KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (42 page)

This was part of the wider escalation of Camp SS terror in the early war years, when deadly violence lurked all around. Among the spaces most closely associated with murder were the infirmaries and, above all, the bunker, which had long stood at the center of violence. But guards now killed almost everywhere, and crucially,
they killed far more frequently. Previously, they had often stopped short of murder. Why was there no more holding back after the outbreak of the Second World War?

Executions

Shortly before midnight on September 7, 1939, a police car pulled onto the Sachsenhausen grounds. Inside, flanked by police officers and held in shackles, sat a muscular man with thick, curly hair. His name was Johann Heinen
and he only had an hour left to live. Heinen, who looked younger than his thirty years, was a man who had known little good fortune in his short life. In the turbulent Weimar years, the trained metalworker had lost his job, and in the early Nazi years, he was locked away for his Communist sympathies. After his release, he had worked for the Junkers factory in Dessau, but shortly before the Second
World War broke out, he was arrested once again, this time for refusing to dig a trench for German air defenses. His resistance proved fatal, as Nazi leaders decided to make an example of him. Having received the go-ahead from Hitler himself, Heinrich Himmler sent a telex to Heydrich in the early evening of September 7, 1939, ordering the immediate execution of the “Communist Heinen” in Sachsenhausen.
The commandant alerted Camp Inspector Theodor Eicke, who was still in Oranienburg and rushed over. Heinen himself was informed of his fate after he arrived in the camp. He spent his last moments smoking feverishly and writing a farewell message to his wife: “Please be brave and think about our boy; you
have
to live for him. I think the hour is up soon. Please forgive that this letter is so rambling
and incoherent. I think I am already dead.” Rudolf Höss, then the Sachsenhausen adjutant, led the prisoner to the industry yard, stepped back, and ordered three NCOs to open fire. Heinen collapsed immediately, but Höss stepped up anyway and shot him once more at close range. Afterward, the SS men walked to the officers’ mess. “Strangely, there was little conversation,” Höss recalled, “as everyone
was caught up in his own thoughts.”
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The killing of Johann Heinen inaugurated a momentous new Nazi procedure. A few days earlier, on September 3, 1939, the day France and Britain declared war against Nazi Germany, Hitler had publicly announced that anyone undermining the home front would be “destroyed as an enemy of the nation.”
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He apparently reiterated this point privately to Himmler the
same day, asking him to take any measures necessary to maintain security inside the Reich.
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Himmler quickly translated Hitler’s general wish into policy. In a typical case of working toward the Führer, to use a concept advanced by Ian Kershaw, he launched the regime’s execution program, with the KL as semiofficial execution sites for men (later also women) condemned without trial.
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The administrative
basis for the new policy was laid in a directive by Reinhard Heydrich, on the same fateful September 3, 1939. Following their arrest of dangerous suspects, regional Gestapo staff were told, Heydrich’s office would decide on “the brutal liquidation of such elements”; it was understood that the victims would normally be killed in the nearest KL.
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But the new measure was not implemented as SS leaders
had hoped. After four days, Heydrich sent an urgent telex to regional Gestapo officers, demanding that many more offenders be reported for execution. Just twelve hours later, Johann Heiden was shot in Sachsenhausen. However, Heydrich was still not satisfied. After two weeks, he cabled again, insisting that anyone guilty of dangerous acts—such as sabotage or Communist activities—had to be “mercilessly
eradicated (that is, through execution).” Once more, Heydrich spoke openly to his subordinates. Only later, as Nazi murders mounted, did officials use camouflage language to cover their bloody tracks in internal documents.
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The SS executions of Johann Heinen and two other men in September 1939 alarmed officials in the Reich Ministry of Justice, who learned about the killings through headlines
in the press like: “Saboteur shot dead: There is no place in the community for people like that.”
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Such lawless executions challenged the judiciary’s hold over capital punishment and Reich minister Gürtner pleaded with Hitler to change course, arguing that the regular court system was perfectly capable of dispensing punishment without SS interference (indeed, the number of judicial death sentences
shot up during the war, already reaching 1,292 in 1941).
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But his intervention backfired. When the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, raised the issue on October 13, 1939, Hitler not only took responsibility for the earlier killings in the KL, he ordered the execution of two bank robbers who had been legally sentenced to ten years in a penitentiary, in a much-publicized trial.
