KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (110 page)

At the other end of the scale stood mass releases. When it came to the evacuation of Nazi prisons, the Reich Ministry of Justice decided to
free large numbers of inmates regarded as harmless.
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But such a measure was unacceptable to Himmler and his officers. Mass releases would have destroyed the founding myth of the KL as the bulwark against Germany’s most evil enemies. Ultimately, the RSHA only agreed to rather low-level releases, freeing several thousand political prisoners.
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A few thousand more German inmates were pressed into
ragtag military formations, but despite the hopes of Nazi grandees like Joseph Goebbels, these reluctant, ill-equipped soldiers made no discernible contribution to the defense of the fatherland.
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Yet another option was to abandon camps after selected prisoners had been moved out, leaving the great majority behind. There was some support for such an approach within the WVHA. After all, orderly
mass evacuations were out of the question by spring 1945; the transport system was in meltdown and the last camps were bursting.
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Himmler briefly toyed with this idea, too, and when it came to the final evacuation of the Buchenwald main camp, he ordered that the remaining inmates should be left to the Allies.
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But he quickly changed his mind. On April 6, 1945, Commandant Pister received Himmler’s
new order to abandon the camp with immediate effect. Buchenwald had to be cleared to a very large extent, Himmler demanded, by taking the prisoners to Flossenbürg.
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In the end, evacuation remained the SS default mode.
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During April 1945, the Camp SS forced hundreds of thousands of prisoners onto transports, as it moved to abandon eight main camps and well over 250 satellite camps. Some SS
officials yielded to pressure from local industry and municipal authorities, who wanted the SS to take away slave laborers before the Allies arrived, to wash their own hands of any association with KL crimes.
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Moreover, the SS principals saw good reasons for holding on to their inmates.
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Himmler himself still regarded prisoners—especially Jews—as pawns in his gambit for a separate peace.
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And the WVHA leaders still saw the KL as sites for vital armaments production. Refusing to accept the inevitable, Pohl and his managers worked frantically to keep the last factories running, while the relentless Hans Kammler hoped to make new miracle weapons; after the Dora underground complex was abandoned, Kammler wanted to produce antiaircraft missiles in another tunnel system, by taking blueprints,
machines, and prisoners to Ebensee.
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From the perspective of fanatics like Kammler, the idea of leaving able-bodied slaves behind in abandoned camps must have seemed like sabotage.

