KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (24 page)

Kapos

One of the secrets of the success of the KL, Heinrich Himmler told German generals in summer 1944, was the deployment of prisoners as
surrogate guards. This ingenious scheme for “holding down subhumans,” he added, had been pioneered by Theodor Eicke. A few select inmates, Himmler explained, forced others to work hard, keep clean, and make their beds. These prisoner supervisors were known, Himmler added, as “so-called Kapos.”
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Himmler was right to regard the Kapo, a word widely thought to derive from the Italian
capo
(head
or leader), as a central cog in the Camp SS machinery of terror. Indeed, it had proven so effective in the prewar KL—allowing a small gang of SS men to dominate large camps and driving a wedge between prisoners—that Nazi officials later introduced a similar mechanism of “divide and rule” in Jewish ghettos and slave labor camps.
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The origins of the Kapo system, however, were very different from
the airbrushed picture Himmler presented in 1944. To start with, there was nothing new about co-opting prisoners.
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In German prisons, inmates had long been appointed to menial positions as “trusties” (back in 1927, for example, Rudolf Höss became a clerk in the Brandenburg penitentiary, following his conviction for homicide). Since many KL inmates had previously spent time inside Nazi prisons,
they were already familiar with the idea of assuming influential posts. “We arrived from the penitentiary,” one Communist activist later described his arrival in Buchenwald, “and were used to a comrade serving as a trusty.”
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What distinguished the KL was not the deployment of prisoners as such, but the powers some Kapos gained.

Neither was Theodor Eicke the creator of the Kapo structure, as
Himmler claimed in his bid to depict the KL as products of intelligent SS design. In truth, such purpose and planning had often been lacking during the birth of the camps. In some early camps, it had been the prisoners themselves—well versed in the practice of political organization—who selected representatives for overseeing order and taking grievances to the authorities. Shortly after Wolfgang
Langhoff arrived in the protective custody wing in Düsseldorf prison in spring 1933, the inmates, mostly Communist workers, elected a young KPD functionary called Kurt as their leader. In other early camps, such appointments were initiated by the SS or SA, but it was still the prisoners who selected their own spokesmen. When Langhoff was transferred to Börgermoor in summer 1933, the deputy commandant
told the new arrivals to pick a block elder; following lengthy discussions, the prisoners elected the same man who had led them back in Düsseldorf, Kurt, who then climbed on a table and gave a brief speech, recorded in Langhoff’s memoirs. The most important thing, Kurt told the others, was “to demonstrate to the SS, by our impeccable order and discipline, that we are not subhumans”—inadvertently
summing up the appeal of the Kapo system for the captors.
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The Kapo system was firmly entrenched by the mid-1930s and continued to grow as the KL expanded. At the end of 1938, for example, when Buchenwald held around eleven thousand prisoners in all, there were over five hundred Kapos.
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Senior Kapos were now appointed by the SS—though the officers often listened to proposals by prominent
prisoners—and formed a parallel organizational structure to the SS.

