KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (32 page)

There was another striking difference—the makeup of the Flossenbürg and Mauthausen prisoner population. In 1938, the Camp SS launched its most ambitious attempt yet to gather the same prisoner groups in the same location,
reserving the two new camps almost exclusively for social outsiders, especially so-called professional criminals. Mass transports of selected prisoners, rounded up in the big three KL for men, began as soon as the new camps opened.
183
As a result, almost all Flossenbürg prisoners before the war wore the green triangle. In Mauthausen, too, the “greens” made up the largest group, closely followed
by “asocials,” who arrived from other KL in 1939, with many Gypsies among them.
184
More than a hundred so-called criminals died in Flossenbürg and Mauthausen before the war broke out, more than in the other three KL for men taken together.
185

Why did the SS concentrate “professional criminals” in the two new quarry camps? Forced labor in quarries was regarded as particularly punishing, and many
Nazi officials believed that the worst prisoners deserved the hardest labor. When a senior SS officer suggested in late 1938 that concentration camp prisoners should be sent to lethal radium mines, Himmler responded enthusiastically, proposing to make “the most serious criminals” available.
186
Although this particular plan came to nothing, the SS later adopted the principle of sending “criminally
recidivist and asocial” inmates to the KL with the worst working conditions.
187
Heinrich Himmler made no secret of his hatred for prisoners with the green triangle. In a speech in 1937, he described them as dangerous and violent born criminals, who had spent much of their lives behind bars. Himmler painted a terrifying picture of murderers, robbers, and sex fiends, like a seventy-two-year-old
man who had committed sixty-three indecent assaults. “It would be an insult to animals to call such a person an animal,” Himmler raged, “because animals don’t behave that way.”
188
When it came to filling the quarry camps in spring and summer 1938, Himmler and other SS leaders felt that it was these prisoners who should suffer.
189

The prisoners who arrived in the two new camps bore little resemblance
to the gargoyles of Himmler’s imagination. Typical for men wearing the green triangle, they mostly were persistent but petty property offenders, from especially deprived social backgrounds, who fell back on small-time theft, fraud, and begging for subsistence and survival.
190
One such man was Josef Kolacek, who had been living in poverty with his parents, whom he supported on his own, in a large
working-class district of Vienna. Kolacek, who was suffering from tuberculosis, was detained by the criminal police on June 14, 1938, shortly before his thirtieth birthday. When he arrived in Dachau, he was still wearing the cheap jacket and collarless shirt with a missing button that he had been arrested in the previous day; the SS also noted with great interest the tattoos on his arms. Although
the police had apparently picked him up during the nationwide raid on the “work-shy,” he was classified as a “professional criminal” in the KL. But Kolacek was no dangerous convict. Although he had been sentenced eight times by the courts, the first time in his teens, almost all sentences were for trivial property offenses, punished with no more than a few days’ or weeks’ detention. Only his last
conviction in 1937, for attempted burglary, had merited a longer term of eight months in a penitentiary. And yet, the SS labeled him a criminal menace, and on July 1, 1938, he was transported with many dozens of other “professional criminals” from Dachau to Flossenbürg, where he faced brutal forced labor and abuse. As one SS official noted ominously a few months later, Kolacek “is lazy and sluggish
during work and has to be reproved all the time.”
191

The early months in the quarry camps of Flossenbürg and Mauthausen were especially hard. As in other new camps, prisoners had to build the infrastructure—exhausting and perilous work aggravated by the primitive living conditions in makeshift compounds. Meanwhile, hundreds of other inmates were already toiling in the quarries. Work began early
in Flossenbürg, where three quarries were operational at the end of 1938. In Mauthausen, too, labor in three different quarries began in 1938, soon the largest such complex controlled by DESt. Prisoners had to carry out the most arduous jobs, preparing the ground with pickaxes and drills, and hauling huge granite blocks.
192
Adolf Gussak, an Austrian Gypsy who came to Mauthausen on March 21, 1939,
on a large prisoner transport from Dachau, later recalled the first days in the Wiener Graben: “In the quarry we had to carry heavy stones. With them on our backs we had to climb the 180 steps up [toward the compound]. The SS beat us. As a result there often was some pushing: everybody wanted to escape the blows. If anyone fell down he was finished off by a bullet in the back of his neck.”
193

