KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (109 page)

Secret negotiations about prisoner releases intensified in early 1945. Although Himmler remained cautious, his search for an exit strategy made him seek closer contacts
abroad. This coincided with growing efforts by foreign governments (such as Sweden and France) and organizations (such as the World Jewish Congress) to save prisoners, animated by reports about mass deaths in the KL. The rescue efforts were led by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), headed by the Swiss diplomat Carl J. Burckhardt, and by the Swedish Red Cross, represented
by its vice president, Count Folke Bernadotte. There was a flurry of letters and meetings between January and April 1945, occasionally involving Himmler’s shady masseur Felix Kersten as go-between.
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The foreign envoys met with a rogues’ gallery of the Third Reich, including the new RSHA boss Ernst Kaltenbrunner and his Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, Camp SS managers like Rudolf Höss and Enno
Lolling, and senior SS officers like Standartenführer Kurt Becher (a key figure during the occupation of Hungary in 1944, he had been appointed by Himmler in April 1945 as Reich commissioner for the KL, primarily to negotiate with the Allies and the Red Cross).
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As for Himmler himself, he appealed for sympathy from the foreign officials, whining that he was a much misunderstood man. Despite
his terrible image, he insisted, he had always been a good shepherd, concerned only with prisoner well-being. To lend some credence to his story, he made a few tactical adjustments behind the scenes, ordering a temporary stop to corporal punishment and deadly human experiments.
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Himmler and his men constructed an alternative reality of the KL to impress their foreign guests. On the occasion
of a visit to Ravensbrück in April 1945, Commandant Suhren regaled an ICRC official with tales about the camps’ educational mission. Such claims were echoed by Himmler. Reports about mass death and murder were just “atrocity propaganda,” he assured his interlocutors. He also brushed aside concerns about conditions in Bergen-Belsen, claiming that a team of medical experts had everything under control.
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For all their contacts with the SS, the foreign rescuers initially had little to show. True, the ICRC continued its delivery of food parcels (especially for western European and Scandinavian prisoners), dropping off supplies directly at the camps.
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But the negotiators were frustrated by German refusals to allow proper inspections and complained about broken promises by WVHA managers.
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Above
all, there was almost no movement on the critical issue of prisoner releases. Only in exceptional cases, Himmler decided in February 1945, could sick and elderly inmates from Denmark and Norway be handed over; between January and March, the Danish authorities received just some 140 freed prisoners.
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Himmler’s most significant concession during this period concerned the move of Scandinavian
prisoners to a special compound in Neuengamme. From mid-March 1945, buses and trucks of the Swedish Red Cross carried inmates from other KL to this camp. One of them was Odd Nansen. As he walked out of Sachsenhausen with fellow Norwegian prisoners, “it was as though we sprouted wings and flew out, to where the row of white buses stood.” By the end of March, Nansen and more than 4,800 other Scandinavians
enjoyed decent food, adequate conditions, and medical care in Neuengamme. Their joy meant more misery for others. To make room for the incoming prisoners, the SS had thrown inmates out of a so-called recuperation block. Some died within hours. More than two thousand others were taken away on buses—the very same white buses that had brought the Scandinavian prisoners—after the Swedish Red Cross
reluctantly agreed to help transport these exhausted inmates to satellite camps (where many of them would perish). Some of the Scandinavian prisoners were deeply troubled by these developments. He was feeling a “gnawing sense of undeserving and unfairness,” Odd Nansen wrote on March 31, 1945, “in our being preferred to other people who are worse off, and who are going under and dying while we
live in plenty.”
