KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (106 page)

One of the largest massacres took place during the evacuation of Lieberose, a Sachsenhausen satellite camp that mainly held Jews from Poland and Hungary. On February 2, 1945, around 1,600 prisoners departed on foot toward the main camp,
more than sixty miles away. Another 1,300 or so stayed behind. Their fate had been sealed in a telex a few days earlier, probably by the Sachsenhausen commandant, which had ordered the execution of the infirm. There was no shortage of SS volunteers. “Come on, let’s go,” one sentry said. “We’re going Jew shooting, and will get some schnapps for it.” The slaughter lasted for three days. There was some
desperate defiance, with one prisoner stabbing the camp leader in the neck. But there was no way out. A few survivors, hidden under discarded uniforms and shoes, were later pulled out by another group of SS men and lynched.
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However, murder was not the SS default mode during the KL evacuations of January and February 1945. The officials were just as likely to leave exhausted prisoners behind
as to kill them. During the partial evacuation of the Stutthof main camp in January 1945, for example, Commandant Hoppe issued written instructions that prisoners who were “sick and unable to march” should stay put; thousands of them watched as the others walked away.
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In Gross-Rosen, too, the SS left hundreds of sick prisoners behind in satellites.
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Some officers shied away from last-minute
murders for fear of Allied retribution.
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Elsewhere, they simply ran out of time, surprised by the speed of the Red Army. Inside the deserted SS barracks, survivors later found signs of the hasty retreat: glasses filled with beer, half-eaten bowls of soup, board games abandoned midway.
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The Red Army liberated well over ten thousand prisoners in early 1945. Most of them, around seven thousand,
were in the Auschwitz main camp, Birkenau, and Monowitz.
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Here, more than a week had passed between the departure of the death marches and the arrival of the Soviets, who lost well over two hundred soldiers during battles in the vicinity of the camp complex. It was an extraordinary period of peril and promise for the remaining prisoners, the final chapter of their suffering, with the ending still
unwritten. Dr. Otto Wolken later described these final days as probably his most difficult in more than five years inside concentration camps. After most of the Auschwitz sentries had left, around January 20–21, the remaining prisoners became more audacious, cutting holes into the barbed wire, moving across different compounds, breaking into SS storerooms. The inmates tried to rule themselves;
they looked after the sick, made fires, and handed out food. But it was too early to celebrate. An exuberant Soviet prisoner, who drunkenly fired into the Birkenau night sky after he found some beer and weapons, was tracked down by a German patrol and shot. A group of French prisoners who had moved into the SS dining hall was also murdered. There were other threats, too, in addition to Nazi killers,
including cold, hunger, and disease. And yet, the great majority of prisoners survived until January 27, 1945. When the first Soviet soldiers appeared at the gates of Birkenau, some prisoners ran toward them. “We hugged and kissed them,” Otto Wolken said a few months later, “we cried with joy, we were saved.”
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Elsewhere in the Auschwitz complex, however, fate took a last terrible twist. On the
same day Birkenau was liberated, SS terror struck in the satellite camp Fürstengrube, just twelve miles farther north. The Camp SS had abandoned the compound eight days earlier, leaving some 250 sick prisoners to fend for themselves. On the afternoon of January 27, 1945, with survival already in sight, a group of SS men suddenly entered the camp and slaughtered almost all the inmates. Only some
twenty prisoners lived to see the Red Army arrive; they had come through the last massacre in Auschwitz.
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Death on the Road

