KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (49 page)

Still, during the initial T-4 selections in the concentration camps in spring and summer 1941, medical matters generally outweighed ideological ones. The fact that a prisoner wore a yellow, green, or black triangle—marking him as Jewish, criminal, or asocial—was an aggravating factor, but
what counted above all else was his state of health, as we can see when looking more closely at the summer 1941 selections in Buchenwald: although Jews were far more likely to be picked out than most other prisoners, the T-4 doctors sentenced only a fraction—around six percent of all Jewish inmates, many of them elderly—to death.
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The other Jews in Buchenwald were left untouched by the killing
program, though not for very long.

Sometime in autumn 1941, the leaders of Action 14f13 stepped up the murder of Jewish prisoners: from now on, almost all Jews in the KL would be assessed by the T-4 doctors.
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This new approach was no doubt linked to the recent escalation of general Nazi anti-Jewish policy; in summer 1941 Himmler’s SS and police units had begun to murder hundreds of thousands
of Jewish men, women, and children in the occupied east, and the regime was closing in on Jews elsewhere.
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In turn, the terror against Jewish KL prisoners intensified, too. Several months before the Nazi regime embarked on the systematic extermination of European Jews, almost all Jews held inside concentration camps were regarded as candidates for the T-4 gas chambers.

The new priorities of
T-4 doctors were revealed when they returned to Buchenwald for a second round of selections in November 1941.
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During their first visit, five months earlier, the doctors had only examined a small proportion of the prisoner population. This time, Dr. Mennecke told his wife on November 26, things were different. In addition to the regular selections, the doctors would determine the fate of 1,200
Jewish men—more than eighty-five percent of all Jewish prisoners in Buchenwald.
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To save time, the doctors abandoned the individual assessments of Jews. Mennecke explained that “none of them will be ‘examined’”; he would base his judgments solely on prisoner files.
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In the end, 384 Buchenwald prisoners were taken to the Bernburg gas chamber between March 2 and 14, 1942. Every single one of them
was Jewish; in less than two weeks, more than a quarter of all Buchenwald Jews were murdered, setting the standard for future T-4 selections.
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How did Mennecke and other T-4 doctors choose their Jewish victims in late 1941–42? Physical condition continued to play a part: many prisoners were elderly and infirm.
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But T-4 doctors also included a number of Jews who could still work.
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In these
cases, the physicians were guided by other criteria. As Mennecke admitted after the war, he condemned some Jewish prisoners who had still been in reasonable health; their selection had nothing to do with medical matters and everything to do with racial policy.
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Dr. Mennecke’s thinking can be reconstructed from notes he made on the back of prisoner photographs (he was planning a publication on
Nazi racial science). Recovered after the war, all the photos appear to show Jewish KL inmates, several of whom are known to have died in T-4 gas chambers.
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None of Mennecke’s comments referred to their health. Instead, he made copious notes on their anti-Nazi views, especially in the case of foreigners; “extraordinarily impertinent and spiteful comments about Germans,” he remarked in one case.
Mennecke was even more exercised by “asocial” behavior, particularly by what he saw as moral deviance. Most Jewish women selected by Mennecke for his photo collection were accused of sex with German men (“race defilement with German soldiers, like on a conveyor belt”) and around half of them were labeled as prostitutes (“pure-bred Jewish whore with venereal disease”). He regarded these women with
leering revulsion, cataloging their supposed promiscuity and degeneracy (“sexually impulsive and insatiable Jewess”). Mennecke applied his moral judgments to men, too; in Buchenwald, almost all Jewish men presumed to be homosexual were sent to the gas chambers.
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Finally, Mennecke took note of the Camp SS verdict on the prisoner’s conduct. Eduard Radinger, for example, a thirty-four-year-old tailor’s
assistant from Vienna, was accused of “gambling, laziness, impertinence.” This may well have helped to condemn him to death, as Mennecke apparently placed a “
+
” next to his name. On March 12, 1942, after having spent almost three years in the KL, first as a “work-shy Jew” and later as a Jewish “protective custody” prisoner, Radinger was deported from Buchenwald to Bernburg, together with 104 other
Jewish men, and gassed.
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The Camp SS Takes Charge

