KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (43 page)

Among Sommer’s victims were some well-known prisoners. Perhaps the most prominent was Ernst Heilmann, the former Prussian SPD leader. Just as he had foreseen, his suffering came to a terrible end soon after the outbreak of the war. On March 31, 1940, after almost seven years
inside the camps, Heilmann was called to the Buchenwald bunker, where he was murdered a few days later. Some of Heilmann’s comrades suspected that he had been denounced by a fellow prisoner for some infraction and avenged his death by murdering the alleged traitor. The climate of the camp was becoming more severe among the prisoners, too.
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The lethal atmosphere, with all the official and unofficial
executions, was highly contagious for the local Camp SS. From 1940, more and more SS men turned murderers. Take an officer like Rudolf Höss. Having participated in sanctioned executions in Sachsenhausen from September 1939, he soon initiated his own killings. On January 18, 1940, a freezing winter day, Höss ordered the prisoners from the “standing commandos”—more than eight hundred of them—to
assemble outside. An icy wind was blowing over the roll call square, and after several hours, the camp elder Harry Naujoks asked Höss for mercy. In his autobiography, Naujoks describes how he had used the expected military address: “Camp Leader, request permission to dismiss [prisoners].” When Höss did not respond, Naujoks tried again, more urgently: “Camp Leader, the people are finished.” Höss
replied: “They are not people but prisoners.” When he finally called off the action, later in the day, the shivering prisoners huddled around stoves in the barracks. Others were carried to the infirmary. Left behind on the snow-covered square were the corpses of the dead, with many more weakened prisoners dying over the next few days.
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The Camp SS had long regarded invalids as a nuisance, but
Höss went much further than he would have dared before the war. And he was not an outlier. Elsewhere, too, SS men began to systematically kill selected ill inmates, using lethal injections and other methods, at a time when casual murders in the concentration camps escalated.
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The Sachsenhausen Death Squad

