KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (55 page)

And so the death of Soviet POWs continued.
When the Sachsenhausen block leader Martin Knittler, a seasoned killer from the camp’s neck-shooting barrack, was informed one day in November 1941 that nine Soviet slave laborers had perished, he replied: “What? Only nine deaths today? We’ll see to that.” Knittler then ordered the remaining Soviet soldiers, who had just showered, to stand for hours outside their barrack in the freezing
cold. The next day, thirty-seven of them were dead.
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SS men like Knittler could rationalize their murders as economically beneficial. Following Nazi social-Darwinist thinking, the lethal conditions they helped to create led to a natural selection; those Soviet soldiers who survived would be the fittest and hardest workers.
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Camp SS leaders in Oranienburg were well aware of the slaughter of
Soviet slave laborers. But Richard Glücks and his men were neither surprised nor alarmed.
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In fact, they fostered the lethal atmosphere inside the KL. When it came to the construction of new barracks, Arthur Liebehenschel had been implacable from the start. The Soviet POWs, he announced in mid-September 1941, had to be housed “in the most primitive manner.”
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What this meant becomes clear when
studying the SS plans for the new camp at Birkenau, drawn up in mid-October 1941. Disease and death were built into the plans, which envisaged 125,000 POWs packed into 174 barracks; the surface space allocated to each prisoner was, appropriately enough, the same size as a coffin. Seven thousand prisoners were supposed to share a latrine hut and 7,800 prisoners a wash hut. These provisions were
worse, far worse, than the standard design for concentration camps. But in the eyes of SS planners—who subscribed to Himmler’s views of Soviets as resilient “human animals”—they were just right.
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At first glance, the treatment of Soviet POWs in late 1941 seems baffling: Why were so many men, who had been earmarked for KL slave labor, pushed to their graves? From the perspective of the SS, however,
these murders were less contentious. The deaths would have raised concerns only if the lives of Soviet slave laborers had held any real value. They did not. Underlying the murder and neglect by the Camp SS was the conviction that the twenty-seven thousand soldiers who had arrived in October 1941 were just the vanguard; far more Soviet POWs would follow and take the place of the dead. Caught
up in the hubris of Nazi domination, the Camp SS counted on an infinite surge of Soviet prisoners.
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But the reinforcements did not come. Not long after the SS had staked a claim on captured Soviet soldiers, Hitler made a decisive intervention. On October 31, 1941, faced with growing labor shortages, he ordered the mass deployment of Soviet POWs for the general German war effort; soon, SS claims
were sidelined by the more urgent demands from state and private industry. What is more, there were far fewer captives than expected. Never again did the Wehrmacht take as many prisoners as it did in the early months of Operation Barbarossa. Afterward, the blitzkrieg predicted by Hitler’s cocksure generals turned into an unceasing war of attrition. The German advance stalled outside Moscow, followed
by the first major counteroffensive in December 1941. By then, most of the captured Soviet soldiers were already dead or dying, victims of the fatal conditions in Wehrmacht compounds and the merciless hunt for “commissars.”
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Himmler’s huge wave of Soviet POWs never hit the concentration camps.

