KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (80 page)

Seizing prisoners from other Nazi authorities was one way of boosting the KL slave labor force. Before the war, Himmler’s bids for regular state prisoners had been rebuffed. But the stance
of the legal authorities relaxed after the appointment of the hard-liner Otto-Georg Thierack as Reich minister of justice on August 20, 1942. Desperate to shore up the standing of the judiciary—which had reached a low point in spring 1942, following a public broadside from Hitler—Thierack was willing to throw one of the last legal principles overboard: the rule that defendants sentenced by the courts
served their time in state prisons. In a meeting with Himmler on September 18, 1942, Thierack agreed to hand over whole groups of judicial prisoners: those sentenced to security confinement, “asocial” German and Czech penitentiary inmates sentenced to more than eight years, convicts at the bottom of the Nazi racial hierarchy (that is, Jews, Gypsies, and Soviets), as well as Poles serving sentences
of over three years. Brushing aside the rule of law, or what was left of it, Germany’s leading jurist condemned many of his own prisoners to death in Himmler’s concentration camps.

The ensuing prisoner transfers accelerated the shift in power between legal and SS terror, and helped the camps finally to outstrip prisons. Although inmate numbers in the latter swelled during the war, too, they could
no longer keep up with lawless terror; by June 1943, the KL prisoner population had grown to some two hundred thousand inmates, around fifteen thousand more than German state prisons. Himmler must have been gratified to overtake the much-maligned legal authorities. But this was now a secondary concern, overshadowed by his quest for more slave labor. Like Hitler, Himmler believed that the incoming
state prisoners would be in great shape, having been pampered in plush prisons; working them to death in concentration camps could only benefit the SS.

Deportations from German state prisons to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Neuengamme, and Sachsenhausen began in November 1942, and were largely completed late the following spring. In all, the legal authorities had handed over more than twenty
thousand state prisoners. Most of them were German nationals, above all petty property offenders, while Poles made up the largest group of foreigners.
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Thousands more Polish state prisoners arrived in Auschwitz and Majdanek from prisons in the General Government (run by the police), following a Himmler order on December 5, 1942, that targeted long-term prisoners judged fit for work.
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Himmler’s
efforts to bolster his slave labor force became more frantic from late 1942, as Germany’s strategic position deteriorated. Following the encirclement of the Sixth Army in Stalingrad and losses in North Africa, not even Himmler could ignore the whispers of impending defeat. War production became more pressing than ever, increasing demands on the RSHA (still in charge of arrests and releases)
to deliver more slaves to concentration camps.
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Some of this pressure came from the WVHA, with Oswald Pohl insisting in a letter to Himmler on December 8, 1942, that many more prisoners were required for armaments production.
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Himmler reacted straightaway. On December 12, he attended Pohl’s wedding as the guest of honor and used the joyous occasion for a confidential chat about the KL.
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Only a few days later, Himmler issued an urgent order to Gestapo leader Heinrich Müller: by the end of January 1943, the police had to deliver some fifty thousand new prisoners to the concentration camps for slave labor.
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Müller grasped the significance of Himmler’s demand and exhorted his police forces that
“every single worker counts!”
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The result was a major police operation against Jews
and foreign workers from eastern Europe. On December 16, 1942, Heinrich Müller informed Himmler about plans for the deportation of forty-five thousand Jews—thirty thousand from Bialystok district, most of the others from Theresienstadt—to Auschwitz. The great majority of them, he added, would be “unfit for work” (in other words, they would be gassed on arrival), but at least ten to fifteen thousand
could be “set aside” for forced labor.
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Just one day later, Müller ordered mass transfers from German police jails and AELs, targeting Soviet workers and others of “alien blood,” who had been arrested for offenses against labor discipline. Müller hoped that this initiative would net at least another thirty-five thousand prisoners “fit for work” for the concentration camps.
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Meanwhile, Himmler
pushed for even more prisoners. On January 6, 1943, he demanded that boys and girls arrested as “suspected partisans” in the General Government and the occupied Soviet Union should become apprentices in KL enterprises in Auschwitz and Majdanek. And just twelve days later, he responded to bomb attacks in Marseilles by calling for the deportation of one hundred thousand members of the local “criminal
masses” to concentration camps, an outlandish target that speaks volumes about Himmler’s state of mind (in the end, some six thousand persons were arrested).
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The manhunts in early 1943 led to a rapid rise in the KL prisoner population. In Auschwitz, the number of registered Polish inmates doubled, from 9,514 (December 1, 1942) to 18,931 (January 29, 1943). Even more significantly, the SS deported
more than fifty-seven thousand Jews to Auschwitz in January 1943, a grim record not surpassed until the mass transports of Jews from Hungary in late spring 1944.
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Not only did the number of KL prisoners increase, but fewer were allowed to leave, as RSHA regulations for releases, already highly restrictive, were tightened further to retain more slave laborers.
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Prisoner numbers across the
KL system would have risen much higher still had it not been for the dreadful conditions, the murderous violence, and the systematic killings that decimated Himmler’s much-heralded workforce. According to incomplete SS figures, almost ten thousand registered inmates lost their lives in January 1943 alone.
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Mortality figures had apparently been even higher during the preceding months, and Camp
SS leaders would no doubt have continued to ignore these deaths had the growing focus on war production not started to drive up the value of slave labor. For the first time in its history, the Camp SS came under sustained pressure to improve conditions. As the RSHA suggested in a biting letter to Pohl on December 31, 1942, what was the point of all the mass arrests if so many new prisoners died
so quickly inside the concentration camps?
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Reducing Death Rates

