KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (35 page)

Pogrom

On the morning of November 7, 1938, a Jewish teenager from Hanover, Herschel Grynszpan, walked into the German embassy in Paris, drew a revolver, and fatally wounded a German diplomat. This lone and desperate act of protest—Grynszpan’s parents and siblings had just been deported
from the Third Reich to the Polish border, together with some eighteen thousand other Jews of Polish nationality—was the spark that set off the pogrom. Two days later, Nazi leaders, who had gathered in Munich for the ritual celebration of the anniversary of Hitler’s failed 1923 putsch, seized on the German diplomat’s death to launch a nationwide orgy of destruction, later called the “night of
broken glass” (
Kristallnacht
) by sarcastic Germans. It was instigated on the evening of November 9, 1938, by Joseph Goebbels, backed by Adolf Hitler, who agreed that the time had come for Jews “to feel the fury of the people,” as the eager Goebbels noted in his diary. Senior Nazi officials frantically sent instructions to their underlings across the country, and within hours, local Nazi thugs
were on the rampage everywhere.
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The pogrom was accompanied by mass arrests, after Hitler ordered the urgent detention of tens of thousands of Jews.
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Just before midnight on November 9, Gestapo headquarters instructed its forces to prepare the arrest of twenty to thirty thousand Jews, especially prosperous ones. More detailed orders followed less than two hours later, this time directly from
Reinhard Heydrich: police officers should arrest as many Jews—above all wealthy, healthy, and younger men—as they could detain locally and then ensure their rapid transfer to concentration camps.
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In the days after November 9, 1938, more than thirty thousand Jews of all ages and backgrounds were rounded up in German villages, towns, and cities. SA and SS fanatics, drafted in as auxiliaries,
abused their victims during the arrests. Regular policemen, by contrast, often acted in a more detached manner. As a middle-aged Frankfurt doctor, whom I shall call Dr. Julius Adler, recalled a few weeks later, the police officer who had detained him at his home on the morning of November 10, 1938, behaved “not particularly friendly but perfectly proper.” Like many other prisoners, Dr. Adler was
moved to a temporary holding center, in his case a large hall in the Festhalle, the Frankfurt convention center, where Jews had to hand over valuables and endure occasional harassment and assaults by SS men who mingled among the police.
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Several thousand Jewish prisoners were spared the KL as the authorities released women and also some men (among them seniors and army veterans) from protective
custody within a matter of hours or days.
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Many other elderly and weak men, however, had to join the other male Jewish prisoners on mass transports to one of three KL—Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald.

Much of the pogrom unfolded before the eyes of ordinary Germans, and the mass arrests and deportations of Jewish men to the KL took place in plain view, too. In many cities, triumphant Nazis
publicly humiliated the prisoners; in Regensburg, the victims were paraded through town with a large placard reading “Exodus of the Jews,” before they boarded a train to Dachau. Popular reactions are hard to gauge, but there was at least some sympathy for the plight of the prisoners. As one regional SD office complained, “hardened democrats” showed great pity for the imprisoned Jews and spread
rumors about suicides and deaths in the camps. There were also some anonymous protests to Nazi leaders. But only a few Germans dared to voice open criticism, while hard-liners loudly applauded the deportations.
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The transports were terrifying. When Dr. Adler and other Jews were locked into a special train in Frankfurt, late on November 10, they were warned that they would be shot if they tried
to open the windows. Although they were not abused during the journey—unlike prisoners on some other transports—the men were greatly worried about what would happen next. Screaming SS guards met them at Weimar train station and pushed them onto waiting trucks. At Buchenwald, the prisoners had to run into the camp, past more guards who kicked and punched them. “Then we moved at the double across
the assembly ground of the camp,” Dr. Adler later wrote, “with those who were too slow being again spurred on by blows with sticks.” During those dark November days, an endless stream of prisoners spilled onto the Buchenwald roll call square, where they faced hours of torment during registration. Some prisoners arrived drenched in blood, with swollen heads and broken bones, following the SS “welcome”
at the gate. “I was hit in the eye,” one man later reported, “and as a result lost the sight in that eye.”
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Similar scenes unfolded in Dachau and Sachsenhausen in mid-November 1938, as the SS pressed a total of around twenty-six thousand Jewish men into its three big KL.
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Almost overnight, the SS concentration camps had dramatically changed. Never before had they held more inmates: within
days, the prisoner population doubled from twenty-four thousand to around fifty thousand.
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Never since the inclusion of female prisoners in the KL system had there been so few women among them: as there were no mass transports of Jewish women to Lichtenburg, the overall proportion of female prisoners in the camps fell to under two percent.
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Never before had there been as many Jews in the KL:
at the start of 1938, they had made up only around five percent of the prisoner population; now they were suddenly in the majority. And never before did as many prisoners die in the KL as in the weeks following the pogrom.

