KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (112 page)

Fear sometimes turned into paranoia and panic, with apocalyptic visions of escaped criminals attacking defenseless civilians. In reality,
most prisoners on the run were careful to stay out of sight. But this did not stop the rumors about hordes of dangerous prisoners on the loose, which fed on similar anxieties about marauding bands of foreign workers. Local officials and newspapers sounded hysterical warnings, and there was plenty of talk about looting, rape, and murder, just as there had been after the evacuation of Buchenwald.
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Galvanized into action, elderly men from the People’s Storm, youngsters from the Hitler Youth, small-time party officials, and upstanding members of the local community reported escaped prisoners to the authorities or joined in manhunts, typical for the decentralization of Nazi terror toward the end of the Third Reich.
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Among the victims were prisoners who escaped from the train in Celle in
the wake of the U.S. air raid on April 8, 1945. The following morning, German soldiers, policemen, and SS forces combed nearby gardens and woods, where most prisoners were hiding, and shot them at point-blank range. Local civilians took part, too. The massacre was masterminded by the local military commander, who claimed that prisoners were “plundering and murdering” all over town; in all, at least
170 prisoners were killed around Celle.
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In numerous other German towns and villages, too, fugitive prisoners were murdered with the help of the local population. It was “a real bloodbath,” one witness wrote after a similar pursuit, still stunned by the sudden killing frenzy that had come over some of his neighbors, who shot prisoners cowering in cellars, sheds, and barns.
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Some locals also
participated in massacres of prisoners still under SS control. This is what happened on April 13, 1945, in Gardelegen, a small town north of Magdeburg. Several prisoner treks had recently reached the area, which was almost completely encircled by U.S. troops. Arguing that the prisoners would pose a grave threat to the population if liberated, the fanatical young Nazi Party district leader in Gardelegen
pushed for mass murder. He was supported by other locals, whipped up by stories of outrages committed by fugitive prisoners. On the afternoon of April 13, the prisoners were marched from army barracks in the center of town to an isolated brick barn outside. The killers—a motley crew of SS men, paratroopers, and others—used torches and flamethrowers to ignite the petrol-soaked straw inside
the barn, and threw grenades. The barn was soon ablaze. “The screams by the men who were burning alive grew louder, as did the groans,” the Polish prisoner Stanis
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aw Majewicz, one of around twenty-five survivors, later recalled. Those who tried to flee were cut down with machine guns. When U.S. troops reached the site on April 15, they found around a thousand charred corpses.
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News of this atrocity rapidly spread through the U.S. press, and Gardelegen has become a symbol of Nazi war crimes. But it was the exception, not the norm. Few local leaders were
as bent on mass murder as those in Gardelegen. Just some twenty miles away, for instance, another Nazi Party official protected a trek of five hundred prisoners in his village. And even in Gardelegen, only a small number of citizens actively participated in the murder of prisoners. Many more Germans, here and elsewhere, had little desire to tie themselves to a lost cause.
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The KL and their
prisoners always drew a range of responses from ordinary Germans. Popular opinion was never united, not at the beginning of the Third Reich, and not at the end, either. The wide spectrum of reactions was evident even in small villages like Oberlindhart. Most locals had watched in silence as the Buchenwald trek halted on April 26, 1945. A few called for mass executions; several others, among them the
mayor, sheltered fugitives. The local drama continued even after the trek had left the village. Some fervent inhabitants denounced prisoners who had hidden in the barn of the Schmalzl family. But there was another twist: a local policeman took pity on the recaptured prisoners after they pleaded for their lives, and led them to a different farm, where they stayed until U.S. soldiers arrived the
following day. They were finally free.
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The End

By early May 1945, even the most blinkered Nazi fanatic knew that the game was up. The Third Reich was in ruins, and many career SS men like Rudolf Höss felt that “with the Führer, our world has gone under, too.” Their last hope was Heinrich Himmler. As Höss and the other Camp SS managers prepared to meet their leader in Flensburg on May 3–4,
1945, they probably expected a final battle cry. Would Himmler offer them another fantastic vision to cling to? Or would he order them to go down in a blaze of glory? But there was no last stand. All smiles, Himmler, who had been frozen out of the new Dönitz government, breezily announced that he had no more directives for the KL. Before he dismissed his men with a handshake, he issued one last order:
the officials should disguise themselves and go into hiding, just as he planned to do himself.
