KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (37 page)

The sinister plot had been prepared for some time, and on August
31, in anticipation of the imminent German attack, Heydrich gave the final go-ahead to his men in Upper Silesia. That evening, a covert commando stormed a radio station in the German border town of Gleiwitz. The men brandished pistols and announced over the airwaves that the station was in the hands of Polish freedom fighters; for effect, shots were fired in the background. Later that night, other
Nazi special commandos staged the “Polish assaults” on German territory that Hitler later referred to in the Reichstag. The SS and policemen involved had trained for weeks at secret locations, even learning to sing Polish songs and growing beards and sideburns to look the part. The most elaborate mock attack came at Hochlinden, where one group, wearing Polish army uniforms and screaming in Polish,
attacked and demolished the German border post, before another group, dressed as German guards, overpowered them.

To make this farce look more convincing, the conspirators decided that bodies of killed “insurgents” were needed. Looking for men who could be executed on cue, their eyes fell on KL prisoners. Sometime in mid-summer 1939, Heinrich Müller, who headed the central Gestapo department
for domestic matters, arranged for top-secret transports of prisoners—or “supplies,” as he apparently called them—from Sachsenhausen, Flossenbürg, and other concentration camps to a police prison in Breslau, where they were placed in solitary confinement. On August 31, 1939, some of these prisoners were taken out of their cells. An SS doctor apparently drugged them, before their lifeless bodies, dressed
in Polish uniforms, were driven to Hochlinden in black Mercedes limousines with drawn blinds. After the staged attack began, the bodies were dragged out, dumped at the border post, and shot. To obscure the identity of the dead, the killers smashed their faces with hammers and axes. Then they took photos of the slain at the scene, which were sent to Berlin as “proof” of the Polish attack. The
following morning, as the actual German troops were advancing into Poland, the special commando hastily buried the prisoners’ corpses in the forest near Hochlinden.
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It could be said that the first victims of the Second World War were concentration camp inmates. Many more casualties would follow, and when the war finally ended, six years later, more than sixty million men, women, and children
were dead, including more than 1.7 million KL victims.
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Nazi leaders had long despised the prisoners, their savage mind-set summed up in spring 1938 by Joseph Goebbels, following a private conversation with Hitler and Himmler about the concentration camps. “There is only scum inside,” he noted in his diary. “It has to be annihilated—for the benefit and welfare of the people.”
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This was no empty
talk. During World War II, mass death engulfed inmates in almost all the camps. And although the great majority of victims died during the second half of the war, the lethal turn of the KL system began early, in the years between 1939 and 1941.

THE CAMP SS AT WAR

“
War came,” Rudolf Höss wrote in early 1947, looking back on the Nazi invasion of Poland, “and with it the great turn in the life
of the concentration camps.”
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Höss was right, at least up to a point. The prisoner population doubled in little more than a year, reaching around fifty-three thousand at the end of 1940, and it continued to rise. A year later, by early 1942, around eighty thousand men and women were locked up, many of them crammed into new concentration camps. Because just as inmate numbers grew, so did the KL
system. In autumn 1939, the SS had controlled six main camps; by early 1942, it was thirteen.
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Considered in isolation, the expansion of the concentration camps might seem exceptional. But the KL system remained part of the wider Nazi web of terror, which also grew much denser during the early war years; existing sites flourished and new ones sprang up everywhere, with camps, jails, ghettos, prisons,
and dungeons holding millions of men, women, and children. And yet, the war did not change everything; it did not revolutionize the Third Reich.
8
As far as KL terror was concerned, there was no immediate break with the past. The SS remained in overall charge and saw no need to redraw the basic outlines. The ability of the concentration camp system to absorb change and to adapt, without losing
its core mission, would prove to be one of its most terrifying strengths over the coming years.