The KL After
Kristallnacht

“
One of the bloodiest and most horrible chapters in the history of Buchenwald”—this is how two veteran prisoners later described the period after the pogrom.
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The SS was largely unprepared for the huge influx of Jewish prisoners in November 1938, plunging the camp system into even greater chaos than after the June raids against “asocials.” In Dachau, barracks that
had been cleared for Jews were soon so overcrowded that some new arrivals were forced into a vast tent instead. In Sachsenhausen, the SS used the makeshift barracks of the little camp, first set up after the summer raids against “asocials,” and they, too, were bursting.
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But Buchenwald proved the greatest ordeal.

The first so-called November Jews arriving in Buchenwald were crammed into a primitive
barrack erected a few weeks earlier for Austrian prisoners. Meanwhile, other inmates had to build, at frantic pace, four more provisional barracks out of thin wooden boards, with no floors, right on the muddy soil. The entire new area, at the far corner of the roll call square, was cut off from the rest of the compound with barbed wire. At night, each barrack was filled with almost two thousand
prisoners, who slept on tiny wooden bunks, more like shelves, without mattresses or blankets; the men were pushed so tightly against one another that it was impossible to move. “Our accommodation was such,” the Frankfurt doctor Julius Adler wrote a few weeks later, “that we always felt like cattle locked into a dirty cowshed.” One night, two of the barracks caved in under the weight of the
bodies inside.
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Every day in Buchenwald, the Jews suffered from dirt and disease, thirst and hunger. Food was only handed out at irregular intervals, as the SS struggled to maintain any semblance of order, while the persistent water shortages caused terrible dehydration. The men could not wash either, or change their damp and soiled civilian clothes; “one was covered up to one’s knees with
a thick crust of clay,” reported Dr. Adler. Inside the barracks, the stench soon became unbearable, especially after a mass outbreak of diarrhea. There were no sanitary facilities to speak of, just two overflowing ditches, where murderous SS men tried to drown several Jewish men. Inevitably, many Buchenwald prisoners suffered from infections and injuries, including frozen limbs, as well as mental
illness, but the SS initially refused them any medical care. Instead, the sick were dumped in a rickety shed—“a hovel stinking of excrement, urine, and pus,” as a prisoner orderly remembered; it was nicknamed the “barrack of death.”
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The Camp SS did not quite know what to do with the “November Jews” and never fully integrated them into the regular routines. In Buchenwald, as well as in Dachau,
these inmates were not pressed into forced labor, watching as other prisoners marched off to work outside the compound. Instead, they spent most of the day sitting, standing, or running on the roll call square, enduring endless drills, parades, and punitive exercises. Only in Sachsenhausen did the SS decide, after a week or so, to draft Jews into work, often at the brick works, where accidents
were frequent, and medical treatment scarce. “For Jews, I only sign death certificates,” the Sachsenhausen SS camp doctor is said to have exclaimed.
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The special status of the so-called November Jews was reinforced by their separation from the other KL inmates, including all other Jews. Despite SS threats, some prisoners—both Jews and non-Jews—passed food and water to the desperate new arrivals,
and offered vital advice on how to behave.
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Such support for the “November Jews” remained rather rare, however, not just because of the obvious dangers, but also because of long-standing prejudices against Jews. “Among the prisoners,” an underground SPD report about Dachau concluded, “there are many who despise the Jews.”
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The “November Jews” had to look to one another for help. Inevitably,