As a result, his grandiose plans for the expansion of the KL system—with the giant new camps in Birkenau
and Majdanek as the main base for Soviet soldiers—failed to materialize, at least in the way he had intended. On December 19, 1941, SS buildings supremo Hans Kammler sent Himmler a sobering update about progress in Birkenau and Majdanek. Hard as he tried to apply a positive gloss, Kammler conceded that the construction of both camps—now projected at one hundred and fifty thousand prisoners
each—was well behind schedule; so far, only twenty-six barracks had been built in Majdanek, and fourteen in Birkenau. The main problem, apart from subzero temperatures and shortages of building material, was the sheer lack of manpower. As conceived in autumn 1941, the building project relied on the influx of huge numbers of Soviet soldiers. But the POWs who had arrived so far were of no use to the
SS. The plans to make the POWs build their own barracks, Kammler admitted, had to be dropped, because the prisoners “are in such a catastrophic physical state that it is currently not possible to contemplate a successful labor deployment.”
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In the end, Majdanek never grew into a major hub for forced labor. The provisional compound was still far from finished in summer 1942. There were only two barracks for SS guards, the watchtowers were incomplete, and building material was scattered all over the grounds.
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Majdanek did not come close to its projected size. Most of the time, it held no more than around ten to fifteen thousand
inmates, and none of them laid any foundations for German settlements in the east.
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SS progress in Birkenau remained slow, too. Only in March 1942, half a year after the initial construction order, had work progressed far enough for the surviving POWs to be transferred from their enclosure in the main camp to Birkenau. These Soviet soldiers now numbered fewer than one thousand, and most of them
soon perished, too. In mid-April 1942, a young Jewish prisoner who had just been deported from Slovakia (a German puppet state) to Birkenau found the last remnant of the Soviet soldiers “in a terribly neglected state,” living on the “unfinished building site, without any protection against cold and rain, and dying in droves.”
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Heinrich Himmler’s first bid for Soviet slave laborers ended in
failure and misery. Rather than turning the KL into gigantic reservoirs of forced labor, the arrival of Soviet soldiers opened a new round of carnage in the camps. In spring 1942, when most of the remaining POW compounds were closed down—with the prisoners now officially classified as concentration camp inmates—no more than five thousand of the twenty-seven thousand Soviet soldiers who had arrived
for forced labor in autumn 1941 were still alive.
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One of the survivors was Nikolaj Wassiljew, who was among the Auschwitz prisoners transferred to Birkenau in March 1942. Asked after the war about the fate of his comrades, Wassiljew gave a blunt answer: “Shot. Killed during work. Died of hunger. Died of illness.”
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Taking Stock

Looking at the KL in late 1941 and early 1942, a great deal
had changed since the outbreak of the Second World War. While they were still recognizable as concentration camps, the system had undergone a major makeover in barely two years. In early 1942, there were thirteen main camps, not six, with four new ones in occupied Nazi Europe: Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Stutthof in Poland, and Natzweiler in France.
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Prisoner numbers had shot up, too, from just
over twenty thousand to around eighty thousand, with most new prisoners coming from occupied Europe, above all from Poland and the Soviet Union. And while prisoners in 1939 might have imagined that their treatment could not get any worse, it quickly had. Nazi terror escalated during the war, inside and outside the KL. The camps’ towering death rate tells its own story, as do the weapons deployed
by the SS. By 1942, the Camp SS practiced almost every conceivable form of murder: beating, hanging, shooting, starving, drowning, gassing, and poisoning.

The pivotal year was 1941, as the concentration camps moved from the lethal conditions of the early war period to mass extermination, developing a dual function. As before, the Camp SS exploited, abused, and killed individual prisoners. But
the camps now also became sites of systematic mass murder, with central programs to kill infirm prisoners and so-called Soviet commissars. Take Sachsenhausen, one of the model camps of the SS. During 1941, an average of around ten thousand regular prisoners were held here. Every day was torture for them, dominated by forced labor, drills, crammed barracks, hunger, illness, and extreme violence. Death
from malnourishment and disease was common, especially among Poles and Jews. Still, the Camp SS had no plans to kill all these prisoners and the majority survived.
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The opposite was true for the ten thousand Soviet “commissars” who came to the camp between September and November 1941 and rarely lived longer than a couple of days; Sachsenhausen was an extermination camp for these men.

Systematic
mass killing turned to genocide in 1942, as the Holocaust entered the KL. But this change did not come out of nowhere. It is striking how many structural elements of the Holocaust had emerged inside concentration camps before the SS crossed the threshold to genocide. This included the deportation of victims straight to their deaths; tight transport schedules; the elaborate camouflage of mass
murder, with fake showers and doctors’ offices; the use of poison gas, including Zyklon B; the construction of new crematoria, which were adapted, repaired, and extended to keep up with all the dead; the regular purges among prisoners to kill those “unfit for work”; the violation of prisoners’ bodies after death, with gold teeth broken out. All this predated the Holocaust. Even the selection of prisoners
on arrival—sending the weaker ones straight to their deaths and working the others until they, too, perished—had been pioneered in autumn 1941, targeting Soviet “commissars.” Simply put: the essential mechanics of the Holocaust were in place by the end of 1941—a KL like Auschwitz was ready for the genocide of European Jewry.

