KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (33 page)

Still, many more men died in KL than in the mid-1930s, especially during the most lethal phase, between summer 1938 and spring 1939. To some degree, this reflected the general growth of the prisoner population at the time. But the death rate rose much faster than inmate numbers. In Dachau, for example, the average
prisoner population doubled in the late 1930s, while the death rate shot up tenfold.
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There were several causes. Daily forced labor became more ruinous than before, as we have seen, with most prisoners forced into heavy construction. At the same time, basic living conditions declined due to shortages and overcrowding. Another important factor was the poor medical care for ill and injured prisoners,
a crucial aspect of the KL that requires further scrutiny.

The Camp SS generally neglected the prisoners’ health, focusing instead on security, punishment, and labor. In the absence of firm direction from above, the medical infrastructure varied from camp to camp. And although the different infirmaries expanded during the late 1930s, adding more space and technical equipment—in Sachsenhausen,
there was now a regular operating room and an X-ray department—the overall standard of care remained woefully inadequate.
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The biggest threat were the Camp SS men themselves. It was a basic SS tenet that ailing inmates were still dangerous enemies. SS men automatically suspected sick prisoners of being cheats and stopped many of them from receiving medical help altogether. When an ill Dachau
prisoner dared to approach camp compound leader Hermann Baranowski for permission to see the doctor, one day in 1937, he provoked a wild tirade: “So what! During the [First World] War, people marched for hours with their guts in their hands! You have to learn to endure pain! I will make sure of it! Dismissed!”
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SS doctors, meanwhile, actively searched for supposed malingerers, following orders
from Theodor Eicke. “Prisoners trying to avoid work by unfounded or prissy sick-reporting,” Eicke insisted, “are detailed to the ‘penal work’ section.”
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KL doctors were also complicit in countless other acts of terror. They routinely declared prisoners “fit” to be whipped, denied them care for wounds, and covered up murders by forging autopsy reports and death certificates.
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SS doctors were
in short supply, and although it is hard to generalize, it seems that those who ended up inside the KL were often inexperienced, incompetent, or both. As graduates, they stood out from other Death’s Head SS officers, almost none of whom had set foot inside a university, except perhaps to beat up left-wing students in the Weimar years. Many KL doctors had only recently qualified and saw the camps,
and the harsh treatment of prisoners, as a springboard for their medical careers. One of this breed of young SS physicians was Dr. Ludwig Ehrsam, the head of the Sachsenhausen infirmary. Not yet thirty years of age, Dr. Ehrsam rarely bothered to examine his patients. Instead, he would force them to perform physical exercises, supposedly to determine whether they were ready to return to work. His
callousness cost numerous prisoner lives, earning him a fitting nickname among the Sachsenhausen prisoners: Dr. Gruesome.
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There were exceptions, of course. A few SS doctors tried to improve the treatment in the KL and occasionally even sent inmates to specialists in proper hospitals.
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Mostly, though, sick prisoners could expect poor provision, neglect, and abuse. It would have been easy
to improve things, if only the SS had wanted. After all, there were experienced physicians among the prisoners who could have assisted in infirmaries, as they had done in some early camps.
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Camp SS men knew very well that these inmates were often much better qualified than SS doctors were.
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However, by the late 1930s, the SS often refused to draw on prisoner doctors, some of whom now helped
their fellow inmates in secret.
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Instead, it left most daily duties in the infirmaries to prisoners with little or no medical training. These Kapos worked under SS orderlies, who were often even more ignorant, and SS doctors, who rarely deigned to deal with routine matters.
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The indifference of SS doctors threatened the entire prisoner population. Poor hygiene created a breeding ground for
infectious diseases, and several epidemics spread through KL in the late 1930s. Buchenwald was hardest hit, following an outbreak of typhoid fever in the overcrowded camp in late 1938. The epidemic soon spread beyond the compound, after wastewater contaminated a nearby stream. Alarmed municipal officials placed several villages under quarantine and blamed the Buchenwald SS for its negligence. By
the time the SS medical staff finally took action—isolating sick prisoners in a special barrack and banning the use of the open latrine—it was too late. The epidemic in the camp raged for weeks, killing scores of inmates.
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One of the last victims was Jura Soyfer, a young poet and writer arrested as a left-wing opponent in Austria after the Nazi takeover in spring 1938. The Buchenwald SS had
forced him to work as a corpse carrier and it was here that he caught typhoid fever. Jura Soyfer died on February 16, 1939, only days after he had learned that the SS was about to release him. He was mourned by other inmates, who had been inspired by the witty parodies of the SS he had secretly performed in the barracks. As his wooden coffin left the camp on the back of a van, on its way to the Weimar
crematorium, a fellow prisoner wondered “how many unwritten poems, how many unfinished works have we locked inside with him!”
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Jura Soyfer was one of around one thousand men who perished in Buchenwald between January 1938 and August 1939, making it, in absolute terms, by far the most deadly KL at the time. In Dachau, by contrast, just over four hundred prisoners lost their lives over the same
period, even though it admitted slightly more men than Buchenwald.
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How do we account for Buchenwald’s wretched record? It was the most recent among the big SS camps, and sanitary conditions were worse there than in Dachau and Sachsenhausen, epitomized by the typhoid epidemic. And the Buchenwald SS was particularly violent, whipped up by the traumatic killing in May 1938 of SS Rottenführer Albert
Kallweit. But there was another crucial factor, perhaps the most important of all. Buchenwald held far more Jewish prisoners than any other KL at the time, and Jews remained the favorite victims of the Camp SS; of all the Buchenwald prisoners who died in the late 1930s, almost half were Jewish, Jura Soyfer among them.
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JEWS

