KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (39 page)

Terror was ever-present in German-controlled Poland. Mass arrests had been in the cards well before the invasion; in late August 1939, Reinhard Heydrich envisaged that his task forces would take some thirty thousand people to the KL, far more than the entire camp population at the time.
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The first Polish prisoners duly arrived in autumn 1939, among them resistance
fighters and members of the intelligentsia, including 168 academics from Krakow University.
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But the number of prisoners from the newly occupied Polish territory initially remained much smaller than the SS had anticipated.

Far more Poles were detained inside the old German borders in autumn 1939; above all, police leaders wanted to remove Polish Jews, sanctioning the arrest of men who had often
lived in Germany or Austria for decades.
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Police terror against Poles inside the German heartland expanded further during the following year, after the mass influx of civilian workers. The Nazi regime was determined to place most of the war’s burden on other shoulders and increasingly exploited foreign workers. In the early war years, most of them were Poles. Some came voluntarily, deceived by
Nazi promises of a rosy life, while many more were dragged westward by force. Conditions were poor and discipline harsh, and the police were never far away. Prejudice and paranoia were ingrained in the minds of the policemen, who saw Polish foreign workers as potential thieves, saboteurs, and rapists. Infractions of the strict rules—written and unwritten—were severely punished, not least with transfer
to the concentration camps.
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Mass arrests in occupied Poland were stepped up, too, and in line with Himmler’s wishes, countless prisoner transports set off for the KL from spring 1940. Often, the Gestapo offered no more than a stereotypical phrase to justify their detention, such as: “Belongs to the Polish intelligentsia and harbors the spirit of resistance.” In Dachau alone, 13,337 Polish men
arrived between March and December 1940, mostly from the incorporated Polish territories; among them were hundreds of Polish priests, after Dachau was designated as the central concentration camp for arrested clergymen.
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In some of the older KL for men, the number of Polish prisoners soon began to rival that of German inmates.
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The Ravensbrück women’s camp was affected, too; in April 1940,
more than seventy percent of all new arrivals were Polish. As they watched Ravensbrück fill up with even more Polish women over the coming months, other prisoners began to wonder whether Hitler had decided “to wipe out the Polish people altogether.”
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Extending the KL System

Heinrich Himmler had never expected his camp system to stay still. Speaking candidly in November 1938, he told the top
brass of the SS that during a war “we won’t be able to make do” with the existing concentration camps. He was worried about another so-called stab in the back, no doubt, and his prescription was clear: more people would be arrested, more space would be required.
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Himmler’s vision soon came true, though even he did not foresee what would become of his terror apparatus—a sprawling, squalid maze
of hundreds of camps.

This apocalyptic final stage was still some years off. Nonetheless, the wide-ranging arrests after the outbreak of war quickly led to overcrowding; by late 1939, the KL population had already risen to around thirty thousand prisoners, and SS leaders cast around for more camps.
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It was around this time that Heinrich Himmler ordered a survey of provisional prisoner camps
set up since the start of the war. Primarily, he wanted to stop regional Nazi officials from running their own private camps, as they had done in 1933. “Concentration camps can only be established with my authorization,” he insisted in December 1939. But Himmler was also thinking about adding one of these provisional sites to his official KL portfolio.
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Several of his lieutenants, including
Camp Inspector Glücks, championed a new KL “for the East,” to hold down the Polish population.
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After much deliberation, the SS settled on a site in the provincial Polish border town O
ś
wi
ę
cim, southeast of Katowice (Kattowitz). O
ś
wi
ę
cim, part of the Habsburg Empire until 1918, had been occupied in the first days of the Second World War, and incorporated into the German Reich in late October 1939,
together with the rest of east Upper Silesia. Even before then, the occupiers had taken the symbolic step of renaming the town, reverting to its old German name—Auschwitz.
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The origins of the Auschwitz camp go back to the First World War, when a temporary settlement for seasonal workers en route to Germany had been set up just outside the town. Most of the grounds, containing brick houses and
wooden barracks, were later used by the Polish army, before being taken over by the Wehrmacht in September 1939 as a POW camp. But it was quickly closed down again and by the end of the year the site was almost empty, if only for a short time.
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In the early months of 1940, SS experts repeatedly inspected the location, weighing up the pros and cons of its use as a KL. In their eyes, it was not
perfect; the buildings were run down and the groundwater of poor quality. Worst of all, two rivers, the So
ł
a and Vistula, met nearby, creating a flood-risk area infested with insects. At the same time, the SS noted several advantages. The site was already established, lay close to a railway hub, and could easily be shielded from prying eyes. In the end, these arguments won the day, and in April
1940, work on the grounds began.
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Faced with new demands in wartime, the Camp SS was willing to improvise; contrary to its recent policy of purpose-building new camps, it returned to the old practice of converting existing structures.