Richard Glücks was not a man of many surprises. But on December 28, 1942, he delivered a stunning message to the Camp SS: Heinrich Himmler had ordered that prisoner mortality in the concentration camps “must absolutely become lower” (this phrase was lifted almost verbatim from Himmler’s order, sent two weeks earlier to Pohl).
Glücks pointed to grim figures. Although some 110,000 new prisoners had arrived during the last six months (June to November 1942), almost 80,000 inmates had died during the same period, 9,258 after executions and another 70,610 from illness, exhaustion, and injury (Glücks did not include Jews gassed in Auschwitz on arrival, without registration). This huge death rate meant that “the number of prisoners
can never be brought up to the [right] level, as the Reichsführer SS has ordered.” Consequently, Glücks decreed, senior camp doctors had to take all available measures to drive down “significantly” the number of deaths. This was not the first time Camp SS leaders had reminded their men that greater output required at least a minimum of care; but never before had such an order been made with
such urgency.
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Signaling its seriousness about raising living standards, the WVHA issued several further directives in 1943. In January, taking his cue from Himmler once more, Glücks made local KL commandants and administration leaders responsible for using all available means to “preserve the labor power of prisoners.”
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Oswald Pohl also weighed in, summing up his views in a long letter to
commandants in October 1943. Arms production in the camps was already a “decisive factor in the war,” he fantasized, but to further increase output, the SS would have to look after its prisoners. In order for Germany to win “a great victory,” Camp SS officers had to ensure the “healthiness” and “well-being” of slave laborers in concentration camps. Pohl then outlined a range of practical improvements.
To underline their importance, he announced that he would personally supervise their implementation.
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After years of endorsing and escalating violence in concentration camps, senior SS officials in Berlin and Oranienburg now seemed to play a different tune, jarring to some guards raised in the school of violence. Of course, SS leaders had not undergone a sudden conversion from cruelty to compassion.
His demands owed nothing to “sentimental humanitarianism,” Pohl reassured the commandants. It was a purely practical strategy, since the “arms and legs” of prisoners were needed to support the German war effort.
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The WVHA was not alone in rethinking its approach. As it dawned on Nazi leaders that the supply of labor power would not be limitless, other groups of forced laborers, too, could hope
for some improvements of their conditions.
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Since starvation was probably the greatest cause of death among registered KL prisoners, a better food supply was the most pressing task—as even Heinrich Himmler recognized.
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However, SS leaders were reluctant to distribute additional resources and instead promoted measures that came at no extra cost. Some were just an outlet for the eccentric ideas
of Himmler, who fancied himself as a visionary nutritionist. Foremost was his preposterous plan to distribute onions and other raw vegetables, an initiative that would have caused more misery for inmates already suffering from intestinal infections.
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Drawing on expert SS advice, meanwhile, Oswald Pohl circulated his own proposals to the camps, full of banal cookery tips (“Don’t boil warm meals
to death!”) and stern reminders to be thrifty (“There must be no kitchen scraps in the KL”).
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Another initiative by Himmler proved more significant. In late October 1942, the Reichsführer SS had permitted prisoners to receive food packages from outside, reviving the old practice from the prewar camps. Soon, parcels arrived from relatives, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC),
and some national Red Cross societies.
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Rare luxuries now found their way into the KL; packages by the Danish Red Cross included sausage, cheese, butter, pork, fish, and more. Such parcels were a blessing for inmates and they talked about little else; some even dreamed about the packages. In her secret Ravensbrück diary, the French prisoner Simone Saint-Clair recorded how desperately she longed
for mail: “Never before have I waited like this for packages and letters!” Those who received regular supplies were less likely to suffer from edema, diarrhea, tuberculosis, and other illnesses. Helena Dziedziecka from Warsaw, another Ravensbrück prisoner, later testified that the parcels “kept us alive.”
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But not every inmate benefited, far from it; there were always many more hopeful prisoners
than parcels.
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For a start, the national Red Cross societies restricted the circle of recipients; in Majdanek, for example, packages by the Polish Red Cross went to Polish prisoners only. Moreover, the SS only passed on parcels addressed to individual inmates; prisoners whose names and whereabouts were unknown to welfare organizations and relatives—or who had no more relatives outside—went hungry.
Meanwhile, SS staff and Kapos found a new opportunity for corruption and helped themselves freely to the packages; when Anna Mettbach, a German Gypsy in Auschwitz, received a parcel from her mother, she found the original contents replaced by rotten apples and bread.
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The local Camp SS barred whole groups of inmates from receiving food parcels altogether, above all Soviets and Jews. “All of
us are very needy,” Edgar Kupfer wrote in his Dachau diary, “especially the Russians, because they get no parcels.”
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In addition to parcels, some prisoners received extra food from the German state, again at no extra cost for the SS. Although the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture had cut official prisoner rations substantially since early 1942, as Germany suffered a general food crisis,
most prisoners did qualify for additional food allowances for heavy labor. However, these allowances were not handed out automatically, and local Camp SS officials were slow to complete the necessary paperwork (some of those who did kept back the extra rations). Eventually, more inmates received their due, though it is likely that most prisoners were left empty-handed.
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SS leaders knew that
efforts to improve conditions could not stop at the food supply. They would have to do something about all the gravely weak and ill inmates. In late 1942, Himmler complained to Pohl that far too many prisoners—some ten percent, by his count—were currently unable to work.
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In the past, the Camp SS had been quick to kill such invalids. These murderous reflexes were now more restrained, however,
as SS leaders aimed to press prisoners who recovered back into work.
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In some camps, these considerations led to restrictions on local SS selections.
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Himmler also effectively abandoned the central program for murdering frail prisoners (Action 14f13), scaled down earlier. In the future, the commandants were told in spring 1943, all prisoners “unfit for work” would be exempt from selections
by the doctors’ commissions (with the sole exception of mentally ill inmates). Instead of killing “bedridden cripples,” the Camp SS should force them to work, as Himmler had demanded for some time.
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