“I would not like to be a Jew in Germany,” Hermann Göring quipped
on November 12, 1938, at a top-level Nazi meeting on anti-Jewish policy, only days after a devastating state-sponsored pogrom had engulfed Germany, with Nazi mobs razing thousands of synagogues, shops, and houses, and humiliating, robbing, and assaulting tens of thousands of Jews; hundreds had died, murdered during the storm of violence or driven to suicide.
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The pogrom was the climax of years
of Nazi persecution, which saw the gradual but relentless exclusion of Jews from German social, cultural, and economic life, pursued by radical forces from below and above. It was becoming impossible for Jews to live in Germany, and around half of the estimated five hundred thousand Jews left their fatherland during the prewar years, despite the uncertainties of life abroad, the Nazi levies on
emigration, and the difficulties of securing visas. The remaining Jews—impoverished, isolated, and deprived—faced a desperate future trapped inside the Third Reich.
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The history of Jews in prewar Nazi Germany has been told before, though rarely with more than a passing glance at the concentration camps.
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There is an obvious explanation for this oversight: except for a brief moment after the
pogrom, only a fraction of the Jewish population was held in the camps. In the prewar years, the focal point of anti-Jewish policy was elsewhere—in schools, at work, in courts, on the streets. And yet, the persecution of Jews in the prewar camps was important, too, as the KL spearheaded anti-Semitic terror and pioneered several radical measures that later hit all Jews under Nazi rule.
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Take
racial legislation. It was an article of faith for Nazi leaders that sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews were a monstrous sin. But even though there had been talk of an official ban since 1933, the regime initially bided its time. From spring 1935, local Nazi thugs across Germany, frustrated with the general direction of the dictatorship, took matters into their own hands and attacked “mixed”
couples. The police, in turn, dragged numerous “race defilers” to concentration camps in summer 1935. German courts could not yet punish them; the police and the SS could. “To put an end to his sensual greed,” the Magdeburg Gestapo noted in one such case, involving a Jewish man accused of sex with his “Christian” housekeeper, it was “absolutely necessary to confine him in a concentration camp.”
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Such cases declined only after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, which formally made Jews into second-class citizens, and outlawed extramarital relations and future marriages, threatening culpable men with prison or penitentiary (women did not fall under this provision). From now on, the Gestapo reserved protective custody for “race defilement” largely for men suspected
of “particularly serious” offenses, and later some Jewish women, too (or “Jewish whores,” as one police officer put it).
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The KL also broke new ground when it came to driving Jews out of the country. Forced emigration only emerged as the primary aim of Nazi anti-Jewish policy in the late 1930s.
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But the police had already gained extensive experience inside concentration camps. From 1935,
the Gestapo had routinely taken German émigrés who came back home into protective custody, suspecting them of “atrocity propaganda” abroad.
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Among them were many hundreds of Jews. Before they were released again, normally after around six months, the Gestapo insisted that they would have to leave the country, preferably for Palestine or beyond. Before long, the release of other Jewish prisoners
had become conditional on emigration, too, pushing even more of them out of Germany; anyone returning once more to German soil was threatened with lifelong detention in a concentration camp.
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The prewar camps foreshadowed the later all-out assault against the Jews in many ways. Not only were KL prisoners the first Jews under Nazi control to be marked with the yellow Star of David, but the prewar
camps functioned as a “motor of radicalization” for anti-Semitic policy more generally, as the historian Jürgen Matthäus put it, driving forward the isolation, forced labor, and murder of Jews in the Third Reich.
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The transmission of these measures from the KL across German society was aided by senior SS personnel, starting at the top with Heinrich Himmler, who not only steered the camps, but
also helped to propel anti-Jewish policy.

