KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps
Read KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Online
Authors: Nikolaus Wachsmann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2015 by Nikolaus Wachsmann
Maps copyright © 2015 by Jeffrey L. Ward
All rights reserved
First edition, 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wachsmann, Nikolaus.
Kl: a history of the Nazi concentration camps / Nikolaus Wachsmann. — First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-374-11825-9 (cloth) — ISBN 978-1-4299-4372-7 (e-book)
1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945) 2. World War, 1939–1945—Concentration camps. 3.
Concentration camps—History—20th century. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Prisoners and prisons, German. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Atrocities—Germany. I. Title.
D804.3 .W325 2015
940.53’185—dc23
2014031269
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may the world at least behold a drop, a fraction of this tragic world in which we lived
—Letter by Salmen Gradowski, September 6, 1944 (discovered after liberation, in a flask buried on the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematorium)
Table 1. Daily Inmate Numbers in the SS Concentration Camps, 1934–45
Table 2. Prisoner Deaths in SS Concentration Camps
Table 3. SS Ranks, with Army Equivalents
MAP 1.
Early Camps in Berlin (by District), 1933
MAP 2.
SS Concentration Camps, Summer 1935
MAP 3.
SS Concentration Camps, September 1, 1939
MAP 4.
SS Concentration Camps (Main Camps), Summer 1944
MAP 5.
The Auschwitz KL Complex, c. 1944
MAP 6.
Buchenwald and Its Satellite Camps, Autumn 1944
MAP 7.
The Evacuation of Auschwitz (Main Routes), Early 1945
Sources: von
Götz, “Terror in Berlin” (map 1);
OdT
, vol. 3 (map 6); D
ł
ugoborski, Piper (eds.),
Auschwitz
, vols. 1 & 5 (map 5 and 7).
Note on place-names: Both maps and text mostly use the official names of camps and cities at the time events described in this book took place, though occasionally the name in use today, or more familiar to readers, has been used instead (or is given as an alternative).
Dachau, April 29, 1945
. It is early afternoon when U.S. troops, part of the Allied force sweeping across Germany to crush the last remains of the Third Reich, approach an abandoned train on a rail siding at the grounds of a sprawling SS complex near Munich. As the soldiers come closer, they make a dreadful discovery: the boxcars are filled with the corpses of well over two thousand
men and women, and also some children. Gaunt, contorted limbs are entangled amid a mess of straw and rags, covered in filth, blood, and excrement. Several ashen-faced GIs turn away to cry or vomit. “It made us sick at our stomach and so mad we could do nothing but clinch our fists,” an officer wrote the next day. As the shaken soldiers move deeper into the SS complex and reach the prisoner compound,
later that afternoon, they come upon thirty-two thousand survivors from many ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds, representing about thirty European nations. Some seem more dead than alive as they stumble toward their liberators. Many more lie in overcrowded barracks, infested with dirt and disease. Wherever the soldiers turn, they see dead bodies, sprawled between barracks, dumped in
ditches, stacked like logs by the camp’s crematorium. As for those behind the carnage, almost all career SS men are long gone, with only a ragtag gang of perhaps two hundred guards left behind.
1
Images of this nightmare soon flashed around the world and burned themselves into collective memories. To this day, concentration camps like Dachau are often seen through the lens of the liberators, with
the all-too-familiar pictures of trenches filled with bodies, mountains of corpses, and bone-thin survivors staring into cameras. Powerful as these pictures are, however, they do not reveal the full story of Dachau. For the camp had a much longer history and had only recently reached its last circle of hell, during the final throes of the Second World War.
2
Dachau, August 31, 1939
. The prisoners
rise before dawn, as they do every morning. None of them know that war will break out the next day, and they follow their usual schedule. After the frantic rush—jostling in the washrooms, devouring some bread, cleaning the barracks—they march in strict military formation to the roll call square. Nearly four thousand men with cropped or shaven heads stand to attention in striped uniforms, dreading
another day of forced labor. Except for a group of Czechs, virtually all the prisoners are German or Austrian, though their common language is often all they share; colored triangles on their uniforms identify them as political prisoners, asocials, criminals, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Jews. Behind the rows of prisoners stand rows of one-story prisoner barracks. Each of the thirty-four
purpose-built huts is around 110 yards long; the floors inside are gleaming and the bunks are meticulously made up. Escape is almost impossible: the rectangular prisoner compound, measuring 637 by 304 yards, is surrounded by a moat and concrete wall, watchtowers and machine guns, and barbed and electric wire. Beyond lies a huge SS zone with over 220 buildings, including storerooms, workshops, living
quarters, and even a swimming pool. Stationed here are some three thousand men from the Camp SS, a volunteer unit with its own ethos, which puts prisoners through well-rehearsed routines of abuse and violence. Deaths are few and far between, however, with no more than four fatalities in August 1939; as yet, there was no urgent need for the SS to build its own crematorium.
