KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (26 page)

Upon arrival in Lichtenburg, Erna Ludolph—a
thirty-year-old Jehovah’s Witness from Lübeck—immediately realized that the premises were much bigger than Moringen. Soon, Ludolph and the others saw further differences, almost all for the worse. As an SS camp, Lichtenburg was run along far more military lines, with roll calls in the corridors and the yard. Leisure time was cut back and forced labor extended by about two hours. The SS also made
far greater use of Kapos. Above all, the women endured harder punishment and occasional violence. Jehovah’s Witnesses made up the largest prisoner group, and conditions were particularly grim for those, like Erna Ludolph, who were isolated as “incorrigible.” One day in 1938, after these women refused to line up to a radio speech by Hitler, the guards attacked them and sprayed them with high-pressure
water hoses.
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Although the local SS staff ensured the stricter treatment of female prisoners, they stopped well short of running Lichtenburg like a KL for men. It developed a distinct identity all its own, removed from the other SS concentration camps. The differences started with the camp’s appearance. The old castle in Lichtenburg, with its large dormitories, was a long way from the SS ideal
of a modern barrack camp. More generally, the Lichtenburg women faced less terror than male KL prisoners. Forced labor was not yet all-consuming, violent excesses were infrequent, and punishments were less severe (according to the official regulations, there was no flogging, for example). As a result, the death rate was very low, with two confirmed prisoner deaths—both of them Jehovah’s Witnesses—between
late 1937 and spring 1939, when the SS closed down the KL Lichtenburg.
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“In the middle of May 1939,” Erna Ludolph recalled after the war, “we Jehovah’s Witnesses, all 400 to 450 of us, were brought by truck with the first mass transports to Ravensbrück.” Expecting the number of female prisoners to grow further, SS officials had decided sometime in 1938 to establish an entirely new camp for
women. After plans to build it near Dachau fell through, attention soon turned to a secluded site by the town of Fürstenberg, some fifty miles or so north of Berlin. Once a small detachment of men from Sachsenhausen had erected the first barracks and buildings in the early months of 1939, the new camp, called Ravensbrück, was ready.
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The prisoners’ living conditions deteriorated after the move
from Lichtenburg, just as they had done after the prior move from Moringen. “Everything escalated to an unbelievable degree,” Erna Ludolph recalled. Roll calls in Ravensbrück were more torturous, forced labor more exhausting, punishment more severe, and life more rigid, with women now wearing identical dresses with blue and gray stripes, as well as an apron and headscarf.
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Still, terror remained
gender-specific, as the Camp SS continued to reserve its most violent abuse for men. Although flogging was introduced as an official punishment in Ravensbrück, some other excesses, including hanging from a post, were still absent. Instead of brutal assaults, the local SS relied more heavily on guard dogs, because Himmler believed that women would be particularly scared of them.
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The special
status of Ravensbrück shaped its staff, too. When the SS first decided to open a concentration camp for women, it faced a dilemma. Until now, the Camp SS had been conceived as an exclusive male club, resting on hypermasculine values. But the deployment of men in a women’s camp was problematic, as the sexual abuses in early camps had shown. In the end, Himmler opted for a compromise. In Lichtenburg
and Ravensbrück, SS men acted as sentries and occupied the senior positions in the Commandant Staff, starting with the commandant himself. The guards inside, however, who had most day-to-day contacts with prisoners, were women, though Himmler balked at admitting them into the SS; although female guards were part of the Camp SS, they were never full SS members. Even during the war, when they came
under the jurisdiction of the SS, these women merely belonged to its retinue (
Gefolge
), wearing special field-gray uniforms.
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The female guards of Ravensbrück differed from their male counterparts in other SS camps. True, most of them were volunteers, too, often in their mid to late twenties, but they normally had no previous history of political violence; the brawls of the Weimar and early
Nazi years had been a male domain. Also, only a fraction of the female guards were NSDAP members, while the bulk of SS men had signed up with the party. What attracted most female recruits to the KL was not any ideological mission, but the prospect of social advancement. Many were poor and unmarried, with few professional qualifications, and the camp promised regular employment with decent pay and
other benefits, such as comfortable quarters and even (from 1941) an SS kindergarten.
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Once inside Ravensbrück, the lives of the female guards were strictly regimented, though they were never subject to the same drill as male “political soldiers”; indeed, the frustrated Ravensbrück commandant repeatedly reprimanded his female guards for breaches of military decorum.
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For now, women remained
marginal in the KL system, both as guards and as inmates. True, the overall proportion of female prisoners was rising fast—from around 3.3 percent in late summer 1938 to 11.7 percent one year later—but Ravensbrück still lagged far behind concentration camps for men, both in size and severity.
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Nonetheless, its creation was significant, concluding the shift from the more traditional detention
of women to the new forms of SS domination.
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*   *   *