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SS executions were here to stay, and as the war got bloodier, Hitler condemned dozens more Germans convicted of sex offenses, theft, fraud, and arson.
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Registered KL prisoners fell under the new execution policy, too. Once again, Sachsenhausen was the testing ground. The first victim was August Dickmann, a twenty-nine-year-old Jehovah’s Witness and veteran inmate, who had resisted Camp SS pressure
to declare his willingness to serve in the army. After his case reached Nazi leaders, Himmler ordered his execution, with Hitler’s agreement. In the early evening of September 15, 1939, all prisoners assembled on the roll call square where the commandant announced the death sentence and then screamed at Dickmann: “Turn around, you swine.” An SS commando shot him in the back and Rudolf Höss
delivered the coup de grâce. As the SS had intended, the other prisoners—among them Dickmann’s brother, who had to put the corpse into a coffin—were terrified. But Himmler also had an eye on wider deterrence and once more sanctioned reports in German papers and on radio.
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Himmler also condemned prisoners when he visited camps, as he did in Sachsenhausen on November 22, 1939. After inspecting
the bunker that morning, he ordered the guards to murder one of the inmates, the Austrian teenager Heinrich Petz, to whom he had briefly spoken. Petz had been involved in several highly publicized killings during car robberies—the fourteen-year-old was not charged because he was underage—and had recently been dragged to Sachsenhausen. The local Camp SS acted straightaway. In the yard of the bunker,
Petz was told to walk toward the fence and was shot as he did so. Since this was no legal killing, the SS draped the youth’s body over the barbed wire to “pretend that it had been a failed escape,” as one of the perpetrators later admitted.
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Early on, some Camp SS men grumbled that such prisoner executions were not worthy of them. But before long, killings on the orders of Himmler and the RSHA
were routine, although Rudolf Höss exaggerated when he claimed that he had “lined up almost every day” with his Sachsenhausen firing squad.
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Still, KL executions became so frequent that detailed guidelines were issued, fixing the procedures in writing.
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Normally, prisoners were executed out of sight, often at the shooting range, the bunker, or the infirmary. In exceptional cases, when the
SS wanted to teach the others a lesson, all inmates had to watch.
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The job of hangman—traditionally regarded as a dishonorable profession—was often left to specially selected prisoners, who were rewarded with cigarettes, and sometimes coffee, alcohol, or food.
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Once the Nazi leadership had designated the KL as execution sites for individual men, it did not take long before the policy was
extended. From 1940, the Camp SS executed groups of Germans and foreigners, sometimes killing dozens of victims together.
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At times, these executions were coordinated across several camps. The first such bloodbath was committed in November 1940, when more than two hundred Poles were murdered in Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, and Auschwitz, on the orders of Himmler and Heydrich. Some of the dead
had been regular prisoners, others had arrived only for their execution. The exact reason for this killing spree remains unclear, though it was clearly connected to Nazi occupation policy in Poland, which was shifting from open to more covert executions of opponents.
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Among the victims was the distinguished doctor Józef Marczy
ń
ski, who had been deputy director of the Warsaw municipal hospitals.
After the German invasion, he had joined the resistance and was arrested during a Gestapo action against the Polish intelligentsia. In May 1940, he was transported from Pawiak prison in Warsaw to Sachsenhausen. Six months later, on the morning of November 9, he was led out of his barrack, together with thirty-two other Poles who had arrived via Pawiak. Apparently, the men expected to be released.
Instead, the SS wrote the inmate numbers on their foreheads, for easy identification of the corpses, and drove them to the nearby industry yard; after they had undressed, they were all shot. In the evening, the other Polish prisoners in Sachsenhausen held an impromptu memorial with prayers and hymns, singing quietly to avoid detection.
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Mass executions of Poles in the KL continued over the
following months and years.
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Some inmates were executed as “hostages” for supposed crimes by Polish civilians.
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Others were already doomed when they arrived, sentenced to death by police summary courts. Operating in occupied Poland since 1939, these were courts in name only; they were really police tribunals beyond the law, handing out death sentences at every turn.
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The summary courts worked
closely with the Camp SS, particularly in Auschwitz, where proceedings eventually moved inside the camp itself, so that the SS could execute the defendants straight after the farcical trials.
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Camp SS Killers

