KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (63 page)

The first new KL complex in the Baltic region emerged in Latvia. Local SS officials had lobbied for a concentration camp for Jews around Riga since the German invasion of summer 1941. According to an internal SS memorandum that autumn, such a local camp promised several advantages
over a ghetto: prisoners could be exploited more fully for forced labor, and the separation of men and women would “put an end to the further procreation of the Jews.”
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But it was not until the SS extended its hold over Jews in the Baltic territories that it finally established a KL. In March 1943, around the time of a visit by Himmler to Riga, five hundred prisoners from Sachsenhausen arrived
to erect the camp in the small suburb of Kaiserwald (Me
ž
aparks), known in the interwar years as an exclusive seaside resort. The early dimensions of the new camp were modest by SS standards, with four prisoner barracks for men and four for women, separated from each other and the outside world by electrified fences. The camp filled up with Jewish inmates from July 1943 onward, including large
numbers of German and Czech Jews who had been deported to the Baltic region back in 1941–42. The prisoners initially came in large columns, laden with their remaining belongings, from the nearby Riga ghetto, which had been emptied by November 1943; later transports arrived from other Baltic ghettos farther afield and from Hungary (via Auschwitz). But most inmates did not stay put for long. The SS
quickly realized that it would be impractical to move all local ghetto workshops into the small Riga main camp, and set up satellite camps near these sites of work instead. In all, at least sixteen such camps were established, most of them in Riga itself. The main camp in Kaiserwald now functioned primarily as a transit hub; after registration, new inmates were quickly shunted to one of the satellite
camps. By March 1944, the various satellite camps of Riga held around nine thousand prisoners, compared to an estimated two thousand in the main camp.
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This imbalance was even more pronounced in another new Baltic concentration camp, Vaivara, a settlement in northeast Estonia. A small contingent of SS men had to improvise here, Richard Glücks conceded, setting things up “completely from scratch.”
Officially opened on September 19, 1943, after hasty preparation, the KL complex grew within weeks to include at least eleven satellite camps; several of them—such as Klooga, some one hundred and fifty miles to the west—rivaled or surpassed the Vaivara main camp in size. Among the prisoners were many families, and it was the young and the elderly who succumbed most quickly to the SS regime
of violence and exhausting labor, which included construction work, the production of explosives, and the extraction of oil shale from marshy terrain. In November 1943 alone, at a time when 9,207 prisoners were held across the Vaivara KL complex, some 296 prisoners died. Hundreds more followed during the bitter winter.
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A third main concentration camp in the Reich Commissariat of the Eastern
Land was set up in the Lithuanian city of Kovno (Kaunas). Just as in Riga, regional SS forces had already proposed a KL for Jews here in summer 1941, but it was established only in autumn 1943. During the final SS push for the liquidation of ghettos, it turned the Kovno ghetto into a main concentration camp, which held some eight thousand Jewish prisoners at the end of the year. Other former ghettos
and labor camps in the region became satellites of Kovno. Among them was the largest Lithuanian ghetto, Wilna. Suspected by the SS as a hotbed of Jewish unrest, it was decimated in summer and autumn 1943. Some fourteen thousand Jews were deported, mostly as KL slave laborers for shale extraction in Estonia, a priority project for Himmler. One of the deported prisoners sent a letter from Vaivara
to friends back in Wilna: “We are still alive and working … It rains hard here and it’s very cold. Conditions are hard enough … Good that you stayed.” In fact, those left behind faced lethal violence as the Camp SS established itself in the former ghetto. By late 1943, just 2,600 Jews were still alive in Wilna, spread across four satellite camps.
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There was something novel about the new eastern
European concentration camps. Already at first sight, the compounds looked very different from the KL model devised in the 1930s. Many prisoners were still wearing civilian clothing, and sometimes whole families lived together. In a former ghetto like Kovno, they even continued to occupy the same houses as before (the Jewish Council initially remained in place, too). Another contrast to older
KL complexes was the rapid proliferation of satellite camps across the Baltic lands, where prisoner numbers began to outstrip the main camps. Turning to the new camps’ administration, they did not adhere to the strict division of the SS Commandant Staff into five departments, which had been the standard in the KL since the mid-1930s. Instead, the internal SS organization was significantly pared down.
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The local Camp SS staff was also supervised in a novel way; while the ultimate power still rested with WVHA headquarters, the commandants in the Baltic region reported not only to Berlin but to a regional WVHA office in Riga, led by a so-called SS economic officer (SS-Wirtschafter), which was responsible for the KL and other economic and administrative matters in the area.
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But the new camps
in the occupied east were not alien bodies in the KL cosmos. For a start, the camps still belonged to WVHA, and most rules and staff were drawn from the regular Camp SS. Moreover, the whole KL system was changing from autumn 1943, becoming far more disparate and decentralized, epitomized by the shift away from main camps to a vast network of satellite camps. From this perspective, the new sites
in the east embodied the improvised type of concentration camp that would characterize the KL system toward the end of Nazi rule, when the grip of the central authorities weakened and some established practices were thrown overboard in a desperate attempt to shore up the sinking Third Reich.