Broadly speaking, Kapos fell into three functional groups. The first were the work supervisors, with larger labor details—sometimes holding hundreds of inmates—having several prisoner foremen in addition to a chief Kapo. Such Kapos had various duties, like reporting delays and preventing escape. Above all, they had to be “good
slave driver[s],” as one survivor put it. SS expectations were summed up in an internal manual: “The Kapo is responsible for the strictest implementation of all orders and for all incidents in the labor detail.”
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Second, there were Kapos who supervised prisoner life inside the quarters. Each barrack (or block, as it was often called) was led by a block elder, supported by a few block service
inmates, room elders, and table elders. In the absence of SS guards, who only entered the barracks intermittently, the block elder held full authority. Each morning, he supervised the rigorous routine after reveille. Then he led his prisoners to the roll call square, where he reported the tally to the SS. After the others had left for work, he would inspect the barrack, to ensure—as SS regulations
demanded—that beds were made “impeccably” and no “work-shy prisoners” were hiding inside (only the block elder and his men were allowed into barracks during the day). Come evening, he controlled the distribution of food, reported missing prisoners, initiated new arrivals, and prepared for lights-out. Afterward, he was “responsible for quiet at night,” as the SS regulations stated.
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Finally,
more and more inmates served as Kapos in the camp administration. Prisoners had already been drafted as orderlies into infirmaries of some early camps, a practice that would become more widespread from the late 1930s.
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Kapos also worked in the prisoner kitchen, storeroom, and bunker, and as clerks in various SS offices. At the top of the hierarchy stood the camp elder (often with two deputies),
who supervised the other Kapos and reported to the SS, acting as the main conduit between oppressors and oppressed. Few prisoners were mightier than the camp elder. However, it was a dangerous post, and by no means all inmates aspired to it. The political prisoner Harry Naujoks, for instance, initially resisted attempts by others to install him in Sachsenhausen, until some of his Communist comrades—who
dominated Kapo positions in the prewar concentration camps—persuaded him to accept. His general strategy, Naujoks wrote in his memoirs, was to make Kapos indispensable by ensuring the smooth operation of roll calls and labor details, thereby keeping the SS at bay. But he knew that the SS wanted more, aiming to use Kapos as auxiliaries of terror. How individual Kapos reacted to these pressures
and how they used their “small room for maneuver,” as Naujoks called it, determined their standing among the rest of the inmates. Some became the scourges of prisoner lives; others, like Naujoks, won a reputation for decency.
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All Kapos gained a measure of influence over other prisoners, and some enjoyed great powers, issuing commands and hitting out.
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This led some inmates to speak of the
Kapo system as a form of “self-administration,” a term widely adopted in the historical literature.
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But the term is misleading, implying a level of autonomous decision-making absent in the KL.
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After all, Kapos had to serve, first and foremost, the wider interests of the SS; block elders reported to SS block leaders, medical orderlies to SS doctors, labor supervisors to SS commando leaders,
and so on. A Kapo who failed to fulfill SS expectations faced punishment and dismissal.
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Despite the privileges that came with being a Kapo, then, it was a precarious existence. Even Harry Naujoks, who was more adept at playing the SS than most, did not last. After he had spent three and a half years as Sachsenhausen camp elder, the SS one day threw him into the bunker, accusing him of a Communist
conspiracy, and then dispatched him to another camp.
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Inmate Groups

“The camps were a veritable circus, as far as colors, markings, and special designations are concerned,” the Buchenwald survivor Eugen Kogon wrote shortly after the war, ridiculing the SS obsession with emblems, acronyms, and badges.
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Triangles—which came in eight colors, with various additional markings—became the main
visual markers to differentiate the prisoner population. Of course, the classification by the camps’ political office was often erratic. Some Communists who had fought the Nazis were designated as asocials, while some Jews who had broken anti-Semitic laws were labeled as professional criminals.
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Nonetheless, Camp SS men relied on the triangles for initial guidance, and prisoners, too, used these
SS symbols to distinguish one another. The color of the triangle shaped each inmate’s identity, whether they liked it or not.