Eicke’s Legacy

Hitler envisaged the war with Poland as more than an ordinary military campaign. His view of the Polish people as racial enemies—“subhuman” Slavs who had to be enslaved or destroyed—helped to make the Polish campaign the first of the Nazis’ racial wars.
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This was Himmler’s moment. Since
summer 1939, his deputy Reinhard Heydrich had overseen the formation of special SS and police task forces, primed to follow the army and fight against “anti-German elements.”
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After the invasion, these task forces wreaked havoc in Nazi-occupied Poland, targeting politicians, state officials, priests, and noblemen, as well as local Jews. Other troops went on a rampage, too, and by the end of 1939,
after the German victory, tens of thousands of Polish civilians had been murdered, including at least seven thousand Jews.
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Among the fiercest killers in newly occupied Poland were Death’s Head SS troops, led by none other than Theodor Eicke. Eicke had long styled himself as a “political soldier” and now moved from the imaginary inner front of the camps to the real front line. During the invasion,
he commanded three SS Death’s Head regiments, giving some of his orders from the safety of Hitler’s armored train. For weeks, his men laid waste to villages and cities, robbing, arresting, torturing, and murdering many of the locals. As a reward, the insatiable Eicke was entrusted with the formation of the SS Death’s Head division, which gradually developed its own organizational structure,
separate from the KL, as Eicke’s move from the camps to the front became permanent. He was joined by thousands of SS sentries as well as several senior KL officials, who came to occupy almost all leading positions in the new division (some later returned to the Camp SS). Once more, Eicke drummed his core values—brutality, racism, ruthlessness—into his men, and they did him proud. The SS Death’s Head
division was responsible for countless war crimes and became one of the most feared units during the Second World War.
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The SS men chosen for Eicke’s division initially assembled for training on a site many of them knew well—Dachau. Eicke had started his career there as commandant in 1933 and now returned, six years later, as a general. On November 4, 1939, Himmler himself came to check on Eicke’s
progress, finding the whole complex much changed; to make room for the SS troops, Dachau had been cleared of almost all prisoners in late September 1939, with some 4,700 men transported to Mauthausen, Buchenwald, and Flossenbürg. The survivors returned after January 1940, once Eicke and his SS troops had left for another training ground.
13

With Eicke gone, the Camp SS had lost the headmaster
of its school of violence. But Eicke’s spirit remained; the essence of his teachings had entered the core of the Camp SS. Also, Eicke never fully severed his ties to the camp system, acting as its elder statesman. His family still lived in the SS settlement in Oranienburg, and whenever he was on leave, he was welcome at the nearby IKL office, where he was more than happy to share his thoughts with
his successor as inspector of the concentration camps, Richard Glücks.
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A sturdy man in his early fifties—born on April 22, 1889, just two days after Hitler—Richard Glücks had spent most of his adult life in uniform. During the First World War, he mainly fought in France, participating in the battles of Verdun and the Somme. Following a brief interlude in a Freikorps after the German defeat,
the decorated soldier served in the much-reduced German army, aiding its illegal rearmament. Glücks eventually lost his post in 1931, during the depression, and was briefly unemployed. He was already a member of the Nazi Party by then, having joined in March 1930, and in November 1932, he entered the SS: the professional soldier became a professional SS officer. Glücks quickly moved ahead and caught
the eye of Theodor Eicke, who appointed him on April 1, 1936, as his chief of staff, the second most powerful position in the IKL. The querulous Eicke was difficult to please, but Glücks was a man after his taste. Efficient and energetic, he was devoted to his boss, a key quality for advancing in an organization built on personal connections and favoritism. Eicke duly secured Glücks an early promotion
to Oberführer, and as his boss got increasingly bogged down in military schemes in the run-up to war, it was Glücks who took over much of the day-to-day management in the IKL, well before his appointment as inspector in October 1939. He would head the KL administration for more than five years, longer even than Eicke, right up to the collapse of Nazi Germany.

