KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (72 page)

PLUNDER AND CORRUPTION

Heinrich Himmler was a mass murderer greatly concerned with decorum. He had long cultivated an image as a
deeply principled man, and during the Second World War he became a prominent preacher of a new kind of Nazi morality that saw mass killing as a sacred duty to protect the German people from its mortal enemies.
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Contrary to the views of some historians, Nazi perpetrators like Himmler did not see themselves as nihilists.
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Himmler regarded the Nazi Final Solution as a righteous act, committed
out of necessity, idealism, and “love for our people,” as he put it in a notorious speech to SS group leaders in Posen in the early evening of October 4, 1943. That the killers had remained unblemished and “decent” during the mass slaughter of Jews was a truly “glorious page in our history,” he told himself and the other SS grandees.
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In his Posen speech, Himmler also outlined the rules governing
the use of the murdered Jews’ property. On his orders, Himmler said, all the “riches” were going to the Reich, via Oswald Pohl’s WVHA: “We did not take any of it for ourselves.” In Himmler’s moral universe, state-sponsored mass murder and robbery was just, but individual theft was a sin: “We had the moral right, we had the duty towards our people, to kill this people [the Jews] which wanted
to kill us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves with so much as a fur, with a watch, with a Mark or with a cigarette or with anything else.” The handful of SS men who had broken this hallowed rule, Himmler shouted, briefly betraying some emotion, would be punished “without mercy” and executed on his own personal orders. After all, they had not stolen from Jews but from the Nazi state,
which owned all the loot.
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Himmler knew only too well that this vision of the SS as a virtuous order was deeply disingenuous. He and his judges were in fact rather sympathetic to thieves within the SS ranks and regarded the tempting availability of valuables belonging to murdered Jews as an extenuating circumstance; even big-time thieves were sentenced to no more than detention (often on probation).
Moreover, theft and corruption in the SS was not rare, as Himmler suggested, but rampant: in 1942, property offenses accounted for almost half of all sentences passed by SS courts (a far higher proportion than among soldiers in the German armed forces, who had fewer chances to enrich themselves). Theft was particularly widespread in the KL, above all in those at the forefront of the Holocaust.
In a camp like Auschwitz, where the WVHA was engaged in a gigantic operation of robbery on Himmler’s orders, his insistence on the “sanctity of property” was bound to fall on deaf ears: if it was right for the state to rob the Jews, local SS officials asked themselves, why should it be wrong for them to do the same?
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Looting for Germany

