KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (40 page)

Bricks and Stones

Following the crushing victory over France, Adolf Hitler
fulfilled an old dream: he embarked on a brief tour of the country he had fought against more than two decades earlier, returning as the avenger of the traumatic German defeat of 1918. The highlight of his trip came on the morning of June 28, 1940, when his Mercedes motorcade entered Paris. The French capital glowed in the early summer sun as Hitler surveyed his new possessions, ticking off the tourist
itinerary. He played the guide during his tour, impressing his entourage with details about history, art, and architecture he had gleaned from books. One of the sycophantic hangers-on was Albert Speer, who had been invited to share in his mentor’s triumph.

Returning to his temporary headquarters that night, a euphoric Hitler ordered Speer to intensify the monumental plans for rebuilding Berlin
and the other so-called Führer Cities (Hamburg, Linz, Munich, and Nuremberg), which had been put on hold after the war broke out. Hitler called it the “most important building project of the Reich,” lasting a full ten years. But why restrict himself to just a few cities? Germany would dominate Europe for centuries, Hitler believed, and needed to show a proud face to the world. By early 1941, he
had designated more than twenty German cities to be remodeled, fantasizing about new streets and squares, theaters and towers.
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The SS was just as eager as Speer to make Hitler’s wishes come true, and its cooperation with Speer’s office, inaugurated before the war, became closer than ever. Speer needed building materials, and the SS pledged to deliver through its company DESt. Speer was more
than happy to bankroll it, and by mid-1941 he had made at least twelve million Reichsmark available to DESt, which grew into a midsize company.
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The main burden of the work would be borne by KL inmates. In September 1940, in a speech to SS officers, Himmler stressed that it was essential for prisoners to “break stones and burn stones” for the Führer’s great buildings.
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The entire SS economy
was expanding, not just DESt, and the early years of the war saw its greatest period of growth.
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It was still overseen by Oswald Pohl, who promoted several skilled managers to the top, more determined than ever to turn his ramshackle outfit into a professional operation.
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Not all the businesses relied on forced labor, at least not early on. Still, the exploitation of prisoners was the backbone
of the SS economy, and because private industry was not yet showing any real interest, the SS had a more or less free hand over its inmates.
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Forced prisoner labor bolstered the growth of the German Equipment Works (DAW), an SS enterprise that incorporated many of the camp workshops and produced a range of goods, from bread to furniture. Set up in May 1939, DAW came into its own during the
war. By summer 1940, the workshops in Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald had been swallowed up, and by early 1941, some 1,220 prisoners worked for DAW in these three camps; numbers were set to rise sharply over the next years, as DAW expanded into the largest of all SS-run companies.
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Another major SS operation was the grandly titled German Experimental Institution for Nutrition and Provision
(DVA). Founded in January 1939, it grew quickly during the war, too, spearheaded by the gardening and herb cultivation on the Dachau plantation, which became one of the largest work details inside the camp; in May 1940, some one thousand Dachau prisoners toiled here every day.
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The SS authorities had even bigger plans for agricultural production in Auschwitz (largely independent from DVA), keenly
watched by Heinrich Himmler, who expected major breakthroughs for the German settlement of the east.
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Himmler’s attention was soon diverted by an even more ambitious project in Auschwitz, a pioneering collaboration between the SS and private industry. In early 1941, the chemical giant IG Farben decided to build a vast factory by the Polish village of Dwory, a couple of miles from Auschwitz