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Only in April 1945, with much of Germany already occupied, did the SS finally surrender a more substantial number of its prisoners. Desperate for an agreement with the Allies, Himmler put his hopes in the well-connected Count Bernadotte, a nephew of the Swedish king. They met three times that month, the last time on the night of April 23–24, when Himmler made his offer to
capitulate on the Western Front (Bernadotte was the emissary who relayed it to the Allies). To help his cause, Himmler let more KL prisoners go. At first, the main beneficiaries were Scandinavians: the Danish and Swedish Red Cross spirited away almost eight thousand prisoners, including those held in Neuengamme. Odd Nansen completed his last diary entry in Germany on April 20, 1945, on “the bus to
freedom”; as the prisoners crossed the border to Denmark, they were greeted by thousands lining the streets, waving flags and handing out flowers, bread, and beer. Himmler soon agreed to free further prisoners. The man responsible for the extermination of countless women and children now extended his “charity” to a few female prisoners, among them pregnant and seriously ill women, as well as mothers
with children. In the final two weeks of war, the Danish and Swedish Red Cross picked up around 9,500 women, largely from Ravensbrück. Another two thousand or more were put onto ICRC trucks and taken to Switzerland. Most of the saved women came from Poland, others from France, Belgium, and elsewhere. “The camp behind us is getting smaller and smaller,” the French prisoner Marijo Chombart de Lauwe
wrote about her rescue from Mauthausen on April 22, 1945, “and I sit here with empty eyes, silent and dazed.” It took time before they understood that they really were free.
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But releases remained the exception. The rescue of some twenty thousand men, women, and children in April and early May 1945 coincided with the suffering of hundreds of thousands more still trapped inside the KL system.
When he made his tactical concessions, Himmler was determined to hold on to the great bulk of prisoners as bargaining chips for the elusive deal with the Allies—even if this meant the continuation of deadly KL evacuations.
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This strategy was most transparent in his approach to Jewish prisoners, whose fate was raised repeatedly during discussions with the Red Cross. Himmler had thought for some
time that improving the conditions for Jews might boost his stock in the West.
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Now he took some symbolic steps. Around March 13, 1945, just before Pohl set off on his hectic tour of the last KL, Himmler apparently instructed him to tell commandants that the killing of Jews should cease. Himmler made similar promises to his foreign negotiation partners and talked to camp commandants directly
about improving the treatment of Jews.
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But his disingenuous intervention came far too late to make any difference. In Mauthausen, for example, Jewish prisoners were still more likely to die than any other group, despite sudden orders to give preferential treatment to sick Jews.
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Eager to buy credit in the West, Himmler was willing to let at least some more Jewish prisoners go. Rewriting
his own genocidal past, he claimed to have always supported their orderly emigration from Germany. To prove his point, he agreed to release one thousand Jewish women from Ravensbrück to the Swedish Red Cross with immediate effect, following an extraordinary meeting on the night of April 20–21, 1945, with Norbert Masur, a representative of the World Jewish Congress who had come to Germany from Sweden,
his safe conduct guaranteed by the SS.
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Himmler never went beyond such tactical adjustments, however.
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In general, he continued to regard Jewish prisoners as hostages for a deal with the West. “Look after these Jews and treat them well,” Himmler is said to have told the Mauthausen commandant Ziereis in late March 1945, “that is my best capital.”
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Himmler’s hostage strategy also determined
the fate of the remaining “exchange Jews” in Bergen-Belsen. Between April 7 and 10, 1945, just days before British troops reached the camp, the RSHA dispatched three trains with 6,700 Jews toward Theresienstadt, the last remaining ghetto, now redesignated as another exchange camp. Only one train reached its destination, after an odyssey of almost two weeks. The other two drifted for days through
war-torn Germany like ghost trains, until they were liberated by the Allies; by then, several hundred prisoners on board were dead.
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THE FINAL WEEKS

By early April 1945 the KL system was in turmoil, caught up in the general maelstrom of doom and defeat. Himmler’s kingdom of terror had shrunk fast since the start of the year, as the Allies penetrated deep into German territory; in all, the
Camp SS lost some 230 satellite camps in the first three months of 1945.
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Meanwhile, chaos and death had spread through the remaining camps. Even their much-vaunted war production had ground to a virtual standstill because of shortages and air raids, which constantly sent SS and prisoners running for cover. “The siren has diarrhea,” a friend of Ágnes Rózsa joked in Nuremberg on February 19,
1945, only days before their camp was hit—one of several satellites destroyed by Allied bombs in the final months of war, causing yet more deaths.
