KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (19 page)

The triumph of Himmler’s model marked a major defeat for the legal authorities. “Only those who still mourn a past liberalistic era,” a Gestapo official crowed in the leading legal journal, “will regard the application of protective custody measures as too harsh or even illegal.”
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Jurists now faced a parallel and permanent apparatus of detention outside their jurisdiction, typical for the duplication
of powers under the polycratic Nazi system of rule.
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True, legal officials could console themselves in the knowledge that their prisons remained the main site of state detention, dwarfing the camps; despite Himmler’s best efforts, his KL held no more than around 3,800 inmates by summer 1935, compared with well over 100,000 inmates in regular prisons.
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But jurists had to accept that the camps
were here to stay, and just like most Germans, they gradually got used to their existence.
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Although there were still flash points in the second half of the 1930s, the legal authorities developed a largely cordial relationship with Himmler’s terror apparatus.
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Their collaboration rested on a division of labor in the fight against suspected enemies of the new order: lawbreakers would be sent
to prison by courts, while those who could not be convicted of new offenses ended up in concentration camps.
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In addition, thousands of state prisoners were transferred to the KL following the completion of a judicial sentence. When the former KPD Reichstag deputy Karl Elgas came to the end of his three-year sentence for high treason in 1936, the Luckau penitentiary governor advocated his transfer
to a concentration camp as there was no certainty that “he will leave his seditious activities behind him in the future”; the Gestapo agreed. Occasionally, prisoner transfers also went in the opposite direction, as KL inmates convicted of criminal offenses could be taken to a prison to serve their sentence, before returning to the camp.
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The growing complicity of legal officials was summed
up in a letter by the Jena general state prosecutor in September 1937. After he informed the Reich Ministry of Justice of the recent opening of a large new camp named Buchenwald, he added: “During the first few weeks seven inmates have been shot dead by the guard posts while trying to escape. The judicial proceedings have been stopped. Cooperation between the camp management and the Public Prosecutor’s
office has so far been good.”
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The New KL

On the afternoon of August 1, 1936, after athletes from more than fifty countries had filed into the world’s largest sports stadium, during a lavish ceremony watched by more than a hundred thousand spectators, Adolf Hitler stepped up to the microphone and officially opened the Olympic Summer Games. The Berlin Games were a master class in Nazi propaganda.
The German capital had undergone a facelift, with gleaming streets and colorful flags greeting foreign visitors, while Nazi leaders were on their best behavior, downplaying the regime’s repressive reality and basking in the reflected glory of the games.
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But Nazi terror was never far from the surface. Even as the Olympic torch was lit inside Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, a group of exhausted prisoners,
driven on by SS guards, were clearing a vast pine forest less than twenty-five miles to the north, on the edge of Oranienburg; they were preparing the ground for a new concentration camp called Sachsenhausen.
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Heinrich Himmler saw the creation of a big KL near the German capital as an urgent necessity. At the time, there was only one SS camp in Berlin, the Columbia House, a notorious former
Gestapo prison taken over by the IKL in December 1934.
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And this building was far too small for the mass of enemies Himmler targeted. The SS was looking for a suitable location for a large camp, and Oranienburg, the town that had housed one of the biggest early camps, seemed like the perfect spot. Since spring 1936, SS planners had their eyes on a large area of secluded woodland to the northeast
of the town, which offered ample space for a new camp, and could be reached easily from Berlin. Following site visits by Himmler and his enforcer Eicke, the SS went ahead in July 1936 with the construction of Sachsenhausen. The new camp quickly took in prisoners from other KL now regarded as redundant. By early September, it had absorbed the remaining inmates from Esterwegen, who later commemorated
their move in the “Sachsenhausen Song”:

