KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (79 page)

The forced sex workers—fewer than two hundred women in all—were themselves prisoners, selected in different concentration camps. Most wore the black triangle of “asocials,” and many, though by no means all, had worked as prostitutes earlier in their lives. Although SS officers
prided themselves on picking volunteers, they actually relied heavily on compulsion, cajoling the women with promises of better conditions (true) and eventual release (false). Selecting a brothel over a lethal labor detail was just another choiceless choice for these women. As one of them put it in autumn 1942: “Half a year in a brothel is still better than half a year in a concentration camp.” What
they had not expected was the scorn of some fellow inmates. After the war, a Polish political prisoner recounted how she and ten other inmates had assaulted another Polish woman in Ravensbrück, whom they suspected of volunteering as a prostitute: “We cut her hair a bit and cut her, too, a bit as we were doing it.” Such assaults remained rare, however. And despite the dread, distress, and degradation
of the brothels, the survival chances of the forced sex workers did improve, since they now received better provisions. For the victims, then, sexual exploitation proved a strategy for survival.
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Looking at the reward system as a whole, the high hopes of Himmler and Pohl proved misplaced. Bribes prompted few prisoners to work harder. After all, working harder was not a matter of choice for
most, given their poor physical condition. As for the group of prisoners that did benefit the most, it largely consisted of Kapos, who were rewarded not for their output but for their already exalted position in the prisoner hierarchy. Instead of a significant increase in KL productivity, Pohl’s initiative led to a further deepening of the gulf between the small upper class of prisoners and the rest.
Growing longer hair, for example, became another visual signifier dividing the privileged few, with their immaculate clothes, from the great mass of shaven-headed, dirty, and starving inmates.
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Growing the Camps

Sergey Ovrashko was still a boy when he was deported in 1942 from his native Ukraine to Nazi Germany for forced labor. Born in 1926 in a small village near Kiev, he was supporting
his family as a cowherd when German troops invaded the Soviet Union. One year later, he found himself toiling in a high-tech arms factory in Plauen (Saxony), some nine hundred miles away. Worse was to come. After a mistake on the assembly line, he was accused of sabotage, arrested by the Gestapo, and sent in late January 1943 as a political prisoner to Buchenwald.
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Ovrashko was one of more than
forty-two thousand prisoners arriving in Buchenwald in 1943, part of an unparalleled surge in inmate numbers that affected the entire concentration camp system.
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The KL prisoner population never grew faster during the war than in 1943, shooting up from an estimated one hundred and fifteen thousand at the start of the year to an estimated three hundred and fifteen thousand at the end.
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In
terms of their overall size, the main camps (and their attached satellites) fell into three groups by the end of 1943. Auschwitz, with 85,298 prisoners, was by far the largest and in a league all its own. It was followed by a group of camps established before the war: Dachau, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald, which now held between twenty-four thousand and thirty-seven thousand
prisoners (the new KL Kovno, with some nineteen thousand prisoners, also belongs to this group). Finally, there were the remaining eleven main camps, many less than a year old, which formed the smallest group, with an average of perhaps six thousand prisoners each.
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To put these figures into perspective: back in September 1939, when war broke out, the largest KL, Sachsenhausen, had held no more
than 6,500 prisoners.
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Most new prisoners were caught during an unprecedented wave of arrests sweeping across Germany and much of Nazi-occupied Europe from late 1942 onward. Economic motives played a major part here (as we shall see below), but they overlapped with other Nazi measures. Above all, there was the Holocaust. Deportations of Jews to Auschwitz increased sharply in 1943, compared
to the previous year, bringing more prisoners than ever to the camp.
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Another important factor was the determination of the RSHA to stamp out any whiff of opposition at home and resistance abroad, a resolve that grew more radical as German confidence in victory began to crumble. From 1942, Nazi leaders became ever more obsessed with the stability of the home front, as the distorted memory of the German defeat and revolution of 1918, so crucial for early Nazi
terror, once more dominated their minds. Adolf Hitler, in particular, imagined the catastrophe of an internal collapse in the most garish colors. He was personally responsible, he told his entourage on May 22, 1942, for thwarting “the creation of a home front of scoundrels like in 1918.”
