KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (47 page)

Dachau turned into a nightmare. Bodies of
Muselmänner
who had died en route were dumped at the train station. Those who made it into the compound lay sprawled across the roll call square or inside specially cleared barracks. They were emaciated,
often with frostbitten hands or feet, and covered in lice, edema, and pus-filled wounds; passing SS guards were surprised when these half-dead men still showed signs of life, crying, whimpering, and begging for mercy, or when they screamed in pain as others ripped off clothing that stuck to their scabs. Many suffered from acute dysentery and an infernal stench soon filled Dachau. The prisoner Alfred
Hübsch vividly recalled the arrival of one of the “horror transports” from Sachsenhausen in early September 1940: “We saw dozens [of new prisoners] with excrement running out of their trousers. Their hands, too, were full of excrement and they screamed and rubbed their dirty hands across their faces. These soiled and sunken faces, with their protruding cheekbones, had something terrifying about
them.” Too weak to walk and eat, many had come to Dachau only to die.
13

In all, more than one thousand prisoners perished between September and December 1940; in four infernal months, around twice as many men had died in Dachau as in the seven prewar years. Then conditions got even worse. In January 1941, the month when Himmler visited, Dachau reached a new deadly record, as at least 463 prisoners
lost their lives.
14
At the same time, the camp was ravaged by scabies. An estimated four to five thousand men were infected in early 1941, almost half of the entire prisoner population. Many were isolated with no medical help, little food, and only bags of straw to sleep on. The prisoner Adam Kozlowiecki, a Polish cardinal who saw the sick on their way to their weekly bath, recorded their appearance
in a secret diary: “Yellow skeletons with big, sad eyes. They looked at us. Some glances expressed a plea for help, others complete apathy.”
15

The dirt and disease in Dachau dented Himmler’s ideal image of the KL, even if his subordinates shielded him from the worst during his visit on January 20, 1941. Himmler’s vision was about all-out order and cleanliness, and filthy invalids had no place
in it; they were a drain on resources, a health risk, and an economic liability. Many Camp SS men agreed. As one of them explained in early 1941, all prisoners “who cannot work” and all “cripples” posed a “colossal burden” for the KL.
16
By then, Camp SS leaders must have realized that the decision to turn Dachau into a dumping ground for the sick had backfired. Not only had it turned the old model
camp into a pit, the situation in the other KL was little improved. True, prisoner mortality had fallen temporarily after sick prisoners left for Dachau.
17
But their numbers soon grew again, and by early 1941 all SS concentration camps for men were full of dying inmates.
18
Something had to be done.

Around the time of his trip to Dachau, Heinrich Himmler settled on a radical solution: invalid
prisoners would be systematically exterminated.
19
Mass murder was already in the air. Across the Third Reich and its newly conquered territories, Nazi leaders and their followers were getting used to murder as a solution to all kinds of “problems,” from political resistance to mental illness. As for weak and sick prisoners in the KL, many SS men were more than happy to see them die. According
to a former inmate, the views of Dachau SS leaders about invalids in 1940 could be summed up as follows: “Let them croak—then we’ll be rid of them.”
20
In fact, as we have seen, some local Camp SS men had already started to go further, murdering some weak and sick prisoners on their own initiative. In another case of “cumulative radicalization,” such unauthorized and ad hoc killings by overzealous
local Camp SS men must have given an added spur to the new centralized program of murdering the infirm, with Himmler reasserting his authority as the final arbiter over life and death.
21

To implement his plan, Himmler turned to the T-4 killing experts. Rumors that the “euthanasia” program would be extended to the KL had circulated in Germany since 1940.
22
But Himmler did not settle things until
early 1941, during discussions with Bouhler and Brack from the Chancellery of the Führer.
23
It was convenient for Himmler to latch on to the “euthanasia” action. Here was a well-oiled machine that had already delivered tens of thousands to their deaths. Moreover, Himmler knew that he could trust the T-4 officials, many of whom were SS veterans (including several former Camp SS men who had been
transferred from Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald to T-4 in late 1939). Some he knew personally: Viktor Brack had once worked as Himmler’s driver and Werner Heyde had overseen prisoner sterilizations in the prewar KL.
24
Once Himmler had made his decision, he moved fast. After a further meeting with Brack on March 28, 1941—and possibly the final go-ahead from Hitler himself—the operation began, and
just one week later, Dr. Mennecke and Dr. Steinmeyer set to work in Sachsenhausen.
25

