KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (64 page)

When Himmler came to Sachsenhausen on September 29,
1942, there were only a few hundred Jewish prisoners left inside. Murder and lethal conditions had decimated the already small group of Jews in concentration camps within Germany’s prewar borders; overall, there were no more than around two thousand Jewish prisoners left across these KL, mostly German and Polish Jews.
185
But even such a small number was too large for Himmler. At the time, Hitler
was pushing for the complete removal of all Jews from the German Reich, and Himmler was keen to comply; during his visit to Sachsenhausen, he ordered the deportation of Jews from all the KL on German soil.
186
Written directives followed a few days later; apart from inmates in important positions (who could be temporarily exempted), all Jewish prisoners would be taken to Auschwitz or Majdanek.
In this way, concentration camps in the Reich would finally become “free of Jews,” the WVHA informed its commandants.
187
Meanwhile, it ordered the Auschwitz SS to dispatch some Polish prisoners as replacements.
188

Deportations trains to the east soon started to roll. Gross-Rosen was among the first camps to realize Himmler’s wishes, dispatching its last group of Jewish prisoners on October 16,
1942.
189
In Sachsenhausen itself, the deportations triggered an unprecedented mutiny. When the Camp SS rounded up Jewish prisoners on the evening of October 22, 1942, and ordered them to hand over their belongings, panic spread as inmates feared a repetition of the May massacre. A small group of young Jewish men ran onto the roll call square, pushed over some of the SS guards, and shouted: “Just
shoot, you dogs!” The Camp SS quickly restored control, though there were no immediate repercussions. The SS men were determined to keep the deportations on schedule, and for once refrained from punishing rebellious prisoners. That same night, a train with 454 Jewish men departed for Auschwitz, including the former boxer Bully Schott, whom we encountered earlier. Arriving on October 25, the prisoners
were led to the Auschwitz main camp and registered. But they were not spared for long. Just five days later, the SS carried out a large-scale selection among prisoners recently deported from the westerly KL. Some eight hundred of them, among them Bully Schott, were sent to the IG Farben building site near Dwory for murder through labor. Hundreds more were led straight to the Birkenau gas chambers.
190

Before long, almost all Jewish prisoners had been deported from concentration camps inside the German heartland; by the end of 1942, the KL in the Reich (excluding Auschwitz) imprisoned fewer than four hundred Jews.
191
The majority of them were held in Buchenwald, which continued to receive some more arrested Jews from the Gestapo, much to the irritation of the local commandant.
192
In late 1942,
there were 227 Jewish men left in Buchenwald. Most of them had been trained as bricklayers and were needed for urgent construction work. Their status as skilled laborers protected them from deportation and from some of the worst SS excesses. For the time being, they were safer than almost any other Jewish prisoners in the KL system. The twenty-eight-year-old Austrian Jew Ernst Federn, for example,
worked on an SS prestige project outside the camp. Prisoners here received double the rations of ordinary Buchenwald inmates, while SS guards acted “in every way humanely and correctly,” as Federn recalled, because they were restrained by the presence of civilians around them.
193

In Sachsenhausen, too, a few skilled workers were saved from deportation. Back in summer 1942, the WVHA had begun
to assemble a small group of Jewish draftsmen and graphic designers in barrack 19, for a project of national importance, though none of them knew what it could be. Then, in December 1942, a senior SS officer from the RSHA foreign desk, Bernhard Krüger, came to initiate them into a top-secret mission ordered by Himmler and backed by Hitler. Code-named Operation Bernhard (after the shameless Krüger),
the prisoners would forge foreign banknotes and stamps.

The Sachsenhausen counterfeiting commando eventually grew from 29 to more than 140 Jewish men. Most of them had arrived from Auschwitz. One of them, Adolf Burger, felt “as if I had come from hell into heaven.” The prisoners were no longer beaten and enjoyed sufficient food, worked in heated rooms, had time for reading, cards, and radio,
and slept in proper beds. Their main task was forging British currency (attempts to copy U.S. dollars never went past the experimental stage). Overall, the prisoners later estimated, they produced banknotes to the value of 134 million pounds. The RSHA only deemed a fraction of this to be good enough to buy gold and foreign goods, and to pay off spies; some of the remaining banknotes were dropped over
England to destabilize its currency. For this outlandish plan to succeed, the whole of Operation Bernhard had to remain secret. This was why the forgers remained almost completely isolated from the rest of the Sachsenhausen camp (though their secret still leaked out). And this was why the RSHA had selected only Jews, since they could be killed at any time. In the end, through a series of flukes,
the prisoners survived the KL. The products of their labor, which had ultimately saved their lives, also endured, as many of the forged banknotes remained in circulation for years to come.
194

