KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (70 page)

Violence and murder were part of the daily Camp SS routine in the east. There were many forms of violence, with some, like slaps and kicks, far more common than others, such as sexual
abuse. Still, there was sexual violence. In recent years, historians have become more alert to systematic sex crimes during ethnic cleansing and genocide, not least by German soldiers in the Nazi-occupied east.
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Inside the KL, too, some prisoners were raped by SS men, though other forms of sexual abuse were more widespread. Women were frequently molested upon arrival in the camps and during
selections, as SS men—who were strictly forbidden to have intimate contacts with inmates—could always claim that they were just doing their job, such as searching for hidden valuables. In addition, there were cases where inmates engaged in intimate relationships with guards, in exchange for food and other privileges, although this carried considerable risks, not just for the prisoners but for the
SS officials, too.
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“Every German in the camp was master over life and death, but not everyone exercised this power”—this was how a Majdanek survivor summarized the unpredictable behavior of the Camp SS.
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Numerous SS officials in the occupied east relished their jobs; even some of their colleagues suspected that these officials had found their true calling inside the KL.
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Among them was
Auschwitz administration leader Karl Ernst Möckel, who announced in 1943 that he was so happy he never wanted to leave.
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It was not just bureaucrats like Möckel who enjoyed themselves. There was no shortage of enthusiastic torturers and killers—men who laughed after they gouged out prisoners’ eyes and urinated on the corpses.
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A few were pathological killers. Hauptscharführer Otto Moll, for
example, the chief of the Auschwitz crematorium complex, clearly took great pleasure in unimaginable acts of cruelty.
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By the same token, there were reluctant perpetrators. Just as some Camp SS men had struggled during the killing of Soviet POWs in 1941, others hesitated during the Holocaust; the daily slaughter of women and children, in particular, hit them harder than they cared to admit.
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A handful of SS officials evaded such murderous tasks or refused outright to participate; in Monowitz, one SS sentry openly told a Jewish inmate that he would never kill a prisoner: “It would go against my conscience.”
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But few others followed their lead, even though there was little risk of serious SS punishment. In fact, some men had been told by their officers that they could excuse themselves
from certain unpleasant tasks.
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Even SS officials who put in for transfer away from camps like Auschwitz continued to do their duty until they departed. Among them was Dr. Eduard Wirths, who was appointed as chief garrison physician in September 1942, aged thirty-three, and served until January 1945. An ambitious doctor and committed National Socialist, with a particular interest in racial
hygiene, Wirths cut a contradictory figure. He confided in Commandant Höss that he was troubled by the mass extermination of Jews and by prisoner executions, and repeatedly asked to be moved to a different post. At the same time, however, Wirths played a central part in the Holocaust in Auschwitz. He initiated new SS doctors and drew up their rosters, and supervised selections at the ramp and the
subsequent gassings.
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As we have seen before, the participation in extreme violence can be partly explained by group pressure. This was true for the Holocaust, too: men who stepped outside their comrades’ circle of complicity were shunned and excluded from rewards and promotions.
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In his memoirs, Rudolf Höss claimed that even he had found the carnage hard to bear. However, he made a point
of attending gassings and cremations, and of remaining “cold and heartless” throughout, to set an example to his men and to cement his authority as a tough leader. A perverse sense of pride came into play, too. During official inspections, Auschwitz SS men liked to flaunt their toughness by upsetting visitors with the grisly reality of mass extermination. Rudolf Höss took “great pleasure in showing
the ropes to a deskbound bureaucrat” like himself, recalled Adolf Eichmann, who claimed that he had shied away from watching the murders close-up.
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Camp SS perpetrators also gained tangible benefits from the Holocaust in the occupied east. As lethal as the KL were for Jews, they were safe havens for the SS men, at least compared to fighting at the front. This was one reason why even reluctant
perpetrators did not volunteer for deployment elsewhere.