Action “Harvest Festival”

At the same time as the Camp SS was putting down roots across the Baltic, it
continued its expansion in occupied Poland. Numerous new camps were added to the KL portfolio in the incorporated Polish territory. From September 1943, the WVHA began to take over the remaining large forced labor camps in Upper Silesia from SS Oberführer Albrecht Schmelt; around twenty camps were turned into Gross-Rosen satellite camps, and several more into satellite camps of Auschwitz. Among
the largest was Blechhammer (Blachownia): when it was attached to Auschwitz in April 1944, more than three thousand prisoners were toiling there on the grounds of a synthetic fuel factory.
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Farther to the east, in the General Government, former labor camps for Jews came under the WVHA, too. Details of their takeover were settled in a high-powered meeting on September 7, 1943, between Pohl, Glücks,
and Globocnik, who agreed that his labor camps in the Lublin district, around ten in all, would turn into satellite camps of Majdanek. In addition, larger labor camps elsewhere in the General Government would also become KL, all “in the interest of a general clearing-up,” as Pohl put it; a few weeks later, following local inspections by his men, Pohl signed off on a list of prospective new
KL sites, including Radom and Krakow-Plaszow.
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The WVHA expansion plans were abruptly disrupted in early November 1943 by a vast bloodbath in the General Government. In the Lublin district alone, SS and police forces slaughtered some forty-two thousand Jews in forced labor camps. Apparently, Himmler had ordered this action in response to a recent prisoner uprising in Sobibor, the only one of
Globocnik’s death camps still operational. Mass murder in Sobibor had continued at a lower pace in 1943 than during the previous year, and once Himmler had abandoned his plan to turn it into a KL (following an intervention by Pohl and Globocnik), it was only a question of time until the camp and its last remaining prisoners were liquidated. Before the SS could implement its plans, however, the prisoners
rose up. On October 14, 1943, they attacked and killed twelve SS men and two Ukrainian auxiliaries, and more than 350 prisoners attempted to escape, many successfully. SS leaders were already on a knife edge, following a similar revolt in Treblinka two months earlier and the Warsaw uprising in spring, and amidst mounting SS hysteria about the dangers of the last ghettos and labor camps, Himmler
ordered the large-scale mass murder of Jewish forced workers in the eastern parts of the General Government.
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Majdanek stood at the center of the slaughter. Under the idyllic code name Action “Harvest Festival,” some eighteen thousand Jews were murdered here on November 3, 1943. That morning, the eight thousand Jewish prisoners in the camp had been isolated; those who tried to hide were pulled
out by SS men and guard dogs. Driven on by the Camp SS, the prisoners were marched along the main camp street, joined by some ten thousand prisoners from nearby Lublin labor camps. They stopped behind the building site of the new crematorium (under construction since September 1943), at the far corner of the camp. Here, the men, women, and children were forced to undress and lie in large ditches;
then they were shot in the back of the head or mown down by machine guns; any wounded survivors were buried alive under the bodies of those shot after them. Most of the killers were SD and policemen, who had been specially dispatched to Majdanek. After the war, one of the killers, Johann B., casually talked about the victims to a film crew, in his jovial Bavarian accent: “Well, they did do some
griping. They griped, some came up to us with raised fists. And ‘Nazi pigs,’ they screamed. You couldn’t really blame them, we might have done the same, if we’d got it in the neck.”