It is significant that Himmler decided to outsource the first extermination program of his prisoners to the T-4 killers, rather than leaving it to the Camp SS. We can only guess at his motives. Perhaps Himmler wanted his SS men to learn from the T-4 professionals before they turned their own hands to large-scale
executions. Or perhaps he worried that mass slaughter inside the camps themselves might trigger prisoner uprisings, whereas killing invalids in faraway “euthanasia” centers meant that the remaining inmates might be deceived about the murderous turn of SS policy.
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Selections

Local Camp SS officers were initiated into the program by their superiors, who told them about Himmler’s orders to kill
the invalids and the infirm. Although the local Camp SS did not act as executioner, it still had a crucial role to play: picking out inmates for the T-4 selections. The most important task, the IKL stressed, was to single out those “who are no longer able to work” (echoing provisions of the “euthanasia” program); among those who were specially targeted, a senior Auschwitz official recalled, were
“cripples,” “incurables,” and “infectious prisoners.”
27

Although the IKL issued some quotas for the total number of prisoners to be presented to the T-4 doctors, local Camp SS men had plenty of leeway when it came to their initial selections. In Dachau, for example, the SS forced prisoners from the various labor details to assemble on the roll call square; Camp SS leaders then noted the names
of particularly weak and emaciated men, as well as those with disabilities, such as missing limbs or club feet. The Dachau SS chose yet more prisoners from so-called invalid blocks and the infirmary, forcing some Kapos to cooperate. Walter Neff, a prisoner orderly on the Dachau tuberculosis block, later acknowledged that he had picked out bedridden prisoners.
28

Following the SS preparations,
the T-4 doctors traveled to the camps, alone or in small groups. After the inaugural trip to Sachsenhausen in April 1941, the physicians visited most other camps, including Auschwitz (May 1941), Buchenwald (June and November–December 1941), Mauthausen (June–July 1941), Dachau (September 1941), Ravensbrück (November 1941 and January 1942), Gross-Rosen (January 1942), Flossenbürg (March 1942), and Neuengamme
(April 1942).
29
In all, a dozen or more T-4 doctors were involved.
30
They were led by the senior medical “euthanasia” experts, Professor Werner Heyde and Professor Hermann Nitsche, who occasionally participated in the selections themselves. The others were mostly veterans from the T-4 program. Previously, men like Dr. Steinmeyer and Dr. Mennecke had visited mental asylums to select patients to
die. Now they came to the camps.
31

On arrival, the T-4 doctors were met by senior members of the local Camp SS—the commandant, his adjutant, or the camp physician—who briefed them about SS preparations.
32
The T-4 physicians, who could move freely around the compound, sometimes demanded to see more prisoners than the SS had picked. The doctors’ power was a potential cause of friction with local
Camp SS chieftains.
33
But in practice, their relationship was largely cordial. They worked together and sometimes socialized, too, going for walks around the grounds to aid their digestion after lunch in the SS officers’ mess.
34

During their selections, the T-4 doctors briefly studied the prisoner files. Then they completed a registration form for each inmate, which had been prepared by the SS,
using the standard criteria developed for the “euthanasia” program. Most questions concerned the prisoner’s condition, asking about “Diagnosis,” “Main Symptoms,” and “Incurable Physical Ailments.”
35
Normally, the doctors also took a cursory glance at the inmates, just as Dr. Mennecke and Dr. Steinmeyer had done in Sachsenhausen. One at a time, the prisoners, often undressed, were paraded before
them; those unable to walk were carried. The doctors scribbled some notes on the forms; occasionally, they would also ask inmates about their background.
36
Then the doctors turned to their next victims.

