KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (107 page)

All the misery and despair ripped the fractious prisoner community further apart. Some camps descended into violent disorder. Starving prisoners ambushed inmates who carried food supplies to kitchens and barracks, only to be beaten back by others armed with clubs and sticks. Some did not stop short of murder, just for a bite
to eat. On April 17, 1945, a group of Ebensee prisoners killed a thirteen-year-old boy, who had just arrived from another Mauthausen satellite camp, and made off with the loaf of bread he had been holding.
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This boy was one of tens of thousands of KL prisoners who died soon after their transfer from another camp. After the horror of the trains and marches, the arrival at their destination had
come as a relief to some.
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But not for long. Gravely weakened, these newcomers largely found themselves without protection and connections, exposed to the full force of SS terror. This is what happened to many of those Jewish men who made the march from Lieberose to Sachsenhausen in February 1945. They had survived the “Jew-shooting” in their abandoned satellite camp and the ensuing death march,
often barefoot and frostbitten, only to perish in Sachsenhausen. Upon arrival, the SS conducted a mass selection and murdered some four hundred victims. Many more were left to freeze and starve in an isolated area of the camp. On February 12, 1945, Odd Nansen watched a group of them delving into garbage bins and fighting over the scraps. They were beaten back by German Kapos, but soon tried again,
their skeletal bodies smeared with blood.

When Nansen returned to his own Sachsenhausen barrack—tormented by his inability to help—he was greeted by a different picture. His fellow Norwegian prisoners still lived in relative comfort. They had enough food, thanks to the Red Cross parcels, as well as plenty of cigarettes, the unofficial camp currency. After their meals they settled down with a
novel, talked, or played games, “unaffected by the death and destruction” outside, as Nansen noted. Some Norwegians saw the death struggle of the Jews from Lieberose as evidence of their depravity. “Those aren’t human beings, they’re swine!” one of them said to Nansen. “I’ve starved myself, but I could never sink to eating sheer filth!”
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The prisoner community remained deeply unequal, as did
the inmates’ survival chances. What was garbage to the prominent few was nourishment to the destitute, and not just in Sachsenhausen; when a German Kapo in Ebensee threw up in January 1945, because he had eaten too much goulash, a starved Russian prisoner devoured his vomit.
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The vast inequities were summed up on March 21, 1945, by Nico Rost, then a Kapo in the Dachau infirmary, who collected
lists of prisoners who had died in the main camp. There had been no deaths among the kitchen staff, he noted, as they could help themselves to whatever they needed. Most German prisoners also survived, he added, because they held better posts and received more food. Likewise, there were few deaths in the barracks holding Czech prisoners and priests, who received food packages from outside. “But
everywhere else,” Rost wrote, “bodies—bodies—bodies.”
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Zones of Death

The deadliest spaces were special compounds for invalids in main camps and some satellites, where the SS left the doomed to die.
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The Camp SS could build on previous experience here: ever since conditions had worsened early in World War II, it had isolated invalids in special sites to hasten their death. From late 1944,
SS officials stepped up this policy of death through deprivation, as a local solution to illness and epidemics in their overcrowded camps, not least after the option of deporting prisoners to die in Auschwitz had fallen away.
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There were “shit blocks” for those depleted by diarrhea, lying in pools of urine and excrement. There were “death blocks” for typhus-ridden prisoners, sometimes surrounded
by barbed wire to stop them from fleeing to other parts of the camp. There were “convalescent blocks,” where gaunt prisoners were sprawled among indescribable filth. And there were the infirmaries, which were often little more than waiting rooms for the dying; still, desperate inmates begged for admission, some of them collapsing just outside the entrances.
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The largest zones of death were
former quarantine compounds in main camps, which had grown rapidly during 1944, with many thousands of new arrivals temporarily housed in tents. Initially, the SS had used these compounds as transit camps, sending most inmates elsewhere for slave labor. But over time, it left more invalids behind, and as the prisoner population grew and disease spread, these spaces acquired a new function, as huge
sites for isolating the sick and dying.

