KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (99 page)

Hierarchies

The Kapo class was no less stratified than the prisoner population as a whole. There was a vast difference between a mighty figure like Karl Kapp and a lowly inmate in the block service who had to wait on his seniors, shining their boots, cooking
their food, and making their beds. Even among Kapos, then, there were masters and servants, leading to a brutal struggle, as David Rousset wrote, to “rise step by step in the hierarchy.”
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Those who made it to the top were known as the notables. It was they who held the senior positions in the orderly room, the labor action office, and the political office, as well as the infirmaries, kitchens, and clothes depots; some prominent block elders and labor supervisors were also among them.
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These notables were powerful and small in number; few prisoners held Kapo positions, and
even fewer gained prominence. In February 1945, for example, at a time when the Mauthausen main camp held some twelve thousand men (excluding the compound for the sick), there were just 184 Kapos senior enough to wear a wristwatch, one of the perks enjoyed by notables; tellingly, 134 of them were German.
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As we have seen, the Camp SS pursued a strategy of elevating Germans over foreigners,
mirroring social relations across Nazi-occupied Europe. Although the proportion of Germans fell to well below twenty percent of the KL prisoner population in 1944, the top Kapo positions were largely put into the hands of Germans.
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SS practice was influenced by Nazi racial thinking.
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Himmler often talked of a sense of loyalty toward “members of our own blood,” and even though German prisoners
were seen as scum, Camp SS leaders believed that their own countrymen should rise above the flotsam of other nations.
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Such preferential treatment was guided not just by dogma, however, but by pragmatism, as well. The fact that German prisoners shared the captors’ native tongue was crucial; theirs was the official language of the KL—of documents, signs, and orders—and the SS demanded to be
understood. Experience was equally important. The SS was looking for prisoners who knew the KL, and almost all the most seasoned inmates were German.
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As the demand for Kapos rose during the war, the Camp SS sometimes put such practical considerations above ideological principles and promoted Germans from the most despised prisoner groups to positions of influence. Men detained as homosexuals,
for example, had often faced lethal SS violence during the first half of the war, peaking around the summer of 1942.
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But while there were further murders later on, a growing number of prisoners with the pink triangle now served as clerks, block elders, and labor supervisors; in Bergen-Belsen, a German homosexual was even appointed as camp elder in late 1944, overseeing the compound for regular
protective custody prisoners.
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Middle and lower-ranking positions often went to prisoners from other nations, and foreign Kapos grew in number and standing as the war continued. In the occupied east, there were never enough German inmates to fill all available positions, so many of these posts went to Poles instead.
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Elsewhere, too, the SS relied on foreigners, especially during the second
half of the war. Prisoners from almost all European countries were promoted, though their prospects varied from camp to camp, depending on the size of national prisoner groups and the time of their arrival. In Ravensbrück, large transports from Poland had come as early as 1940, and Polish women gradually became entrenched in lower and middling Kapo positions, even pushing aside some German “asocials.”
French women, by contrast, did not arrive in large numbers until 1943–44, and consequently found themselves excluded from posts as block elders or camp police.
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As the Kapo class expanded, so did the number of Jews among them, though they were normally restricted to overseeing other Jewish prisoners only.
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Initially, this development centered on Auschwitz and Majdanek, following the mass
deportations to both camps; according to survivors, around half of the Auschwitz-Birkenau block elders in early 1944 were Jews.
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The number of Kapos with the yellow star increased elsewhere, too, as Jews were forced into new KL in eastern Europe, like in the Baltic region, and into satellite camps inside Germany. In satellites largely reserved for Jewish prisoners, individual Jews were deployed
as labor supervisors, doctors, clerks, and block elders, and exceptionally even as camp elders. Some of them were already well versed in negotiating the gray zone between fellow inmates and German rulers, having previously held influential positions in ghettos, where Jewish Councils had been given significant responsibilities for the administration of everyday life.
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There was no job security
for Kapos, of course, not at the top and even less so lower down, where there were frequent promotions, transfers, and dismissals. Among the greatest powers senior Kapos had was that of anointing others. Officially, appointments were made by the Camp SS. In practice, SS staff were often swayed by experienced Kapos, especially when it came to middling and lower positions. In this way, the notables
shaped the composition of the wider Kapo class, creating networks of prisoners bound by patronage and loyalty.
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This was yet another case of “groupness.” Political prisoners, for example, often did their best to reserve Kapo positions for fellow sympathizers. Likewise, foreign Kapos pushed their own countrymen forward; in Ravensbrück, many Polish Kapos owed their posts to Helena Korewina, the
influential translator of the SS camp supervisor.
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The competition over Kapo positions once more pitted different prisoner groups against one another. The battles were fought at all levels, but they were most visible at the top of the prisoner order, and often appeared to pit two groups of German inmates against each other: political prisoners, with the red triangle, and so-called criminals,
wearing the green triangle.