Most important, perhaps, SS leaders believed that they had to protect the German public. They remembered the scare stories of the 1918 revolution, when freed prison inmates were (wrongly) accused of terrible crimes.
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Fears of a recurrence appeared to come true after the evacuation of Buchenwald. Although the Camp SS had managed to force some twenty-eight thousand prisoners out of the main camp at the last moment, following Himmler’s revised orders, another twenty-one thousand were still left inside when U.S. troops arrived. Their liberation came as a great surprise to the German civilian authorities—the
Weimar police president called the camp in the late afternoon of April 11 to speak to Commandant Pister, only to be informed by a gleeful inmate that Pister was no longer available—and the region was soon awash with reports of prisoners pillaging and raping the helpless population. These stories were largely baseless; years of pent-up fears among locals distorted minor incidents into atrocities.
But there was no stopping the rumors, which even reached the Führerbunker in Berlin. Hitler was livid, and is said to have instructed Himmler that all KL prisoners who could march had to be forced out during evacuations.
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Himmler was spurred into action. Around April 15, 1945, he held a meeting with Camp SS officers, receiving Richard Glücks and other senior figures on his special train. Pointing
to the alleged atrocities in Weimar, he evidently ordered the complete evacuation of the remaining KL.
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Just a few days later, around April 18, 1945, Himmler reiterated his hard line in a telex to Flossenbürg, brushing aside any suggestion of leaving inmates to the Allies: “There is no question of handing over the camp. No prisoners [must] fall alive into enemy hands. The prisoners in Weimar-Buchenwald
abused the population in the cruelest way.”
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Similar instructions appear to have reached other main camps at the time.
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Himmler’s uncompromising stance was hardened, no doubt, by recent accounts of Camp SS crimes in the foreign media. There had been earlier exposés, after the Allies reached sites like Majdanek, Natzweiler, and Auschwitz, including the first films shot in abandoned camps,
but the echo abroad had still been muted.
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Not so in April 1945, as graphic images from recently liberated camps flashed around the globe. The media attention initially centered on Buchenwald, the first SS camp liberated in spring 1945 with large numbers of prisoners still inside.
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Himmler was furious about these reports, which made a mockery of his ongoing efforts to paint himself as a humanitarian.
During his meeting with the representatives of the World Jewish Congress on April 20–21, 1945, he complained bitterly about the Buchenwald “horror stories” in the foreign media. In the future, Himmler threatened, he might not leave any more prisoners behind.
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This was not the final word, however, as the local Camp SS did not, or could not, implement Himmler’s order to the letter. Of all the
main camps abandoned during the last three weeks of the war, only Neuengamme was almost completely cleared. In Flossenbürg, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück, by contrast, the Camp SS left some invalids behind.
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The same happened in numerous satellite camps.
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So not all Camp SS men had understood Himmler’s instruction—insofar as it reached them—as an automatic order to march all mobile prisoners
out and kill the rest.
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In the last remaining camps, meanwhile, which persisted into the final days of the regime, the SS really had nowhere left to send all its prisoners. As a result, the Dachau main camp was only partially emptied, with U.S. troops liberating some thirty-two thousand inmates on April 29. And when SS officials fled Mauthausen, a few days later, they left some thirty-eight
thousand prisoners behind in the main camp and in Gusen.
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In the last satellite camps (over eighty), too, the SS staff left most prisoners inside as they slipped away in early May. Still, until the Camp SS ran out of options, it generally tried to implement a policy of total (or near-total) evacuations.

The most striking exception to the rule was Bergen-Belsen, the only main camp formally turned
over to the Allies. On April 11, 1945, Himmler authorized his representative, SS Standartenführer Kurt Becher, to leave the area around Bergen-Belsen to the British army. Perhaps Himmler wanted to make a grand gesture to the West, though he also had pragmatic reasons for abandoning the camp and its prisoners, since an evacuation would have run the risk of spreading typhus among the German population
and troops. Following the conclusion of a local armistice, British forces rolled up to the main camp entrance on the afternoon of April 15, 1945. They were greeted by Josef Kramer—the only SS commandant not to flee—who officially handed over the camp. British soldiers were shocked when they entered. Despite desperate SS efforts to clear up the site, more than thirteen thousand bodies were
strewn across the main compounds. Major Alexander Smith Allan recalled “a carpet of human bodies, mostly very emaciated, many of them unclothed, jumbled together.” During an uneasy period of transition, some SS men initially helped to administer the camp; they even shot at prisoners. But as the full scale of the crimes emerged, British officers disarmed and detained the remaining SS staff. “The first
person I arrested was Josef Kramer,” Sergeant Norman Turgel said after the war. “I was very proud of being a Jew who arrested one of the most notorious gangsters in Nazi Germany.”
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Abandoning the Camps

By spring 1945, the SS officials were experts in preparing for evacuations.
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Often, they began by closing the satellites nearest to the front line, moving prisoners back to the main camp or
to satellites designated as reception camps. Although the advance of the Allies frequently foiled these plans, and diverted prisoner transports elsewhere, some of the reception camps became vast sites. In the Neuengamme complex, the two camps Wöbbelin and Sandbostel took in almost fifteen thousand prisoners in April 1945; conditions inside were infernal and around four thousand inmates died before
liberation. “We could smell the Wöbbelin camp before we saw it,” the regional U.S. army commander later wrote.
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Another well-established SS routine was the eradication of incriminating evidence. Across the remaining camps, the officials destroyed documents, torture instruments, and other proof of SS crimes, including the gallows. The gas chambers in Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrück
were dismantled, too, while prisoner corpses were hastily buried or burned. The aim was to make everything “look decent” before the arrival of the Allies, as the Ravensbrück commandant Fritz Suhren told inmates. In the Neuengamme main camp, the SS even forced prisoners to clean the barrack floors and windows, and paint some of the walls, expecting a coat of whitewash to cover years of barbarity.
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On the eve of the final evacuation, local Camp SS officials then decided the destiny of the remaining invalids. Many weakened inmates had perished over the preceding weeks and months. But the catastrophic conditions always created more
Muselmänner
, and their fate hung in the balance to the end. Individual Camp SS officials chose very different paths, just as their colleagues had done during earlier
evacuations. Some forced the invalids to leave, providing that transport was available.
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Elsewhere, SS men left the sick behind as the camp was cleared. And there were also some final massacres, following Himmler’s maxim that no prisoners should fall into Allied hands.