No one knows how many KL prisoners died during the evacuations of early 1945, on icy roads and crammed trains, in ditches and forests. It must have been several tens of thousands, among them an estimated fifteen thousand men, women, and children from the abandoned Auschwitz
complex.
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Although popular memory of these evacuations is dominated by death marches, most of the way to the KL farther inside the Reich was covered by rail. Conditions on these trains were immeasurably worse than during earlier evacuations from western camps such as Natzweiler. All the horrors of the KL were packed into the train carriages. With rolling stock in short supply, the German authorities
used lots of open freight cars, which offered no protection against the elements. The suffering was greatly prolonged by all the delays. Although most trains eventually reached their destination, they often crawled for days along the congested and crumbling German railway network.
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One of the deadliest transports left the Auschwitz satellite camp of Laurahütte on January 23, 1945. The train moved
excruciatingly slowly, often forced to a complete standstill, and when it finally reached Mauthausen almost a week later, around one in seven prisoners on board were dead.
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For most of the prisoners, the ordeal of the evacuations did not begin on the trains, however, but on preceding death marches, which claimed the majority of victims in early 1945. The prisoners had received little food before
they left. One Auschwitz survivor recalled that she got a tin of beef and two inedible loaves of bread. This was supposed to last for several days, but the starved had often devoured everything before they set off.
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Soon prisoners were so exhausted that they walked in a trance; sometimes even friends no longer recognized each other.
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But the marches did not erase all distinctions between captives.
Some small support networks endured, with close friends and family helping each other as best they could, while those who walked alone were often the first to fall. Privileged prisoners also fared better, just as they had done inside the KL. Healthier and better fed, they wore proper shoes and warm clothes, while others staggered along in rags and wooden clogs, and soon collapsed.
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Dispatched
by Oswald Pohl to monitor the KL evacuations in the east, Rudolf Höss found it easy to chase the trail of individual treks: he just had to follow the dead.
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The death rates of the marches varied greatly, depending on factors such as available supplies and distances covered.
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While illness and exhaustion were probably the main killers, shootings were endemic, too. Anyone suspected of escape
was fair game, according to SS rules, even prisoners who had merely stepped out to defecate by the side of the road.
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And although SS directives gave no clear guidance on the treatment of the sick, their murder was common practice, too. Most victims died a lonely death, felled by SS bullets after they had lost touch with the main column, though there were some large-scale massacres, as well;
during a march from the Auschwitz satellite Blechhammer, for example, the SS loaded the sick onto sledges and blew them up with hand grenades.
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Few of the killers were senior Camp SS officers, as most of the local top brass had already made their getaway. Despite their talk of standing tall against the Soviets, high-ranking Nazis made a habit of fleeing first. Rudolf Höss recounted bitterly
that the Auschwitz commandant Richard Baer had saved himself in a comfortable SS limousine, with plenty of time to spare.
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Other commandants, too, hurried away, leaving the supervision of the marches to their underlings. Many of them were NCOs who had risen to senior positions inside satellite camps. But these transport leaders could not be everywhere along the stretched columns, which meant
that the decision to pull the trigger was often made by regular guards. “In practice each guard decided for himself who to shoot,” one testified after the war. Some of these executioners were women, breaking one of the last gendered taboos of the Camp SS. But the great majority were men, including some elderly soldiers who had only recently joined.
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Fear of the Red Army drove many of these perpetrators
in early 1945. Soviet troops were wreaking terrible revenge against the German population during their advance, and the Third Reich was awash with stories of massacres, skillfully exploited by the Nazi propaganda machine. Many ordinary Germans saw these crimes as payback for atrocities in the KL, which had “shown the enemy what they can do to us if they win.” The guards themselves, meanwhile,
were determined to keep ahead of the Red Army. If frail prisoners slowed the treks down, and if screams, slaps, and kicks could not drive them forward anymore, they used their guns.
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The guards’ desire to save their own necks prompted the largest massacre during this period of KL evacuations. In late January 1945, a death march of around three thousand Stutthof prisoners (mostly Jewish women)
arrived in the town of Palmnicken in East Prussia. Trapped by the Baltic Sea on one side and the advancing Soviet troops on the other, the SS, eager to escape, escorted the prisoners to the nearby coast and mowed them down with machine guns; wounded survivors drowned or froze to death, their corpses washing up for days on local beaches.
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APOCALYPSE