Red and Green

When Benedikt Kautsky looked back in 1945 at his seven years as a Jewish Socialist in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz, he found harsh words for many of his fellow inmates. But he reserved his greatest condemnation for the “green” Kapos, with their “hideous brutality and insatiable greed.” Kautsky pictured them as more animal than human. As serious
and incorrigible offenders, he claimed, they had made perfect partners in crime for the SS, who turned them into their most devoted executioners. Wherever the “greens” gained the leading Kapo positions, he reported, the results had been catastrophic, engulfing camps in treason, torture, blackmail, sexual abuse, and murder. The “greens” were the “pestilence of the camps.” Only political prisoners,
who pursued the good of all decent inmates, could stand up to them. The ensuing struggle for supremacy between the upright “reds” and the wicked “greens,” Kautsky concluded, had been a matter of life and death for the other inmates.
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Kautsky spoke for many survivors, especially former political prisoners like himself.
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In their testimonies, they often described the “greens” as deadly threats,
who had been unhinged criminals long before entering the KL. According to one German Communist, also writing in 1945, the Nazis had rounded up “thousands of crooks, killers, and so on” after their capture of power, and then filled almost all senior Kapo positions with these degenerates for whom murder was just a hobby.
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The same devastating picture of “green” Kapos has been painted over and
over again, and has become a fixture in popular works on the KL. But it is no more than a caricature. To be sure, like most caricatures, it draws on some truths. German ex-convicts did gain some leading Kapo positions, especially in camps for men, and a number of them committed hideous crimes inside; Kapo nicknames like “Bloody Alois” and “Ivan the Terrible” speak for themselves.
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But the sins
of some have led to the slander of all.

Contrary to the convictions of so many political prisoners, only a few “greens” had been sent to the KL as violent criminals. Even an observer as astute as Primo Levi was wrong to believe that the Nazis had specially selected hardened criminals in prisons to deploy them as Kapos.
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In fact, most of those detained in the prewar KL had committed minor property
crimes, as we have seen, not brutal excesses. And this did not change during the war. Convicted rapists and murderers did not normally end up in concentration camps, but in state prisons, either locked in dark cells, or led to the gallows or guillotine.
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The mass of “green” KL inmates were still small-time offenders, if they were guilty of any crimes at all. The reputation of these men and women
as savage convicts owed less to their criminal record than the dark fantasies of their fellow inmates, in whose imagination petty criminals mutated into serial murderers.
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Wild rumors became fact, as the violence of some Kapos was explained by their imagined homicidal past.