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Then there were the material advantages. In addition to gaining access to the property of murdered Jews, perpetrators received official recognition, like promotions and rewards (just as they had done during the murder of Soviet “commissars”).
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The troops also got a small bonus for each selection, gassing, and cremation. It did not take
much to make men volunteer. The Auschwitz camp physician Dr. Kremer noted in his diary on September 5, 1942, that SS men were queuing up for “special actions” to get their hands on “special provisions”: five cigarettes, one hundred grams of bread and sausage, and, most important, seven ounces of schnapps, with the Camp SS once more using alcohol to ease mass murder (drink fueled the perpetrators
in Globocnik’s death camps, as well).
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SS Rottenführer Adam Hradil, one of the so-called gas chamber drivers, who steered trucks with old and sick Jews from the Auschwitz ramp to the gas chambers, testified after the war that he found the trips “not a lot of fun.” Nonetheless, he liked his job: “I was happy when I received a special ration of schnapps.”
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Previous experience with torture and
abuse made it easier to participate in the Holocaust. The leading concentration camp officers in eastern Europe could look back on many acts of extreme violence. Some had made their mark outside the KL. Before Amon Göth joined the Camp SS as commandant of Plaszow in 1944, he had committed countless atrocities during ghetto clearances and as the commander of Plaszow forced labor camp.
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But most
senior officers were veterans from the Camp SS, for whom the Holocaust was the climax of their cumulative brutalization.
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Many of them had gone through the school of violence in the prewar SS camps. In the Auschwitz main camp, two of the three senior commandants (Rudolf Höss and Richard Baer) and four of the five camp compound leaders had begun their careers back in Dachau in 1933–34.
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There
are similar biographies among the lower ranks. Gustav Sorge, who had joined the Camp SS in 1934 and became leader of the Sachsenhausen death squad, was transferred to eastern Europe in the second half of 1943. Sorge had frequently demonstrated his propensity for extreme violence against Jews in the past, and as camp leader of several Riga satellite camps, “Iron Gustav” (as he was known here, too)
continued his crimes. One former prisoner testified that Sorge had devised a novel way of identifying male prisoners he wanted dead. During roll call, he would kick them with full force in the groin; then they were dragged away by the camp elder, never to be seen again.
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For Camp SS men like Sorge, the Holocaust was the crowning moment in a career of violence. But even these men did not commit
atrocities mechanically. Experienced perpetrators still acted within the wider moral landscape delineated by their superiors. And although almost all acts were sanctioned during the Holocaust, there were some limits, for the sake of what Himmler called decency and for more tactical reasons. How such restraints affected even hardened Camp SS killers can be illustrated by briefly turning westward,
to the Herzogenbusch concentration camp in the occupied Netherlands.

Herzogenbusch was staffed in January 1943 by several Camp SS veterans. The new work service leader was none other than Gustav Sorge (prior to his posting to Riga). He had been transferred from Sachsenhausen with several notorious block leaders, as well as a feared guard from the bunker, who became the new camp compound leader.
The first commandant was another hardened SS man: Karl Chmielewski, who had proven himself as the murderous compound leader of the Mauthausen subcamp Gusen, not least during the mass murder of Dutch Jews in 1941.
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Gathering such violent veterans would seem like a recipe for atrocities. The reality turned out differently, however. As we have seen, the higher SS and police leader in the Netherlands,
Hanns Albin Rauter, held considerable sway over the camp and believed that a more moderate regimen in the transit compound for Jews would mislead the inmates about the Nazi Final Solution. He urged similar moderation in the protective custody compound (opened in mid-January 1943), which mostly held Dutch men detained for alleged political, economic, and criminal offenses; conceived by Rauter
to showcase the supposedly strict but fair German occupation policy, treatment here was comparatively mild, too.
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The unexpected demand for restraint in Herzogenbusch baffled SS veterans like Gustav Sorge, who complained that it went against all the established practices of the Camp SS.
