KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (25 page)

Just as the German police continually expanded the circle of political suspects, so, too, did it widen its assault on social outsiders. The main victims were those pursued since 1933 as asocial or criminal, identified in the camps by black or green triangles. They were joined in the mid-1930s by another group: men arrested as homosexuals, who had
to wear pink triangles. Following the murder of Ernst Röhm, the regime cracked down hard on homosexuality. Existing legislation became stricter in 1935 (though women were still exempt) and the police stepped up its raids, led by the obsessively homophobic Himmler; it was regrettable that gay men could not be killed, Himmler told SS leaders in 1937, but at least they could be detained. Again, the
vast majority of arrested men were sent to prison, but some found themselves in the KL.
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In 1935, these men were briefly concentrated in Lichtenburg—in June, 325 of all the 706 inmates here were classified as homosexual—but mostly they were distributed across the SS camp system.
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Men detained as homosexuals suffered unusually harsh treatment in the KL. The SS saw them as perverts deserving
special punishment. To “protect” others, some officials put men with the pink triangle into isolated barracks. And to “cure” them, guards often forced them into particularly hard labor details, like the latrine and punishment company.
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In addition, several prisoners were castrated. Under Nazi law, homosexuals had to consent to such operations, but Camp SS officials forced some into submission.
Among them was the Hamburg tailor Otto Giering, who, having been convicted repeatedly for homosexual acts, was taken to Sachsenhausen in early 1939, at the age of twenty-two. In mid-August 1939, Giering was called to the infirmary and sedated. When he woke up, with a heavy bag of sand on his stomach, he was told that he had just been castrated. A few days later, the commandant himself walked in
and triumphantly held up a glass: “You can have one more look at your balls, but as a conserve.”
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SS men watched homosexual prisoners with great suspicion, and those accused of sexual contacts inside the KL were tortured to extract “confessions”; occasionally, the men were then handed over for criminal trials to courts.
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Some of the suspects had been denounced by other inmates. Given the
force of SS homophobia, accusations of homosexuality proved a potent weapon against competitors and antagonists. More generally, many fellow inmates shared the social prejudices against homosexuals and ostracized them; even sympathetic prisoners kept their distance. As soon as he received the pink triangle on his uniform, Otto Giering recalled, he was “subjected to mockery and harassment” by prisoners
“of all categories”—just one example of the many rifts between inmate groups.
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Solidarity and Friction

Harry Naujoks felt at home inside the Communist movement. He had been born in 1901 into a poor working-class family, not far from the ships on the Hamburg docks, and the small and sturdy man even looked like a sailor, with his strangely swaying gait. He had actually trained as a boilermaker,
leaving school early, and quickly became politicized in his local union. In March 1919, not yet eighteen years old, he joined the recently founded KPD and later led the party’s Hamburg youth wing. Naujoks was a loyal local functionary and in 1933 joined the resistance against the Nazis. He would pay a heavy price: detention in several early camps in 1933–34, more than two years in a penitentiary,
and well over eight years in the KL. Throughout, Naujoks remained devoted to the cause and was repaid with support from other Communist inmates. From the moment he set foot inside Sachsenhausen on November 11, 1936, his comrades took him under their wing. As he entered the camp, he was shown to the storeroom by a fellow Hamburg Communist; his block elder, another Hamburg comrade, told him about
the most important rules of camp life; then yet another former KPD functionary from Hamburg took Naujoks to get food from the camp kitchen. At the end of his first day in Sachsenhausen, Naujoks later wrote, he already felt a sense of belonging.
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Newcomers from other large prisoner groups—such as Social Democrats and Jehovah’s Witnesses—could count on friends and comrades for moral and material
support, too.