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Even in defeat, the Camp SS leaders followed Himmler. Several men from Office Group D dressed in navy uniforms and took false identities. Gerhard Maurer became Paul Kehr, and Höss turned into Franz Lang. In disguise, Höss and Maurer, together with several other WVHA men, took jobs on small farms
in rural northern Germany and initially evaded capture. Their former boss Richard Glücks, however, who had taken the jolly moniker Sonnemann (Sunnyman), had no hope of passing himself off as a farmhand. Glücks was a shadow of the sturdy figure he had been six years earlier, when he took over the KL system. His gradual loss of institutional power, evident not least in his increasingly rare meetings
with Oswald Pohl, had been accompanied by a marked physical decline. Popping pills and drinking heavily, he was rumored to have lost his mind, and ended up in a German military hospital in Flensburg, more dead than alive. On May 10, 1945, just after the capitulation of the Third Reich, Glücks killed himself, biting on a capsule of potassium cyanide.
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Glücks’s death was part of a wave of suicides
that swept Germany in spring 1945. Nazi propaganda extolled suicide as the ultimate sacrifice. In truth, it was mostly fear and despair that led former Nazi officials to take their lives.
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The roll call of SS suicides was led by Heinrich Himmler, who killed himself on May 23, 1945, in British captivity, two days after his arrest. Among the other Camp SS officers who died by their own hand were
Enno Lolling and the last Dachau commandant, Eduard Weiter.
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Most of the dead were hard-bitten veterans, though some had felt more ambivalent about the KL system, among them Hans Delmotte, the young Auschwitz doctor who had broken down during his first selection of prisoners.
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Like Himmler and Glücks, several Camp SS suicides used cyanide, which had been tested a few months earlier for this
very purpose during a lethal prisoner trial in Sachsenhausen. A few others, like the Gross-Rosen commandant Arthur Rödl, departed in more dramatic style: a man with a long history of hands-on violence, Rödl chose a suitably gory death and blew himself up with a hand grenade.
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Most Camp SS officers, however, wanted to survive the Third Reich. They may have talked about heroic sacrifice and kamikaze
missions, but in the end, they scrambled to save their skins.
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The mass of SS guards did the same. In the remaining camps, the officials often stayed away from the compounds in the final days, plotting their getaway. When the moment came, they changed into civilian clothes and disappeared.
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Likewise, SS escorts on death transports tried to evade capture at the last moment; if there were no
regular clothes at hand, they put on prisoner uniforms.
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Before they made their escape, SS escorts had to decide the fate of the remaining prisoners on their transports. Some chose to kill. Early on May 3, 1945, for example, SS men ordered prisoners on a Buchenwald death march, which had reached a small forest near Traunstein in Bavaria, to line up and opened fire, killing fifty-eight men.
Then the guards “threw away their weapons and made a quick getaway,” testified the only survivor, who had lain injured under two dead comrades.
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Elsewhere, SS escorts disappeared during brief stops or overnight, concerned only with saving themselves.
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When the survivors of a Sachsenhausen death march awoke on May 2, 1945, in a forest clearing outside a small village near Schwerin, with all
guards gone, they were dumbfounded. “We could not comprehend it, not believe it,” the Austrian Jew Walter Simoni recalled after the war.
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But the abandoned prisoners were not yet safe; they were “free people but not liberated,” as one survivor later put it, still in danger of falling victim to Nazi fanatics. Bewildered and exhausted, some dazed prisoners actually continued their aimless march,
even without SS escorts.
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Only the arrival of the Allies finally put an end to the transports. We will never know how many prisoners gained their freedom in April and early May 1945 in German cities and villages, on trains, in forests, and on the open road, but their total number most probably exceeded one hundred thousand.
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Many more men, women, and children survived inside the last KL.