Death was frequent in Mauthausen. In the first year between August 1938 and July 1939, at least 131 prisoners perished, divided almost evenly between so-called criminals and asocials.
194
Relative to the small size of its prisoner population—there were only 1,431 inmates on July 1, 1939—Mauthausen may well have been more lethal than any other KL during this period. In other camps, inmates began
to dread a transfer to Mauthausen, after returning prisoners described the huge quarries as hell on earth.
195
Those in Flossenbürg had a better chance of survival: fifty-five prisoners perished before the outbreak of war (almost eighty percent of them so-called professional criminals).
196
Among the survivors was Josef Kolacek from Vienna, who was eventually released after more than nine months
in Flossenbürg.
197

A High-Tech Factory

No project better sums up the economic hubris of the SS in the late 1930s than its giant new brick works at Oranienburg. In summer 1938, on the wooded banks of a canal little more than a mile from Sachsenhausen, the SS began to build what would have been the world’s largest brick factory, with a projected annual output of 150 million bricks, around ten
times more than large factories normally produced. The project—probably initiated by Albert Speer, who advanced the necessary funds to DESt—was heavily promoted by the SS as a showcase for its economic prowess. Determined to prove its ability to harness modern technology for the Nazi regime, the SS opted for the most costly and cutting-edge equipment, so-called dry press machines, which promised both
speed and efficiency. SS managers staked their reputation on a successful outcome. Heinrich Himmler apparently attended the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone on July 6, 1938, and remained keenly interested in progress at the building site.
198

The entire project rested on forced labor. Although the SS used some civilian contractors for the brick works, the bulk of the labor force came
from Sachsenhausen. In the prewar years, a daily average of 1,500 to 2,000 prisoners was deployed, making it the largest labor detail in any SS concentration camp at the time. After the prisoners had cleared many of the trees on site, they began the building work, excavating a dock area, moving and leveling the ground, and constructing the main factory building. Another labor gang worked on a railway
line for transporting clay, from its source a few miles away, to the plant.
199

The contrast between the plant’s high-tech design and the primitive conditions on the construction site could hardly have been greater. Prisoners performed the most strenuous labor with the most basic tools or no tools at all. Large groups of inmates carried piles of sand in their uniforms, worn back-to-front so that
the back of jackets formed a kind of apron. Others moved large mounds of earth on rickety wooden stretchers or shifted sacks of cement on their shoulders. Elsewhere, prisoners climbed scaffolds and poured down cement, barely clinging on in their wooden clogs. There were many accidents—severed limbs, crushed bones, and the like—but no respite. SS terror was as abundant as facilities were scarce;
the latrine, for example, was no more than a beam across a ditch, and SS guards liked to push exhausted inmates into the pool of excrement below.
200

The Sachsenhausen inmates feared the brick works as a particularly destructive labor detail.
201
In the mornings, they faced a long march to the building site, moved along with clubs and whips by SS men, only to stagger back to the compound in the
evenings, carrying the sick, the wounded, and the dead. On site in Oranienburg, the prisoners spent the entire day without shelter; after the glistening heat of summer 1938, they braved the bitter winter, always working at a ferocious pace. Because the deluded SS managers had agreed on an impossibly tight schedule for their flagship plant, guards and Kapos drove prisoners with a brutality unusual
even for a KL.
202

Countless prisoners perished on the desolate Oranienburg building site, succumbing to exhaustion, accidents, and abuse; there were some suicides, too.
203
The worst period came in winter 1938–39, when a renewed SS push to complete the project coincided with a cold snap across the Berlin region. Prisoners worked in thin uniforms and without gloves as the temperatures fell below
freezing for almost three months; often, the soup they ate for lunch would turn to ice.
204
Between December 1938 and March 1939, at least 429 Sachsenhausen prisoners died at the brick works and elsewhere in the camp, more than in any other KL during this period.
205
The great majority of the dead were so-called asocials, who made up the largest prisoner group at the Oranienburg building site and
often faced special harassment by SS and Kapos.
206

