The Third Reich at War (86 page)

Large numbers of non-German offenders were from this point onwards dealt with by the SS, though others continued to pass through the courts. This largely accounts for the fact that the officially registered number of death sentences in the Reich fell from 5,336 in 1943 to 4,264 the following year, though part of the reason for the drop may also lie in the fact that fanatically Nazi judges of the younger generation were being called up to the front, leaving the courts in the hands of older judges who retained at least some vestigial allegiance to the judicial process.
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The statistical decrease, in other words, marked a continued growth in the number of native Germans sentenced to death. To their number were added the ‘asocials’ and ‘habitual criminals’ consigned by Thierack to the SS for ‘extermination through labour’. After Hitler had approved of the killings on 22 September 1942, the transfer of prisoners from state jails and penitentiaries began. Most of them were ‘security confined’, repeat offenders who had been in prison since the early years of the Third Reich. Gypsies and Jews in the prisons were also included in the process. Individual prisoners whose transfer to a concentration camp had to be recommended by the Ministry were examined in their prison by officials, usually in a very brief session lasting no more than a few minutes. Some were kept in prison beyond their release date so that they could be examined in this way. Prison governors tried, and in many cases succeeded, in retaining prisoners whose labour was particularly economically valuable to the prison. Altogether more than 20,000 prisoners were handed over. Most were taken to Mauthausen, where they were savagely beaten, sometimes to death, on their arrival, then, if they survived this ordeal, they were forced to haul stones weighing up to 50 kilograms each up the 186 broad steps of the camp quarry. If they staggered and fell, the prisoners were shot by the SS guards, who would sometimes throw them down into the quarry from 30 or 40 metres up, or force them to empty trucks of stones on to the men working below.

17. German Prisons and Penitentiairies

A number of prisoners put an end to their suffering by jumping off the cliff into the quarry depths. By the end of 1942, the mortality rate of the transferred prisoners stood at 35 per cent, far greater than that of any other group of camp inmates apart from Jews.
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III

