KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (118 page)

Sites of Remembrance

On September 14, 1958, the GDR political elite celebrated one of its most solemn acts of state: the dedication of the Buchenwald national memorial complex. By the following year, the new memorial, which reminded some critics of monumental Nazi architecture, already drew more than six hundred thousand visitors, including children on mandatory school trips. It encompassed burial grounds, pylons,
a huge bell tower, and a sculpture depicting inmates standing tall against the SS—an allusion to the mythical self-liberation of Buchenwald, the fictional focus of the official Communist narrative, which discounted the decisive role of U.S. liberators. Further national memorials followed in Ravensbrück (1959) and Sachsenhausen (1961). All three sites sought to legitimize the East German state by
celebrating international solidarity and the heroics of the Communist prisoners; just as resistance fighters had supposedly overcome Nazism in the camps, the GDR would defeat contemporary incarnations of Fascism. During his speech in Buchenwald on September 14, 1958, Prime Minister Grotewohl promised to “fulfill the legacy of the dead heroes,” a reference to the estimated fifty-six thousand victims
of the KL. What he did not say was that another seven thousand or more prisoners had died in Buchenwald after the demise of the Third Reich, not as victims of the SS, but at the hands of the Soviet occupation forces.
131

Between August 1945 and February 1950, Buchenwald had served as one of ten Soviet special camps on German soil. Red Army guards took over the Camp SS buildings, as they did in
Sachsenhausen and Lieberose, which also became special camps. The old prisoner barracks filled up with new inmates, rounded up in ad hoc arrests and condemned by military tribunals or interned without trial. Most prisoners were middle-aged German men who had once belonged to the Nazi movement. But they were not detained as war criminals—few had been senior officials or violent perpetrators—but as
alleged threats to the current Soviet occupation. They even included some former resisters against Nazism, like Robert Zeiler, a survivor of KL Buchenwald who found himself back inside the camp in 1947 on trumped-up charges as an alleged U.S. spy.

In general, there was nothing unusual about the temporary transformation of former KL sites into Allied internment camps. In the early postwar years,
Dachau and Flossenbürg were used by the U.S. military, Neuengamme and Esterwegen by the British, Natzweiler by the French. But the western Allies quickly released most prisoners and held the remaining war crimes suspects under mostly adequate conditions. Not so the Soviet authorities, who neglected the special camps and their often harmless inmates. Indifference and ineptitude bred terrible conditions,
with hunger, overcrowding, and illness resulting in mass death. Out of one hundred thousand prisoners taken to the three former concentration camps turned into Soviet special camps, well over twenty-two thousand perished inside.
132

The use of former KL for Allied internment hampered early survivor efforts of on-site remembrance. In many camps, inmates had come together immediately after liberation
to honor the dead. In Buchenwald, survivors held an impromptu service on the roll call square on April 19, 1945, gathering around a wooden obelisk (elsewhere, survivors built more permanent memorials). But the Buchenwald grounds were soon out of bounds, following the establishment of the special camp, and former inmates had to direct their commemorative efforts elsewhere. When the site was designated
as a national memorial, in 1953, the initiative came not from survivors but from the SED, which elbowed the inmate association aside. By then, the appearance of the former concentration camp had already altered dramatically. Some parts had collapsed; some had been torn down; and some had been taken away by the Soviet troops and German locals, who departed with machines, pipes, and even with
the windows of the crematorium. More alterations and demolition work followed to prepare the ground for the memorial and museum. By the time of the opening, much of the old camp was gone, replaced by the new GDR version of Buchenwald.
133

