KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (45 page)

Before the Holocaust

Soon all Jewish men in the KL were in mortal danger. In the first months of the Second World War, the SS still differentiated, directing its greatest fury against Polish Jews. But such distinctions soon disappeared, as the police extended its persecution of German Jews—suspected as supporters of the enemy—and the Camp SS extended its terror.
“The struggle against the Jews,” the Sachsenhausen death squad leader Gustav Sorge testified after the war, “was a racial struggle.”
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Even the hearts of some guards considered humane hardened when it came to Jews. The Ravensbrück camp supervisor Johanna Langefeld, for example, was a fanatical anti-Semite and let Jewish prisoners feel her hatred.
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A crucial moment came on March 9, 1940, when
Heinrich Himmler banned all further releases of Jews; only Jews who held valid visas and could emigrate before the end of April would still be freed.
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The flow of releases of Jews, already small, became a trickle and then dried up altogether.
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One of the lucky few to escape at the last moment was Leon Szalet, thanks to the dogged persistence of his daughter, whom he had brought up alone, as
a widower. In early 1940, the mood among Polish Jews in the camp had fluctuated between hope and despair. When Szalet heard that he might be released, some comrades could not hide their envy. When it looked as if his plans would fall through, one gleeful prisoner broke into a popular tune, changing the lyrics: “A ship leaves for Shanghai, and Szalet won’t be nigh.”
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But on May 7, 1940, he really
was set free, to the surprise even of SS block leaders. After eight months in Sachsenhausen, he was sick, starved, and depressed, and he never really recovered.
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But at least he escaped more SS torment. This was the fate of the Jews who were left behind, and now faced near-certain death.

Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, which initially led the way in early wartime terror against Jews, claimed
the lives of many Jewish prisoners; in Buchenwald alone, almost seven hundred died during 1940.
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Men accused of intimate relations with “Aryan” women, and marked on their files and uniforms as “race defilers,” were particularly vulnerable, as the combination of sex and race remained irresistible to the SS. On May 3, 1940, for example, Gustav Sorge beat and kicked to death an elderly Jewish prisoner
who had just arrived in Sachsenhausen; as Sorge broke his victim’s bones, he screamed: “Oh, you swine, you’re a Jew and fucked our Christian women!”
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Like this inmate, many Jewish men died within days or weeks of their arrival. Those who survived a little longer carried the deep marks of SS excesses. Crushing forced labor was accompanied by extreme violence, wiping out several members of the
same families. The Camp SS also continued to cut rations, holding regular “fasting days,” when Jews received no food at all, and occasionally banned all Jews from entering the infirmaries. Young and strong men soon looked old and infirm, and even the most resilient among them fell into despair. “In Sachsenhausen, I did not know whether I was still human,” the Polish-born boxer and mechanic Salem
(Bully) Schott remembered. “I did not feel anything anymore, except hunger.”
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In other camps, too, Jewish men lost all hope. In Dachau, the most feared site was a new extension of the plantation, called Freiland II, which was cultivated from spring 1941.
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Karel Ka
š
ák, a privileged Czech prisoner who worked as an illustrator on the plantation (the SS planned a book about the different plants),
secretly documented the abuses: “21 March [1941]. [Commando leader] Seuss ordered the Jews to immediately take off their bandages from the infirmary, under which they have horrific wounds, and to work without them in the soggy and muddy ground. All 200 Jews are terribly miserable, shattered, abused, and utterly emaciated figures; 90 percent can barely keep on their feet.”
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Almost every day,
there were murders or forced suicides on the plantation, as the following extract from Ka
š
ák’s notes illustrates:

May 9 [1941]. Again a Jew shot in Freiland II. He started to run. The sentry told us that although he has instructions to shoot without warning, he shouted twice. The [prisoner] stopped and just exclaimed: “I want to go there” and fell after two shots … Again they have put a group
of lifeless and unconscious Jews on the cart. Human flesh, the bodies of these sons of God, stacked like logs, arms and legs swaying limply—a horrendous picture that we witness daily …

