KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (36 page)

In all, at least 469 Jewish men died in the KL in November and December 1938. Buchenwald was by far the most lethal site, accounting
for almost two-thirds of these deaths; 297 Jewish prisoners are known to have lost their lives here. Sachsenhausen claimed at least another 58 lives, and Dachau 114. To put these figures into context: in the five years between 1933 and 1937, 108 men (of all backgrounds) are known to have died in Dachau, an average of fewer than two fatalities per month.
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The Pogrom in Perspective

When Dr.
Julius Adler was released from Buchenwald on November 18, 1938, after eight days inside, he walked toward the next village with some other freed Jewish men. Famished, they entered a tavern, where the friendly landlord and his wife served them plenty of coffee, water, and sandwiches. Then the former prisoners drove to Weimar and boarded an express train back to Frankfurt, still dressed in the filthy
clothes they had worn inside the camp. On his return home, Dr. Adler was grateful for the warm welcome from many non-Jewish acquaintances. But looking back at Buchenwald, he had learned two critical lessons: “Make every effort to get out those who are still in Germany, or in the camp, and second, to tell oneself in every situation: Anything is better than the concentration camp!” By the time he
wrote these lines in January 1939, Dr. Adler had already left Germany.
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Many other German Jews did the same. Almost every family had been hit by the mass arrests, in one way or another. And although not all released men would, or could, share their experiences—“My husband does not talk about it,” the wife of Erich Nathorff noted on December 20, 1938, after his return from Sachsenhausen—their
suffering was written on their faces and bodies. And so the horror of the KL, together with the devastation of the pogrom itself, led to a desperate scramble to escape the Third Reich—exactly what Nazi leaders had wanted.
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The pogrom was a watershed for Jews in Nazi Germany. But was it a watershed for the KL, too? The answer seems obvious. The camps changed dramatically in November 1938, after
all, becoming bigger and deadlier than ever before, while the acts of theft and violence fused the Camp SS even closer together. Also, the camps proved themselves once more as versatile tools of Nazi terror. By quickly locking away tens of thousands of Jews, and terrorizing more into leaving the country, the men of the Camp SS passed another test in the eyes of Nazi leaders, just as they had done
during the Röhm purge more than four years earlier.
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And yet, one should not overstate the lasting impact of the pogrom on the KL system. In many ways, it marked an exceptional moment in the prewar years, and the camps soon returned to their prior state.

To start with, Jewish prisoners did not remain in the majority for long. Nazi leaders had wanted to shock them, not to lock them away for
good, and most so-called November Jews were quickly freed, far more quickly than previous victims of police raids. Mass releases set in around ten days after the pogrom and continued for weeks, as Heydrich’s office issued various orders for the discharge of elderly, sick, and disabled Jews, as well as First World War veterans. Of course, the ensuing releases were tied to certain conditions. Some men
had to sign over their businesses to non-Jews. Many more had to promise to leave Germany. As early as November 16, 1938, Heydrich had ordered the release of Jews “whose date of departure” from Germany was “imminent”—men like Julius Adler, who had long prepared his exit. Emigration thus became closely tied to the release of “November Jews,” with prisoners signing written pledges to get out of the
country. “Are any of you not emigrating?” the Dachau commandant Loritz would ask Jewish men, just before they left the camp. But at least the prisoners were released, and at a rapid rate. In Buchenwald, the total number of “November Jews” dropped from almost ten thousand in mid-November 1938 to 1,534 on January 3, 1939, to just twenty-eight on April 19, 1939.
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With the departure of these so-called
November Jews, the total number of Jewish KL prisoners declined to pre-pogrom levels. From the regime’s perspective, the camps had served their function—forcing many Jews out of Germany—and there was no need for further mass arrests. Only a few hundred new Jewish prisoners arrived between January and August 1939, and like those Jews still inside, they had largely been detained as asocials,
criminals, or political opponents. When war broke out in September 1939, the Nazi regime held no more than 1,500 Jews in its concentration camps, out of a population of 270,000 to 300,000 Jews still living on the territory of the Third Reich.
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The pogrom, in short, did not turn the KL into places for the permanent mass confinement of German Jews.

Neither did it lead to a permanent extension
of the KL system. Following the dramatic growth after the pogrom, prisoner numbers quickly dropped again after most of the “November Jews” departed, falling to around 31,600 by the end of 1938.
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Numbers continued to fall over the coming months. True, there were some major police actions—including mass arrests of Austrian Gypsies in summer 1939—but not on the scale of the raids in the previous
year; overall, far fewer new prisoners entered the camps.
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Meanwhile, the police continued its prisoner releases. Most surprisingly, given his previous hostility to mass releases, Heinrich Himmler agreed to mark Hitler’s fiftieth birthday on April 20, 1939, with a major amnesty, extended to various long-term political prisoners and social outsiders. On the instructions of Himmler and Eicke,
the inmates were told that they had reached “the road to freedom” (though their fate would be dependent on their future behavior). Thousands of prisoners were freed in late April 1939, among them the petty criminal Josef Kolacek from Vienna and the beggar Wilhelm Müller from Duisburg, whom we encountered earlier on. Because of the amnesty, which was not publicized in the press, KL prisoner numbers
fell to around twenty-two thousand in late April 1939, slightly below the mark for summer 1938.
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This figure was virtually unchanged when Germany went to war four months later; on September 1, 1939, the KL system held around 21,400 prisoners.
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The camps’ seemingly irresistible rise had stalled in the run-up to war. This was not what SS and police leaders had envisaged. In late 1938, Himmler
and his men had hoped to use the momentum of the pogrom to enlarge the camps even further. More construction was urgently needed, they argued, so that thirty-five thousand prisoners could be accommodated at any one time. However, the call for an injection of 4.6 million Reichsmark for new buildings met with staunch opposition from Reich minister of finance Count Schwerin von Krosigk, backed by
Hermann Göring. Von Krosigk wanted to prevent the unchecked growth of the concentration camps. Every time they were extended, he warned, the police would fill them with more prisoners, and then demand further extensions, setting off an endless cycle of arrests. Instead of enlarging the KL system, he proposed the release of thousands of work-shy prisoners and others who posed no real threat to the
state.
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Even in the late 1930s, leading Nazi figures still questioned the radical direction of Himmler’s terror apparatus and saw no need for bigger camps.

