KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (94 page)

To gain a clearer picture, the Allies needed information from other sources, in addition to the decryptions. There was no shortage, even in the early war years, and especially in London, where the British authorities collected more extensive and reliable intelligence than their counterparts in
the United States.
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Some accounts of abuses and atrocities in the KL came from British staff abroad.
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But the most telling material arrived via outside agencies, such as Jewish groups and the Polish government-in-exile, which collected and circulated numerous reports from the Polish underground. Though sometimes confused and contradictory, and weighted toward the suffering of the Polish population,
these reports added crucial details about the camps—including news about the mass extermination of Jews, with isolated references (especially from 1943) to selections, gas chambers, and crematoria in Auschwitz. The Polish authorities in London not only passed confidential material to the British and other governments, they released some reports directly to the media, resulting in newspaper
articles in the United States, Switzerland, Britain, and elsewhere. As early as June 1941, the
Times
of London carried a brief piece on starvation, slave labor, and murders of Polish prisoners in the “dreaded Oswiecim [Auschwitz] concentration camp.”
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As the war drew to a close, the Allies received ever more detailed reports, especially relating to the Nazi Final Solution. Although Allied governments
had been aware since the end of 1942 (at the latest) of the systematic mass extermination of European Jewry, the exact role of Auschwitz and Majdanek in Nazi genocide was not yet fully understood. The famous Allied declaration of December 17, 1942, which publicly denounced the wholesale slaughter of the Jews in eastern Europe, made no direct mention of the KL, referring merely to Jews being
worked to death in “labor camps.” And even this declaration was quickly forgotten by senior government officials in Britain and the United States, who questioned the reliability of eyewitness testimony and worried that excessive exposure of Nazi atrocities might detract from the business of fighting the war.
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The magnitude of Nazi criminality took a long time to sink in.

But by 1944, the truth
became hard to ignore. To be sure, Allied intelligence was still scattered, which accounts for the continuing confusion about aspects of the KL system.
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And yet, the contours of the KL, above all of Auschwitz itself, came into ever sharper relief. During interrogations, German POWs mentioned mass killings in the camp, and occasionally referred to gassings. German generals secretly recorded in
Allied captivity made similar remarks.
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By far the most important information, and also the most recent, came from escaped prisoners. A first detailed report about the slaughter of Hungarian Jews reached Switzerland in mid-June 1944, just four weeks after it had begun. “Never since the foundation of Birkenau,” it concluded with great accuracy, “have so many Jews been gassed.”
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The most influential
survivor account came from two Slovakian Jews, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, who had been deported to Auschwitz in 1942 and escaped on April 10, 1944. After they had crossed the Slovakian border, they found shelter in the Jewish community in
Ž
ilina and completed a sixty-page typed report on the camp. Translated into different languages, it offered a thorough analysis of the Auschwitz complex,
outlining its development, layout, and administration, as well as conditions inside. Most critically, Vrba and Wetzler gave a thorough account of Auschwitz as a death camp, detailing the arrival of Jews from across Europe and the selections, gassings, and cremations. The sober tone and the mass of details made the report all the more devastating. Over the coming months, copies were distributed to
influential figures in Slovakia and Hungary, and also reached the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, the Vatican, the U.S. War Refugee Board, and several Allied governments. Some conclusions featured prominently in the media in summer 1944, and in the United States, whole extracts of the report by Vrba and Wetzler were published a few months later.
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Given the growing awareness of genocide in
Auschwitz, some survivors and historians have since asked why the Allies did not bomb the killing facilities or the tracks leading up to the camp. “Why were those trains allowed to roll unhindered into Poland?” asked Elie Wiesel, who was fifteen years old when he was deported in May 1944 from Hungary to Auschwitz with his parents, his sisters, and his grandmother.
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In fact, bombing raids on
Auschwitz had been considered for the first time back in 1941 by the British air force, following a request by the Polish government-in-exile. But such proposals only gathered momentum during the mass murder of Hungarian Jews, following urgent appeals from Jewish leaders in May and June 1944 to bomb Birkenau and the connected railway lines.
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Looking at the Allied response, the lack of urgency
is palpable. The USSR showed hardly any interest in the so-called Final Solution, and although the western Allies were more engaged, its military leaders were focused on war strategy—charting the fastest route to victory—not on humanitarian missions. In the end, the pleas were turned down.
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This does not mean that the Allies missed a major chance to halt the Holocaust in summer 1944. Railway
tracks and yards were hard to hit and easy to repair, and trains could have been rerouted. And while a direct attack on Birkenau would have carried great symbolic weight, it might not have saved many lives. It would have been technically possible for heavy U.S. bombers to attack the site from around July 1944 (the IG Farben factory near Monowitz, which was seen as a military target, was hit for
the first time on August 20), but by this time the vast majority of the deported Jews were dead. Moreover, the bombers’ inaccuracy makes it unlikely that the killing complex could have been hit without causing carnage in the adjacent prisoner compounds; this was a time before real “precision strikes.” But even if such an attack had succeeded, it is hard to see how it would have stopped the mass murder.
The determination of Nazi leaders to exterminate the Jews would not have been deflected by bombs on Birkenau (in fact, SS men habitually blamed Jews for Allied air raids and sometimes attacked Jewish prisoners “in retaliation” after KL had been hit). No doubt the SS killers would have found other ways to continue their murderous mission.
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Indeed, they were already doing so. During the genocide
of Hungarian Jews, as we have seen, the Auschwitz SS used not only gas chambers and crematoria, but also shootings and open pits; as the Nazi task forces had demonstrated in the Soviet Union in 1941–42, technically sophisticated facilities were not essential for genocide.