Those inmates who remained behind in Germany’s state prisons experienced steadily deteriorating conditions as the war progressed. The need for labour sharply increased the pressure on the Justice Ministry to effect what Thierack called the ‘mobilization’ of prisoners. They were increasingly lent out to arms manufacturers, for a suitable fee, in the same way that concentration camp inmates were. Similarly, this often involved their being sent out to sub-camps rather than staying in prison. In the prisons themselves, food supplies started running low, and inmates were sometimes reduced to eating animal fodder and mouldy vegetables. Thus in 1943, for example, prisoners at Pl̈tzensee were reported to be grabbing leaves from the trees in the prison yard as they went round it on their daily exercise, to add nourishment to their soup. Weight loss and vitamin deficiencies weakened the prisoners and made them susceptible to infection.
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Food supplies were not keeping pace with the increase in the prison population, particularly among women. The number of women convicted of criminal offences rose from 46,500 in 1939 to 117,000 in 1942, and that of juvenile offenders from 17,500 to 52,500. Many of these were sentenced for offences against wartime laws and regulations, particularly economic offences, which increased from under 3,000 in 1940 to more than 26,500 two years later. Convictions for illegal association with prisoners of war, a new offence, reached 10,600 by 1943. But the number of people sentenced for other crimes was on the rise too: theft convictions rose from 48,000 in 1939 to nearly 83,000 in 1943, for example. By contrast, sexual offences declined steeply, with pimping convictions down by over 50 per cent, rape by more than 65 per cent, and sexual offences with minors by more than 60 per cent. Evidently the police were so concerned to enforce wartime restrictions that they were starting to neglect other areas of the criminal law, though the fall in sexual offences would also have reflected the departure of millions of young men to the battle-front.
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Inevitably in these circumstances, overcrowding became a serious problem in Germany’s state penal institutions during the war. The total prison population grew from just under 110,000 in mid-1939 to 144,000 in mid-1942 and 197,000 in mid-1944. In the Old Reich - the area within the borders of 1937 with some small additions during the war - the number rose from around 100,000 at the beginning of the war to 140,000 in September 1942 and 158,000 two years later. The proportion of female inmates increased from 9 per cent of the prison population in 1939 to 23 per cent four years later, by which time German penal institutions were keeping more than 43,000 women behind bars. These numbers were far higher than the prisons had been designed to hold. Dirt and disease were the result, as prisoners were packed in several to a cell, hygiene facilities were strained beyond their limit, and washing and showering, particularly in the final year of the war, became nigh impossible. Infestations with scabies and lice became common, and several prisons were hit by epidemics of typhus and other infectious diseases. Prison warders became increasingly short-tempered and prone to use violence to maintain order, as the ratio of warders to prisoners deteriorated from 1:6 (in 1939) to 1:14 (in 1944). In some cases, prisoners were chained to the wall or floor when they were being punished. Beatings, relatively uncommon in the 1930s, became commonplace in the last two years of the war. The prison authorities’ decision to help the collection of winter clothing to assist the German troops freezing before the gates of Moscow in December 1941 netted more than 55,000 socks and nearly 5,000 jumpers confiscated from inmates, exposing prisoners to cold and leading to a rise in the death rate. Prisons did not possess air-raid shelters, and those in or near the centre of large towns and cities were particularly prone to destruction in bombing raids, leading to more deaths and further overcrowding as the number of cells was further reduced.
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Even after 1943, more Germans were held in state prisons than in concentration camps. But conditions in the latter deteriorated too. From the mid-1930s, the camps had begun to function mainly as centres of detention for ‘asocials’ and other minorities, after most of the political opponents of the regime for whom they had originally been intended had been released on good behaviour. As soon as the war began, however, the camps began to resume their earlier function as centres of detention and deterrence for the wider German civilian population, above all former Communists and Social Democrats. At the beginning of the war, Hitler gave Himmler new powers of arrest and detention, which he used, with the Leader’s agreement, to apprehend people suspected of opposing the regime. On 26 October 1939 the Gestapo ordered that if anyone from an arms factory was taken off to a camp for behaviour hostile to the state or likely to undermine the morale of the workforce, a notice had to be put up in the factory announcing the fact, adding in severe cases that he had been put in a punishment block. Care should be taken, the order added, not to announce the length of the sentence or the date of release. If corporal punishment in the camp was ordered for the worker, this should be publicized too.
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If this was not enough of a deterrent, the camps began to function as places of execution for people arrested by the police as ‘saboteurs’ or ‘shirkers’. Executions were widely publicized. While he was still at Sachsenhausen, Rudolf Ḧss later reported, an ex-Communist at the Junkers aircraft factory was arrested after refusing to carry out air-raid protection work; Himmler personally ordered his execution, which was to take place at the nearest concentration camp. The man was taken to Sachsenhausen, where it fell to Ḧss to carry out the execution. He ordered a post to be erected in a sandpit near the camp workshops and had the man tied to it. ‘The man was completely resigned to his fate,’ he remembered later, although ‘he had not expected to be executed. He was allowed to write to his family, and was given cigarettes, for which he had asked.’ A firing-squad shot him through the heart and Höss ‘gave him the
coup de grˆce
’. ‘In the days to come,’ he added, ‘we were to have plenty of experiences of this kind. Almost every day I had to parade with my execution squad.’
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Most Germans sent to the camps became long-term inmates. Thus ‘political’ prisoners once again became an important part of the camp population. They had to wear a red triangle on their uniforms to distinguish them from the other categories of prisoner, such as the green-triangled ‘criminals’. Political prisoners’ later accounts of their experiences in the camps portrayed the ‘criminals’ in particular as brutal and ruthless men who were deliberately put in positions of responsibility by the SS in order to intimidate the rest. The reality was rather different. Both ‘criminals’ and ‘politicals’ were used by the SS to work with the camp administration in controlling the other inmates because they were Germans and thus fulfilled the racial criteria demanded by the SS for positions of responsibility. Benedikt Kautsky, son of a leading Social Democrat of the Imperial era, later recalled from his own time as a prisoner in a variety of concentration camps that a ‘bitter struggle’ was constantly being waged between the ‘reds’ and the ‘greens’, in which each side would denounce members of the other to the SS, engage in ‘despicable intrigues’ and stage ‘palace revolutions’ against their opponents. The winners were able to get relatively safe jobs in the camp office, better food, better clothing, more freedom of action, more power and more status. Attaining the position of ‘block leader’ or ‘capo’ meant a better chance of surviving. By such means, the political prisoners succeeded in some camps, notably Buchenwald and Neuengamme, in dominating the internal self-administration of the inmates themselves. There is no convincing evidence that the ‘criminals’ were any more brutal or unscrupulous than other, political capos. The survival of all of them depended on carrying out the orders of the SS.
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The vast expansion of the camps as they were converted from centres of punishment to suppliers of forced labour transformed their character. From 21,000 mostly German inmates in mid-1939, the system grew to hold 110,000 by September 1942 and nearly 715,000 in January 1945, including over 202,000 women. At Buchenwald, for instance, nearly 100,000 new prisoners were admitted in 1944 alone. The camp contained prisoners from more than thirty different countries, and foreigners outnumbered Germans many times over.
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In these circumstances, as camp authorities were unable to keep pace with building programmes to cater for the massive influx of new prisoners, death and disease, aided by the brutality of the camp guards, became more common even than before. Below the camp aristocracy of ‘greens’ and ‘reds’, the broad mass of prisoners lived in a state of continual fear and privation. Camp life was, with rare exceptions, a war of all against all for the survival of the fittest, in which the worst jobs were given to those least able to defend themselves. Jews and Slavs received the lowest rations and the least adequate accommodation, and hunger, overwork, beatings and disease turned the weakest into ‘Moslems’ (
Muselmänner
), the inmates’ designation for those who had given up. Such people no longer tried to keep clean or to stop other prisoners stealing their food or survive the blows that were inevitably rained down on them by the guards and the capos, until they died of ill-treatment and exhaustion.
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The transformation of the camps into centres of labour supply for industry, and the influx of hundreds of thousands of new prisoners, provided opportunities for self-enrichment that commandants and officers were not slow to exploit. Aware of the corruption problem, Himmler addressed senior SS leaders in Posen on 4 October 1944, reminding them that they had taken from the Jews ‘what wealth they had’ and handed it over to the Reich.

We have taken none of it for ourselves. Individual men who have lapsed will be punished . . . A number of SS men - there are not very many of them - have fallen short, and they will die without mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us. But we have not the right to enrich ourselves with so much as a fur, a watch, a mark, a cigarette or anything else. We have exterminated a bacterium because we do not want in the end to be infected by the bacterium and die of it. I will not see so much as a small area of sepsis appear here or gain a hold. Wherever it may take hold, we will cauterize it.
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