3
This was Camp SS terror
at its most controlled—a far cry from the lethal chaos of the final days in spring 1945, and also from Dachau’s ramshackle beginnings back in spring 1933.
Dachau, March 22, 1933
. The first day inside the camp is drawing to a close. It is a cold evening, less than two months after the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor set Germany on the road to the Nazi dictatorship. The new prisoners
(still in their own clothes) are having bread, sausage, and tea inside the former office of a dilapidated munitions plant. This building had been hastily converted in recent days into an improvised camp, cordoned off from the rest of the deserted factory ground with its crumbling structures, broken concrete foundations, and derelict roads. In all, there are no more than 100 or 120 political prisoners,
largely local Communists from Munich. After these men had arrived on open trucks a little earlier, the guards—some fifty-four men strong—announced that the captives would be held in “protective custody,” a term unfamiliar to many Germans. Whatever it was, it seemed bearable: the guards were not Nazi paramilitaries but amiable policemen, who chatted with the prisoners, handed out cigarettes, and
even slept in the same building. The next day, the prisoner Erwin Kahn wrote a long letter to his wife to say that all was well in Dachau. The food was good, as was the treatment, though he was getting restless waiting for his release. “I am just curious how long this whole business will last.” A few weeks later, Kahn was dead, shot by SS men after they took over the prisoner compound. He was among
the first of almost forty thousand Dachau prisoners to perish between spring 1933 and spring 1945.
4
* * *
Three days in Dachau, three different worlds. In a span of only twelve years, the camp changed time and again. Inmates, guards, conditions—almost everything seemed to alter. Even the site itself was transformed; after the old factory buildings were demolished and replaced by purpose-built
barracks in the late 1930s, a veteran prisoner from spring 1933 would not have recognized the camp.
5
So why did Dachau transform from its benign beginnings in March 1933 to the SS order of terror, and on to the catastrophe of the Second World War? What did this mean for the prisoners inside? What drove the perpetrators? And what did the population outside know about the camp? These questions go
to the heart of the Nazi dictatorship, and they should be asked not just about Dachau, but about the concentration camp system as a whole.
6
Dachau was the first of many SS concentration camps. Established inside Germany in the early years of Hitler’s rule, these camps soon spread, during the Nazi conquest of Europe from the late 1930s, to Austria, Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands,
Belgium, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and even the small British Channel Island of Alderney. In all, the SS set up twenty-seven main camps and over 1,100 attached satellite camps over the course of the Third Reich, though numbers fluctuated greatly, as old camps closed down and new ones opened; only Dachau lasted for the entire Nazi period.
7
The concentration camps embodied the spirit of Nazism
like no other institution in the Third Reich.
8
They formed a distinct system of domination, with its own organization, rules, and staff, and even its own acronym: in official documents and common parlance, they were often referred to as KL (from the German
Konzentrationslager
).
9
Guided by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s main henchman, the KL came to reflect the burning obsessions of the Nazi
leadership, such as the creation of a uniform national community through the removal of political, social, and racial outsiders; the sacrifice of the individual on the altar of racial hygiene and murderous science; the harnessing of forced labor for the glory of the fatherland; the mastery over Europe, enslaving foreign nations, and colonizing living space; the deliverance of Germany from its worst
enemies through mass extermination; and finally, the determination to go down in flames rather than surrender. Over time, all these obsessions shaped the KL system, and led to mass detention, deprivation, and death inside.
We can estimate that 2.3 million men, women, and children were dragged to SS concentration camps between 1933 and 1945; most of them, over 1.7 million, lost their lives. Almost
one million of the dead were Jews murdered in Auschwitz, the only KL to play a central role in what the Nazis called the Final Solution—the systematic extermination of European Jewry during the Second World War, now commonly known as the Holocaust. From 1942, when the SS started to dispatch deportation trains from across the continent, KL Auschwitz operated as an unusual hybrid of labor and death
camp. Some two hundred thousand Jews were selected on arrival for slave labor with the other regular prisoners. The remainder—an estimated 870,000 Jewish men, women, and children—went directly to their deaths in the gas chambers, without ever being registered as inmates of the camp.
10
Despite its unique role, Auschwitz remained a concentration camp and continued to share many features with the
other camps, most of which—KL like Ellrich, Kaufering, Klooga, Redl-Zipf, and many more—have long since been forgotten. Together, they occupied a unique space in the Third Reich. They were sites of lawless terror, where some of the most radical features of Nazi rule were born and refined.