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Over time, however, most guards adjusted to the unfamiliar requirements. Those who did not faced sanctions
for prisoner abuses and other violations. Rauter was serious about preserving the façade of his “model SS enterprise,” as he called it, and initiated a number of cases in SS and police courts.
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The most prominent target was Commandant Chmielewski; after his taste for violence and corruption became open knowledge outside the camp, he was arrested in autumn 1943. The following summer, he was sentenced
to fifteen years in a penitentiary and sent to Dachau as a prisoner.
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Location really mattered, then, in Herzogenbusch and elsewhere. It was of great importance where concentration camps lay in occupied Europe, with the occupation authorities treading more carefully in the west than in the supposedly “backward” east. In Herzogenbusch, such tactical considerations resulted in more lenient conditions,
compared to other KL. In eastern Europe, where the German occupiers ran a far more draconian regime, Camp SS leaders had no such reasons for restraint. Here, deadly violence became so frequent, a former Majdanek sentry testified after the war, that “it did not attract any attention when a block leader murdered a prisoner, by shooting or beating to death.”
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Colonial Masters

The outlook of the
Camp SS in the east rested on the supremacist ideology that shaped the Nazi occupation of Poland and the Soviet Union as a whole. Accordingly, SS staff stood at the top of the racial hierarchy, towering over Poles, Soviets, and Jews, who made up the great bulk of the prisoner population. The Camp SS had unleashed extreme violence against these groups for some time, and this violence was bound to
escalate in the colonial setting of Nazi rule over eastern Europe.
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Encounters with prisoners reinforced SS prejudices, as the conditions in the camps in the east made some inmates resemble the miserable caricatures of Nazi propaganda.
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This was still not enough for some SS officials, who snatched any remaining shreds of dignity from prisoners; in Majdanek, inmates were occasionally forced
to walk around the mud in ball gowns, high heels, or children’s clothes.
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The prisoners’ dehumanization often had the desired effect, making it easier for the Camp SS to commit genocide. As the SS man Pery Broad wrote in 1945, his colleagues in Auschwitz “simply did not see a Jew as a human being.”
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It has been argued that hands-on Nazi killers were untroubled by their actions because they
believed them to be necessary.
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There is some truth in this. Rudolf Höss, for one, saw himself as something of an expert on Jewish matters—he had even been to Jerusalem during the First World War—and regarded Jews as existential threats who had to be exterminated.
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But the mass slaughter in camps like Auschwitz and Majdanek also sowed doubts in the minds of some officials, prompting their
SS superiors to reaffirm the moral right of the Final Solution. In Auschwitz, Höss and other SS leaders gave regular pep talks, telling the block leaders that Jewish prisoners deserved to die because they had sabotaged the German war effort by blowing up bridges and poisoning wells (reviving old anti-Semitic tales).
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The murder of Jewish children was equally essential, Höss reassured his men.
Echoing Himmler’s views, he explained that the children who looked so innocent would otherwise turn into the most dogged avengers. Höss illustrated his point with a revealing image: if little piglets were not slaughtered, they would grow into proper pigs.
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Such vicious propaganda must have fallen on fertile ground. It also added to the residual fears of Camp SS officials, for whom the initial
shock about the basic living conditions in the east often gave way to general anxieties about their safety. They might have felt like colonial masters, but their sense of supremacy was undercut by the alien surroundings, fretting about partisan attacks from outside, and prisoner assaults and illness inside.
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The fear of epidemics, in particular, continued to haunt the Camp SS, despite partial
vaccinations. The paranoid Unterscharführer Bernhard Kristan, for example, always pressed the door handle to the office of Jewish clerks in the Auschwitz political office with his elbow, rather than his hand, to avoid any contact.
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From this perspective, Jewish prisoners posed not just a general threat to Germany’s future, but a more immediate risk to the well-being of local SS officials.
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