And yet, the mass murder of invalids and Soviet POWs was no dress rehearsal
for the Holocaust. This would be reading history backward. These killings were driven by their own terrible logic, without the murder of the Jews in mind. Indeed, when the decision for these earlier killing programs was taken in spring and summer 1941, the Nazi regime had not yet settled on the immediate extermination of European Jews as state policy. No KL was designated as a place for killing
large numbers of Jews until 1942. This shift came only after momentous decisions by Nazi leaders ushered in a new chapter in the history of the SS concentration camps, and the Third Reich as a whole.

6

Holocaust

Shortly after three o’clock on the afternoon of July 17, 1942, a plane carrying SS leader Heinrich Himmler and his small entourage touched down at Kattowitz airport. Waiting on the ground were high-ranking party and SS officials, among them the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, who had busily prepared his camp for Himmler’s impending visit. Höss accompanied the SS leader and the
other dignitaries on the drive south, heading for Auschwitz, where Himmler was formally welcomed over coffee in the officers’ mess.
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The whole camp complex had grown enormously since Himmler’s inaugural visit in spring 1941. The SS had greatly extended its local zone of interest. The main camp was also much changed and now included a makeshift section for thousands of female prisoners, who were
poised for transfer to the huge new compound in Birkenau. Another major development was under way at the nearby IG Farben site, where a satellite camp (Monowitz) was being built. Most significant of all, Birkenau had recently become a camp for the systematic mass extermination of European Jewry.

During his two-day visit, Himmler was given a comprehensive tour of the Auschwitz complex. He was
keen to check on various economic ventures, both agricultural and industrial. To discuss his ideas about farming, the trained agronomist Himmler set time aside for the dynamic local SS director of farms, Joachim Cäsar, and he also visited agricultural projects, apparently stopping at a cowshed for a glass of milk poured by a prisoner.
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Himmler also toured the IG Farben building site. Though impressed
by the modern construction methods, he was impatient for the production of synthetic fuel and rubber to begin. Not for the last time, he pushed the company to speed things up.
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Inside the main camp, Himmler inspected the overcrowded women’s compound and watched as one female prisoner was whipped during corporal punishment.
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He was standing not far from the camp’s crematorium, where the gassing
of Soviet POWs had taken place back in autumn 1941. By the time of his visit, however, the center of mass murder in Auschwitz had already shifted, away from the main camp to the new extension in Birkenau.

Well beyond the first nearly complete Birkenau prisoner sectors stood a couple of innocuous-looking farmhouses—a few hundred yards apart and hidden among the trees—that had lately been converted
into gas chambers. Here, according to Rudolf Höss, Himmler closely observed the mass murder of a newly arrived transport of Jews: “He did not say anything at all about the extermination process, he just watched in silence.”
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The SS leader was a dispassionate observer, just as he had been during a massacre of Jewish men and women near Minsk, one year earlier.
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But Himmler was not silent for long.
On the evening of July 17, 1942, he attended a festive dinner with the leading Auschwitz SS officers—all in full uniform—and made small talk about their jobs and families. Later he relaxed, during an informal get-together with Höss and his wife, and a few select others, in the modern mansion of the Nazi Gauleiter in a forest near Kattowitz, complete with golf course and swimming pool. Himmler
was uncharacteristically lighthearted that night, even exuberant, though he avoided any direct references to the events of a few hours earlier. Still, the murder of European Jewry must have been on his mind and he even allowed himself a few glasses of red wine and a smoke. “I had never known him like that!” recalled Rudolf Höss.
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The following morning, back in Auschwitz, Himmler made a point of
calling on Höss before his final departure. Visiting the commandant’s villa, Himmler was at his most affable and posed for the cameras with Höss’s children, who called him “Uncle Heini” (Höss later proudly displayed the pictures in his home).
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Perhaps he felt that such displays of civility were especially important in a place like Auschwitz, where his men were engaged in daily assault, plunder,
and mass murder.