The story of the Sachsenhausen counterfeiting commando was exceptional. But such exceptions matter, not only because they saved Jews like Adolf Burger, but because they demonstrate that the Nazi authorities
could be pragmatic if they had to—in this case by partially suspending Himmler’s autumn 1942 directive to remove Jewish prisoners from the Reich. This points to a wider truth about the Holocaust: in their pursuit of the wholesale extermination of European Jewry, SS leaders were always willing to consider “tactical retreats.”
195
This willingness was nowhere more obvious, perhaps, than in the 1943
order to set up a new KL for Jews, right inside the German Reich.

As the genocide of European Jews reached a frenzied climax during the second half of 1942, the leaders of the Third Reich decided to spare a few victims and exploit them as “valuable hostages,” as Heinrich Himmler called them. Obsessed by global conspiracy theories, Nazi leaders had long contemplated the use of Jewish “hostages”
as leverage against enemy nations supposedly ruled by Jewish politicians and financiers. Now both the SS and the German Foreign Office agreed that some selected Jews and their families—those with connections to Palestine or the United States, for example—might be exchanged for Germans interned abroad or else for foreign currency and goods. With Hitler’s agreement, Himmler in spring 1943 ordered
the establishment of a collection camp for Jews who might be used in these prisoner exchanges. He made clear that conditions should be such that the Jewish prisoners “are healthy and remain alive.”
196

The new camp was set up in Bergen-Belsen, between Hanover and Hamburg in northern Germany, on the half-empty grounds of an existing POW camp.
197
Despite its unusual mission, reflected in the official
title “residence camp” (
Aufenthaltslager
), Himmler designated it as an SS concentration camp run by the WVHA. It was initially staffed by SS men from Niederhagen, the camp at Wewelsburg castle that had just closed down. The first large prisoner contingent came from Buchenwald, on April 30, 1943, to prepare the site for the so-called “exchange prisoners,” who arrived from July 1943 onward; by December
1944, a total of around fifteen thousand Jewish prisoners had been taken to Bergen-Belsen, where they were held in different sectors, depending on their backgrounds. The proliferation of compounds added to the camp’s confusing layout, which turned into a shantytown of barracks and tents. To further complicate matters, the SS later added a KL compound for regular protective custody prisoners,
though numbers here remained small, at least initially; during 1943 and 1944, Bergen-Belsen was predominantly a camp for Jews.
198

The Jewish prisoners in Bergen-Belsen dreamed about leaving on exchange transports. Fanny Heilbut, who had arrived with her husband and two sons (a third son had died in Mauthausen) from Westerbork in February 1944, recalled that the hope of freedom “went a long way
to keep us going.” But this dream only came true for a small proportion of Jewish inmates. By the end of 1944, only some 2,300 prisoners had been allowed to exit the Third Reich. Fanny Heilbut and her family were not among them. One of the lucky few was Simon Heinrich Herrmann, who departed from Bergen-Belsen on June 30, 1944, with 221 other prisoners bound for Palestine (in exchange, a group of
ethnic German settlers from the Protestant Templar sect, who had been interned by the British in Palestine, were sent to Germany). As the former prisoners left Bergen-Belsen behind, Simon Herrmann later wrote, “an invisible hand removed the shackles from our bodies and souls, opening the doors and windows in our hearts.” Herrmann and the others safely landed in Haifa on July 10, 1944. Not many other
transports left the camp in 1943–44, and by no means all of those headed for freedom. In fact, more than two thousand Polish Jews were deported from Bergen-Belsen to Auschwitz. The German authorities had deemed them unsuitable candidates for exchanges, unwilling to recognize their prospective Latin American citizenship certificates (so-called
Promesas
). By far the largest such transport, with
some 1,800 inmates, left on October 21, 1943; all of them were murdered two days later in Auschwitz.
199