In an effort to camouflage the salvos, the Majdanek Camp SS piped light music—Vienna waltzes, tangos, and marches—across the ground, using specially erected loudspeakers. Finally, late in the evening, the shots and
the music fell silent, after the last prisoner had been executed. Several volunteers from the Camp SS who had participated in the shootings returned to their quarters and held a wild party, drinking much of the vodka they had received as a special reward; some did not even bother to wash off the blood from their boots before they reached for the bottle.
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What they celebrated was the largest
single massacre ever in an SS concentration camp. More people were murdered in Majdanek on November 3, 1943, than any other day in any other KL, including Auschwitz. The massacre also marked the end of Majdanek as a Holocaust camp. Mass gassings had already stopped in September 1943, and now all the remaining Jewish slave laborers were dead; at the end of November, there was not a single Jewish prisoner
left inside the main camp.
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The wave of mass murder in early November 1943 affected the KL system more widely. Several Jewish labor camps destined for WVHA takeover were effectively wiped out, among them Globocnik’s large camp at the old airport in Lublin, which had functioned as a central collection point for the clothes of murdered Jews.
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Several other labor camps were still incorporated
into the KL system from early 1944 onward, though this process now took longer than the SS had anticipated: some camps were established as late as spring 1944, just months before they were abandoned again in the face of the Soviet advance. Among the new camps were three larger former labor camps in Bli
ż
yn, Budzy
ń
, and Radom, which became satellite camps of Majdanek, as did a smaller camp on Lipowa
Street in Lublin itself. By mid-March 1944, these four new satellite camps held some 8,900 prisoners (mostly Jews), almost as many as the Majdanek main camp.
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Only one of the Jewish labor camps absorbed by the WVHA in early 1944 was turned into a main concentration camp—Plaszow (P
ł
aszów), the third main KL in the General Government and the last to be established in occupied eastern Europe.
In autumn 1942, the German authorities had started to set up a forced labor camp in the Plaszow district on the outskirts of Krakow, mainly for Jews from the local ghetto that was about to be liquidated. Only in January 1944 was this camp transferred from the authority of the regional SS and police leader to the WVHA. By March 1944, Plaszow had overtaken Majdanek in size, holding some 11,600 Jewish
men, women, and children (as well as 1,393 Poles in a separate compound). Several thousand more prisoners were detained in six attached satellite camps; unlike at Riga and Vaivara, however, the focal point of forced labor remained the main camp itself, with prisoners pressed into workshops, construction, and a quarry.

Plaszow’s conversion into a concentration camp resulted in various administrative
changes, including the introduction of the WVHA camp rules. The inmates themselves, some now wearing the typical striped uniforms, had initially placed great hopes in the new rulers, the former prisoner Aleksandar Biberstein wrote after the war. But these hopes were soon dashed. Instead of better conditions, terror became more efficient under the auspices of the Camp SS. “The random murders
and shootings of Jews ceased,” Biberstein recalled, only to be replaced by the systematic “extermination of the rest of the Jewish camp inhabitants,” with frequent selections and some transports to Auschwitz.
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Here, the victims may well have encountered some of the last Jewish survivors of the older KL within the Third Reich’s prewar borders, who had been deported together to Auschwitz back
in autumn 1942.

SS Exceptions: Jewish Prisoners Inside Germany

On September 29, 1942, Heinrich Himmler inspected Sachsenhausen, guided by Inspector Richard Glücks and Commandant Anton Kaindl, who tried to impress him with various economic ventures. Although Auschwitz had already grown into the largest KL, Himmler retained an interest in his older camps, and he probably knew that just a few months
earlier the Sachsenhausen SS had committed the bloodiest anti-Semitic massacre inside the German heartland since the 1938 pogrom. In “revenge” for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, SS men had executed around 250 Jews on May 28–29, 1942, apparently inside the neck-shooting barrack built for Soviet POWs. Most victims had been rounded up in Berlin for execution. The others were prisoners
randomly selected in Sachsenhausen itself, who begged for mercy as they were dragged away. The massacre had been observed by senior SS and RSHA officials. Other Nazi leaders applauded from afar. “The more of this dirty scum is eliminated,” the Berlin Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary, “the better for the security of the Reich.”
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