Ideological commitment Glücks had
in abundance; but of charisma he had none, and he was always destined to remain in the shadow of his mentor, Eicke. Compared to the overbearing Eicke, who led from the front, Glücks appeared indecisive, a serious character flaw in SS circles. And while Eicke had sought the company of his men, Glücks was a more remote figure. The intense male world of SS camaraderie was not really for him. “I live
very frugally, don’t drink, and have no passions,” he wrote in 1935. Some senior Camp SS members viewed him with suspicion because he had never served an apprenticeship inside a KL, complaining that he was just a desk-bound bureaucrat. His superiors were more positive, but even here Glücks could not emulate Eicke. Although he was directly subordinate to Himmler, the two men were never close and rarely
met.
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Himmler had promoted Glücks not for his initiative or leadership skills, but because he stood for continuity, promising to consolidate his predecessor’s legacy.

The same message was sent by the appointment of Arthur Liebehenschel as Glücks’s second-in-command. More than ten years Glücks’s junior, he had also been a career soldier, leaving the German army after twelve years in late 1931
as an NCO. Just a few months later, he enlisted in the SS, and in summer 1934 he joined the Camp SS, which he served for almost all of the Third Reich. As adjutant in Lichtenburg, Liebehenschel gained hands-on experience and then moved to the IKL in summer 1937. Here, he headed the political department and worked closely with Glücks, who valued his managerial skills. Some of his other colleagues,
by contrast, saw Liebehenschel as a weak figure, describing him as “sensitive,” “quiet,” and “kind”—damning words in the martial world of the Camp SS. Rudolf Höss, his former neighbor in the genteel SS settlement in Sachsenhausen, where their children had sometimes played together, pictured him as a man “who could not even hurt a fly.” In reality, Liebehenschel was deeply implicated in the increasingly
murderous IKL policies, and he later got a chance to prove himself as commandant of Auschwitz.
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In the early war years, then, the camp administration was headed by two old hands, Glücks and Liebehenschel, who had learned their trade under Eicke. Continuity was the watchword in the individual camps, too, at least inside the Commandant Staffs, where key positions, from senior officers down to
block leaders, were largely held by Camp SS veterans. Most of the eleven men promoted by Glücks to camp commandant between 1939 and 1942, for example, had previously held senior KL positions, and they, too, had internalized Eicke’s values.
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Take Martin Weiss, appointed in April 1940 as commandant of the new SS camp Neuengamme. Weiss was a first-generation member of the Camp SS, having started
his career in April 1933, aged twenty-seven, as a sentry in Dachau. He later moved to the Commandant Staff, and by 1938 had risen to adjutant. An electrical engineer, Weiss was better educated than most of his comrades, but like them, he had frequented radical nationalist circles in the Weimar years and had been active early on in the nascent Nazi movement. Weiss was part of the new breed of technocrats
of terror, graduates of Eicke’s school who came to the fore during the Second World War. Above all else, Weiss saw himself as a professional: just as other people became army or police officers, he had become a camp commandant, and he was so proud that he used his job title even on his private notepaper.
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In the daily running of their KL, commandants like Weiss needed little prompting from above.
Inspector Glücks was not looking for administrators but for men of action who knew the rules of the game, and he was generally happy to let them get on with it. According to Rudolf Höss, Glücks often dismissed questions from commandants: “You all know much better than me what’s going on.”
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And yet, the early war-time commandants were never autonomous, despite their considerable might. Glücks
and his IKL managers were in constant contact with individual camps, ruling on requests and issuing instructions about labor, punishment, transfers, promotions, discipline, and much else besides; the IKL also updated Eicke’s old camp regulations.
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Some commandants grumbled about “unrealistic” directives sent by Oranienburg pencil pushers.
21
But although they could sidestep some central rules,
local camp officials implemented most orders. They also sent a stream of statistics to the IKL, including daily updates on inmate numbers and categories, and monthly figures of fatalities and causes of prisoner deaths.
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Of course, the managers at the IKL gained no complete picture from this data, thanks not least to cover-ups by individual commandants. “What the camps really looked like,” Rudolf
Höss cautioned, “could not be seen from the correspondence and the files.”
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But the IKL officials had more than reports to go on. They inspected camps and called local officials for regular meetings to Oranienburg, keeping up the informal contacts so important in the Camp SS.
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Overall, then, the IKL kept a watchful eye on its camps.