Auschwitz officially operated from June 14, 1940, when the first mass transport of Polish inmates arrived: 728 men from Tarnów prison near Krakow, across the border
in the General Government. Most of them were young men, including students and soldiers, accused of a wide range of anti-German activities.
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On arrival, they were assaulted by SS men and by some of the thirty German Kapos who had come from Sachsenhausen more than three weeks earlier. Soon, the shirts and jackets of the Polish prisoners were covered in sweat and blood. One of them was twenty-one-year-old
Wies
ł
aw Kielar, who received inmate number 290. Once he and his fellow prisoners had lined up on the roll call square, they were addressed by the new camp compound leader, Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, previously stationed at Dachau and one of around 120 SS men in Auschwitz, who told them that this was not a sanatorium but a German concentration camp. “We were soon to experience,” Kielar wrote
later, “what that meant, a concentration camp!”
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The Auschwitz commandant was another old hand of the Camp SS. Rudolf Höss was officially appointed (by Himmler) on May 4, 1940, having just returned from an inspection of the site. As commandant, the tireless Höss was eager to apply what he had learned in Dachau and Sachsenhausen. For over a million prisoners, Auschwitz was death. For Höss, it
was his life. When he arrived, he envisaged a new model camp, with himself at the helm. But the dilapidated place he took over was far removed from his dreams. There was not enough wood or bricks during the initial construction, and Höss could not even put up a fence around his camp: “So I had to steal the urgently needed pieces of barbed wire.”
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Auschwitz remained a wasteland, as even the SS
acknowledged, though this did not stop its rapid expansion into one of the largest KL.
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At the end of 1940, just half a year after it opened, nearly 7,900 prisoners had been transported to Auschwitz, where they were held in one-story and two-story brick buildings on the former army barrack grounds.
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Many more arrived over the following year, as the grounds were extended. By early 1942, Auschwitz
had become the largest concentration camp of all (except for Mauthausen), with nearly twelve thousand men locked up inside. More than three-quarters of these men were Poles, as the camp’s main purpose remained the battle against the conquered population.
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Today Auschwitz is synonymous with the Holocaust, but it was built to impose German rule over Poland.
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In addition to Auschwitz, the SS established
four other KL for men between spring 1940 and late summer 1941.
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The first was Neuengamme, close to Hamburg. Previously a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen, it was now turned into a main camp, a few months after an inspection by Himmler in January 1940. The SS transferred more prisoners from Sachsenhausen, who had to build the new main camp, working for up to sixteen hours a day in frost and rain.
One inmate recalled that, early on, the ground had been completely frozen: “We had to dig the foundation for the barracks. The pickaxes were heavier than we were.” On June 4, 1940, survivors and recent arrivals were finally relocated to the new compound, which was far from ready; around eight hundred prisoners were crammed into three half-finished barracks. Nonetheless, the camp grew quickly;
at the end of 1941, Neuengamme held 4,500 to 4,800 prisoners.
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Gross-Rosen, another of the new main camps, had started out as a satellite camp, too. Situated in Lower Silesia, on a hill near the town of Striegau, it had operated as an outpost of Sachsenhausen since early August 1940, when the first prisoners were taken to two provisional barracks surrounded by a fence. Himmler himself visited
in late October 1940, and in the following spring, on May 1, 1941, Gross-Rosen was designated as a main camp. At first, it remained rather small, however, as there were no funds for its enlargement, and by October 1, 1941, no more than 1,185 prisoners were held inside.
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Its moment as a place of mass detention and death was still to come.