town. The company was primarily attracted by nearby natural resources and good transport links, though it also welcomed the availability of forced laborers from the local KL (at a rate of three or four Reichsmark per prisoner per day). Himmler jumped at the chance of cooperating with industry, hoping to advance the economic standing and expertise of the SS. After his first visit to Auschwitz on March
1, 1941, accompanied by Richard Glücks, he ordered the extension of the main camp, partly to provide more workers for IG Farben. Soon after, in mid-April of 1941, the first prisoner commando commenced work on the new IG Farben construction site, helping to erect the foundations for a vast factory complex aimed at the production of synthetic fuel and rubber. By early August 1941, more than eight
hundred Auschwitz prisoners worked on the site, under terrible conditions, with numbers rising further in the autumn.
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Enthusiastic as Himmler was about the budding chemical plant in Auschwitz, his main focus in the early war years was still on bricks and stones. In 1940, some six to seven thousand KL prisoners worked in six different DESt businesses daily; demonstrating his priorities, Himmler
personally inspected all six sites in 1940–41.
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Building materials had been very much on the mind of Himmler and his SS managers as they established their new concentration camps. Neuengamme was all about bricks from the start. It had been set up as a satellite camp in December 1938 on the grounds of a disused brick factory, recently purchased by DESt, though the work did not really get off
the ground before the war. Production was pushed ahead when Neuengamme became a main camp, and gained further momentum after the German victory over France; bricks were needed urgently, especially for buildings in nearby Hamburg.
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In Gross-Rosen and Natzweiler, the eyes of SS officers were drawn to granite, not brick. In Gross-Rosen, it was black-and-white granite that attracted their attention;
DESt bought the quarrying works in May 1940, and the later decision to make Gross-Rosen a main camp was partially influenced by the expectation that this would increase output. In Natzweiler, too, the exploitation of KL prisoners in quarrying was part of SS plans from early on. The DESt work there was established after Himmler inspected the local quarry on September 6, 1940; apparently, Albert
Speer had spotted some rare red granite that was perfect for the new German Stadium in Nuremberg.
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Existing concentration camps were also affected by the SS building boom, with extra workshops, machines, and prisoners boosting DESt production. On Speer’s initiative, stone-processing works were set up from late summer 1940 in Oranienburg. Nearby, other prisoners from Sachsenhausen were still
rebuilding the failed Oranienburg brick works. Himmler kept a close watch on progress, just as he did elsewhere; having promised massive deliveries of bricks to Speer, he inspected the troubled Oranienburg factory twice in 1940–41. In Flossenbürg, meanwhile, the SS developed an additional quarry from April 1941, following the example of Mauthausen. Here, quarrying had expanded for some time, especially
after the creation of a new subcamp in Gusen, a couple of miles west of Mauthausen (officially operational from May 25, 1940). As a result, Mauthausen remained the largest of all the SS granite works, deploying an average of almost 3,600 prisoners across its three main quarries in July 1940.
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The SS looked to prisoners to boost its output and DESt managers even championed the training of KL
inmates as stonemasons. Following a meeting with commandants in Oranienburg on September 6, 1940, it was announced that the participating prisoners would be offered privileges such as money, fruit, and separate quarters. In addition, prisoners were to be lured by the prospect of freedom; if they did well, they had the “best prospects” of being freed before long.
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But these were empty promises.
In practice, most bonuses were limited to cigarettes and extra rations. Moreover, hardly any prisoners benefited; by early 1941, fewer than six hundred inmates were training as stonemasons in the different KL.
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Nonetheless, the SS initiative was a sign of things to come. True, this was not the first time the Camp SS had offered rewards. But in the past such benefits were largely restricted to
Kapos responsible for order and discipline. During the war, in recognition of the growing importance of forced labor, the SS was prepared to extend preferential treatment to some productive prisoners.