Not long after the extension of Action 14f13 in late 1941, the Nazi authorities cut it back. Dr. Mennecke, accompanied by other T-4 doctors, made his final trip to the KL in spring 1942, calling at Flossenbürg and Neuengamme; the last transport of victims left Neuengamme for the Bernburg killing center in June 1942. This marked the end of the
operation in its original setup, twelve months after the first prisoners—Siegbert Fraenkel and the other men from Sachsenhausen—had been murdered.
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Inside a year, some 6,500 or more concentration camp prisoners had died in the T-4 gas chambers.
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The commandants were informed about the curtailment of Action 14f13 on March 26, 1942, in a secret communication. Arthur Liebehenschel from the IKL
announced that the slaughter, which he referred to as “special treatment,” had to be scaled down. The general rules of the program had been disregarded, he claimed, with the SS presenting too many prisoners to the T-4 commissions. From now on, Liebehenschel stressed, only prisoners who were permanently unable to work should be sent to their deaths. All others—including the sick who could regain some
strength—would be held back to “carry out the labor tasks given to the concentration camps.”
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At first glance, this apparent reversal of policy was caused by a recent shift in SS priorities; in spring 1942, Heinrich Himmler demanded that the KL make a greater economic contribution to the German war effort (chapter 8), prompting Camp SS managers like Liebehenschel to scramble to stay on message.

In reality, however, the demise of Action 14f13 was not about economics at all.
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Rather, the marriage of convenience between Camp SS and T-4 had come to an end. The focus of the T-4 organization had shifted to a far bigger program of mass extermination—the Holocaust. By spring 1942, many officials had already relocated to occupied eastern Europe, where they were in great demand for the new death
camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka; in comparison, the murder of KL prisoners in the “euthanasia” killing centers inside Germany lost its significance.

The Camp SS, meanwhile, did not need the T-4 killers anymore. In recent months, SS men had proven themselves as professional mass murderers in their own right, with
Muselmänner
among their prime targets. While thousands of weak and sick prisoners
were being selected for the T-4 gas chambers, local Camp SS men had started to murder many more on the spot during the second half of 1941.
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Previously, such SS murders of invalid inmates inside the KL had been sporadic. Now they became systematic and soon superseded Action 14f13. Although some more prisoner transports still went to the external T-4 gas chambers later in 1942, before they closed
down, most murders now took place inside the concentration camps.
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Why did local Camp SS men embark on mass executions of infirm prisoners, in parallel to the coordinated T-4 program? Partly because they could. Their initial experiences during Action 14f13 had taught them that it would be safe to move to executions inside the KL. Fears about prisoner unrest had proved unfounded; the T-4 selections
continued without a hitch, despite the growing prisoner awareness of the murders. Also, the local Camp SS must have seen practical benefits; murdering
Muselmänner
inside the KL meant no more doctors’ commissions, deportations, and delays. Furthermore, SS men believed that they had the right to kill. Once Himmler had sanctioned the mass murder of the infirm by launching Action 14f13, the local
Camp SS saw little reason to hold back. The dynamic had been the same in autumn 1939, when Himmler’s central execution policy set off a spate of local killings. Once again, radical actions taken at the top of the SS state triggered a radical response from below, ratcheting up terror inside the camps.

