KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (2 page)

Precedents and Perspectives

In April 1941, German audiences flocked to cinemas to watch a star-studded feature
film, purportedly based on a true story and released with much fanfare by the Nazi authorities. The climax of the movie was set against an unusual background—a concentration camp. There was to be no happy end for the starved and disease-ridden inmates, all of them innocent victims of a murderous regime: a brave prisoner is hanged, his wife shot, and others massacred by their vicious captors,
leaving only graves behind. These chilling scenes bore an uncanny likeness to life in SS concentration camps at the time (there was even a special screening for guards in Auschwitz). But this was not a drama about the SS camps. The film was set decades earlier, during the South African War, and the villains were British imperialists.
Ohm Krüger
, as the film was called, was a powerful piece of
German propaganda during the war with Britain, and mirrored a public speech made a few months earlier by Adolf Hitler: “Concentration camps were not invented in Germany,” he had declared. “It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations.”
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This was a familiar refrain. Hitler himself had made the same point before, telling the German
people that his regime had merely copied the concentration camps from the English (though not their abuses).
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Nazi propaganda never tired of foreign camps. During the early years of the regime, speeches and articles routinely harked back to the British camps of the South African War, which had caused much indignation across Europe, and also pointed at present-day camps in countries like Austria,
said to be scenes of great suffering for domestic Nazi activists. The real meaning behind this propaganda—that the SS camps were not exceptional—could hardly be missed, but just to make sure that everyone got the message, SS leader Heinrich Himmler spelled it out during a speech on German radio in 1939. Concentration camps were a “time-honored institution” abroad, he announced, adding that the
German version was considerably more moderate than foreign ones.
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Such attempts to relativize the SS camps had little success, at least outside Germany. Still, there was a grain of truth in the crude Nazi propaganda. “The Camp” as a place of detention really was a wider international phenomenon. In the decades before the Nazi seizure of power, camps for the mass confinement of political and
other suspects—outside regular prisons and criminal law—had sprung up in Europe and beyond, usually during times of political upheaval or war, and such camps continued to flourish after the demise of the Third Reich, leading some observers to describe the entire epoch as an Age of Camps.
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The first of these sites appeared during colonial wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
as brutal military responses to guerrilla warfare. Colonial powers aimed to defeat local insurgents through the mass internment of civilian noncombatants in villages, towns, or camps, a tactic used by the Spanish in Cuba, the United States in the Philippines, and the British in South Africa (from where the term “concentration camp” gained wider circulation). The colonial authorities’ indifference
and ineptitude caused mass hunger, illness, and death among those inside such internment sites. However, these were not prototypes of the later SS camps, differing greatly in terms of their function, design, and operation.
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The same is true for camps in German Southwest Africa (now Namibia), run by the colonial authorities between 1904 and 1908 during a ferocious war against the indigenous population.
Many thousands of Herero and Nama were imprisoned in what were sometimes called concentration camps, and around half of them are said to have died due to the neglect and contempt of their German captors. These camps diverged from other colonial camps, as they were propelled less by military strategy than a desire for punishment and forced labor. But they did not provide a “rough template”
for the SS camps, either, as has been claimed, and any attempts to draw direct lines to Dachau or Auschwitz are unconvincing.
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The era of the camps really began with the First World War, which brought them from faraway colonies into the European heartlands. In addition to POW camps holding millions of soldiers, many of the belligerent nations set up forced labor camps, refugee camps, and civilian
internment camps, driven by doctrines of total mobilization, radical nationalism, and social hygiene. Such camps were easy to establish and guard, thanks to recent innovations like machine guns, cheap barbed wire, and mass-produced portable barracks. Conditions were worst across central and eastern Europe, where prisoners often endured systematic forced labor, violence, and neglect, and several