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In all, perhaps one hundred and fifty thousand KL prisoners perished between January and March 1945, during the evacuations and inside the remaining camps, resulting in the first sharp fall in inmate numbers for many years.
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But it would be a
mistake to think that the Camp SS was finished. Although its grip was slipping fast, it had not yet lost complete control. And the size of its terror apparatus was still formidable. At the beginning of April 1945, the SS operated ten main concentration camps and almost four hundred satellites.
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Around thirty to thirty-five thousand SS officials served in these remaining camps.
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And although
the prisoner population had plummeted, the KL still held an estimated five hundred and fifty thousand inmates, far more than one year earlier.
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These men, women, and children came from all across Europe, and most of them were held in satellite camps. Germans were in a smaller minority than ever, making up less than ten percent of the prisoner population.
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By contrast, Jewish prisoners had
grown into one of the largest groups. Their numbers in concentration camps within the Third Reich’s prewar borders had increased rapidly in recent months, first with the transports of slave laborers to satellites, and then with the evacuations from the east. By early spring 1945, Jews made up perhaps thirty percent of the KL population.
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Only in April and early May 1945 did the KL system finally
collapse. During a dramatic five weeks, the WVHA disbanded, and Allied forces reached the remaining satellites and the last main camps: Buchenwald and Dora (April 11), Bergen-Belsen (April 15), Sachsenhausen (April 22–23), Flossenbürg (April 23), Dachau (April 29), Ravensbrück (April 30), Neuengamme (May 2), Mauthausen-Gusen (May 5), and Stutthof (May 9).
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In well over one hundred camps, the
Allies found prisoners left by the SS, ranging from a handful of survivors in some satellites to fifty-five thousand in Bergen-Belsen. In total, an estimated two hundred and fifty thousand prisoners were liberated inside concentration camps during this period.
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Most camps, however, were empty when Allied troops arrived. The SS had evacuated the great majority of satellites and also reduced
the prisoner population in most main camps. In Neuengamme, virtually no inmates were left inside when British soldiers entered the vast compound.
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The deserted camps stood in sharp contrast to roads and trains outside, which were full of prisoners. Countless death transports crisscrossed the ever-shrinking Third Reich, often cut off from the remaining camps; tens of thousands of prisoners died
before Allied troops reached them.

Historians have offered conflicting assessments of these last death transports. Some depict the KL system as remarkably resilient, even at the end, with prisoner treks operating as small concentration camps on the move.
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Others argue that the transports should be viewed separately from the history of the KL, as a new stage of Nazi genocide.
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Ultimately,
neither position is fully persuasive. There was nothing stable about the KL system in spring 1945; seeing the treks as mobile camps ignores the manifest differences from life inside.
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At the same time, the death transports are still very much part of the camps’ history. The transports were dominated by Camp SS men, after all, who were already accustomed to murdering prisoners for escaping or
for losing their strength. As for the prisoners themselves, their desperate physical state was a product of the camps, while the behavior they had learned inside, and the connections they had made there, proved invaluable on the road. In the final analysis, the death transports accelerated long-standing trends in the KL system. Its structure became even more dynamic, with prisoners perpetually on
the move; perpetrators gained even more autonomy, killing with complete impunity; staff became even more diverse, as more men from outside were drafted in as guards; Kapos held even more sway, with some officially armed and co-opted as escorts; and terror became even more visible, with treks and trains moving all over Germany.
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“No Prisoners [Must] Fall Alive into Enemy Hands”

The mass evacuation
of the KL in spring 1945 was no foregone conclusion. Amid growing panic, SS leaders considered several alternatives and sent contradictory signals to the bewildered local officials.
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The most radical idea was a last bloodbath, condemning all prisoners to go down with the Third Reich. At a time when Hitler preached that it was better to reduce Germany to ruins than to leave anything to the enemy,
there was some loose talk among SS leaders and local officials of razing the camps, too, together with all those inside. But just as Hitler’s scorched-earth order was not implemented, the SS never came close to the total annihilation of all prisoners.
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