there were many obstacles to solidarity, starting with the general deprivation. Many of the new prisoners had yet to adjust to the camps, and were bewildered by the daily torment. Moreover, while the SS may have seen all Jews as alike, things looked very different from the perspective of the prisoners themselves, who were acutely conscious of all the barriers of class, religion, nationality, and
politics. The so-called November Jews were German and Austrian, secular and orthodox, young and old, Communist and conservative, intellectual and uneducated, Zionist and assimilated, bourgeois and proletarian. Often, they had nothing in common except for being victims of Nazi racial mania. Such divisions were hard to overcome, especially in the face of extreme suffering.
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And yet, there were
acts of mutual aid, especially among men who had known each other already before their imprisonment.
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Solidarity could only achieve so much, however, and prisoners were helpless against SS assaults. While Nazi leaders called off the pogrom outside within a day, the looting and violence inside the KL continued for weeks, effectively extending the pogrom. Whenever an SS man approached, Jewish
prisoners feared verbal abuse and worse. “Words like Jewish pig are the order of the day,” Dr. Julius Adler recalled, adding: “Woe unto him who was driven to protest.”
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Camp SS men used all their well-honed methods of humiliation, though some were still unsure about how far they should go. When Dr. Adler first arrived in Buchenwald, a guard knocked the glasses off his face; when Adler could
not find them, however, the same SS man picked them up for him and handed them back. Other guards had no second thoughts, though, and assaulted the new inmates at every turn, on the roll call squares during the day, and inside the barracks at night. All this violence, as Jewish prisoners recognized only too well, laid bare the true intentions of the Nazi regime. “They have declared war against us,”
a Buchenwald prisoner later wrote, “having rendered us defenseless for years.”
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The Camp SS men did not stop at abuse. They also robbed the “November Jews,” on a grand scale. Corruption was as old as the camps; it was not exceptional, it was endemic. In the early camps, for example, officials often blackmailed prisoners, forcing them to pay a ransom to regain their freedom.
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Corruption continued
after the SS coordination. Guards forced inmates to carry out household chores in their own homes, ordered prisoners to make goods for them, stole their money, and diverted SS supplies into their own pockets. Few SS men could resist the temptations of near-total power. Almost the entire Camp SS was on the make, from rank-and-file men to leading officers; even Theodor Eicke, who periodically
reproached his men for dishonesty, ran a secret account, spending the funds at his discretion.
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SS corruption reached new heights in November 1938. The pogrom outside had involved mass looting, followed by more state-sponsored theft; in the most cynical move, the regime ordered German Jews on November 12 to pay one billion Reichsmark as “atonement” for the damage done by the Nazi mob.
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The
Camp SS enriched itself, too, above all in Buchenwald. Here, SS men ordered incoming “November Jews” to throw their valuables into open crates, never to be returned. Prisoners who had kept back money were robbed later on, in various other ways. SS guards sold them basic goods—like water, food, shoes, sweaters, and blankets—at exorbitant prices, and also forced them to make “donations” to escape
more violence. The Buchenwald SS was not shy about flaunting its ill-gotten gains; even NCOs were seen around town wearing fancy clothes and driving luxury cars.
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While the Camp SS reveled in its newfound wealth, the balance sheet for Jewish prisoners was grim. After just a few days in the camps, almost all of them carried serious wounds, both physical and psychological. There was a spate of
suicides. Several Jewish men, unable to bear their torment, ran into the electrified fence or crossed the sentry line. In the past, the Camp SS had sometimes prevented suicide attempts. Not this time. “Just let them get on with it,” Theodor Eicke told his men.
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