KL memorials in other countries also reflected the commemorative concerns of the respective political authorities, who tried to stamp the dominant national narrative
of the Nazi past onto these sites. True, survivor organizations played an important role, but the appearance of museums and monuments, and the speed of their construction, was largely determined by wider social forces.
134
In Auschwitz, for example, a state museum opened in 1947 in the former main camp under the auspices of the new Polish government, and it has been expanded and revamped ever since
(the grounds of the former IG Farben plant at Dwory, by contrast, belong to the Polish chemicals giant Synthos and remain off-limits to commemoration and conservation). For decades, public memory in Auschwitz was dominated by national Polish narratives. As the main memorial of the Polish People’s Republic, Auschwitz marked the patriotic resistance against Germany, national suffering, socialist
solidarity, and Catholic martyrdom—themes that resonated with large sections of the Polish population. By contrast, the memory of Jewish prisoners, who made up the vast majority of the dead, was sidelined, as symbolized by the progressive decay of the Birkenau compound. Memory has become far more diverse in recent decades, linked in part to the fall of Communism at the end of the 1980s, though this
did not put an end to political controversies over the memorial.
135
Such commemorative conflicts were grounded in the history of the camps themselves. The KL system had always fulfilled multiple functions, allowing individual interest groups to emphasize separate elements in their narratives.

This is evident in Mauthausen, too, where a vast memorial park has grown along the road to the former
camp. Starting with a granite monument dedicated to French freedom fighters in 1949, more than a dozen national memorials followed, each mirroring aspects of public memory prevailing in the sponsoring state. As for the Austrian authorities, they opened a memorial in 1949, encompassing some restored KL buildings (though most prisoner barracks were sold off and dismantled). In keeping with the official
Austrian account of the Nazi period, the memorial was primarily designed as a site of national martyrdom, with a Catholic chapel in the former laundry and a stone sarcophagus on the roll call square. A museum was not added until 1970, with an exhibition focusing on Austrian victimhood. Since then, commemoration in Mauthausen has changed, reflecting the growing engagement with the past since the
1980s. Memorials for forgotten victims have been added, remembering homosexuals (1984), Roma (1994), and Jehovah’s Witnesses (1998), and a more nuanced history of the camp is told in a new visitor center (2003). Popular interest has sharply risen, with the number of visiting Austrian students expanding from just six thousand (1970) to over fifty-one thousand (2012).
136

The memorial landscape
in the neighboring German Federal Republic has also shifted since the early postwar years. The long and rocky path can be best illustrated by the development of Dachau, the birthplace of the KL system. Following the end of the U.S. military trials, the Bavarian authorities turned the former prisoner compound into a housing project for ethnic German refugees from Eastern Europe (other KL sites became
DP camps, too, among them Bergen-Belsen and Flossenbürg). The Dachau prisoner barracks were used as apartments, the infirmary as a kindergarten, and the delousing block as a restaurant, later called “At the Crematorium.” For years, the history of the KL was obscured by the settlement, and between 1953 and 1960 there was not even a rudimentary museum on the site. Most locals ignored the camp in
their midst, or distorted its history. The Dachau mayor, who had already served as deputy mayor during the Nazi years, told a journalist in 1959 that many inmates had been rightly detained as criminals. Local politicians around other KL sites were equally reluctant to face the truth. In 1951, the Hamburg mayor opposed plans for a French memorial in Neuengamme, because “everything should be done to
avoid opening old wounds and reawakening painful memories”; instead, the former KL grounds were used for decades as a prison, built with bricks from the Neuengamme SS works.

Only in the 1960s did Dachau become a major site of remembrance. Under pressure from survivors’ organizations, the Bavarian state finally relocated the residents from the camp grounds, with the last ones leaving just before
the opening of the state memorial in spring 1965. As elsewhere, this process was accompanied by major changes to the site. Against the wishes of survivors, the authorities razed many of the remaining KL buildings, leaving behind a vast, clean, and barren area. Fresh foundations indicated where the barracks had once stood. Around the former roll call square, two newly built huts were meant to illustrate
everyday prisoner life and a museum charted the rise of Nazism and the history of the camp. This was still a partial history, though, foregrounding political prisoners. The same applied to a new monument on the square, erected by the main survivor association, which included a chain with colored triangles worn by different inmate groups: red (political prisoners), yellow (Jews), purple (Jehovah’s
Witnesses), and blue (returned emigrants). The colors denoting social outsiders, however, were all missing: there was no black (asocials), green (criminals), pink (homosexuals), or brown (Gypsies). At the far end of the site, meanwhile, several new buildings sprang up, with a large Catholic chapel and convent, a Jewish monument, and a Protestant church aiming to give religious meaning to
the prisoners’ suffering. The expanding Dachau memorial attracted more and more visitors, and by the early 1980s, annual figures had risen from around four hundred thousand (1965) to nine hundred thousand. The growing visibility of the site generated some hostility among local politicians, who still preferred to gloss over the past. Their opposition only abated from the 1990s, when Dachau and other
German KL memorials entered a new phase of commemoration.
137