It was during the early months of the Second World War that Gustav Sorge, the twenty-eight-year-old
deputy report leader in Sachsenhausen, became a mass murderer. Sorge had killed before, shooting his first inmate soon after joining the Camp SS in Esterwegen in late 1934. His education in the school of violence had continued over the coming years, but only during the war did he turn to mass killing. Unlike some of his fellow SS guards, Sorge had been no underachiever; he had done
well in school and trained as a metalworker. Like a disproportionate number of Nazi killers, he had grown up as an ethnic German abroad after his Silesian hometown fell to Poland after the First World War. He was infused with radical German nationalism in his early teens and finally left for Germany in 1930, where he was further embittered by his unemployment. Sorge threw himself into the Nazi cause,
joining the NSDAP and SA in 1931, aged nineteen, and the SS in the following year. Although he did not appear brawny, with a puny physique and high voice, he became a feared bruiser in the street brawls of the dying days of the Weimar Republic. It was during one such fight against Communists that he gained the nickname “Iron Gustav” (after a German celebrity of the time), which he later carried
as a badge of honor in the KL.
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In the early war years, Gustav Sorge led a small band of Camp SS killers in Sachsenhausen, which acted as an informal death squad; an escaped prisoner, speaking to British agents, described Sorge as the “high priest” over life and death, “whose helpers and aides were constantly competing with each other in shameful and murderous deeds.” The group was largely
made up of block leaders, the men who supervised prisoner barracks and labor details. As we have seen, only SS men committed to cruelty could make the grade as block leaders. The rest—judged by their superiors, like Sorge, as “too weak” and “too slack”—moved to less prominent posts or sentry duty; in early 1941, one Sachsenhausen block leader was even committed to a ward for mentally ill SS men because
he was plagued by nightmares.
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No single path led to the Sachsenhausen death squad. In all, there were perhaps a dozen men, mostly NCOs in their twenties. The youngest was Wilhelm Schubert, who had joined the Hitler Youth in 1931, aged fourteen. He volunteered for the Camp SS in 1936 in Lichtenburg, joined the Sachsenhausen Commandant Staff in spring 1938, and became a block leader the following
summer, aged twenty-two. Mocked by his SS colleagues as immature and erratic, Schubert sought their acceptance by public displays of brutality. He was always quick to reach for his weapon, earning him the nickname “Pistol Schubert” among prisoners. True to form, when he was promoted to Oberscharführer in 1941, he celebrated by beating up prisoners at random and shooting at their barracks.
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Perhaps the most feared member of the death squad was Richard Bugdalle, nicknamed “Brutalla” by prisoners. At twenty-nine years of age, he was slightly older than his colleagues when he became block leader in 1937. But, like them, he was a seasoned Nazi activist, having joined the SS in October 1931, and he was also a veteran of the KL. In Sachsenhausen, Bugdalle directed the notorious penal company.
In contrast to Schubert, who became agitated when torturing inmates, the burly Bugdalle was calmness personified. His specialty was punching prisoners; a keen amateur boxer, he could kill with a few well-aimed punches in the ribs and stomach. “If a man had to be liquidated,” Gustav Sorge later testified, “Schubert and I always took Bugdalle with us.”
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The men of the death squad sometimes acted
on superior orders. But they also set themselves up as judge and executioner, condemning prisoners for any number of “crimes.” Several men were killed on arrival, after Sorge’s gang stepped up the long-established “welcome” procedures; others were hounded for weeks “with a view to slowly liquidate [them],” as Sorge confessed after the war.
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Some newcomers were murdered as suspected sex offenders
or homosexuals.
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Prominent political prisoners and other opponents were targeted, too. After the Austrian state prosecutor Karl Tuppy—who had tried the Nazi murderers of the Austrian chancellor Dollfuss in 1934—arrived in Sachsenhausen on November 15, 1939, the SS went into overdrive. For about twenty minutes, Tuppy was battered in the political office. When the prisoner Rudolf Wunderlich was
called in to drag the body away, he recoiled: “I had never seen anything like it. His face was gone. Just a piece of completely undefined meat, full of blood, cuts, the eyes completely swollen up.” He left Tuppy at the gate, where Sorge and Schubert took turns in beating him. He died later the same day.
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The death squad pursued prisoners not just for who they were, but also for what they did
in Sachsenhausen. Over a brief period in 1940, Sorge killed an inmate who did not greet him fast enough, one who had stumbled, and one who had left ink stains on a letter (the SS suspected a secret code). Anyone who challenged the SS—mostly new prisoners who did not know better—was in grave danger, too. When Lothar Erdmann, a distinguished former union official, arrived in autumn 1939, he was shocked
by the violence. After he was beaten himself by Wilhelm Schubert, he dared to answer back: “What, you’re hitting me? I was a Prussian officer in the First World War and now have two sons at the front!” Erdmann was a marked man; mocked as “the officer,” he was battered for days, especially by Schubert and Sorge, until he could barely move. He died on September 18, 1939, around two weeks after
his arrival in the camp.
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Although the violence of Sachsenhausen guards built on prewar practices, their sustained campaigns of murder were greatly heightened by the war. The guards must have been encouraged by the introduction of a perfunctory SS court system in October 1939, which finally removed Camp SS men altogether from the grasp of the regular judiciary.
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Also, the dehumanization of
prisoners by the spread of illness and starvation made it easier for the SS to treat its victims as “the scum of all scum,” as one Sachsenhausen block leader put it.
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Even more important was the escalating SS execution policy. The guards knew that their superiors pushed for the murder of individual prisoners, so why should they hold back?

Finally, there was the general eruption of violence
during wartime. Hitler’s genocidal rhetoric and the brutal reality of German warfare from autumn 1939 made clear that a new era had begun, and the guards were bound to participate. Prisoners speculated that success on the faraway battlefields brutalized the Camp SS; as the German army vanquished its enemies abroad, guards felt empowered to do the same on the “inner front.”
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This echoes the view
of some historians that extermination policy in the Third Reich was radicalized by the Nazi leaders’ elation over apparent victories.
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But just as some SS men murdered because they felt that the Third Reich was untouchable, others got carried away after setbacks and defeats; it is striking how often KL murders were committed in “revenge” for supposed attacks on Germany.

Before long, local Camp
SS men like Gustav Sorge claimed the right to murder on their own initiative. Although they knew that killings officially required authorization from above, the perpetrators were convinced that they did the right thing, as Sorge later testified in court: “We believed that we were helping state and leadership when we abused prisoners and drove them to their deaths.”
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To some extent, this was
a self-serving lie; after all, Camp SS men sometimes tortured just for fun.
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Nonetheless, the killers did feel that they were realizing the general wishes of their superiors, as Sorge later explained: “Personally, I now believe that orders to act, in so far as they were given, were only meant to point lower-ranking officials in a certain direction, so that they would then try to act, of their
own accord, as the top leadership wished.”
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In this way, SS killers saw themselves as working toward their leaders.
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The result was a lethal dynamic, with murderous orders from the top and local initiatives from below radicalizing each other and plunging the KL into a maelstrom of destruction.