The truth was often different, even in the case of some of the most infamous “greens.” Take the case of Bruno Frohnecke,
a vicious Kapo. Detained since 1941 as a professional criminal, Frohnecke became the scourge of a large Auschwitz construction detail. He abused fellow prisoners at every turn, hitting them with his fist, clubs, and sticks, and kicking them in the abdomen and genitals. “All I can say is that I have never met anyone like him,” a survivor told the German police in 1946. “He was not a thug; he was
a murderer, in the true sense of the word.” But before he had fallen into SS hands, Frohnecke had shown no particular propensity for brutality. He had been an inept conman, not a killer, and had been caught again and again for small scams. Frohnecke, in short, was no natural-born killer: he only became a violent criminal inside the KL.
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What is more, while Frohnecke’s background was typical
for “green” Kapos, the same cannot be said for his actions in the camps, as some other “greens” acted in a comradely fashion and took great risks to save fellow inmates, including Jews, from certain death.
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The case of the first thirty Kapos in Auschwitz is instructive here. In the literature, these men have sometimes been held up as typical “green” criminals.
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A closer look reveals a more
complex story. Though they were all “green” veterans from Sachsenhausen, and enjoyed many privileges in Auschwitz, not all of them abused their powers. Some did become brutal murderers, like the former safecracker Bernhard Bonitz (prisoner number 6). During his first year or so as a block elder, he is said to have strangled some fifty Auschwitz prisoners, by throwing his victims to the ground, pressing
a stick across their neck, and standing on both ends. He later continued his crimes as the first chief Kapo of the construction commando on the IG Farben site, lording it over some 1,200 prisoners.
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Several of his “green” Auschwitz colleagues, however, conducted themselves very differently. They shunned Bonitz and other notorious Kapos “because of their behavior toward the prisoners,” in the
words of Jonny Lechenich (prisoner number 19). Once they even confronted Bonitz directly; he was a prisoner, too, they told him, and should treat his men more humanely. Lechenich himself became active in the camps’ underground organization and later fled with two Polish prisoners, joining the Home Army.
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He was not the only one to make common cause with his charges. Otto Küsel (prisoner number
2), the Kapo in the Auschwitz labor action office, was widely known as decent, and eventually escaped in late 1942 with three Poles, rather than betray their plans to the SS. After nine months on the run, Küsel was rearrested; brought back to Auschwitz, he was tortured for several months in the bunker.
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More generally, brutal “greens” like Bernhard Bonitz had no monopoly on violence. Jewish
prisoners, for example, were often outraged when they suffered at the hands of others wearing the yellow triangle: “Aren’t you a Jew, like us?” Avram Kajzer challenged a Gross-Rosen supervisor, who punched him in reply.
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The focus on the “greens” has rather obscured the uncomfortable truth that Kapos from all backgrounds colluded with the SS and committed cruel excesses.

Neither did the Camp
SS habitually favor “greens” over “reds.” Political prisoners had filled positions of authority since the birth of the KL, and this continued during the war. Important clerical posts largely went to politicals, for example, who were more likely to possess the requisite administrative skills, and “reds” also gained other influential positions, above all in Buchenwald, where German Communists held
all key posts by 1943.
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The pragmatic approach of the Camp SS inflamed tensions between Germans wearing the red and the green triangles.
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In Dachau, the “reds,” who held the upper hand, helped to condemn “greens” to hard labor and human experiments, and restricted their medical treatment. One former prisoner recalled that when he sought treatment for edema in the infirmary, “red” Kapos beat
him away, screaming: “Piss off, green swine!” Dachau political prisoners defended their actions as payback for the abuses some of them had suffered at the hands of “greens” in Flossenbürg, early in the war. These Flossenbürg “greens,” in turn, had justified their attacks as revenge for even earlier abuses by politicals back in Dachau.
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The spiral of violence seemed unstoppable, escalating the
enmity between the two prisoner groups.

However, the significance of these battles for dominance has been exaggerated. Generally, the outcome only mattered to the small number of prisoners who stood to benefit. “Red” Kapos primarily fought for their own groups.
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Likewise, most benefits gained by “green” Kapos went to their confidants, excluding many others with a green triangle, even though
they often shared the same barrack.
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All considered, it is likely that a larger number of prisoners benefited when the “reds” were on top.
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But this was, at best, a matter of degree, as the “groupness” practiced by senior Kapos with “red” and “green” triangles often made it difficult for the mass of ordinary inmates to tell them apart. German political prisoners, a Polish survivor of Auschwitz
wrote in 1946, differed “in nothing” from the “greens” and were just as hated by the rest of the inmates.
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