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Ruthless action was required against criminals, political enemies, and other deviants who might attack the
regime. During a time of crisis, Hitler repeated again and again, one had to “exterminate,” “eliminate,” “execute,” “beat to death,” “shoot,” or “liquidate” large numbers of “scum,” “rats,” and “asocial vermin.”
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Hitler saw the concentration camps as the most powerful weapon in this war on the home front. On May 23, 1942, toward the end of a blazing speech to the Nazi top brass, he singled out
the KL as the main bulwark against an uprising. If Nazi Germany should ever face an internal crisis, Hitler exclaimed, Heinrich Himmler would have to “shoot the criminals in all concentration camps, rather than let them loose on the German people.”
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Himmler did not expect to use these emergency powers. Rather than wait until the Third Reich was in danger, his police forces would root out any
threats in advance. Facing a sharp rise in common crime, linked to growing deprivation, dislocation, and damage caused by the war, the criminal police stepped up its policy of crime prevention and sent more Germans straight to the KL, sometimes with explicit instructions that their return was undesirable. Looking at prisoners from the territory of the German Reich, Himmler declared in a speech in
autumn 1943, those detained as “asocial” and “criminal” far exceeded political prisoners. Among them were ex-convicts and minor property offenders, whose deviant behavior was characterized as a dangerous attack on the home front. On the same grounds, the police arrested several thousand German women, charged with illicit contacts with foreigners; before being dragged to camps, some women accused
of sexual relationships were publicly shamed and humiliated.
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The German police also targeted Gypsies inside the Third Reich with unprecedented zeal. In autumn 1942, after years of escalating Nazi persecution, including segregation, sterilization, detention, and expulsion, the leaders of the criminal police in the RSHA advocated a systematic solution to the “Gypsy Question.” Depicting Gypsies
as a criminal and biological threat to the home front, they lobbied Himmler for mass deportations. Himmler agreed. With Hitler’s blessing, he ordered on December 16, 1942, that the great majority of Gypsies should be sent to a concentration camp. Police guidelines, passed in the following month, left some leeway for local officials; determined to make their districts “Gypsy free,” they generally
opted for the hardest approach. Starting in late February 1943, some fourteen thousand men, women, and children—among them many families—were deported from Germany and annexed Austria to Auschwitz-Birkenau; as the biggest Nazi camp, it seemed best placed to absorb a large number of prisoners at short notice (another 8,500 Gypsies arrived from elsewhere, mostly from the occupied Czech territory).
Their arrival marked the birth of the so-called Gypsy camp in sector BIIe of Birkenau.
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One of the first prisoners was the forty-three-year-old trader August Laubinger from Quedlinburg, who arrived on March 4, 1943, together with his wife, Hulda, and four children. This was not his first time in a KL; in summer 1938, as we have seen, the police had sent him as “work-shy” to Sachsenhausen. Back
then, he had been lucky to be released, and returned home to his family just before the outbreak of the war. This time, there was no way out. August Laubinger, prisoner number Z-229, died in Birkenau sometime before the end of the year.
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The primary focus of police terror on the home front was not on Gypsies or German social outsiders, however, but on foreign workers; in summer 1943, more than
two-thirds of all new Gestapo prisoners were foreigners, who were routinely suspected as troublemakers, subversives, and criminals. The growing number of foreigners living in Germany, which swelled because of the merciless pursuit of foreign labor by Fritz Sauckel, only intensified these fears. By the end of 1943, the total number of foreign civilian workers and POWs inside the Third Reich had
reached a staggering 7.3 million, turning the Nazi vision of an ethnically unified “people’s community” on its head. The great majority of foreign workers came from Poland and the Soviet Union (especially from Ukraine), with hundreds of thousands more from western Europe, above all from France. Worst off were the hungry and exhausted men and women from eastern Europe, who had to wear special markers,
resembling the KL triangles, to identify them in case they broke the draconian rules.