One victim was the fifty-five-year-old agricultural laborer Wilhelm Schwarz, who was part of a fifty-man-strong earth-leveling detail—all of them, like him, “asocial” prisoners—toiling at the brick works. Schwarz died on the morning of March 21, 1939, some nine months after he had arrived in Sachsenhausen as a “work-shy” prisoner. According to
the responsible Kapo, who was interviewed during a routine investigation, Schwarz had been crushed to death as he tried to empty a dump truck filled with sand. This may not have been the whole story, but whatever the truth, the Kapo, a political prisoner, clearly had no sympathy for inmates like Wilhelm Schwarz, even in death: he complained bitterly that the “asocials” in his unit were extremely
“lazy” and “unreasonable,” refusing to “make the slightest effort during work.”
207
The SS guards cared even less about the gruesome death of Wilhelm Schwarz, or any of the other fatalities at Oranienburg. The dead could be replaced straightaway, as there was no shortage of prisoners, and so the Camp SS worked more prisoners to death, in an early display of lethal disregard for its forced laborers.
208

But even with a boundless supply of forced labor, the Oranienburg brick works would not have become the expected triumph, as SS ambitions far exceeded SS abilities. The brick works turned into a giant disaster, reminiscent of some vast and pointless state projects pursued by the Soviets in the Gulag. The decisive moment came in May 1939, during the first proper trial run, with the plant already
months behind schedule. SS officials watched in disbelief as their dreams turned to dust, quite literally: the bricks that left the brand-new kilns just crumbled and fell apart. In their ignorance and haste, SS managers had committed a litany of elementary errors. Most grievously, they had never bothered to check whether the local clay was suitable for dry press production. It was not. The vast
new factory, which had claimed so many lives, would never produce a single usable brick.
209

The debacle at Oranienburg was a devastating indictment of SS incompetence. Clearly, the SS was in no position to run a large high-tech factory.
210
The reaction of Oswald Pohl was equally telling. Instead of scaling back SS ambitions, he pressed ahead with brick production in Oranienburg, whatever the
price. Obstacles would not stop the SS; they had to be overcome. To save face, and his own career, Pohl moved fast in the summer of 1939, hoping to keep Himmler in the dark about the true scale of the disaster. Looking for scapegoats, he got rid of the private building contractor and the hapless chief executive of DESt. Pohl handed control of DESt to younger men with a greater understanding of modern
management, who combined opportunism, drive, and professionalism with commitment to the Nazi cause. Soon, prisoners had to tear down structures they had only just erected in Oranienburg; they demolished kilns and ripped out machines and concrete foundations. Meanwhile, a huge rebuilding program added new parts, this time using the more reliable wet press process. All this cost yet more lives and
money, and the SS still had little to show for it. In 1940, after production had restarted on a small scale, the plant barely produced three million bricks, almost all of which were needed on site. And although the output rose in the following years, it never even came close to the original targets.
211
However, SS hubris remained unchecked, as SS managers stubbornly clung to the belief that any
plans, however far-fetched or deadly, could be willed into reality.

Illness and Death

The KL of the late 1930s were no full-scale slaughterhouses. Living conditions were not lethal for most prisoners, and systematic mass extermination was not yet on the SS agenda. As a result, the bulk of the inmate population survived, at least for now. This was true, above all, for female prisoners, only a
handful of whom perished during the late 1930s.
212
Although the prospects for men were bleaker, the great majority of them pulled through, too. True, death was no longer the exception; but it was not yet the norm, either. Of the well over fifty thousand men taken to concentration camps sometime between January 1938 and August 1939, 2,268 are known to have lost their lives inside. Despite the immense
hardship of the camps, then, survival remained by far the most likely outcome.
213