Coordinating Anti-Jewish Abuse

Before 1938, few Jews were taken to the KL. Despite the detention of Jewish “race defilers” prior to the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, there were still no more than a few dozen Jewish prisoners in each camp during the mid-1930s; even a large KL like Sachsenhausen only held around fifty Jewish men by early 1937.
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Despite the small size of the Jewish prisoner population, it always loomed large in the minds of Camp SS men, who eagerly anticipated their arrival, just like some guards in the early camps had done.
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Radical anti-Semitism was part of the Camp SS code, a wild mix of traditional prejudice, racial mania, perverse fantasies, and political paranoia. Many SS men had been steeped in anti-Semitism
long before they entered the camps, and once inside, their hatred was fanned daily, in word and deed. So deeply ingrained was this mind-set that even an SS guard formally questioned about his part in the murder of a Jewish prisoner (the attorney Friedrich Weissler in Sachsenhausen) saw no cause to conceal his feelings. “[Scharführer Christian] Guthardt acknowledged that he is a fanatical Jew-hater,”
a Berlin state prosecutor noted after an interrogation in 1937, “and declared that for him, a Jew was less than a head of cattle.”
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Almost every day in the mid-1930s, SS guards made Jews run the gauntlet. They showered their victims in invective and made them debase themselves with humiliating tasks, like singing the Buchenwald “Jew Song,” which ended as follows:

But now at last the Germans
know our nature

And barbed wire hides us safely out of sight.

Traducers of the people, we are fearful

To face the truth that felled us overnight.

And now, with mournful crooked Jewish noses,

We find that hate and discord were in vain.

An end to thievery, to food aplenty.

Too late, we say, again and yet again.
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At the center of SS abuse stood, once more, forced labor. The guards, who
derided Jews as lazy cheats, were determined to teach them a lesson about labor they would never forget.
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Just like in the early camps, Jews had to perform particularly heavy and revolting jobs. The infamous latrine squads—widely mocked by the SS as “4711 commandos” (after a German eau de cologne)—almost always included Jews. The same was true for the most exhausting labor details. As they were
breaking boulders with heavy hammers, Sachsenburg prisoners had to shout things like “I am an old Jewish swine” or “I am a race defiler and should peg out.”
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Such work was often accompanied by blows and kicks, as SS guards stayed especially close to the Jewish commandos. In Sachsenhausen, for example, Jews who cleaned the guardhouse regularly suffered “broken ribs, knocked-out teeth, and other
physical injuries,” two survivors wrote after the war.
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The guards also tortured Jews with senseless work, even more so than others. In Esterwegen, SS men repeatedly forced Jewish prisoners to pile up a large mound of sand. Once they had finished, they had to pull an iron cart to the top, climb inside, shout “Comrades, a new age is dawning, we’re setting off for Palestine!” and ride down; the
cart would inevitably crash, causing serious injuries.
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In view of such excesses, it is not surprising that Jews were far more likely to die than the average inmate during the mid-1930s.
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