hundreds of thousands died. By the end of the First World War, Europe was littered with camps, and their memory lingered long after they had been dissolved. In 1927, for example, a German parliamentary commission still angrily denounced wartime abuses of German prisoners in French and British “concentration camps.”
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Many more camps emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, as much of Europe turned away
from democracy. Totalitarian regimes, with their Manichean division of the world into friend and foe, became the strongest champions of camps as weapons to permanently isolate and terrorize alleged enemies. By birth, the KL belonged to this breed of camp and shared some of its generic features. There were even a few direct links. The camp system in Franco’s Spain, for example, which held hundreds
of thousands of prisoners during and after the civil war, apparently drew some inspiration from the Nazi precedent.
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Probably the closest foreign relative of SS concentration camps could be found in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
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Building on the experiences with mass detention during the First World War, the Bolsheviks had used camps (sometimes labeled as concentration camps) ever since the
revolution. By the 1930s, they presided over a vast system of detention—known as the Gulag—which encompassed labor camps, colonies, prisons, and more. The corrective labor camps of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) alone held some 1.5 million prisoners by early January 1941, many times more than even the SS camp system. Like the KL complex, the Soviet one was driven by destructive
utopianism, aiming to create a perfect society by eliminating all enemies, and its camps followed a somewhat similar trajectory: from haphazard sites of terror to a huge network of centrally directed camps, from the detention of political suspects to the imprisonment of other social and ethnic outsiders, from an early emphasis on rehabilitation to often deadly forced labor.
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In view of these
parallels, and the prior emergence of the Soviet system, some scholars have suggested that the Nazis simply seized the idea of the concentration camp from the Soviets—a misleading claim, though one that is almost as old as the SS camps themselves.
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There are two specific problems. First, there were profound differences between both camp systems. Although the Soviet camps were initially more deadly,
for example, the KL later took a more radical turn and developed along far more lethal lines, culminating in the Auschwitz extermination complex, which had no equal in the USSR or anywhere else. NKVD prisoners were more likely to be released than to die, whereas the opposite was true for prisoners in the wartime SS concentration camps. In all, some ninety percent of inmates survived the Gulag;
in the KL, the figure among registered prisoners was probably less than half. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt put it in her pioneering study of totalitarianism, the Soviet camps were purgatory, the Nazi ones pure hell.
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Second, there is little evidence of the Nazis copying the Soviets. To be sure, the SS kept an eye on Soviet repression in the Gulag, especially after the German invasion of summer
1941: Nazi leaders considered taking over “concentration camps of the Russians,” as they put it, and sent a summary about the organization and conditions in Soviet “concentration camps” to their own KL commandants.
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More generally, the violence of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, both real and imagined, served as a permanent reference point during the Third Reich. In Dachau, SS officials told
the first SS guards in 1933 to act as brutally as the Cheka (security organization) had done in the USSR. Years later in Auschwitz, SS men referred to one of their cruelest torture instruments as the “Stalin Swing.”
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But a general interest in Soviet terror should not be mistaken for influence. The Nazi regime was not inspired by the Gulag in any major way and it is hard to imagine that the history
of the SS concentration camps would have been substantially different had the Gulag never existed. The KL were largely made in Germany, just as the Gulag was primarily the product of Soviet rule. There were similarities, of course, but they were largely outweighed by differences; each camp system had its own form and function, shaped by specific national practices, purposes, and precedents.
A study of international comparisons and connections can still provide useful perspectives, but such an analysis lies beyond the scope of this book; what follows is the story of the SS concentration camps, with occasional glances beyond Nazi-controlled territory.