The treatment of invalids was only one of the dilemmas facing the local Camp SS. As they realized that camps like Buchenwald
and Dachau could only be partially emptied, SS officials had to decide which prisoners to take with them. In Dachau, they began by assembling Jews, and later added Germans and Soviets. In total, 8,646 inmates left on April 26, 1945; almost half came from the Soviet Union, Jews made up more than a third, and Germans the rest.
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In Buchenwald, the SS started with Jews, as well, and then added others,
among them Polish, Soviet, Czech, French, Belgian, and German inmates; more than half of the twenty-eight thousand prisoners who departed came from the “little camp.”
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Clearly, SS officials did not proceed at random during their selections for death transports. They targeted specific prisoners, especially those seen as high value or particularly dangerous, with Jewish “hostages” falling into
both categories.
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Prisoners did anything to avoid the final death transports. Having dreamed for so long about leaving the camps, they were now desperate to stay until the Allies arrived. During the partial evacuation of Buchenwald and Dachau, some prisoners tried to obstruct and delay the SS. But most defiance was easily broken. “With a handful of SS men one can force prisoners to do anything
deemed necessary,” one Buchenwald inmate wrote despondently on April 9, 1945.
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The mastery of the SS often ended at the camp gates, however. While it was still powerful enough to force prisoners out, it was unable to keep its transports on track. With the German transport system torn apart, trains constantly stopped or changed direction. Journeys that should have lasted a day took weeks, and
the longer they lasted, the more prisoners died. When the remnant of a train that had left Buchenwald on April 7, 1945, with around five thousand prisoners on board reached Dachau some three weeks later, it was packed with more than two thousand dead (these were the corpses U.S. soldiers found as they first entered the camp on April 29). Elsewhere, SS guards pushed survivors out of trains that had
got stuck in the middle of nowhere, and continued on foot. But with many roads no longer passable or cut off, treks often split or got lost. Prisoners felt as though they walked in circles, always escaping from the nearest Allied troops.
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On the road, the SS transport leaders could expect no more guidance from their superiors. The communications network was collapsing, making contact with WVHA
headquarters largely impossible. Soon, the WVHA disappeared altogether. Oswald Pohl left his office in Berlin in mid-April, shortly before the German capital was surrounded, and so did most of his men, including those in Office Group D; the last Camp SS managers, including Richard Glücks, fled from Oranienburg on April 20–21, 1945. After SS security guards locked the doors for a last time, the
T-Building, the nerve center of the KL system since summer 1938, stood empty.
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And just as Germany was divided in late April, so, too, was the Camp SS. WVHA managers fleeing from Berlin split into two groups, one heading north, the other south, and quickly lost touch with each other.
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With few exceptions, the final death transports were also supposed to move north or south, as the SS tried
to hold on to its last prisoners.
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Initially, most transports headed for the remaining main camps. Likewise, Camp SS managers assembled in KL that were still operational. In the north, the rump of WVHA Office Group D set up a temporary base at Ravensbrück. Oswald Pohl, meanwhile, moved south (apparently on Himmler’s orders) and settled in his quarters on the Dachau plantation. Here he was joined
by several other WVHA officers, including a few members of Office Group D and their families, as well as two former commandants, Richard Baer (Dora) and Hermann Pister (Buchenwald), and their staff. Just days before Dachau was liberated, Pohl presided over a last lavish supper for his men. Accustomed to an opulent life, he wanted to go out in style.
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