May 14. In the afternoon they again shot a Jew in Freiland II …

May 15. Again a Jew shot. They threw his cap behind the sentry and the Kapo forced him with a truncheon to fetch it. Complete exhaustion has made
[the Jewish prisoners] unrecognizable, like in a trance, with a far-away gaze …

May 16. At nine in the morning two more Jews shot in Freiland II. They threw the exhausted men into the water and held them under water until they had almost lost consciousness, and definitely lost their minds, and Kapo Sammetinger hit them with the spade until he had forced them to cross the sentry line, whereupon
they were immediately shot.
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Dreadful as Dachau was, conditions were even worse in Mauthausen. This KL, which had not held any Jews in the prewar period, gradually filled up in the early war years, with almost one thousand Jewish men arriving in 1940–41. The vast majority of them were doomed.
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Most of the victims were Jewish men arrested in the occupied Netherlands. A first large group had
been rounded up there in February 1941: after the German authorities and their local allies had met growing resistance to their persecution of Dutch Jews, Himmler ordered mass arrests in retaliation. Their initial destination was Buchenwald, where some 389 young Jewish men arrived as so-called hostages on February 28, 1941.
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“Unbearable conditions soon arose,” one of them testified later, and
by May 22, 1941, over forty men had died. That day, almost all the survivors, some 341 men total, were forced on a train to Mauthausen on orders of the IKL; most likely, SS leaders had decided that they should die.
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The prisoners arrived in Mauthausen around midnight and the SS guards set upon them straightaway; within three months, more than half had perished. Most of them died in the quarries,
crushed by rocks, beaten to death, or forced over the sentry line. Some committed suicide and threw themselves to their deaths, holding hands; on October 14, 1941, for example, the SS recorded that sixteen Jews had perished by “jumping [in the] quarry.” Whether they had been pushed or not, the SS men were guilty, a responsibility they bore lightly. When further transports of Jews arrived in Mauthausen,
SS officials jokingly welcomed their new “battalion of paratroopers.”
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By 1941, concentration camps had become death traps for Jewish prisoners. The sharp rise in the death rate, compared to the prewar years, owed much to the unrestrained rank-and-file guards. But their superiors were involved, too, and several prisoners reported that KL commandants had given explicit orders to kill Jewish
prisoners.
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Clearly, the Camp SS was influenced by the general course of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, which turned far more lethal between 1939 and 1941, with the SS in the driving seat. Still, the transition to systematic murder came particularly early in the KL, well before Nazi policy as a whole moved in this direction. While the immediate extermination of European Jews had not yet been decided
by early summer 1941, the death of Jews in concentration camps was an almost foregone conclusion by then.

This is not to say that the Nazi Final Solution started earlier than we thought. Despite isolated calls by radical Nazi activists for deporting all Jews to the KL, the camps remained on the periphery of anti-Jewish policy in the early war years.
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Instead, the authorities relied on other
sites of mass detention, setting up hundreds of forced labor camps and ghettos in Poland, Germany, and elsewhere; the largest ghetto in Warsaw held some 445,000 Jews by March 1941, suffering mass starvation, disease, and death.
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By contrast, the KL were reserved for selected Jews only, above all men seen as particularly dangerous criminals or terrorists. They were arrested for punishment and
deterrence, as in the case of the Jews rounded up in the Netherlands, whose fate was common knowledge among the Dutch Jewish community.
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If the only “crime” of Jewish men, women, and children was being Jewish, however, they were far more likely to suffer elsewhere.