What, then, about the long-term impact of the SS assault on the “November Jews” on life inside the KL? In the history of the prewar camps, the weeks after the pogrom stand out as the most deadly by far, in terms of the total number of dead. This is not to say, however, that the Camp SS had suddenly moved to new extremes of violence, as historians have often suggested.
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Rather, the weeks after
the pogrom marked a deadly peak in a much longer lethal spell, which began in summer 1938 and lasted until spring 1939, and which claimed many victims in addition to the Jewish men arrested after the pogrom.

As we have seen, the expansion of terror and the deterioration of conditions began several months prior to the pogrom, in summer 1938. Following the raids against the “work-shy,” prisoner
mortality across the concentration camp system shot up, from a monthly average of around eighteen deaths between January and May 1938 to around 118 deaths between June and August 1938.
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The main victims were “asocial” men, with the Jews among them being the most vulnerable of all—sometimes even more vulnerable than the so-called November Jews who arrived months later.
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As far as Jewish prisoners
were concerned, at least, SS terror in the camps did not suddenly intensify after the pogrom. It had started to escalate before.

And the terror carried on for several months after the pogrom. From late 1938, inmates were at greater risk of death than before; on average, 323 prisoners perished each month between November 1938 and January 1939.
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Nearly half of them were Jews arrested after the
pogrom. The remaining victims came from other prisoner groups, who were also hit by the rise in SS terror.
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This was especially true, once more, for so-called asocials.
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Crucially, mass mortality in the KL persisted well into spring 1939, long after the release of almost all so-called November Jews.
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Despite a drop, the death rate initially remained extremely high; on average, 189 inmates
lost their lives each month between February and April 1939. Almost two-thirds of the dead were “asocial” prisoners, for whom lethal SS repression continued almost unchanged into 1939.
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Only later that year did the KL death rate decline more markedly, at a fast pace. Soon, prisoner mortality had fallen well below the highs of the preceding months. During the summer of 1939, the last period
of calm before the outbreak of the Second World War, an average of thirty-two prisoners died each month in the camps—far fewer even than in summer 1938, although overall prisoner numbers were almost identical.
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This serves as another reminder that the Nazi camps did not head straight into the abyss. Instead, just like the Soviet Gulag, periods of rising terror were followed by greater moderation.
There were structural reasons for the turnaround in summer 1939: the weather was much better, prisoner quarters were less crammed, and other elements of the infrastructure improved, too, such as the water supply at Buchenwald. At the same time, the SS also pulled back from some of its most violent excesses.
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Inmates were grateful for the respite in summer 1939, after the horrors of the previous
twelve months. “If we were not prisoners,” the Sachsenhausen camp elder Harry Naujoks wrote, “one could almost describe our life at the moment as peaceful.”
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Long-term prisoners like him were not deceived, however. They had seen enough of the KL to know that their course could change again at any moment, in a far more deadly direction.

One of these veteran prisoners was Ernst Heilmann, who
had suffered all the pains of the camps, many times over. Back in summer 1933, as we have seen, he had been beaten and degraded as the “director of the crapper” in the early camp Oranienburg. Later, he was tortured in the Prussian “model” camp Börgermoor, where guards shot and wounded him during a suicide attempt. His abuse had continued after the coordination of the KL system in Sachsenhausen and
Dachau, and from September 1938 in Buchenwald, the new central camp for Jews, where he was pressed into a transport detail, carrying heavy stones and earth. It was in Buchenwald that another prisoner, who had known Heilmann in his glory days as a leading Weimar politician, met him in one of the barracks reserved for Jewish inmates, sometime after the November pogrom. Heilmann was unrecognizable;
his clothes were soiled and ripped, his face furrowed, his mustache cut off, his hands chapped, his back bent, his spirit broken. “He was no longer the human being Heilmann,” his acquaintance later wrote, “he was just the wreck Heilmann.” After they exchanged some news about mutual friends and politics, Heilmann told him about his torment at the hands of the guards. Asked about the future, Heilmann
gave a stark reply: “There will be war. You Aryans will still have a chance, because they will need you. But we Jews will probably all be beaten to death.” This chilling prediction soon came true for Heilmann himself, who died in the early months of the Second World War, as the KL descended into terror on an unprecedented scale.
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4

War

On the morning of September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler, wearing a simple gray military uniform, addressed the hastily convened Reichstag in Berlin. Unusually tense and nervous, Hitler announced to millions of Germans listening on the radio—among them KL prisoners lined up on roll call squares—that war with Poland had broken out. In his speech, Hitler played the victim. Germany was forced
to act because of Polish provocations and border violations, he claimed, including no fewer than three serious incidents during the previous night. “Tonight,” Hitler announced, “Poland has for the first time fired on our territory with regular troops. Since 5:45 a.m., fire is being returned!”
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There had indeed been trouble on the German-Polish border in Upper Silesia. But it had all been staged
by the Nazis themselves: dramatic political theater—devised by Hitler and Himmler, directed by Heydrich, performed by special Nazi forces—to give an excuse, however flimsy, for German aggression. “The victor,” Hitler had bluntly told his military commanders a few days earlier, “will not be asked whether he told the truth or not.”
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