Until 1938, the majority of inmates were classified as political prisoners, mostly wearing red markings on their uniforms.
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In November 1936, for example, the authorities identified 3,694 of all 4,761 concentration camp inmates as political prisoners.
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Among them was a hard core of political activists, first and foremost Communists.
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Many were veterans of the early camps. Following their release in 1933–34, they had often rejoined the underground resistance and soon found themselves back in the KL.
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On Himmler’s
orders, issued in March 1936, such prisoners, held for a second time, faced extra punishment and were only considered for release after a minimum of three years (not three months, as in the case of other inmates).
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In Dachau, there were an estimated two hundred so-called second-time-rounders by early 1937, wearing special markings. Their barrack was fenced off from the rest of the compound,
effectively creating a camp inside the camp. For the first time, an entire group of inmates was isolated from the others, setting an inauspicious precedent. These second-time-rounders received no books, fewer letters, and less medical care, while facing the most exhausting work. One of the prisoners was the German-Jewish lawyer Ludwig Bendix, whose time in Dachau in 1937 was a far cry from his first
spell in protective custody back in 1933. Bendix, who was now weak and ill, experienced forced labor in Dachau as a martyrdom “which I feared I would not survive and which I could only bear by mobilizing all my strength.”
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Despite Himmler’s obsession with left-wing opponents, the overall proportion of underground activists among KL inmates decreased in the mid-1930s, reflecting both the gradual
demise of the resistance and the general shift to policing other forms of deviance. When it came to opposition against the regime, the police now cast its net wider than before. Grumbling and dissent probably accounted for some twenty percent of all protective custody cases in 1935–36; in some months, as many individuals were detained for jokes or verbal attacks as for Communist activities.
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It did not take much to be branded a dangerous enemy of the state. Magdalene Kassebaum, for example, endured two spells in Moringen, first for singing “The International,” then for burning a picture of Hitler.
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The police also detained some clergymen, part of the wider Nazi confrontation with Christian churches in the mid-1930s. Although the number of arrests remained very small—no more than
a few dozen Catholic and Protestant priests were held in the KL in 1935—they carried symbolic weight and caused some disquiet within German society.
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The clergymen, who had to wear the red markings of political prisoners, were frequently singled out for violent abuse. The Camp SS was militant in its anticlericalism, even more so than the general SS, and most men renounced the Church, goaded
by the fanatical Eicke, who summed up his views as follows: “Prayer books are things for women and for those who wear panties. We hate the stink of incense.”
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Eicke’s hatred erupted spectacularly in 1935, after the Berlin Cathedral chaplain Bernhard Lichtenberg had privately questioned the conditions in Esterwegen. Responding to the accusations in a note to the Gestapo, Eicke blasted the interference
of “Rome’s black agents,” who “leave their excrement on the altars,” complained about the stain of “poisonous state-eroding saliva” on his SS uniform, and called for Lichtenberg to be sent to Esterwegen himself.
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Many guards emulated Eicke when they encountered imprisoned priests. So brutal were the verbal and physical assaults that even the wives of some Camp SS men expressed sympathy for the
plight of clergymen.
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By far the largest group of religious prisoners in the mid-1930s was Jehovah’s Witnesses, who, having pledged their allegiance to God, resisted the total claim of Nazism. Their persecution had started early in the Third Reich and soon intensified, after they refused to serve in the new German conscript army, continued to proselytize after their religious association was
banned, and distributed critical leaflets. The regime tried to stamp out such defiance, with some paranoid Nazi officials picturing the Witnesses as a mass movement in cahoots with Communists (in reality, they only had some twenty-five thousand members). Several thousand believers were arrested in the mid-1930s. Most ended up in regular prisons, but others were taken to the KL. At the height of
repression in 1937–38, more than ten percent of all men in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald were Jehovah’s Witnesses. So large was this prisoner group that the Camp SS gave them a special insignia: the purple triangle.
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Prisoners with the purple triangle endured great hardship. “The Jehovah’s Witnesses are the daily targets for every kind of persecution, terror, and brutality,” one of them wrote
in 1938, not long after his release. Some abuse was ideologically motivated, with Camp SS men mocking their victims as “heaven clowns” and “paradise birds.” Asked after the war why he had buried one of the prisoners up to the neck, the former report leader in Sachsenhausen replied: “He was a conscientious objector. As such he had no right to life, in my view.”
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What really enraged the SS men,
however, was not the prisoners’ religious beliefs but their “obstinate” behavior, as Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to carry out certain orders and even tried to convert other prisoners.
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The leaders of the passive resistance were hit with great venom. One of them, the miner Johann Ludwig Rachuba, was punished by the Sachsenhausen SS between 1936 and 1938 with more than 120 days strict detention,
more than one hundred lashes, four hours hanging from a post, and three months in the punishment company (he later died in the camp). Such brute tactics rarely worked, however, as many prisoners saw the torture as a test of their faith. Only later in the war did SS officials become shrewder, realizing that many Jehovah’s Witnesses made reliable workers as long as they were not deployed in ways
that conflicted directly with their beliefs.
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