Among the worst such compounds was the “little camp” in Buchenwald, set up two years earlier in windowless horse stables separated from the main camp by barbed wire. By early April 1945, it held eighteen thousand prisoners. Many had only recently arrived from evacuated camps, in a state of shock and exhaustion. The misery of the adjoining main compound—vermin,
disease, and starvation—was magnified in the “little camp,” and between January and April 1945, around six thousand prisoners died inside. Among them was Shlomo Wiesel. His son, Elie, later said that Buchenwald, which had promised to be an improvement on Birkenau, turned out to be much the same: “At first, the little camp was almost worse for me than Auschwitz.”
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There were so many
Muselmänner
by the beginning of 1945 that the Camp SS designated entire satellite camps as collection sites; SS men sometimes called them “bite-the-dust camps.”
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In January 1945, for example, the Dora SS set up a satellite camp in the deserted garages of the Boelcke air force barracks on the edge of Nordhausen, not far from the main camp. There was no shortage of dying men and the new camp filled up fast;
in less than three months, around twelve thousand Dora prisoners were forced inside, many of them survivors of the Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen evacuations. The weakest ones—unable to walk, stand, or speak—were left to die in one of the two-story garages; the concrete floors inside were hosed down, once in a while, to wash away some of the blood and feces. Prisoners soon called the Boelcke camp a
“living crematorium,” and for good reason. In the weeks before U.S. troops reached the camp on April 11, up to one hundred men died every day; in all, more than three thousand perished. Another 2,250 dying prisoners were herded into boxcars, one day in early March 1945, and sent away, never to be seen again. Their destination was Bergen-Belsen, which had become the largest zone of death in the KL
system.
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Belsen

In the early months of 1945, veteran inmates of Bergen-Belsen watched in dismay as endless rows of cadaverous men, women, and children marched toward their compounds. Transport after transport brought more prisoners, whole armies of “wretched figures,” as Hanna Lévy-Hass, who had been held there since the previous summer (following her arrest as a resistance fighter in Montenegro),
wrote in her diary in February 1945. In just eight weeks, the camp more than doubled in size, from 18,465 prisoners on January 1, 1945, to 41,520 on March 1, and peaking at around 53,000 on April 15, the day British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen.
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And as the camp grew, so did chaos, disease, and death, with devastating speed.