The selections were swift—like a “conveyor belt,” Dr. Mennecke noted in Dachau—and sped up as T-4 doctors gained experience. By November 1941, Mennecke needed less than three minutes to pass judgment
on a prisoner, down from an average of eight minutes back in April. “The work is going with a real swing,” he informed his wife.
37
Apparently, the T-4 doctors only spared a few of the prisoners they saw. It is not clear what swayed them, though it is likely that some First World War veterans were among those given a temporary reprieve.
38
In the end, the decision by Mennecke and his colleagues
came down to a snap judgment they entered into a box on the bottom left-hand corner of the form.
39
The fate of each prisoner was determined by a quick stroke of the pen: “
+
” meant death, “-” meant life.
40

The forms were reviewed by officials at T-4 headquarters in Berlin, who approved the final list of victims.
41
This list was then dispatched to one of three “euthanasia” killing centers (Hartheim,
Bernburg, or Sonnenstein) that liaised with the respective KL to organize the prisoner transports.
42
When the day came—often several months elapsed between selections and transports—Camp SS men accompanied the prisoners to the killing centers; the Mauthausen SS used a Mercedes omnibus and two yellow postal buses to ferry the victims to their deaths.
43
The prisoners’ departure was reported by telex
to the IKL in Oranienburg, which kept abreast of the whole operation.
44

By the time the death transports arrived at the killing centers, many prisoners on board were suspicious and scared; the smell of burning flesh that sometimes hung over the institutions added to their alarm. As local T-4 staff took over from the SS men and checked the paperwork, some prisoners lied about their health or background,
hoping that this might help them. A few others tried to run, only to be wrestled to the ground by SS men. There was no way out. Soon, the prisoners were led away, supposedly to the showers. After they had undressed and entered the gas chamber, the T-4 staff locked the door and pumped poison gas inside, from carbon monoxide steel cylinders supplied by IG Farben. Some victims began to vomit,
shake, or scream, and struggled for air. After several minutes, the last ones fell unconscious, and some minutes later all were dead. After a while, the gas chamber was ventilated and the bodies dragged out by T-4 staff. They burned the corpses in an adjacent crematorium, but not before ripping out all gold fillings (prisoners had been marked before they went to their death). The gold was sent
in batches to T-4 headquarters, which arranged for it to be melted down and sold on. According to one former official, this more or less covered the costs of the killings. The murder machine was self-financing, as victims paid for their own extermination.
45

Doctors as Murderers

Like other T-4 doctors, Friedrich Mennecke reveled in his role. It has sometimes been suggested that enthusiastic henchmen
like Mennecke led double lives to cope with their grisly deeds. Mass murderers in the camps and loving husbands at home, they are said to have erected an impenetrable barrier between professional and private lives.
46
Nothing could be further from the truth in Mennecke’s case, as his copious correspondence reveals. Whenever he was away from home, he bombarded his wife with postcards and letters;
like an obsessive bookkeeper of his own life, no detail was too small to ignore, from his bowel movements in the morning to his choice of dessert wine after dinner.
47
The letters dating from his time in the camps show that SS Hauptsturmführer Mennecke saw no reason to deceive his wife, who, like him, was a committed National Socialist. He even joked about his murderous mission: “Let the next happy
hunt begin!!” he scribbled one morning in November 1941 as he set off for Buchenwald.
48
Far from drawing a line between his work and private life, Mennecke pleaded with his wife to join him—and she did, more than once, accompanying him on his trips to Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Gross-Rosen.
49

Friedrich Mennecke took great pride in his work, which allowed him to rub shoulders with eminent doctors
and senior Nazi officials; he proudly informed his wife whenever his superiors praised him.
50
And he was fiercely competitive, rejoicing whenever he managed to finish more forms than his colleagues (“He who works fast saves time!”). Throughout his time in the KL, Mennecke did not suffer any obvious pangs of conscience, sleeping soundly and eating well. If anything, the selections of starving prisoners
seemed to whet his appetite. “This morning, we worked really hard again,” he reported about his stint in Buchenwald on November 29, 1941. By eleven o’clock, he had completed seventy forms and felt hungry. He walked over to the SS canteen and devoured “a huge meat dumpling (not a burger), salted potatoes and cabbage, plus sauce.”
51