Most Jews remained trapped in Bergen-Belsen, tormented by their receding hopes of freedom. Conditions varied across the different sectors. In 1943 they were worst in the so-called star camp, the largest compound of the exchange camp, named after the yellow stars the Jews had to wear. There
was never enough food (official rations were identical to other concentration camps) and all adults, except for the elderly, had to work hard, often in camp maintenance. But even in this compound the authorities initially allowed privileges unheard of elsewhere in the KL system, except for Herzogenbusch, the other camp for “privileged” Jews. In the star camp, inmates wore civilian clothing and kept
some of their belongings. Families met up during mealtimes and evenings (there were hundreds of children). As in ghettos, some of the internal administration was left to a Jewish Council and a camp police. And just like in Herzogenbusch, there was a Jewish prisoner court. As for SS guards, they were instructed to address prisoners by name, not number. There were some SS abuses, but nothing like
the daily orgies of other KL. Overall, conditions were poor but sufferable, until they began to deteriorate from spring and summer 1944; over the following months, Fanny Heilbut’s husband and one of her sons perished, as did many thousands of others.
200

Bergen-Belsen was an anomaly in the KL system during the middle of World War II. At the time, it was the only concentration camp inside Germany’s
prewar borders that held large numbers of Jewish prisoners, and the only KL for Jews not geared toward their eventual death. Virtually all other Jewish concentration camp prisoners found themselves in eastern Europe, which meant likely death. This was true, above all, for Auschwitz, the largest of all the Holocaust camps. From summer 1942, most Jews deported to this camp were murdered within
hours of their arrival, as we have seen. It is the fate of the others, those selected as SS slaves in Auschwitz and other KL in eastern Europe, to which we must turn next.

7

Anus Mundi

On September 5, 1942, a few SS men marched into block 27 of the Birkenau women’s infirmary to assist the camp doctor during a selection. For the SS, such selections were part of their working life. For the prisoners, they were the worst torment. The sick women knew their probable fate and some desperately tried to hide. But to no avail. That day, hundreds of Jewish women were
condemned to death and herded onto trucks. Near the gas chambers, they had to undress in broad daylight. Unlike Jews who had just been deported to Auschwitz, these prisoners understood what would happen inside the converted farmhouses. Some silently stood or sat in the grass, others sobbed. Among the supervising SS officers was a physician, Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, who later testified that the women
had “begged the SS men to spare their lives, cried, and yet all were driven inside the gas chamber and gassed.” Sitting in his car outside, Dr. Kremer listened as the screams died down. A few hours afterward, he recorded a conversation with another Auschwitz doctor in his diary: “[Dr. Heinz] Thilo was right, when he told me today that we are at the
anus mundi
(the anus of the world).”
1

It is
easy to picture the balding, fifty-eight-year-old Dr. Kremer smirking at this expression (the diaries reveal his crude sense of humor). But he recognized some deeper truth in Dr. Thilo’s words. After all, Kremer had never planned to be in Auschwitz. Nor was he keen to stay. A professor of anatomy at the University of Münster, he had joined the SS medical service during the summer break, and to his
surprise was posted to Auschwitz in late August 1942 for a number of weeks to replace a sick colleague. “There is nothing to excite one here,” he wrote on the day of his conversation with Dr. Thilo. The selections and gassings—he participated in more than one per week—certainly gave him little satisfaction.
2
What is more, Dr. Kremer struggled with the climate. He complained about the humidity
and the “masses of vermin,” including fleas in his room at the SS hotel in town. Then there was the “Auschwitz illness.” Within days, Kremer was struck down by this gastric virus, not for the last time. But what he really feared were other diseases, and for good reason. Earlier that year, an Auschwitz SS doctor had died of typhus, and during a ten-day period in October 1942, when Kremer was stationed
in the camp, the SS counted some thirteen more suspected cases of typhus among its men, while the officer in charge of agriculture, Joachim Cäsar, caught typhoid, which had just killed his wife (Cäsar recovered and remarried a year later, wedding his laboratory assistant in the SS registry office inside the camp).
3
Conditions for the Camp SS elsewhere in the occupied east were no better. Female
guards in Majdanek, too, were in and out of the hospital with infections. The frustrations felt by the SS staff—disgusted by the primitive sanitary conditions and afraid of catching diseases from inmates—only increased their proclivity for violence.
4