Official SS plunder was meticulously arranged during
the Holocaust. In Auschwitz, a well-rehearsed routine was followed as soon as a deportation train reached the camp. The Nazi authorities allowed Jews to bring some luggage for the promised “new life” in the east, including clothes, food, tools, and other personal items. These possessions were seized at the ramp by a special prisoner unit, piled up, and put on trucks to be sorted. Meanwhile, edible
goods were taken to a food warehouse. Once the ramp was empty, another prisoner unit scoured the area for money and valuables discarded before or after the selections.
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A second phase of plunder followed near the gas chambers. Here, prisoners from the Special Squad gathered up clothes, shoes, and other personal effects, such as glasses and watches, after the victims had undressed. Following
the gassings, the Special Squad also searched the dead for valuables hidden on their bodies. The hair of women, shorn after they were dead, was collected and dried in rooms above the crematoria, and later used for the production of felt and threads (contrary to rumors, no soap was made from human fat). Gold teeth were cleaned and melted down in a special workshop, together with other precious objects,
such as jewelry. According to a secret report compiled by Auschwitz prisoners, some ninety pounds of gold and white metal were extracted from the teeth of murdered Jews in the second half of May 1944 alone (at the height of the extermination of Hungarian Jewry).
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Most loot in Auschwitz ended up in a special section of the camp known among inmates (and later the SS) as Canada, named after the
faraway country associated with great riches. As the Holocaust had gathered momentum, Commandant Höss asked in early June 1942 for the urgent assembly of wooden barracks to store the property of murdered Jews. In the end, six barracks near the main camp were used, but these warehouses (Canada I)—inspected by Oswald Pohl during his visit on September 23, 1942—soon proved too small. The Camp SS killed
faster than it could process its plunder, and despite the use of additional huts, the bags and suitcases kept mounting up. Eventually, a much larger compound of thirty barracks was opened in Birkenau (Canada II) in December 1943. But it, too, could not keep up with the pace of genocide, and luggage piled up between the new barracks or had to be moved to other sites.
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Inside the Auschwitz storage
areas, hundreds of male and female prisoners from the so-called Canada Commando worked around the clock to sort the spoils. The largest labor details were combing through the mountains of clothes, which were fumigated, searched for valuables, separated, and stacked. As they emptied jackets and coats, prisoners from the Canada Commando sometimes found letters or photos. “I never dared to look
at them,” the Polish Jew Kitty Hart wrote after the war. “Only a few meters away from us—and perhaps at the very same moment—the people, to whom all this had belonged, were burned.” Meanwhile, a specialist SS unit sifted through the banknotes and other valuables; German money was deposited in a designated WVHA account, and the rest was itemized and packed up.
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Some of the loot stayed inside
the camps. In Majdanek and Auschwitz, the SS supplemented its stock of prisoner clothing with suits, shoes, and hats of murdered Jews.
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But the bulk was shipped elsewhere in Poland and Germany. The transports of human hair, for instance, went to the Reich Economic Ministry and to private companies, some of them hundreds of miles away; in a wool combing plant in faraway Bremen, workers one day
discovered small coins inside thickly woven plaits cut from the heads of Greek girls back in Auschwitz. Human hair arrived from other concentration camps as well. From summer 1942, the WVHA had issued instructions to several KL to collect the hair of registered prisoners (including men), though the plan to use it for the production of socks for submarine crews and other goods in an SS workshop was
soon dropped.
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Most garments amassed during the Holocaust in Auschwitz and Majdanek were sent to agencies designated by the Reich Economic Ministry. Other shipments of clothes went to the Ethnic German Liaison Office (VoMi), an SS office that facilitated the settlement of ethnic Germans in the Nazi-occupied east. Under the new Nazi Order, German settlers would not only take over some houses
and farms of murdered Jews, but also their clothes. By early February 1943, Auschwitz and Majdanek had sent 211 railway carts of clothing to VoMi, including 132,000 men’s shirts, 119,000 women’s dresses, and 15,000 children’s overcoats. The new owners were not supposed to know about the murderous provenance, so the SS leadership gave strict instructions to remove all yellow stars from the clothing.
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At the center of SS plunder in the concentration camps stood the WVHA. As we have seen, it masterminded the looting of property amassed in all Operation Reinhard camps (the two WVHA camps Auschwitz and Majdanek, and the three Globocnik death camps). In the words of the U.S. judges who sentenced WVHA chief Oswald Pohl to death in 1947, his office had become the “clearinghouse for all the booty.”
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In addition to issuing detailed directives for the processing and dispatch of the spoils, and supervising the accounts, the WVHA handled many of the goods.