The execution policy had a profound impact on the local Camp SS. As state-ordered executions mounted, SS men on the ground felt emboldened to dispense their own brand of justice. Their
moral compass was already defective, and once Nazi leaders had set the precedent of lawless executions, an upsurge in murderous initiatives by local Camp SS men was almost inevitable. Such unauthorized killings remained officially prohibited, to be sure, as SS leaders sought to keep a grip on the camps.
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But it was impossible to draw a line between “right” and “wrong” murders.

Some commandants
led from the front, none more so than the indomitable Karl Otto Koch in Buchenwald, who oversaw a first unauthorized mass execution in autumn 1939. The background was the unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life on November 8, when a bomb planted by a lone resister detonated in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. It killed seven spectators on the spot, but Hitler escaped unharmed, boosting the belief
in his divine mission (the would-be assassin, Georg Elser, was murdered in Dachau in 1945).
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Hitler was riding a wave of popularity at the time and many Germans were appalled by the attempt on his life.
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Few were more determined to exact revenge than the men in the Camp SS, who launched brutal attacks on imprisoned Jews. The claim that Jews were behind the attack—too far-fetched even for Nazi
propaganda—was enough for obsessive anti-Semites to justify vicious assaults, exactly one year after the 1938 pogrom. In Sachsenhausen, SS men tormented Jewish men during the night of November 9 while Jewish women in Ravensbrück were locked into their barrack for a month, at the mercy of a particularly abusive female guard. “Our hearts raced as soon as she appeared,” one prisoner testified later.
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All this was overshadowed by events in Buchenwald, where so many Jews had already suffered before the war. On the morning of November 9, 1939, all prisoners assembled as normal for roll call. But it soon became clear that this was no normal day, for the SS forced the men back into their barracks. Then the Jews were ordered to return. Among them, the SS picked out a group of German and Austrian
men, mostly in their twenties and thirties. The others went back inside, where they were isolated for days in complete darkness, without food and drink. Meanwhile, the selected men walked to the camp gate, where they waited anxiously while the SS guards—some still drunk from the previous night—commemorated the anniversary of the 1923 Nazi uprising. After a small parade, the SS returned and lost no
more time. On orders of Commandant Koch, the twenty-one Jews were marched from the gate toward the quarry. When they reached flat terrain, SS men drew their weapons and shot the prisoners from behind; anyone who tried to run was quickly hunted down.
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This massacre was unparalleled. Never before had the local Camp SS murdered as many prisoners in broad daylight, and without any instructions
from above. Perhaps the fanatical Koch felt entitled to act because his camp compound leader Rödl had been slightly wounded in the Bürgerbräukeller blast. Whatever Koch’s motives, he had no problems finding willing executioners among his Buchenwald men.
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And although his SS superiors were suspicious about the cover story he had concocted—that the Jewish prisoners were shot during a mass escape—an
internal investigation came to nothing. Koch got away with murder.
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Commandant Koch, already drunk with power, soon became fully intoxicated, selecting more and more prisoners for execution. Among his victims were dozens of new arrivals who somehow caught his roving eye. One was killed simply because Koch had met him before in other KL. “Now this bird won’t follow me around anymore,” Koch joked.
Others were murdered for disciplinary offenses or because they knew too much about SS corruption. The condemned men were taken to the Buchenwald bunker, run by Oberscharführer Martin Sommer. It is easy to see why Sommer became the unofficial camp executioner. A longtime Nazi activist (he had joined the NSDAP in 1931, when he was just sixteen years old), Sommer was a man of exceptional cruelty.
He dispensed the official punishments like whipping, and took part in other outrages, starving and choking prisoners, sexually abusing them, and crushing their skulls; on some days, he later admitted, he had dished out more than two thousand beatings in the bunker. Although Sommer was not the only Camp SS man to graduate with ease from torture to murder, his cold-bloodedness was remarkable even
among the SS; after his deadly deeds, he sometimes slept in his office, with the prisoner’s corpse stowed under his bed.
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