In mid-March 1945, Oswald Pohl embarked on
a frantic tour to check on conditions in the KL, on Himmler’s orders. As he passed through a landscape littered with ruins, accompanied by Rudolf Höss and other WVHA officials, he must have realized that the end was near. But he did not slow the pace of his “breakneck tour,” as Höss called it; “as far as I could I visited every camp,” Pohl said later. In the end, he inspected half a dozen or more
main camps within the prewar German borders.
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The situation inside these concentration camps, now bursting with ravaged prisoners from recently evacuated sites, had lately deteriorated dramatically; during the first three months of 1945, the Buchenwald SS recorded more dead inmates than during all of 1943 and 1944 combined. Although some crematoria were running day and night, the bodies of the
dead were mounting up fast. In Dachau, the Camp SS started in February 1945 to bury thousands of prisoners in mass graves, on a hill near the main camp, because the incinerators could not keep up anymore. So many prisoners were dying, Nico Rost noted in his Dachau diary on February 25, 1945, that the survivors did not have time anymore to mourn their friends.
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Oswald Pohl witnessed all this
carnage during his visits in March 1945. The worst camp, Pohl and his managers agreed, was Bergen-Belsen, where they saw masses of starving prisoners and corpses as Commandant Kramer led them through the grounds. The WVHA officials reacted by issuing various orders to the local SS, as they had done elsewhere on their tour. The hard-bitten Rudolf Höss offered practical advice about mass cremation,
drawing on his own expertise. Pohl himself, meanwhile, gave worthless instructions about adding herbs, berries, and plants from nearby forests to the prisoner diet, and also used his last meetings with local KL officials, in Bergen-Belsen and the other camps, to discuss their evacuation plans, with mass murder still very much on SS minds.
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The Race Between Illness and War

Flossenbürg, January
5, ’45

Dear Marianne! In this letter I will set out the whole truth to you for once. My health is fine. The life in the camp is dreadful. 1000 men in 200 beds. Manslaughter and whip—hunger are daily visitors. More than 100 kick the bucket every day—perish on the concrete in the latrine or lying outside. Beyond description the filth—lice a[nd] more … Talk to all [our] acquaintances about a donation
of food—bread—cigarettes—margarine—spread. Your Hermann.

This plea by the German Communist Hermann Haubner was smuggled out of the camp and eventually reached his wife. But it did not save him. Haubner died on March 4, 1945, one of 3,207 fatalities in the Flossenbürg complex in the final month before the camp was abandoned.
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In the early months of 1945, the remaining concentration camps became
disaster zones, including those that had so far been spared the worst. One immediate cause for the catastrophe was the huge rise in prisoner numbers. Overcrowding was nothing new, of course; Buchenwald had been packed to excess since 1942.
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But nothing prepared the camps for the rush near the end, which began with the mass transports from sites closer to the front line in the second half of
1944. Many KL complexes were completely overcrowded by the end of the year, only to be hit by the second wave of evacuations in early 1945. All camps in the heartland of the Third Reich now registered record figures. Buchenwald remained the largest complex of all, with 106,421 prisoners on March 20, 1945; around thirty percent of them were crammed into the main camp, with the rest spread across eighty-seven
satellites, many of them no less packed.
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The final few months came down to a “race between illness and war,” as Arthur Haulot put it in his Dachau diary on January 31, 1945.
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Would prisoners be saved in time by the Allies? Or would they perish from hunger and disease, like so many before them? Rations now dwindled to almost nothing. In camps like Ellrich, even bread, the staple of the prisoner
diet, went missing. “It is dreadful, this hunger,” the Belgian inmate Émile Delaunois wrote in his diary on March 8, 1945, adding two weeks later: “There are only
Muselmänner
left!” Almost one thousand prisoners—nearly one in six—died in Ellrich in March alone.
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This was not a natural disaster but a man-made one, the culmination of years of Camp SS terror. Overcrowding was a direct product
of Nazi policy. Likewise, the dramatic shortages of supplies were linked to the SS conviction that inmates, as proven enemies of the German people, did not deserve better. While prisoners were dying of hunger in spring 1945, the Camp SS itself still received regular deliveries of high-quality provisions, including liver pâté and sausages. After liberation, former inmates found SS warehouses piled
high with food, as well as shoes, coats, mattresses, and medicine.
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Camp SS leaders showed little interest in systematically improving the prisoners’ plight, preferring once more to blame the victims. When Oswald Pohl was told in November 1944 that some SS officials had requested better clothing for inmates, he was furious. Instead of pitying prisoners, Pohl thundered, his men had better teach
them how to look after their things, “if need be by a sound hiding.”
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