By autumn 1942, SS couriers regularly dropped crates full of watches, alarm clocks, and fountain pens at the WVHA-D office in Oranienburg. They were repaired in a special workshop in Sachsenhausen by around 150 skilled prisoners, some two-thirds
of them Jews; like prisoners in the camp’s counterfeiting commando, these men lived under privileged conditions (SS plans to set up a similar workshop in Auschwitz never came to pass). The finished goods were then distributed via WVHA-D—on Himmler’s orders—to officers and men from the Waffen SS; the navy and air force benefited, too. Indeed, different agencies competed for the spoils, with
gold watches and pens in particular demand; one SS Obergruppenführer asked Himmler in 1943 for “large quantities” to give “real pleasure” to wounded SS men at Christmas time. The ongoing genocide meant that the supply did not dry up, and as late as November 1944, the WVHA-D officials still sat on more than twenty-seven thousand watches and clocks, as well as five thousand fountain pens. (When he later
heard about this scheme, Adolf Eichmann could not believe that the “weirdos” in the WVHA had wasted their precious time on such “bullshit.”)
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Meanwhile, jewelry, foreign currency, dental gold, and other precious metals amassed in the Operation Reinhard camps were delivered to the central WVHA headquarters in Berlin; Odilo Globocnik frequently appeared in person to hand over valuables from his
camps. The goods were then taken by SS Hauptsturmführer Bruno Melmer in locked crates to the German National Bank (Reichsbank).
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Melmer was a busy man: between summer 1942 and late 1944, he made no fewer than seventy-six trips. Normally, the National Bank deposited the equivalent value of the goods in a special account. Purified gold was melted into bars by the Prussian Mint, while other metals
were supposed to be sent on for further refining.
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At the same time, the National Bank handled gold extracted in other KL. In the early war years, dental gold of dead prisoners had been used for the fillings of SS men and their families. But by autumn 1942 the SS had stockpiled enough supplies to last for several years, and so the WVHA decided to deposit the surplus with the National Bank.
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The total value of the SS booty in Auschwitz and Majdanek is impossible to determine, but it is likely to have amounted to several hundred million Reichsmark; some was retained by the SS, but most went into the coffers of the German Reich.
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Still, this was only a fraction of the property seized by the Nazi regime from its victims across the occupied continent—European Jews had been systematically
stripped of their belongings long before they reached the KL—and it was rather insignificant for the wider German war effort.
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Above all else, the plunder in the KL reveals the murderous utilitarianism of SS managers. Everything had to be harnessed for Germany, they believed, including the dead—even in the face of cold economic logic. There was no profit to be made from human hair, after all,
which had to be laboriously collected, dried, packaged, and shipped, only to be sold off at bargain prices: 730 kilograms of hair shaved off the heads of Majdanek prisoners between September 1942 and June 1944 netted just 365 Reichsmark, less than the value of a single gold cigarette case looted during Operation Reinhard.
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It was not enough for the SS to murder the Jews and steal their property;
all traces of Jewish life had to be erased. Once the Nazi Final Solution was complete, nothing would be left behind: the dead turned to dust, their belongings into booty.

Robbing the Doomed

Corruption was a structural feature of Nazi rule, based as it was on patronage and nepotism.
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And it burgeoned at all levels during World War II. Inside Germany, a rampant black market developed as a result
of shortages and rationing.
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Elsewhere, the Nazi plunder of Europe fueled personal corruption, with the Holocaust offering the greatest profits for the German occupiers, their foreign supporters, and local opportunists.
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The Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl later recalled that when he had first arrived in the camp in September 1942, local SS men had told him that “there was more money and
stuff around than one could dream of, all there for the taking: all one had to do was help oneself.”
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The Camp SS in the east made the most of these opportunities, lining its pockets with the riches of murdered Jews. Compared to the “gigantic corruption in Auschwitz,” wrote the Jewish survivor Benedikt Kautsky, who experienced several KL following his arrest in 1938 as a prominent Austrian
Socialist, the regular thefts by SS men in older camps like Buchenwald were negligible.
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Some rank-and-file SS men became jealous of the riches amassed by their commanding officers, but corruption was all-inclusive; most Camp SS staff in the east were on the make.
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The centers of corruption were Auschwitz and Majdanek, the two KL most closely involved in the Holocaust. SS men working near
the crematoria, the storage rooms, and the ramps had the easiest access to money and valuables. Georg W., a sentry stationed near the Majdanek gas chamber complex, later confessed that he used to walk “over to the places where jewelry was lying” to take it. Ordinary SS members became wealthy overnight; an Auschwitz official by the name of Franz Hofbauer once pocketed ten thousand Reichsmark in a
day. Even train drivers who had steered the deportation transports used to linger nearby—pretending to fix the train engine—after Jews had marched off to their deaths, in the hope of finding some discarded valuables.
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Living in an upside-down world, some perpetrators saw the Nazi Final Solution as their lucky break.