KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (105 page)

There were frequent selections in Stutthof, Inge added. Indeed, from summer 1944 local Camp SS officials stepped up the systematic murder of weak, elderly, sick, frail,
and pregnant prisoners, just as they did in the Baltic KL. The Stutthof SS initially saw this as a radical solution to the overcrowding of the main camp, where the number of disease-ridden inmates was growing daily, with even more “unfit” prisoners returning from satellite camps. But increasingly, the local SS also used murder to ready the camp for a possible evacuation, preemptively killing those
considered a burden for transports (following the example of the Baltic camps).
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Several thousand victims of Stutthof selections, largely children and their mothers, were sent by train to Birkenau. Others were murdered in Stutthof itself, especially after the closure of the Birkenau killing complex in autumn 1944. It was around this time that the Stutthof SS began to use a small gas chamber
to murder Jews (as well as some Polish political prisoners and Soviet POWs) with Zyklon B. However, the main weapons of the Stutthof SS were deadly injections and shootings. Report leader Arno Chemnitz operated a neck-shooting apparatus in the crematorium, which was modeled on the one he had observed as a block leader in Buchenwald during the 1941 murder of Soviet “commissars.” Another Stutthof SS
man later described the aftermath of a routine execution of fifty or sixty women: “I did not look closely at the corpses, but I saw drying pools of blood on the floor, also bloodstained faces of corpses and I remember a blood spattered door frame.”

Many more Stutthof inmates succumbed to the catastrophic living conditions. Corpses multiplied quickly inside the barracks; some inmates woke up pressed
against the cold bodies of those who had perished during the night. In autumn and winter 1944, a typhus epidemic ravaged the camp, the third and worst such outbreak to hit Stutthof. It eventually forced the SS to suspend mass executions, and on January 8, 1945, Richard Glücks placed the entire camp under quarantine for almost two weeks. By this time, around 250 prisoners perished each day,
and the dying continued until the camp was evacuated.
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Life in the other remaining eastern KL was also overshadowed by the prospect of evacuation in autumn and winter 1944. SS preparations were most intense in the biggest site of all, Auschwitz. Material and machines were moved out, as we have seen, and the families of SS officers finally tore themselves away from their opulent homes (Frau Höss
and her children left in early November 1944). SS officials left behind in Auschwitz became increasingly nervous as the front edged closer. Would they manage to escape in time? Would local resistance fighters attack the camp from outside?
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Would the Soviets get there first? Such fears intensified when SS men heard Allied broadcasts on the BBC in autumn 1944, which named several notorious Auschwitz
officials and warned that anyone involved in further bloodshed would be brought to justice. As the mood among the Auschwitz SS darkened, some staff lost their appetite for plunder and excesses.
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The demise of Auschwitz was epitomized by the closure of its gas chambers. Sometime in late October or early November 1944, the gassings inside the camp—the last of the Nazi death camps—stopped forever.
Soon afterward, the demolition of the Birkenau killing complex began, and prisoners were forced to conceal any remaining ash and bone fragments.
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Some SS murderers were relieved that this part of their duties had come to an end. “You can well imagine, my beloved,” the chief SS garrison physician, Dr. Wirths, wrote to his wife on November 29, 1944, “how nice it is for me that I don’t have to do
this horrible work anymore, and that it exists no more.”
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The inmates, too, recognized this as a momentous event. As he watched the crematorium walls tumble, Miklós Nyiszli recalled, he had a premonition of the fall of the Third Reich as a whole.
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Why did the SS dismantle the Birkenau gas chambers? Many historians have pointed to a supposed Himmler order to stop the mass extermination of Jews.
50
If such an order really existed, it was no more than window-dressing for Himmler’s plan to negotiate a secret peace with the west. In practice, the SS never abandoned the Final Solution, and in Auschwitz itself, murders of Jews and other prisoners continued, even after the gassings stopped.
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The true motives for abandoning the gas chambers were more pragmatic. Mass deportations of Jews were coming
to an end because of Germany’s deteriorating military position, and the Auschwitz SS was keen to cover its tracks before the Red Army reached the camp.
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SS leaders wanted to avoid a repetition of events in Majdanek, where the gas chambers had fallen largely intact into Soviet hands.
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They also hoped to salvage the murderous hardware; many parts of the crematoria were dismantled, packed up, and
shipped westward. The final destination was a top-secret location near Mauthausen, where the SS planned to rebuild at least two of the Birkenau crematoria; it also dispatched some of the Birkenau killing experts to Mauthausen. More than likely, this new complex, which was never built in the end, would have included gas chambers for further systematic mass murder.
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As the Camp SS gradually prepared
to abandon Auschwitz, it preemptively moved many inmates away, following the example of earlier evacuations. This was the main reason why the daily Auschwitz prisoner population almost halved in four months, dropping to seventy thousand by late December. Several compounds were closed down and dismantled altogether, including the huge “Mexico” extension (BIII) in Birkenau.
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In all, around one
hundred thousand prisoners departed during the second half of 1944 from Auschwitz. Previously, the camp had been the final destination for countless prisoners; now the flow was being reversed. Some transports went north to Stutthof, as we have seen, but most went to camps farther west, away from the approaching Red Army. One of them was Gross-Rosen, the only other main KL in Silesia.
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Gross-Rosen
grew with breathtaking speed in the second half of 1944, following the almost daily arrival of prisoner transports from elsewhere. By January 1, 1945, it held 76,728 prisoners, briefly turning a backwater of the camp system into the second-largest KL; among them were more than twenty-five thousand Jewish women in satellite camps, most of whom had come from Auschwitz. Like Stutthof, Gross-Rosen
now operated as a vast reception camp for prisoners from concentration camps farther east. Order started to break down as the overcrowded main camp descended into chaos. Conditions were worst in a new compound, built from autumn 1944 onward with barracks dismantled in Auschwitz. When winter came, the prisoners here were exposed to the bitter cold, as many huts were missing windows and doors; there
were no toilets or washrooms, either, and the inmates waded through snow, mud, and feces. Conditions were no better across many of the remaining Gross-Rosen satellites. “Nothing can surprise me anymore,” Avram Kajzer noted in his diary in early 1945, after he witnessed two fellow inmates of Dörnhau satellite camp pounce on a bone, after it had been dropped by a guard dog, and then grill it over
a fire to eat.
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Flight from the Red Army