The police habitually handed out brutal penalties. This was true, above all, for Poles and Soviets, whose punishment the compliant legal authorities now largely left to the police. There was no reason to worry about the millions of foreign workers, Heinrich Himmler assured SS group leaders in Posen on October
4, 1943, “as long as we come down hard on the smallest trifles.” Most alleged offenses were indeed trivial. Turning up late for work or disagreeing with a German superior was enough to be accused of “loafing” or “obstinacy.” The most common police sanction for supposedly grave offenses was a brief spell in a Gestapo camp (so-called Work Education Camps, or AELs, and Extended Police Prisons); these
were harsh wartime additions to the Nazi landscape of terror, designed to discipline and deter “recalcitrant” workers through short but sharp detention. The most serious cases, however, were dealt with elsewhere: prisoners accused of sabotage, such as Sergey Ovrashko, and others regarded as especially dangerous, were dragged to the KL, which filled up with many tens of thousands of foreign workers
in 1943. In this way, the SS gained more slave laborers and simultaneously increased the pressure on foreign workers outside to conform to Nazi demands. Punishment and deterrence went hand in hand.
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Like Ovrashko, many Soviet foreign workers were still in their teens when they came to the KL. In Dachau alone, some 2,200 Soviet youths, aged eighteen or under, arrived in 1942. Their average age
soon fell even further, after the German occupation authorities in the east dispatched ever-younger boys and girls for labor to the Reich. The police had no qualms about dragging these children to concentration camps, and in January 1943 Heinrich Himmler officially lowered to sixteen years the minimum age for committing Soviet forced workers.
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In practice, some were younger still. The Russian
prisoner V. Chramcov, himself a teenager when he was forced to Dachau, recalled that one barrack had been packed with more than two hundred children, aged between six and seven.
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Some veteran prisoners looked on in horror. In his Dachau diary, Edgar Kupfer noted on April 11, 1943, that the “many little Russians in the camp” were “utterly miserable with hunger.”
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The tentacles of Himmler’s
terror apparatus also reached far beyond the borders of the Third Reich, pulling even more foreigners into concentration camps from abroad. As the war turned further against Germany in 1943, resistance across Nazi-occupied Europe intensified. So did the Nazi response. Himmler led from the front, insisting on overwhelming force. In northern and western Europe, he authorized selective assassinations
of public figures as a form of “counterterrorism,” while his men ran wild in eastern and southeastern Europe, using antipartisan warfare as an excuse for blanket executions. When it came to locking up foreign suspects, Himmler often opted for his trusted concentration camps. The call for mass deportations of foreign resisters, deviants, and hostages to the KL became a reflex for him, and contributed
to the sharp rise in prisoners from Nazi-occupied Europe. Among them were the so-called NN prisoners, held in almost total isolation. To discourage resistance in northern and western Europe, Hitler had ordered that some suspects should secretly be deported to Germany, never to be seen again by their families; they would disappear in “night and fog” (
Nacht und Nebel
, or NN).
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The mass arrest
of foreigners in 1943 left its mark on the KL system. In most camps inside the Third Reich’s prewar borders, German prisoners had still constituted the largest or second-largest inmate group in early 1943. Now these camps began to change. In Buchenwald, for example, the proportion of Germans among the inmate population fell from thirty-five percent to thirteen percent during 1943 (even though the
number of German prisoners still rose by more than one thousand), while the share of east European prisoners increased correspondingly; on December 25, 1943, there were 14,451 Soviet and 7,569 Polish prisoners in Buchenwald, making up almost sixty percent of the prisoner population (37,221). By contrast, there were only 4,850 Germans, who were almost outnumbered by the 4,689 French, a prisoner group
that had been virtually nonexistent one year earlier.
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Hunting for Slave Laborers

In late May 1942, Heinrich Himmler sent a word of warning to Oswald Pohl: it was important to avoid the impression “that we arrest people, or keep them inside [the KL] after their arrest, to have workers.”
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He may have been anxious about appearances, but Himmler had long resolved to grow the slave labor force
inside his concentration camps. Economic considerations had already influenced the arrest of “work-shy” men back in the late 1930s, and by 1942, Himmler’s appetite for forced laborers had become ravenous.
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