SCALES OF SUFFERING

The odds for survival fell dramatically in the early war period. On some days,
inmates in KL workshops produced nothing but coffins, just to keep up with all the dead.
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In 1938, the deadliest year before the war, around 1,300 prisoners had perished inside.
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In 1940, at least 14,000 prisoners lost their lives; 3,846 are known to have died in Mauthausen (around thirty percent of its inmate population), making it the most lethal KL at the time.
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Hunger and disease were
the greatest killers—most of the dead were emaciated, haggard, and hollow-eyed—followed by SS violence and executions.
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Prisoner suicides shot up, too. In Sachsenhausen, twenty-six prisoners are said to have killed themselves in April 1940 alone; some died in a fit of despair, running into the electrified fence, and some had meticulously planned their demise. The other inmates soon got used
to the presence of death; on occasion, they even ignored the corpses sprawled beneath their feet as they used the latrines. Pity was becoming an increasingly rare commodity in the early wartime camps.
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Camp SS officers regarded the growing mountain of corpses with some concern. What troubled them was not their conscience, though, but the disposal of the bodies. In the prewar years, prisoner
corpses had normally been taken to local morgues. This was no longer viable. Not only was it too time-consuming to store and transfer all the dead, the SS had no desire to advertise the lethal turn of the KL. The solution was simple—the SS would operate its own crematoria inside the camps. Although such plans had been mooted before, they were only realized from late 1939 onward, in cooperation with
two private contractors (Heinrich Kori GmbH and Topf & Sons). By summer 1940, all prewar KL for men were equipped with incinerators, and similar machinery was set up in new camps, too; the Auschwitz crematorium went into operation in August 1940.
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Other practical measures followed. From 1941, for example, registry offices were established inside the camps, so that fatalities could be recorded
by SS men, not by regular civil servants outside; inevitably, the SS officials classed almost all prisoner deaths as natural or accidental.
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There was no sure way to survive the KL during the war, but there were countless ways to die. Some groups were in much greater danger than others, however. Suffering inside the camps was never indiscriminate, and the gulf between prisoners became even
wider during the early part of the war. The political and racial hierarchies imposed by Nazi rulers were crucial; in general, Poles were more likely to die than Germans, and Jews more likely to die than Poles.
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Gender was decisive, too, as the KL system remained a mostly male construct; at the end of 1940, female prisoners only accounted for around one in twelve inmates, and the fate of these
4,300 women was still very different from that of their male counterparts.
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The Ravensbrück Women’s Camp

When Margarete Buber-Neumann arrived in Ravensbrück on August 2, 1940, she came to the end of an arduous journey that had begun six months earlier, and more than three thousand miles away, in the Karaganda Gulag. Born in Germany in 1901 into a bourgeois family, she had joined the KPD as
a young woman. By the late 1920s, she had dedicated herself full time to the cause, working in the Berlin office of the Comintern magazine. Here she met her husband, Heinz Neumann, the high-flying editor of the incendiary newspaper
Rote Fahne
(Red Flag). When he fell from grace in the early 1930s, after internal party intrigues, Margarete followed him abroad. After moving like fugitives from one
European city to another, they finally arrived in Moscow in early summer 1935. By then, the witch hunts were already under way. The Great Terror—fueled by Stalin’s obsession with spies and saboteurs—claimed a million or more victims in 1937–38, including thousands of German Communists. Having escaped the Nazis, they fell to their Soviet heroes instead. Among them was Heinz Neumann, jailed, tortured,
and executed in late 1937. A few months later, his wife was arrested, too. Sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, Margarete Buber-Neumann was taken to Karaganda in the Kazakh steppe, one of the largest Soviet labor camps, where around 35,000 prisoners faced harsh labor under appalling conditions. In early 1940, she was suddenly taken back to Moscow, and soon farther to the west. The Soviet authorities,
whom she had once revered, delivered her to the Nazis, as one of around 350 prisoners handed over between November 1939 and May 1941, during the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Many were released, once they had been pumped for intelligence. Not so Buber-Neumann. The Gestapo accused her of high treason and placed her in protective custody.
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