Unification in 1990 had a major impact on German memory culture, above all in former East Germany. Over the coming years, the national concentration camp memorials were stripped of GDR propaganda and remodeled, not least by commemorating the Soviet special camps. This process proved particularly painful in Buchenwald, where clashes
between the new curators and the Socialist-led KL survivor association degenerated into a public row over the actions of Communist Kapos.
138
But unification affected memory in western parts of Germany, as well. The suffering of German Communists and their fellow travelers, previously marginalized by the prevailing Cold War mind-set, gradually received greater recognition.
139
Similarly, the fate
of Soviet KL prisoners came into sharper focus, and they also finally received some compensation as forced laborers, following a second wave of German reparations (though this came too late for most).
140

The end of the Cold War intensified public engagement with the Third Reich more generally, not least to assuage anxieties outside Germany about a possible resurgence of radical nationalism. Since
the 1990s, the German government has taken an active lead in the commemoration of Nazi crimes, from the designation of the Auschwitz liberation date as the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism, to the construction of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the heart of Berlin. Similarly, the national government has started to support KL memorials directly, providing
an important catalyst for changes in official commemoration.
141
Previously neglected sites, like Dora (in the shadow of Buchenwald) and Flossenbürg (in the shadow of Dachau), have been remade in recent years; in Flossenbürg, the former prisoner kitchen and laundry—used commercially by a private company until the 1990s—now houses an exhibition about the camp.
142
And new monuments and museums on
the sites of long-ignored satellite camps and death marches make the immense spread of the KL system more visible.
143
Even established memorials like Dachau have been redesigned once more in light of new research and changing public perceptions.

*   *   *

Dachau, March 22, 2013.
It is a bright, cold spring day, much as it was exactly eighty years ago, when the concentration camp first opened.
The site is easy to find, with plenty of signs pointing the way (until the 1980s, the city authorities kept its profile low). Anyone arriving by train can walk along a Path of Remembrance, adorned with multilingual panels, to the memorial. At the entrance stands a new visitor center, opened in a state ceremony in 2009, broadcast live, and attended by the Bavarian political establishment, which had
long shunned the memorial. “We don’t forget, we don’t suppress, we don’t relativize what happened here,” the prime minister pledged. As prisoners did in the past, visitors pass through the doorway of the old SS gatehouse, following a path reopened in 2005 despite local opposition. The wrought-iron gates with the inscription
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
lead directly onto the roll call square, where several
large visitor groups are gathered. It is a quiet day, like most Fridays, but there are still some 1,500 visitors. To the left of the square they see the two reconstructed barracks and the outlines of the others, bisected by the camp street that leads toward the crematorium. On the right stands the museum, overhauled in 2003. And straight ahead lie the offices of some thirty academic, archival,
and pedagogic staff. Their task, the director says in a newspaper interview to mark Dachau’s anniversary, “is to tell the history of this camp free from all political slant.”
144
The memorial has clearly come a long way. This is far from suggesting a sense of closure, though. Commemoration will keep on changing, here and at other former KL sites. Neither will the history of the camps ever come
to an end. Blind spots remain. New sources, approaches, and questions will make us reconsider what we thought we knew; on March 22, 2013, for example, none of the historians in Dachau could pinpoint with certainty the building where it had all begun eighty years earlier.