.
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Over the coming months, the remaining camps grew into behemoths, bursting with prisoners from evacuated sites, as well as newly arrested inmates. The prisoner population
of the Mauthausen complex, for example, exceeded eighty thousand by late February 1945, over fifty thousand more than one year earlier.
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Not only were the remaining camps inside Nazi Germany now at their largest, they were at their most lethal, too. Starvation and disease were rampant, and the SS went on a last killing spree as the Third Reich went down in flames.
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The morale of the prisoners
inside was closely tied to the progress of the war, as it had been for years. News of major Allied victories, such as the landings in Italy (1943) and France (1944), had been greeted ecstatically, with prisoners smiling, whistling, even dancing.
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But their hopes of swift liberation had been dashed again and again, leading many inmates to seek solace in fantastical rumors and in the stories of
spiritualists and fortune-tellers, which flourished in the KL.
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Only in early 1945 could the prisoners really be sure that the war would soon be over. The Allies were now unstoppable. In the east, Soviet troops penetrated deep into the Third Reich. In the west, the all-or-nothing offensive by the Wehrmacht in December, on which Nazi leaders had pinned their last hopes, quickly stalled, followed
by a decisive push from the western Allies, who advanced steadily until they crossed the Rhine in early March 1945. On April 25, 1945, American and Soviet soldiers met on the Elbe, splitting the remnants of the Third Reich in half. The German surrender came less than two weeks later, in the early hours of May 7, 1945.
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Life during the final months and weeks in concentration camps was unbearably
tense. As prisoners heard the detonations from the front come closer, they felt as if “on tenterhooks,” one of them wrote in a secret note.
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The KL resembled beehives, with swarms of inmates gathering to exchange the latest news. Their mood fluctuated wildly between hope and anguish. Some were sure that liberation would come at any moment. Others feared that the SS would execute them before the
Allies arrived, or force them out. The prospect of leaving the camp terrified many prisoners, especially after they had witnessed the arrival of earlier death marches. But they were also scared of being left behind, especially if they were ill and weak, like little Tommy in Sachsenhausen. “[If] this camp is evacuated—what then?” the boy asked Odd Nansen in late February 1945. “If I’m still lying
here and can’t run, what will they do with me?” When Nansen visited Tommy for the last time two weeks later, shortly before Norwegian prisoners like him departed from the camp, he feared that he would never see the boy again.
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It is impossible to say how many prisoners perished between January and early May 1945 during the evacuations and inside the KL. However, an estimate of forty percent
dead—some three hundred thousand men, women, and children—is probably not wide of the mark. Never before had so many registered prisoners died so quickly.
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Perhaps some four hundred and fifty thousand prisoners came through the final catastrophe, with Jews, Soviets, and Poles making up the largest groups.
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Most of these survivors were rescued inside the KL, though some sites stood eerily empty
by the time the Allies arrived. In the Sachsenhausen main camp, Soviet troops found no more than 3,400 prisoners on April 22–23, 1945, mostly in the abominable sick bays.
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One of them was Tommy. After the boy limped out of his barrack, he saw Red Army soldiers moving through the big gate and shouting “Hitler kaputt, Hitler kaputt!” Ever since this moment, Thomas (Tommy) Buergenthal has reflected
on the reasons for his survival against all odds. “If there is one word that captures the conclusion to which I always returned,” he wrote decades later, “it is luck.”
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THE BEGINNING OF THE END

When Soviet troops reached the Auschwitz main camp and Birkenau, at around three o’clock on the afternoon of January 27, 1945, the site looked nothing like it had just a few months earlier. The SS had
dismantled or destroyed many buildings and set fire to the thirty barracks of Canada II, the huge compound storing the property of murdered Jews; the ruins were still smoldering as Soviet soldiers walked among them. Before SS officials had torched these warehouses, they sent some of the most valuable goods back toward central Germany. Building materials had been moved out, too, as had technical
equipment like the X-ray machine used for sterilization experiments. The SS had demolished the Birkenau crematoria and gas chambers, as well, beginning in November 1944; crematorium V, the last operational one, was blown up shortly before liberation. Now the Birkenau “death factory” lay in ruins. As for the once overcrowded prisoner compounds, they were largely deserted. Less than five months earlier,
in late August 1944, over 135,000 prisoners had been held across the camp complex. By the time the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, there were just 7,500 left, mostly sick and weak prisoners abandoned during the final evacuation.
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But the loss of Auschwitz was still a big blow for the SS, as the camp had been the jewel in its crown: a model for the collaboration with industry, an outpost for German
settlements, and its principal death camp.

In recent times, the day of the liberation of Auschwitz has become the focal point for remembrance of the Holocaust.
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Symbolic as the date is, however, January 27, 1945, marked neither the beginning nor the end of the camps’ liberation. The end of suffering was still a long way off for most prisoners; if freedom came at all, it came weeks or months
later, often after another round of death marches in April and May 1945. As for the beginning, the first phase of KL evacuations had occurred earlier, between spring and autumn 1944; and although it is widely forgotten today, it foreshadowed much of the horror that was to follow.

Early Evacuations

By early September 1944, the German army appeared to be on the brink of defeat on the Western Front,
following the Allied advance after the D-day landings in June. The military situation seemed increasingly hopeless and the popular mood in Germany hit a new low.
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Anticipating the loss of further territory, the WVHA now ordered the immediate evacuation of its two most westerly concentration camps. On September 5 and 6, 1944, the SS moved all 3,500 prisoners out of the Herzogenbusch main camp
in the Netherlands; its small satellite camps were closed down, too.
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Natzweiler in Alsace was evacuated around the same time. Almost all 6,000 prisoners were deported from the main camp to Dachau between September 2 and 19, 1944; the SS also abandoned around a dozen attached satellites on the left bank of the Rhine, moving out a further 4,500 prisoners. But the Natzweiler complex was not finished
yet, as its satellite camps on the right bank of the Rhine continued to operate. In fact, after the German army temporarily stabilized its position, several new satellites were added, and by early January 1945, the camp complex held some 22,500 prisoners. With satellites now turning around an extinct main camp, Natzweiler encapsulated the fragmentation of the KL system toward the end.
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Despite
their speed, the western European KL evacuations in autumn 1944 proceeded in a fairly orderly fashion. The WVHA closed the camps well before the Allies arrived, which left sufficient time to move the vast majority of prisoners by train, the preferred SS mode of transport. Not only was it easier to guard prisoners on trains, compared to marches, but journey times were much shorter, too. Exhausting
as these transports were, they did not cause mass death. “Apart from terrible fatigue, we arrived [in Ravensbrück] in a pretty decent state,” a former Herzogenbusch prisoner recalled. As a result, almost all inmates survived the early evacuations in the west.
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