At the same time as Gross-Rosen, another main camp was
founded—Natzweiler, in idyllic surroundings on a steep hill in the Vosges Mountains in Alsace. It also started out as a small camp, with the first three hundred prisoners arriving toward the end of May 1941. As in the other new camps, the SS was forced to improvise during the construction phase. At the outset, inmates were held on a temporary site, while the SS administration was housed in a hotel
in the nearby village of Struthof.
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And just as in Gross-Rosen, the camp grew more slowly than the SS had anticipated; the initial target figure of 2,500 prisoners was only approached at the end of 1943.
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The final new SS concentration camp, located near Paderborn in Westphalia, was Himmler’s private folly. Devoted to mysticism, he wanted to create a spiritual home for the SS. He selected the
renaissance castle Wewelsburg in Niederhagen, and from 1934 turned it into an enormous SS shrine. In May 1939, during a time of severe labor shortages in Germany, Himmler drafted KL prisoners to help with his pet project. Initially, they were held in a small labor camp on a hill opposite the castle, run as a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen, but on September 1, 1941, Himmler turned it into a main
camp, called Niederhagen. On paper, it was a regular SS concentration camp. Given its specific focus, however, it remained the smallest of all the main camps, holding no more than around six hundred prisoners in early 1942. And yet, it was no less lethal than other KL. Some prisoners died in quarries, others during the construction of the “crypt” (presumably designed for worshipping SS leaders)
under the northern tower of the castle. In the end, Himmler’s eerie plan was never fully realized. In early 1943, as Germany diverted more and more resources to total war, even he could not justify the project anymore. The surviving prisoners were transferred elsewhere and the main camp closed down on April 30, 1943; in all, Niederhagen had existed for less than two years.
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Despite its hurried
expansion during the early war years, the KL system did not fragment. Before long, life inside the new camps largely resembled life in the old ones. There were structural reasons for this: all camps received orders and directives from the IKL and RSHA. And there were personal links, too. In all the five new camps, the first Kapos had arrived from Sachsenhausen, the springboard for the expansion
of the KL system, and they quickly fitted into the routines they knew so well.
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Many of their SS masters, too, had breathed the air of the camps for years. Among the new commandants were ambitious young officers like Höss. SS leaders also gave another chance to veterans judged to have failed elsewhere, as in the case of Karl Koch. Another beneficiary was the first Gross-Rosen commandant, Arthur
Rödl, who had previously held senior positions in Lichtenburg, Sachsenburg, and Buchenwald. Wherever he went, Rödl had offended his superiors; he was incompetent and barely literate, they complained, and had been promoted way above his station. Even Theodor Eicke regarded him as an embarrassment, but had been unable to get rid of him; as a highly decorated stalwart of the Nazi movement who had
participated in the 1923 putsch, Rödl could count on Himmler’s protection. His promotion to Gross-Rosen commandant in 1941 would be his final opportunity to prove his worth in the Camp SS.
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The new camps contributed to the spread of wartime terror. As we have seen, Auschwitz was designed to combat dissent and opposition among the Polish population. And three of the other new KL—Neuengamme, Gross-Rosen,
and Natzweiler—had a political function, too. All three were located close to the German border and helped to subjugate occupied peoples. Neuengamme was situated near Denmark and Holland and grew into the most important camp in northwestern Germany; Natzweiler lay in territory recently annexed from France; Gross-Rosen lay in eastern Germany, between incorporated Poland and the Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia, and already at the beginning some forty percent of its prisoners were Polish and Czech.
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And yet, the early wartime expansion of the KL system was not about terror alone. It was also about forced labor, with SS economic ambitions growing fast as the German army went from strength to strength.