Attacking Polish Prisoners

On August 13, 1940, the daily routine in Mauthausen was briefly disrupted when two middle-aged Polish
prisoners, Victor Lukawski and Franc Kapacki, slipped away from the Gusen subcamp. Escapes were still extremely rare, and after the guards realized that two men were missing, they ran amok. As collective punishment, all eight hundred prisoners (almost all Poles) in the escaped men’s work detail were forced to move heavy rocks in the quarry at running pace; those who broke down were battered by
Kapos and SS. After they returned to the camp, they had to stand to attention all night without any food. The balance sheet of the day of violence was stark: in all, fourteen Polish prisoners died in Gusen on August 13, 1940. The two escapees met a gruesome end, too; they were dragged back a couple of days later and beaten to death.
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From the beginning, the new Gusen subcamp had been earmarked
as a “reeducation camp” for Polish prisoners. The first transport with 1,084 Polish men came on May 25, 1940, the day the camp officially opened, and others soon followed. In all, some eight thousand Poles, many of them members of the Polish intelligentsia, arrived in late spring and summer 1940, mostly from other KL like Dachau and Sachsenhausen. By the end of the year, more than 1,500 had lost
their lives in Gusen, where the average monthly mortality stood at five percent.
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The inferno was overseen by SS camp leader Karl Chmielewski. A trained woodcarver from Hesse, he had come to the SS in 1932, after he lost his workshop during the Great Depression. He prospered after joining Himmler’s personal office, and in summer 1935, at the age of thirty-one, he was initiated into the Camp
SS; he trained in the Columbia House camp under Karl Otto Koch, one of the best teachers in cruelty, and in the following year he moved to Sachsenhausen, where he was groomed for higher office. Chmielewski’s moment came in 1940, when he was transferred to Gusen to command some sixty SS men. Under his reign, which lasted until late 1942, one in every two prisoners perished. A tall and strong man, Chmielewski
led from the front, showing his men how the prisoners should be beaten, kicked, whipped, and killed. His superiors were duly impressed, with the Mauthausen commandant Franz Ziereis praising his “especially pronounced personal toughness.”
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Murderous violence also surrounded Poles in the other KL, after prisoner numbers shot up in 1940–41. In Sachsenhausen, thousands of Poles were isolated in
the little camp, now cleared of Jews and known as the “Polish quarantine camp,” where they were tormented like the Jewish prisoners before them.
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Extreme terror characterized the smaller camps, too. After a Polish inmate escaped from Flossenbürg in summer 1941, the local Camp SS made the other Poles stand to attention for three days and nights without food—perhaps the longest roll call in the
history of the KL; some prisoners who fell unconscious were murdered by a Kapo, who forced a hose with running water down their throats.
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Nowhere was the SS assault on Polish prisoners more deadly than in Auschwitz, where Poles made up the great majority of inmates in 1940–41. Prisoner numbers had grown rapidly after the camp was set up and so did the dead. The ingredients making up camp life
were the same as elsewhere: violent and often senseless labor, never-ending roll calls, hunger, disease, and dirt. “In the camp, one lived from one day to the next, just to be still alive tomorrow,” Wies
ł
aw Kielar recalled.
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In its first twelve months, several thousand men died in Auschwitz, and things only got worse. During a twelve-week period from October 7 to December 31, 1941, SS bureaucrats
recorded the dispatch of 2,915 prisoner corpses from the main camp’s morgue to the crematorium.
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The rage of the SS extended to other prisoner groups, too, in addition to Poles and Jews. German-speaking Gypsies were often targeted during the early war years, partly owing to deep-seated prejudices among SS men (Rudolf Höss, for one, was convinced that Gypsies had tried to abduct him as a child). In Buchenwald, some six hundred Austrian Roma arrived via Dachau in autumn 1939. They faced
extreme hardship and hunger, and around two hundred died during the first winter. Many had suffered frozen limbs and were brought for amputations to the infirmary; SS doctors had no hesitation about killing some with deadly injections. “None of my comrades want to go to the infirmary anymore, because no one comes back,” one young inmate told a fellow prisoner. “I think all of us Gypsies will die
in Buchenwald.”
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The SS also selected some political opponents for “special treatment.” In the first half of 1941, the great majority of new arrivals in the Gusen subcamp were veterans from the Spanish Civil War. Among the other inmates, these men quickly gained a reputation for bravery and solidarity. This only confirmed the fears of the SS, who saw them as battle-hardened enemies and singled
them out for the hardest punishment. In 1941, almost sixty percent of prisoners classified as “Red Spaniards” or “Spaniards” perished in Mauthausen; many of the 3,046 victims were murdered in the quarries. The steep steps the prisoners had to climb every day, with huge blocks of granite on their backs, resembled “a long cemetery,” one of the survivors wrote.
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