The scene of the first Camp SS massacre of
Muselmänner
was Buchenwald. Following the arrival
of two prisoner transports from Dachau in July 1941, Buchenwald SS men felt overwhelmed by infirm inmates and feared that some of the newcomers carried infections. The local SS decided to kill the invalids, and rather than wait for the return of the T-4 commission, went ahead on its own. Several hundred exhausted prisoners were isolated in the infirmary, as suspected carriers of TB, and murdered by
an SS doctor with lethal injections.
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Other concentration camps followed suit during the second half of 1941. SS men in different camps explored different killing methods, as the spirit of lethal experimentation became all-pervasive. In Gusen, for example, hundreds of weak and emaciated prisoners were killed during so-called “bathing actions.” Directed by the terrifying camp leader Karl Chmielewski,
the Gusen SS forced the prisoners under freezing showers for thirty minutes or more; some drowned in the standing water, others succumbed to hypothermia, with the screams of the dying men echoing across the compound.
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Camp SS men elsewhere used other ways to murder the infirm, with lethal injections—either intravenously or straight into the heart—emerging as the SS favorite. The main drug of
choice was phenol; when it was unavailable, SS doctors often injected air instead. The Ravensbrück camp doctor Rolf Rosenthal recalled that, when he witnessed the lethal injection of a female prisoner after his arrival in January 1942, he was told that “this was always administered when people were very ill and incurable.”
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By 1942, the systematic murder of exhausted, weak, and ill prisoners
had become a permanent feature of the KL. Sometimes local Camp SS officials would pick their victims within days of arrival.
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More commonly, the prisoners were pulled out during regular selections in infirmaries. Doctors played a major role here, just as they had done during Action 14f13; but this time it was Camp SS physicians who sent the prisoners to their deaths, not outsiders like Dr. Mennecke.
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Although the mass murder of
Muselmänner
was decentralized, it was sanctioned and probably encouraged by senior IKL managers. Previously, the Oranienburg officials had insisted on steering such killings—as during Action 14f13. But in view of the growing number of sick prisoners, they must have concluded that managing all murders was impossible and relaxed the rules. According to an internal SS
document, camp doctors were now authorized to kill “on their own initiative” those prisoners who were “incurably ill,” “ridden with epidemics,” or “suspected of suffering from an epidemic disease.”
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To retain some central control, Camp SS managers in October 1942 revived the plan of turning Dachau into a collection camp for “physically weak prisoners who are not fit for use”; this time, all
these prisoners were slated for extermination.
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Over the coming weeks and months, many
Muselmänner
from other KL arrived in Dachau to die.
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Some perished in transit.
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The most appalling transport arrived on November 19, 1942, with several hundred men on board. It had set off days earlier from Stutthof and the prisoners, crammed into cattle cars, had received almost no food since. When the
doors opened at the Dachau SS compound, dozens of corpses lay inside. The dead were dumped inside the camp, together with the soiled survivors, some so starved that their shoulder blades protruded like wings. Even the cruelest SS block leaders “turned away in disgust,” Karel Ka
š
ák wrote in his notes. Dozens of the new arrivals are said to have died within hours; at least one of them was killed
by an SS guard, who stepped on his throat until he suffocated.
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Few prisoners who arrived in Dachau on so-called invalid transports in 1942 lived for very long. Those who defied illness, hunger, and neglect were killed after SS selections, apparently by lethal injection.
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Another method of mass murder considered by the Dachau SS was poison gas. The construction of a gas chamber was under
way since spring 1942, and its primary purpose, it seems, was the extermination of weak and sick prisoners, though it remains unclear whether this facility was ever put to use.
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Dachau would not have been the first KL to kill invalid inmates with gas; by autumn 1942, SS men in several other camps had already done so.
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The main target of these experiments with poison gas had not been
Muselmänner
, however, but Soviet prisoners of war, who began to arrive in the thousands from late summer 1941 onward.

EXECUTING SOVIET POWS

Early on June 22, 1941, German troops invaded the Soviet Union—Operation Barbarossa, the biggest and most devastating military campaign ever, had begun. German forces, more than three million men strong, initially advanced rapidly and left death and destruction in their
wake.
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Hitler had long dreamed about this moment, picturing a decisive showdown with “Jewish Bolsheviks” that would determine Germany’s destiny. More than two months before the invasion, he told his generals to prepare for an all-out war of extermination.
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From June 1941, the German army realized Hitler’s order, flanked by specially trained SS and police killing units, such as the task forces.
At the same time, the German authorities were drawing up plans for the long-term occupation of the Soviet Union, which were gigantic in scale and genocidal in intent, condemning many millions of civilians to death by starvation.
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