Still, the prisoners who escaped from the KL to warn the world did not risk their lives in vain. Growing awareness of Nazi
crimes could save lives. The shock waves caused by the account of Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, for example, probably helped to persuade the Hungarian regent Horthy to put an end to the deportations in July 1944.
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More generally, eyewitness reports by prisoners—those who had fled and those still inside—shaped the picture of the KL in the Allied nations. Articles and radio programs based on
inmate testimonies helped to dispel some of the indifference and skepticism that existed. By November 1944, at the time the Vrba-Wetzler report was published, most Americans understood that the KL were sites of mass extermination.
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Crucially, reports in the Allied media fed back to the Third Reich, as well. By reading foreign newspapers and listening to enemy broadcasts—with millions secretly
tuning in to the BBC—more and more Germans learned about the atrocities in Auschwitz and Majdanek.
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Foreign news even filtered back to the KL. The realization that they had not been forgotten by the outside world gave prisoners new hope, as well as greater determination to resist the SS.
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Impossible Choices

One day toward the end of World War II, a few Dachau prisoners made a pact. Determined to show that there was an alternative to the usual strife between inmates, they would act like gentlemen; for a whole day, rough and selfish behavior would give way to civility and compassion, as if they still lived regular lives outside. When the agreed day came, the men tried their
hardest to stay true to the ideal of common decency, starting with the scramble to dress, wash, and eat in the morning. By evening, all of them had failed, defeated by the harsh realities of the camp. “The beast inside humans gains the upper hand,” the Belgian resistance fighter and Dachau prisoner Arthur Haulot noted in his diary on January 19, 1945, after he heard about the experiment. “One does
not with impunity live so long outside the norm.”
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Although survivors drew many conflicting conclusions about the concentration camps after the war, they agreed that the inmates’ behavior could not be judged by ordinary standards. This had already been the accepted view inside the camps.
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The KL, many prisoners believed, had inverted conventional morality. There were times when charity could
become suicidal, and deviance—including murder—could be just. Failure to understand this essential truth and adapt to the law of the camp would prove deadly.
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But what, exactly, was the law of the camp?

Some inmates gave a stark answer: it was the law of the jungle. The conditions caused a relentless battle for goods and positions, they believed, and created an enormous chasm between a small
elite, most of them Kapos, and the destitute mass that fought to the death for an extra piece of bread, bedding, or clothing. In this brutish vision, the other prisoners were rivals in the struggle for survival, locked into a war of all against all. Slowly dying in an infernal Neuengamme satellite camp in the last year of the war, an elderly Belgian prisoner wrote a despairing message to his son,
himself gravely ill in the infirmary: “The camp is changing, there are only wolves among wolves!”
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This vision may be too bleak, when applied to the KL as a whole. But we cannot completely wish it away, either. However comforting it would be to cling to idealized images of a prisoner community united in suffering, the conflicts between inmates were all too real, and they turned all the more vicious
the more lethal the KL system became.

And yet, prisoner relations were not ruled by aggression and anarchy alone. There were some unwritten rules, for a start. Under the prisoners’ informal code, the theft of bread belonging to another was a sin. Saving bread required great self-discipline, as starving prisoners had to fight the temptation to devour their full ration. Every piece of stale bread
was a symbol of a prisoner’s will to survive; and every theft was seen as an unforgivable betrayal, tantamount to treason. As a Neuengamme room elder told a group of new arrivals: “Stealing bread from a comrade is the worst kind of wickedness; he is stealing his life.”
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This ruling did not put an end to thefts, nor did it result in perfect justice, as some innocent inmates became victims of uncontrolled
fury. Nonetheless, such thefts were generally seen as wrong and deserving of punishment.

So there was a moral structure in the KL.
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Prisoners may have been unable to live by the same ethical code they followed outside, as in the case of the Dachau “gentlemen,” but they retained a sense of right and wrong within the warped world of the camps. Not everyone agreed on the same rules, of course, but
there were lines most prisoners did not want to cross. Living by these basic rules was not just about survival, it was about self-respect as well. “I am straight with everyone,” Janusz Pogonowski secretly wrote to his family from Auschwitz in September 1942, “I have done nothing I need to be ashamed of.”
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Preserving dignity was almost impossible on one’s own, and Pogonowski credited two friends
for helping him through a severe illness, supporting him materially and morally. It was thanks to them, he wrote, that his soul was “healthy, proud and strong.”
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Such mutual support among KL prisoners was not exceptional, as some observers suggest, but common.
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It took many different forms, from sharing food to political discussions, and undermined SS attempts at total domination.

Some prisoners
saw all such acts as resistance: survival itself was a “form of resistance,” Ágnes Rózsa wrote in her diary in early February 1945.
10
Several scholars have taken a similar line, stretching the definition of resistance to cover all nonconformist acts in the KL. As the Italian psychologist Andrea Devoto memorably put it: “anything could be resistance, since everything was forbidden.”
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However,
such an all-embracing definition blurs the lines between very different acts. Should we use the same term to describe a prisoner who sabotaged German munitions and a prisoner who fought for his own life, if necessary at the cost of others? Even a narrower definition of resistance can be problematic, when applied to the camps, since prisoners had no hope of working to overthrow the Nazi regime.

In the end, other terms may help us to see the prisoners’ choices more clearly, though there are inevitable overlaps between the different categories. There was perseverance, which involved individual acts of self-preservation and self-assertion; there was solidarity, which was directed at the spiritual survival and protection of groups of inmates; and there was defiance, which included protests,
and other planned and principled opposition to the Camp SS. Given the immense power of the SS, such direct challenges were rare, and they were not always unambiguous, either. Escaping from the camp, for example, might allow a prisoner to join the partisans or tell the world about Nazi crimes, but it might also condemn other inmates to death, under the SS policy of collective punishment.
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