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Solidarity within these groups was often close and could pave the way to better positions inside the camp, as in the case of Naujoks, who was transferred in early 1937 (with the help of another old Hamburg associate) from the exhausting forest clearing detail to a coveted post as a joiner. “There are no [more] screams, no beatings, not even any pressure to work fast,” Naujoks
wrote. Prisoners united by a shared past maneuvered trusted individuals into Kapo positions to gain greater influence. The Communists proved particularly adept at this, thanks to their large numbers and tight discipline. Harry Naujoks himself was installed in late summer 1937 in the storeroom, beginning his rise to camp elder.
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Since members of the same prisoner group spent much of their free
time together—because the SS tended to assign barracks based on triangle colors—these groups became focal points for collective self-assertion. In the evenings, prisoners would conduct illicit discussions and lectures about politics, religion, history, and literature. In Esterwegen, the much-weakened Carl von Ossietzky seemed to revive when he engaged fellow prisoners in debate. “It was always
quite an experience to listen to him, to argue with him, to ask him questions,” a former Communist prisoner recalled reverently.
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There were some bigger meetings, too. In Sachsenhausen, Harry Naujoks and his comrades held a first large gathering in December 1936, as SS guards were getting drunk at their staff Christmas party. The covert meeting was organized by a former KPD Reichstag deputy,
who gave a brief speech, followed by the recitation of poems and songs of the labor movement. “Each one of us at that event was touched by the power of the collective, giving us the strength to withstand the terror,” Naujoks wrote in his memoirs.
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Communist prisoners were not alone in fostering a community spirit. Jewish prisoners held cultural events in their barracks—with music, poetry, and
plays—and Christians came together to pray on festive days.
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Any more direct challenges to SS dominance remained extremely rare. In the early camps, prisoners had occasionally stood up to protest, emboldened by their belief in the imminent demise of the Third Reich.
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But there was no sign of the Nazi regime crumbling, and by the mid-1930s SS guards took great pleasure in crushing even hints
of defiance. Only a few individuals still dared to confront the SS. Among them was the Protestant pastor Paul Schneider, held in Buchenwald since late 1937. The following spring, Schneider was dragged into the bunker, where he was starved and abused for months, after he had refused to salute a new swastika flag hoisted above the main gate. But Schneider was not deterred. On Sundays and holy days,
he sometimes shouted brief words of encouragement from the bunker to prisoners on the roll call square, before furious SS guards silenced him with whips and fists; his voice finally fell quiet in summer 1939, when he succumbed to the SS torture.
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The bold defiance of prisoners like Pastor Schneider briefly united inmates of all backgrounds in admiration. Such unity was rare, however, as the
KL bred much division and discord. The most pronounced chasm, at least until the late 1930s, existed within the large group of left-wing prisoners, between German Communists and Social Democrats. The long history of antagonism between the parties—with each accusing the other of betraying the working class and enabling the rise of the Nazis—often crippled closer contacts in the camps.
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In the
early camps, Communists and Social Democrats were still sore from their recent clashes during the Weimar Republic. True, there was some solidarity across party lines, especially among the rank and file. But many revolutionary Communists had not forgotten their suppression at the hands of the pro-democratic forces in Prussia and elsewhere, and openly snubbed SPD-affiliated prisoners. Some Social
Democrats, in turn, were dismayed at being sidelined by the more numerous and better organized Communists; one complained that Communists in his barrack treated him “like a leper,” while another lamented the absence of even “a minimum of comradeship.” On occasion, Communist inmates even denounced SPD prisoners to the camp authorities, or attacked them physically.
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Former SPD leaders, ridiculed
as “bigwigs” by Communists and Nazis alike, endured the greatest hostility. Ernst Heilmann, for example, had been known for his uncompromising opposition to the KPD and did not change his views in captivity, earning him the lasting contempt of Communists in all the camps he was dragged through; no one had a trace of sympathy or compassion for him, the Communist Wolfgang Langhoff recalled. Apparently,
guards also ordered KPD inmates to assault Heilmann, typical of SS attempts to inflame existing tensions between left-wing prisoners.