Set up as a camp for “exchange Jews” selected for possible prisoner
swaps by the Nazi authorities, Bergen-Belsen had since taken on several new functions, putting it on the road to disaster. From spring 1944, as we have seen, the Camp SS used it as a holding camp for sick and dying men from other KL. Then, in summer 1944, it established a transit compound for thousands of women en route from occupied eastern Europe to German satellite camps. Around 2,500 of them
stayed behind in Bergen-Belsen. Among them were two young German Jews, fifteen-year-old Anne Frank and her older sister, Margot, who had been deported from Auschwitz in late October 1944, where they had arrived several weeks earlier on the last RSHA train to leave the Netherlands (after evading the Nazi authorities for two years in a hideout in Amsterdam, together with their parents and four others).
In Bergen-Belsen, the sisters were initially crammed into the tents of the transit compound, which offered no shelter against the cold and rain. After a storm blew several tents away on November 7, 1944, the Camp SS moved the women into barracks inside the “star camp.”
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By then, the situation of the so-called exchange Jews was sharply deteriorating, too. Although they were still held separately,
the SS started to treat them like the other KL inmates. “The regimen in the camp gets worse every day,” Hanna Lévy-Hass wrote in December 1944. “Have we not already reached the nadir of our suffering?”
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Much worse was to come, as mass transports in early 1945 completely overwhelmed the camp. While WVHA officials continued to use Bergen-Belsen as a destination for half-dead men from other KL,
they also turned it into a reception camp for evacuation transports, initially from eastern camps like Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen, and later from camps deep inside the Reich, too.
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On April 11, for example, a train came from the recently abandoned Dora satellite camp Woffleben. Around 150 prisoners had died during the weeklong journey (another 130 men escaped). Some 1,350 survivors were herded
into Bergen-Belsen. One of them was Émile Delaunois, whom we met earlier. Just before the evacuation of Woffleben he had vowed “to do anything to regain my freedom as soon as possible.” He did survive the last days in Bergen-Belsen, only to die shortly after liberation.
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The Bergen-Belsen SS hastily reassigned compounds and added new ones, including a subcamp on the grounds of nearby army barracks.
Even so, the site was hopelessly overcrowded. The composition of the prisoner population changed, too. Most of the new prisoners were female, turning Bergen-Belsen into the only wartime camp (apart from Ravensbrück and Stutthof) that held considerably more women than men. And it was no longer a camp almost exclusively for Jews. Although Jews were still by far the largest group—accounting
for around half the inmates in mid-April 1945—they were joined by prisoners from other backgrounds, among them many political prisoners from Poland and the Soviet Union.
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“What takes place here is the most horrendous in world history,” the noted Dutch lawyer and Zionist leader Abel Herzberg wrote in his diary on March 17, 1945, more than a year after his arrival as an “exchange Jew.”
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Even
before new prisoners glimpsed the horror that awaited them in Bergen-Belsen, they could smell it. A stench of decay and death—sickeningly familiar to prisoners from camps like Auschwitz—enveloped the compounds during the final weeks. “We are all full of lice, everything is dirty, filthy, and full of crap,” sixteen-year-old Arieh Koretz, another “exchange Jew,” noted in his diary on February 8, 1945.
Thousands of inmates soiled themselves, and the whole camp, a prisoner doctor later said, came to resemble one huge latrine. At night, inmates faced more agony, with cold winds sweeping through broken roofs, windows, and doors. The barracks were often bare—no lights, straw sacks, covers, stoves, chairs—except for the mass of prisoners, dead and alive.
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Disease was raging, too, with a devastating
typhus epidemic gripping the camp. The greatest killer of all was hunger. “I have been working for five days now without bread,” the twenty-four-year-old Dutch Jew Louis Tas wrote on March 25, 1945. “Last night insane hunger and dreams of food,” he added the next day. There were
Muselmänner
everywhere, so emaciated that their bones made up more than half of their body weight.
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The prisoners’ hope of survival vanished fast. “I am ill again and have given up all hope of getting out of here,” Abel Herzberg wrote on March 7, 1945. “I am afraid of the pain, of the death-struggle.”
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Each morning, prisoners threw the bodies of those who had died the previous night out of
the barracks, though not before they had ripped clothes and valuables from the stiff bodies. The corpses were then flung on trucks or carts, which dumped the dead in different corners of the camp; toward the end, prisoners were just left lying wherever they had died.
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Never in the history of the KL did so many prisoners die as fast of disease and deprivation as in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945.
During this one month, when the camp held an average of around 45,500 prisoners, some 18,168 lost their lives.
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Among the dead were Anne and Margot Frank. During their last days, the two sisters, ravaged by typhus and dysentery, had been huddled under a blanket in one of the infirmaries. When a friend found them there, she pleaded with Anne to get up. But Anne, who had been looking after her
dying sister, just replied: “Here the two of us can lie on a bunk, we are together and have peace.”
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Camp SS leaders had not planned the Bergen-Belsen disaster. They expected weak prisoners to die, to be sure, but not at this rate.
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As the situation spiraled out of control, Commandant Josef Kramer sent a frank letter to the WVHA on March 1, 1945, warning that conditions were “untenable.”
Shortages of supplies and massive overcrowding were causing a “catastrophe.” Kramer demanded beds and blankets, as well as trucks to pick up food and equipment for delousing.
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But his appeal rang hollow. Kramer was at pains to present himself as a responsible official, not just to his SS superiors but to future Allied judges, as well.
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Previously, he had betrayed little of the urgency expressed
in his letter to the WVHA. In fact, as a veteran Camp SS officer and radical anti-Semite, he had brought more suffering to the camp after his arrival in early December 1944. And when the full tragedy unfolded, Kramer and his men mostly watched from the sidelines, not least to protect themselves from disease. During March 1945, the sight of SS officials became rare inside the Bergen-Belsen compounds.
“There are no more roll calls. Also no work,” Abel Herzberg wrote on April 1, 1945. “There is only death.”
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