The camps for women were late additions to the KL system, which had been created and cemented in the mid-1930s. Toward the end of 1934, it seemed as if the camps might disappear. Just three years later, they were firm fixtures of the Third Reich, outside the law, funded by the state and controlled by a new agency, the IKL. The SS had also
developed a basic blueprint for the KL, drawing on its first camp at Dachau. Its key features were a uniform administrative structure, a common architectural ideal, a professional corps of SS men, and a systematic brand of terror. The simultaneous extension of the SS system—the prisoner population rose from around 3,800 in summer 1935 to 7,746 at the end of 1937—points to another key aspect of
the KL, first highlighted by Hannah Arendt shortly after the Second World War. In a radical totalitarian state like the Third Reich, terror did not decrease after the regime established itself. Nazi leaders pursued ever more extreme aims, and so the KL expanded, even as domestic political opposition diminished.
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This extension was not yet over by late 1937; it was only just beginning.

3

Expansion

Friday the thirteenth of May 1938 was a date etched into the memory of Buchenwald prisoners. The day had begun balmy and bright; spring was in the air and the countryside around the camp glowed vibrantly. It was still early in the morning, with the sun rising fast across the clear sky above the Ettersberg, but a large prisoner detail was already hard at work in the forest outside
the camp, digging trenches for sewage pipes. At around nine o’clock, two of the prisoners, Emil Bargatzky and Peter Forster, went to collect coffee for the others, as usual, walking along a secluded path when they suddenly attacked the guard who escorted them. Before he had time to fire his rifle, SS Rottenführer Albert Kallweit was hit over the head with a spade. The two prisoners, who had long
planned their escape, dragged the guard’s body into the undergrowth, grabbed his weapon, and ran for their lives.
1

The killing of Rottenführer Kallweit sent shock waves through the SS. Successful breakouts were extremely rare since Inspector Eicke exhorted his men to shoot at fleeing prisoners without warning. And a deadly attack on the SS was unprecedented.
2
Heinrich Himmler flew to Weimar the
next day to inspect the camp and Kallweit’s corpse, accompanied by Theodor Eicke. He also ordered a manhunt for the escaped prisoners. Regional papers carried sensational reports about the killing of the SS man and announced a hefty reward of one thousand Reichsmark for information leading to the fugitives’ capture; for weeks, the incident was the talk of the town in Weimar and beyond, a rare moment
when the camps penetrated public consciousness in the late 1930s.
3

On May 22, 1938, after Emil Bargatzky had spent nine days on the run, the police found him hiding in a brick factory some 140 miles north of Buchenwald. Within a week, he faced a hastily arranged show trial before the Weimar Special Court. Reporting on the trial, the regional press made much of his criminal record. Born into a
poor family in 1901 as one of fifteen children, Bargatzky had struggled to hold down a job during the calamitous Weimar years—working as a carpenter, butcher, and coachman—and committed several offenses. The press pounced on these transgressions as further proof of his subhuman nature. The Weimar state prosecutor, meanwhile, commended the KL guards who protected the national community from dangerous
asocial elements like Bargatzky. He also spoke out in favor of the “preventive” policing against social outsiders, which was intensifying during the late 1930s and swept many thousands into overcrowded concentration camps—among them Emil Bargatzky, who had been held since 1937 because of his criminal past.
4