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The conflicts between left-wingers continued into the mid-1930s and beyond. The scars of the Weimar battles healed only slowly, if at all, and there were repeated clashes over the distribution of Kapo posts, with Social Democrats complaining about Communist
domination. Some individual friendships evolved, as they had done in the early camps, and open-minded prisoners like Harry Naujoks reached out and supported others irrespective of political differences. But the dominant mode was still that of mutual distrust, and the Left never formed a united front in Nazi captivity.
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Women in the Camps

It seemed a day like any other when, one Friday morning
in early 1936, a guard unlocked Centa Beimler’s cell in Stadelheim. She expected to be escorted to work, as usual, but there was exciting news: she was about to leave the prison. Beimler began to hope that she would finally be set free, almost three years after her arrest. But the Gestapo had other plans. As long as her husband Hans remained at large, following his spectacular escape from Dachau,
his wife would stay put. Rather than being released, Centa Beimler was moved from Stadelheim to the Moringen workhouse, which had become the central German protective custody camp for women.
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Fortunately for Centa Beimler, Moringen was a world away from the camps for men. Moringen was not even an official SS concentration camp, as it was still controlled by the Prussian state, not by the IKL;
its civilian director—a rule-bound bureaucrat from the civil service—was the antithesis of Eicke’s “political soldier.” Compared to the KL, inmate numbers were much smaller, with a monthly average of no more than ninety women on the protective custody wing. These women wore their own clothes, not uniforms, and faced monotonous but bearable labor; most of them knitted or mended clothes, working
for less than eight hours a day. Most important of all, there were no physical assaults by the staff.
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On the whole, Moringen resembled a regular prison, with many of the related hardships, like rigid schedules, bland food, and poor hygiene. However, the Moringen women—divided into several communal rooms and dormitories, according to their backgrounds—could mingle relatively freely. After her
long time in a tiny cell in Stadelheim, Centa Beimler was grateful for the company of other Communists, including her own sister. The women played games and sang together, and held political discussions. “You could talk about everything, and that made it easier for all of us,” Beimler later wrote.
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Centa Beimler was a leading figure among the Communist women of Moringen. Her husband, Hans,
was a hero of the resistance, while Centa impressed even prisoners of different beliefs with her strength of will, unbowed by her long imprisonment.
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But the women around Centa Beimler did not dominate Moringen in the same way Communist men did in the KL. For a start, female Kapos gained far less power and influence.
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Moreover, the prisoner population in Moringen was more diverse. Jehovah’s
Witnesses made up a sizable proportion already in 1935, reflecting the high level of female activists, and during 1937 they became the largest prisoner group; by November, around half of the protective custody prisoners were Jehovah’s Witnesses.
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These changes in Moringen went hand in hand with sharply rising prisoner numbers, up from 92 in early January 1937 to around 450 in November 1937.
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Centa Beimler herself was no longer among them, having been released in February under tragic circumstances. Several months earlier, the Communist women in Moringen had heard that Hans Beimler was fighting with the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, further boosting his reputation. Then rumors spread that he had been killed during the defense of Madrid. Centa Beimler was tormented
by uncertainty—she “walked around more dead than alive,” one fellow inmate recalled—until the director confirmed the news. Soon after, she was set free. Now that her husband was dead, the Nazis no longer needed her as a hostage; her sister followed a few months later.
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Most other inmates, however, stayed behind until the entire protective custody wing in Moringen was closed down and all remaining
prisoners were transferred to Lichtenburg.

Opened in December 1937, Lichtenburg was the first KL for women. It had taken Theodor Eicke three years to establish such a camp, highlighting the peripheral place of female prisoners in his vision; for him, the “enemies behind barbed wire” were men. Still, he finally felt forced to act. Not only was the detention of protective custody prisoners outside
the IKL an anomaly, but the numbers of female inmates just kept on rising. Moringen was becoming too small, as Himmler himself had seen during an inspection in late May 1937, while the bigger Lichtenburg stood empty after its closure as a camp for men. It was quickly redesignated and soon filled up again; by April 1939, 1,065 women were held inside.
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