From Esterwegen we set out,

away from moor and mud,

and Sachsenhausen was soon reached,

the gates were once more shut.
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Among the first prisoners was Ernst Heilmann, who had somehow survived until now. “I have returned from the moor,” he wrote in a first letter to his wife from Sachsenhausen on September 8, 1936. Esterwegen, meanwhile, was hastily
closed down and turned into yet another judicial prison camp (the timing was fortunate for the SS, since the Emsland land cultivation project proved largely fruitless). The next camp to shut was the cramped Columbia House, bringing even more inmates to Sachsenhausen in autumn 1936; by the end of the year, the new KL already held some 1,600 prisoners.
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Sachsenhausen was the first of many purpose-built
KL sites and came to rival Dachau as the new model camp. Its construction was part of the wider consolidation of the concentration camps in 1936–37 by Himmler and Eicke, who remained in close contact during this time. Now that the future of the KL system was secure, they reshaped it, replacing most of the existing camps with two brand-new ones: Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald (in Thuringia).
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Himmler and Eicke had already hoped in 1936 to set up a large new KL in Thuringia, around the same time as Sachsenhausen, but the project only got off the ground the next spring. Following personal inspections in May 1937, they finally approved a suitable site, a large forested area on the northern slopes of the small but steep Ettersberg (a beauty spot favored by the nearby Weimar population). The
new camp was provisionally named after the mountain, but when this met with local opposition because of the association with Weimar’s most famous citizen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Himmler opted instead for Buchenwald (“beech forest”), a pastoral term that would come to stand for institutionalized inhumanity. The connection with Goethe, however, could not be severed. A large oak tree,
under which he had supposedly met with his muse, stood right on the new camp grounds; because it was protected, the SS had to build around it. Prisoners came to see the presence of Goethe’s oak in the midst of Buchenwald as a desecration of the memory of Germany’s greatest writer, symbolic of the wider destruction of culture under National Socialism.
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The first prisoners arrived in Buchenwald
on July 15, 1937, and more transports followed over the next weeks. By early September, some 2,400 men had been placed in the new camp. Almost all had arrived from three older KL, which now closed down. There was Bad Sulza, a small camp only recently taken over by Eicke; Sachsenburg; and Lichtenburg, which would reopen a few months later, in December 1937, as the first SS concentration camp for
women. Among the prisoners moved out of Lichtenburg was Hans Litten, who had spent three comparatively bearable years there. He found no such respite in Buchenwald. In his first letter to his mother, sent on August 15, 1937, he told her in code that he was once again brutally abused.
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The landscape of SS terror was changing fast in the second half of the 1930s. Camps that had been hurriedly
set up during the Nazi capture of power were replaced by tailor-made structures meant to last.
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Of the four camps under Eicke’s IKL in late 1937, only Lichtenburg and Dachau had their roots in 1933. And Dachau was already in the midst of a major rebuilding program; much of the old munitions factory was torn down to make way for a permanent new camp.
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SS leaders saw newly built KL as the future.
Himmler and Eicke enthused about such modern camps, as they called them, and over the coming years added another three: Flossenbürg (May 1938), Mauthausen (August 1938), and Ravensbrück (May 1939), the first SS concentration camp specially constructed for women, replacing Lichtenburg.
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What made the new camps so novel, in the eyes of Himmler and Eicke, was not their internal organization or
the guards’ ethos, both of which followed the old Dachau model.
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Rather, it was their functional design. The new concentration camps were planned as small cities of terror, holding masses of prisoners. At a time when the entire SS system held less than five thousand prisoners, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald were projected for six thousand men each.
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In fact, following Himmler’s vision of unrestrained
police terror, there was no fixed limit on prisoner numbers. In contrast to older camps in narrow buildings, the new KL was designed to be “capable of expansion at any time,” Himmler wrote in 1937, shortly after he and Eicke inspected the Sachsenhausen prototype. Boundless terror required boundless camps.
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This was one reason why the new grounds were so large: Sachsenhausen encompassed almost
eighty hectares of land (1936) and Buchenwald more than a hundred (1937).
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In the growing camp cosmos, the prisoner compound itself made up only one part, and by no means the biggest. Outside, there were storage rooms, garages, workshops, administrative offices, petrol stations, and water and sewage pumps, as well as large SS quarters and residential settlements, all connected by a network of
roads built by prisoners.