The judges at Bargatzky’s murder trial on Saturday, May 28, took less than two hours to
pronounce the death penalty. He was now on death row and faced execution by the legal authorities behind prison doors. But his fate was to take a final twist after Heinrich Himmler asked Hitler for permission to have Bargatzky hanged in Buchenwald instead, near the scene of the crime. Hitler approved.
5
Early on the morning of June 4, 1938, the Buchenwald prisoners lined up on the roll call square.
SS guards surrounded them, some pointing machine guns at the crowd. Shortly before 7:00 a.m. the main gate opened and the manacled Emil Bargatzky was led onto the square, past rows of SS men. He walked as if in a trance and some prisoners speculated that the SS had drugged him. After a judge dressed in a black robe read out the death sentence, Bargatzky stepped onto a wooden box on the newly
erected scaffold and put his head through a noose. On the word of Commandant Karl Otto Koch, the box was pushed away and a prisoner, designated as the executioner, pulled the rope; Bargatzky twisted and turned for several minutes until he died. The SS left his disfigured corpse dangling for some time on the roll call square, as a grisly warning to all prisoners.
6

The SS staged this first official
execution of a concentration camp inmate, which echoed ritual German executions in the early modern era, as a demonstration of might, attended by high-ranking dignitaries like Theodor Eicke, who eagerly reported the details to Himmler.
7
SS leaders brazenly turned an ignominy—two escaped inmates and a dead guard—into political capital, presenting it as proof of the barbarity of the prisoners and
the fundamental importance of the camps. Already before Bargatzky’s hanging, a popular SS periodical had tried to boost the status of the Camp SS in a graphic article, complete with mug shots of the two fugitives and a photo of the slain guard in heroic pose. The article, which drew heavily on Eicke’s worldview, claimed that the “cowardly attack” by the two “racially inferior criminals” showed just
how dangerous the mission of the political SS soldiers really was (in reality, Camp SS men were far more likely to be injured by friendly fire from other guards than by prisoners). Under the headline “He died for us!” the influential SS weekly waxed lyrical about the pasty Rottenführer Kallweit, hoping to elevate him into the pantheon of Nazi martyrs, and also praised the other unsung heroes of
the Death’s Head SS, who were “permanently facing the enemy” while the rest of Germany was “peacefully going about its daily business.”
8
The image of SS guards as valiant guardians of the nation was meant to strike a chord at a time when Eicke was in the midst of a major recruitment drive, greatly expanding the size of the Camp SS in the run-up to war.

Most important, the Camp SS saw the death
of Rottenführer Kallweit as a signal for more violence. Even in distant Dachau, guards threatened prisoners with brutal retaliation.
9
In Buchenwald itself, SS men went on a rampage. Collective punishment was common after escapes, but it reached new heights on Friday, May 13, 1938. Screaming guards beat the remaining prisoners from the sewage plant detail back to the compound, where a mob of SS
men whipped and punched them until some maimed victims collapsed. The guards murdered at least two Buchenwald prisoners that day. All others, Commandant Koch demanded, would face much greater hardship in the future.
10
He was true to his word, as one assault followed another. During one such attack, some three weeks after Bargatzky’s execution, SS men smashed several windows in prisoner barracks,
tore up dozens of bed covers, ripped apart hundreds of straw mattresses, and left three inmates dead.
11

SS leaders supported this hard line. In a paean to the killed guard in the
Völkischer Beobachter
, Theodor Eicke threatened that “enemies of the state” would face “iron hard” discipline.
12
Himmler said much the same during his visit to Buchenwald on May 14, 1938, and two days later, he repeated
his demand for tough action in a letter to Reich minister of justice Gürtner. Earlier that spring, Himmler claimed, he had responded to a complaint by Gürtner about excessive SS shootings by ordering his men to use their weapons more sparingly, with “devastating” results. This attempt to blame Gürtner for the killing in Buchenwald was absurd—Rottenführer Kallweit had walked too closely to the
two prisoners, in breach of SS protocol—but this did not stop Himmler from announcing that guards would now reach more readily for their rifles, preempting future judicial criticism.
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