During the final five weeks of the Third Reich, the Allies liberated an estimated one hundred and sixty thousand prisoners in main camps, most of them in Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Mauthausen-Gusen. In addition, Allied troops found an estimated ninety thousand prisoners in over one hundred satellite camps, in some cases even after the official German capitulation. The great majority of
liberated satellites were small, holding fewer than one thousand prisoners. But there were also huge ones like Ebensee, where U.S. troops encountered an estimated sixteen thousand survivors on May 6, 1945. Among them were Dr. Miklós Nyiszli, who had arrived on the death transport from Auschwitz in January 1945, and the Czech interpreter Drahomír Bárta, a longtime inmate of the camp. When the first
U.S. soldiers appeared in Ebensee, Bárta noted in his diary, they were greeted by “indescribable scenes of joy and ecstasy.”
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The final moments of captivity were full of confusion. The prisoners had long been suspended in a state of nervous exhaustion, between hope of liberation and fear of SS massacres, stray bullets, and bombs. “All that has kept us going for three weeks is the rumor that
the war will only last for two or three more days,” Ágnes Rózsa wrote on April 28, 1945, in the Flossenbürg satellite camp Holleischen, where she had arrived after the bombing of her old camp in Nuremberg. She endured another week of slave labor in a nearby munitions workshop, until it was hit by Allied bombs on May 3, 1945. Rózsa survived once more, but she was still in SS hands. “Our liberation
is so close and so real,” she wrote the following day. “That makes the thought that we have to die at the last minute … even more unbearable.” When freedom finally came on the morning of May 5—with U.S. soldiers emerging from the surrounding forest—it came suddenly. Silence fell across the former farm that made up the Holleischen camp. Then there were shouts of “They are coming! They are here!” followed
by wild screams from more than one thousand women inside.
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On occasion, the transition from terror to freedom came in a more orderly fashion. In Buchenwald, SS Commandant Pister told the camp elder, the German Communist Hans Eiden, early on April 11, 1945, that he would hand the camp over to him. Soon after, a final command went out over the loudspeakers, ordering SS members to move out immediately.
By now, U.S. troops were in the immediate vicinity; shots were ringing out as the SS fled, with the guards on the watchtowers the last to leave. In midafternoon, with the SS finally gone, prisoners emerged from hiding and went toward the main gate. Soon after, Eiden spoke over the public address system, confirming that “the SS has left the camp” and that an international committee of prisoners
was in control. When the U.S. troops reached the main compound, a white flag greeted them on one of the towers.
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In Dachau, too, U.S. soldiers saw a white flag when they arrived on the afternoon of April 29, 1945, though here the flag had been raised by anxious SS men, not the prisoners. Although Dachau was not the last concentration camp to fall, its liberation symbolized the destruction of
the Nazi terror machine. It was more than twelve years since the SS had set up its first makeshift camp on the site. Since then, Dachau had changed its appearance many times over and gained multiple functions: bulwark of the Nazi revolution, model camp, SS training ground, slave labor reservoir, human experimentation site, mass extermination ground, and center of a satellite camp network. Dachau
was not the most deadly KL, but it was the most notorious at the time, inside Germany and abroad. “Dachau, Germany’s most dreaded extermination camp, has been captured,”
The New York Times
reported on its front page on May 1, 1945. Of the more than two hundred thousand prisoners who had passed through the Dachau complex since 1933, at least fourteen thousand had perished in the final months from
January 1945, not counting all the unknown victims, like those of the death marches that continued for several days after the liberation of the main camp.
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The final hours in Dachau had been just as tense as in the other camps. By the morning of April 29, 1945, most SS men had fled, but the guards on the watchtowers still trained their machine guns on the prisoners. Detonations could be heard
close by, planes roared across the overcast sky, and the howl of tank engines came and went. Then prisoners listened as small arms fire edged closer, with some guards shooting back. Finally, a U.S. officer, accompanied by two reporters, peered into the compound from the gatehouse and entered the empty roll call square. Within minutes, the square was bursting with ecstatic inmates, who embraced
and kissed the liberators. “They grabbed us,” the officer wrote the following day, “and tossed us into the air screaming at the top of their lungs.”
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