History and Memory

“
In the future, I believe, when the word concentration camp is used, one will think of Hitler’s Germany, and only
of Hitler’s Germany.” Thus wrote Victor Klemperer in his diary in autumn 1933, just a few months after the first prisoners had arrived in Dachau and long before the SS camps descended into mass murder.
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Klemperer, a liberal German-Jewish professor of philology in Dresden, was one of the shrewdest observers of the Nazi dictatorship, and his prediction proved prescient. Nowadays the KL really are
synonymous with “concentration camps.” What is more, these camps have become symbols of the Third Reich as a whole, occupying an exalted place in history’s hall of infamy. They have appeared almost everywhere in recent years, in blockbuster movies and documentaries, bestselling novels and comics, memoirs and scholarly tomes, plays and artworks; google “Auschwitz” and you get well over seven million
hits.
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The urge to understand the concentration camps began early. They took center stage in the immediate postwar period, starting with the Allied media offensive in April and May 1945. The Soviet press had made little of the liberation of Auschwitz a few months before—one reason why the camp initially remained peripheral in popular discourse—so it was not until the liberation of Dachau, Buchenwald,
and Bergen-Belsen by the western Allies that the KL made it onto the front pages in Britain, the United States, and beyond; one Australian news report described Germany in April 1945 as “the concentration camp country.” There were radio broadcasts, newsreels, magazine spreads, pamphlets, exhibitions, and speeches. And although they lacked historical perspective, these accounts did convey
the scale of the horrors unveiled inside; in a May 1945 survey, ordinary Americans guessed that around one million concentration camp prisoners had been killed.

Of course, these media revelations should not have come as a complete shock. Reports about atrocities in the KL had appeared abroad since the early days of the Nazi regime—sometimes written in exile by former prisoners or relatives of
murdered inmates—and the Allies had received vital intelligence during the war. But the reality turned out to be far worse than almost anyone expected. As if to make up for this failure of the imagination, Allied leaders encouraged journalists, soldiers, and politicians to inspect liberated camps. For them, the camps proved the absolute righteousness of the war. “Dachau gives answer to why we fought,”
declared one U.S. army newssheet in May 1945, echoing the sentiments of General Eisenhower. In addition, the Allies used the camps to confront the German population with its complicity, inaugurating a reeducation campaign that continued over the coming months, reinforced by early trials of SS perpetrators.
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At the same time, survivors themselves helped to put the KL in the public eye. They were
not stunned into collective silence, as has often been said.
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On the contrary, a loud, polyphonic chorus rose up after liberation. Throughout their suffering, prisoners had dreamed about bearing witness. Some had even kept secret diaries. One of them, the German political prisoner Edgar Kupfer, was probably the most diligent chronicler of Dachau. Taking advantage of his sheltered office job on
the camp grounds and his reputation among fellow inmates as a loner, he secretly wrote more than 1,800 pages, starting in late 1942. Prior to his detention in 1940 for critical comments about the Nazi regime, the nonconformist Kupfer had worked as a tour guide, and he envisaged his book as a grand tour of Dachau. He knew that the SS would likely murder him if they discovered his secret, but somehow
he survived and so did his notes; barely recovered, he typed up his manuscript in summer 1945, ready for publication.
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Other liberated men, women, and children were yearning to tell their story, too, now that they were free to speak. Some started straight away, still inside the camps; even the sick would grab the sleeves of passing Allied medical staff to get their attention. Survivors quickly
coordinated their efforts. They had to work together to alert “world public opinion,” a former prisoner told fellow survivors in Mauthausen on May 7, 1945. Within days of liberation, survivors everywhere had started to collaborate on joint reports.
30
Thousands more accounts followed soon after former prisoners left the camps. Jewish survivors, for example, testified before historical commissions
dedicated to commemoration and research, culminating in the first ever international conference of Holocaust survivors in Paris in 1947, attended by delegates from thirteen countries. Survivor testimonies were also encouraged by occupation forces, foreign governments, and NGOs, to help punish the perpetrators and preserve the memory of the camps.
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Some of these accounts later appeared in journals
and pamphlets.
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Other survivors wrote directly for publication. Among them was the young Italian Jew Primo Levi, who had endured almost a year in Auschwitz. “Each of us survivors,” he later recalled, “as soon as we returned home, transformed himself into a tireless narrator, imperious and maniacal.” Writing almost everywhere, day and night, Levi completed his book
If This Is a Man
in just a few
months; it appeared in Italy in 1947.
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