Prisoner compounds looked rather similar across the new KL. They were clearly organized and easy to survey. The SS prided itself on strict security and surrounded the sites with wire, fences, towers, ditches, and a no-go zone. Inside stood a few administrative buildings—such as the laundry, kitchen, and infirmary—as well as a large roll call square. Then there were the
prefabricated single-story wooden prisoner barracks (in Buchenwald, two-story stone barracks were added in 1938). The barracks resembled the ones Wolfgang Langhoff had seen in Börgermoor back in 1933. Such parallels with the Emsland camps were not accidental, since the SS architect of Sachsenhausen had previously worked there (there was one major change, though: most of the new barracks were longer
and split into two wings, with prisoner quarters at each end and washrooms in the middle). Despite many similarities, the new KL compounds were not identical to each other, owing in part to the terrain on which they were built. Also, the SS still experimented with different designs. The Sachsenhausen compound was initially laid out as a triangle, with prisoner barracks forming a half-circle around
the roll call square at the base; but this shape impeded the camps’ expansion and surveillance, and was later loosened. In Dachau, by contrast, the SS opted for a rectangular design, with rows of symmetrical barracks on either side of the main camp road. This would become standard in most SS concentration camps.
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There was one more central feature of the new KL: secrecy. To be sure, even these
camps were never completely isolated. Social contacts to locals living outside continued as the SS system grew; by 1939, for example, SS men made up nearly one-fifth of the local Dachau population.
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Still, the new camps were largely shielded from sight. In contrast to most early camps, they were set up in more remote and concealed locations, keeping curious spectators away.
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These KL were
also more autonomous from the surrounding infrastructure. Many citizens had initially expected economic benefits from a camp in their midst. A few traders did indeed profit, as did some other locals; a Lichtenburg farmer, for example, used prisoner excrement as fertilizer on his fields. But on the whole, hopes for major material benefits were dashed, not least because the new camps became more self-sufficient,
with workshops for blacksmiths, shoemakers, tailors, joiners, and others. Dachau even had its own bakery and butcher, leading the way for the other KL.
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As a result, camps became less visible for the men and women living in nearby villages and towns, just as they did to most other Germans in the second half of the 1930s.
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THE CAMP SS

During a speech on German radio on January 29, 1939, to
mark the Day of the German Police, Heinrich Himmler made a rare public reference to the SS concentration camps. After reassuring his listeners about the decent conditions in the “strict but fair” KL, Himmler turned to their function: “The slogan that stands above these camps is: There is a path to freedom. Its milestones are: obedience, diligence, honesty, orderliness, cleanliness, sobriety, truthfulness,
readiness to make sacrifices, and love of the fatherland.”
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The SS was so taken with Himmler’s motto that it was soon displayed in several KL—on signs, roofs, and walls—for all inmates to see; a photo of prisoners before one of the placards featured in the Nazi press.
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Similar SS slogans had appeared before. Since 1936, for example, the wrought-iron doors leading from the Dachau gatehouse
to the prisoner compound bore the words “Work Makes Free,” a phrase later added to the gates of Sachsenhausen, Flossenbürg, and Auschwitz.
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SS men used such cynical phrases to torment prisoners. During the war, guards in Sachsenhausen would direct new inmates to the solemn slogan from Himmler’s 1939 speech, painted in huge letters on the barracks around the roll call square, and then point to
the nearby crematorium: “There is a path to freedom, but only through this chimney!”
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In his own warped way, however, Himmler had been quite serious about the “path to freedom.”
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He liked to think of himself as a strict teacher and regarded camps in general as instruments of mass education—a popular view in Nazi Germany, with its many different types of camps for molding “national comrades.”
As for his KL, Himmler saw them as part reformatories, and prisoners who had been made to change their “inner attitude,” as the SS called it, might be allowed to rejoin the national community.
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In line with this approach, many prisoners detained during the second half of the 1930s were eventually released again.
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None of them had been educated, of course; they had been broken. When Himmler
talked about SS “methods of education,” what he really meant was coercion, punishment, and terror—the only ways to deal with all the deviant, dirty, and degenerate “scum” and “rubbish” in the KL, as far as he was concerned.
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What is more, Himmler insisted that not all prisoners be freed, even after they were broken. Echoing contemporary criminological thinking, with its division of offenders
into reformable and incorrigible, Himmler was certain that one “must never release” the most depraved common criminals and the most dangerous political enemies, those who would infect the German people once more with the “poison of Bolshevism.”
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