The overall balance sheet of the SS economy in the early war years was mixed. State subsidies and cash infusions by Speer were always welcome, and the SS also gained from corporate scams.
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Turning
more closely to the flagship company DESt, its quarries, heavily reliant on manual work, proved profitable. Above all, DESt benefited from the extremely cheap labor, since SS businesses paid the state no more than a nominal 0.30 Reichsmark per prisoner per day. It was cut-rate forced labor that made the SS quarries lucrative.
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Despite this competitive edge, other DESt enterprises filed losses.
In particular, the SS continued to struggle with more complex technologies, with the calamitous brick works in Oranienburg posting bigger losses than ever.
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Looking at Germany as a whole, the early wartime SS ventures remained insignificant. To be sure, they provided some materials for Hitler’s megalomaniac building plans. But DESt, like the whole SS economy, never delivered what it promised:
production lagged behind targets, prisoners achieved only a fraction of the output of free laborers, and the quality of the stones remained inferior.
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By the summer of 1941, the SS was no closer to being a significant economic player than it was at the start of the war. While the economic turn of the SS had a negligible effect on the German economy, its impact on life behind barbed wire was
dramatic, bringing more death and destruction than ever to KL construction sites and quarries.

ROAD TO PERDITION

“[If] I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image,” Primo Levi wrote in his memoir of Auschwitz, “I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be
seen.” Such prisoners were still moving, but they were no longer alive, Levi added, “the divine spark dead within them.” Before long “nothing will remain of them but a handful of ashes in some nearby field.” Levi called these doomed prisoners, who died without anyone remembering them, the “drowned.”
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In the wartime KL, such men and women had been known by other names, such as “cripple,” “derelict,”
or, with heavy sarcasm, “jewel.” Most common of all was a term used in Auschwitz and several other concentration camps—
Muselmänner
(sometimes
Muselweiber
for women).
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The
Muselmänner
(Muslims) were the living dead. Exhausted, apathetic, and starved, they had lost everything. Their bodies were no more than bones and dry skin covered in sores and scabs. They could barely walk, think, or talk,
and stared ahead with a hollow, blank gaze. Other prisoners dreaded them as a harbinger of their own fate, for it did not take much—a cold, a beating, a sore foot—to set a prisoner on the road to perdition. The yearning for food, which still animated the
Muselmann
early on, was the last sign of life to be extinguished. Some died while eating, their fingers gripping a last piece of bread.
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Life
had lost its meaning for the
Muselmann
, and so did the camp’s survival strategies. Exercise, washing, mending, barter, and keeping a low profile—none of this was possible anymore. How could he follow orders he no longer heard? How could he obey rules he no longer understood? How could he march when his feet no longer supported him?

In the years after liberation, the
Muselmann
has come to embody
the horror of Nazi concentration camps, a harrowing and heartbreaking figure closely associated with the Holocaust and the final stages of the KL system.
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However, the doomed prisoners had actually appeared much earlier. From autumn 1939, conditions in the camps deteriorated to such an extent that thousands of prisoners joined the ranks of the dying. It was the early wartime period that gave
birth to the
Muselmann
.

Hunger and Disease

The last thing new prisoners expected to see in concentration camps, after the brutal SS “welcome,” was flower beds. But during spring and summer, blooming flowers and well-tended lawns were everywhere, outside the barracks, around SS buildings, and alongside the main paths. In the early war years, the Camp SS still insisted on decorum and order, cladding
the camps in a thin veneer of normality, both for themselves and for visitors. “Sometimes when I was thinking about the loving care the Gestapo henchmen lavished on these flower beds,” a prisoner who had come to Sachsenhausen in autumn 1939 recalled, “I thought I was going to go mad over it.”
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The contrast between the blossoms outside the barracks and the misery inside could hardly have been
greater. Once prisoners entered, they were often overwhelmed by a stench of dirty and diseased bodies crammed together.
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Although the SS continued to insist on barracks being cleaned, as part of the abusive drill that passed for education, this did little to overcome the often dreadful conditions.

Overcrowding was a massive problem early in the war. Buchenwald grew the quickest. In just four
weeks, it virtually doubled in size, from 5,397 (September 1, 1939) to 10,046 prisoners (October 2, 1939).
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The inmate population in Sachsenhausen, too, nearly doubled before the year was out.
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All aspects of life were affected. Uniforms, soap, bedding, and more were in short supply. Barracks were packed, exceeding their already unviable maximum capacity by two or three times. Only later in
1940 did conditions in Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen ease, after their prisoner populations declined; in Buchenwald, the peak of 12,775 prisoners (October 31, 1939) was not passed again until spring 1943.
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Now it was other KL that absorbed the general rise in inmate numbers: the reopened camp at Dachau, the extended camp at Mauthausen, and new camps such as Auschwitz. These camps, too, were soon
crowded, forcing more and more prisoners to fight over space to sleep, wash, and dress.