On January 12, 1945, the Soviet forces launched a devastating offensive that forced the Third Reich to its knees. Tanks broke through along the vast Eastern Front, sweeping past Wehrmacht defenses, and advanced rapidly toward the German heartland. When the Red Army regrouped at the end of the month, the front line had been completely redrawn. The Third
Reich had lost its last foothold in occupied Poland, as well as other vital territory—East Prussia, East Brandenburg, and Silesia—as millions of German civilians joined the retreating Wehrmacht in a desperate mass flight.
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In the path of Soviet troops had stood three big camp complexes—Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, and Stutthof—which held over one hundred and ninety thousand prisoners in mid-January
1945, more than a quarter of all KL inmates.
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Earlier SS discussions about the full evacuation of these camps had involved the respective Gauleiter and higher SS and police leaders, who held significant sway over the evacuations.
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The WVHA had played a key role, as well. It was Oswald Pohl who had first ordered the Auschwitz SS to plan for retreat, and when he visited the camp one last time,
around November 1944, he examined the blueprint drafted by his protégé, Commandant Richard Baer, with the regional party, police, and SS authorities.
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Back in Oranienburg, Pohl’s managers would decide on the final destination of prisoner transports from the abandoned camps.
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Still, they could not micromanage events from afar, given the rapid developments on the ground, and left most of the logistical
details to local SS commandants and their officers.
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Despite its preparations the SS was caught off guard when the massive Soviet attack came in mid-January 1945. Local Nazi leaders only added to the confusion, often refusing to give evacuation orders until it was too late.
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In Auschwitz, everything was thrown into disarray as the Camp SS abandoned ship. “Chaos; the SS in panic,” inmates scribbled on a note as guards rushed across the main camp
to round up prisoners, hand out provisions, pack up goods, and destroy documents. Prisoner columns started to leave the Auschwitz complex on January 17, 1945, and within two days, more than three-quarters of all the remaining inmates were on the road. Some were in good spirits as they left Auschwitz behind; the last survivors of the Special Squad, for instance, hoped to evade the SS killers by blending
into the treks. The great majority of inmates, however, were filled with dread as they departed, anxious about the snow, the SS, and the unknown. “Such an evacuation,” Polish prisoners wrote just as the first treks set off, “means the extermination of at least half of the inmates.”
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In the end, around one in four Auschwitz prisoners would perish during the transports.
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Auschwitz was initially
evacuated on foot, with prisoners marching westward. The two main routes, around forty miles long, led them to Loslau and Gleiwitz. On arrival, most survivors—among them Tommy Buergenthal, the young boy we met earlier—were crammed onto trains and taken farther inside the Reich. The largest group, an estimated fifteen thousand prisoners, was sent to the Gross-Rosen main camp, already utterly overcrowded
and about to be evacuated, too.
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Unlike Auschwitz, which was abandoned in a matter of days, the final evacuation of Gross-Rosen, 170 miles farther northwest, stretched over months. While the main camp and several dozen satellites were hastily given up in early 1945, the KL complex as a whole continued; because of the way the front line moved, several dozen Gross-Rosen satellites were still operational
in early May 1945.
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Over in Stutthof, the final evacuation was equally protracted. The SS abandoned some thirty satellites during the second half of January 1945, marching many of the prisoners toward the main camp.
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The main camp itself was then partially evacuated on January 25 and 26, 1945. With the Red Army only thirty miles away, the SS led around half of the twenty-five thousand prisoners
on a march to the Lauenburg region, some eighty-five miles farther west. On arrival, it put the survivors into makeshift camps, with virtually no food, water, or heating. When the SS abandoned the Lauenburg camps again, a few weeks later, and forced the remaining prisoners on yet another death march, it left behind hundreds of dead. Meanwhile, the Stutthof main camp was still open. Because of
its isolated position, the Soviets had bypassed the area and did not take the camp until May 9, 1945; by then, there were just 150 KL inmates left. Over the preceding weeks, many thousands had died, waiting in vain for the liberation that had seemed so very near. Among the victims was Inge Rotschild’s mother, who perished, just skin and bones, on her daughter’s thirteenth birthday.
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In early
1945, the KL system was in perpetual motion. Fleeing from the Red Army in January and February, the SS had forced more than one hundred and fifty thousand prisoners out of Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, and Stutthof (several Sachsenhausen satellites were affected, too).
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When Camp SS officials assembled these transports, the first prisoners were those “fit for work”; as a general rule, probably originating
with Himmler and Pohl, these inmates were destined as slave laborers for other KL.
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Less clear was the fate of invalids. Just as during the earlier evacuations in the east in 1944, there were no definite orders from the top, it seems, leaving the initiative to the local Camp SS. If transport was available, officials sometimes cleared the entire camp, forcing all sick prisoners onto trucks, carts,
or trains. Elsewhere, especially in more remote satellites, SS men conducted selections shortly before the treks departed, and murdered the weakest inmates.
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