KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (53 page)

MURDEROUS UTOPIAS

There was a time, in the early years after the Second World War, when historians showed little
real interest in Hitler’s worldview. Writing him off as a madman or an opportunist, they overlooked his core convictions. Of course, Hitler’s rambling writings and speeches, and his interminable monologues over lunch and dinner, never added up to a systematic body of thought, and there continues to be some debate about the extent to which his views dictated the course of the Third Reich. Nonetheless,
Hitler clearly held strong political beliefs that guided him and shaped the new Germany he wanted to build.
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At the very center of Hitler’s worldview—together with his fanatical hatred of Jews and Bolsheviks—stood the belief that Germany could not survive without the conquest of living space. Hitler had already made up his mind about this in the mid-1920s, when he still seemed destined for
political obscurity. Germany needed to expand, he believed, and its future lay in the east, above all in the Soviet Union, with its vast stretches of land and rich agricultural resources. Hitler remained fixated on this goal for the rest of his life. Even as he was cowering in a maze of bunkers under the garden of the bombed Reich Chancellery, not long before his suicide in April 1945, he talked feverishly
about the German mission to secure living space in the east.
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Back in summer 1941, right after the start of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s dream appeared to be within his grasp. Germany was on course for a crushing victory over the Soviet Union, or so it seemed; within a month of the invasion, the Wehrmacht had crossed the Dnieper, taken Smolensk, and closed in on Kiev. On July 16, 1941, in
a top-level conference, Hitler laid out his vision. All the European areas of the Soviet Union would remain in German hands, Hitler announced: “We have to turn the newly gained eastern territories into a Garden of Eden.”
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Over the coming weeks and months, Hitler fantasized again and again about the glorious future awaiting Germany in the east. His mind kept wandering over his new dominions,
daydreaming about all the towns and cities he would build. In three hundred years, Hitler mused, the bare and empty expanses would be flowering landscapes. Lording over the remaining Slavic population, the German rulers would live in opulent settlements, connected by a huge network of roads. “If only I could give the German people an idea,” Hitler sighed in private in early September 1941, “of what
this space means for the future.”
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Settlements in the East

One man who needed no convincing was Heinrich Himmler, who was infatuated with the idea of living space. Soon after the German victory over Poland in autumn 1939, he had traveled across the occupied territory with his friend Hanns Johst, who afterward wrote how the Reichsführer SS, who had studied agriculture as a young man, got out
of his car, gazed across the fields, and picked up some earth: “Thus we stood like ancient farmers and we smiled at each other with twinkling eyes. All of this was now German soil!”
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Himmler made it his mission to colonize this soil, after Hitler charged him in autumn 1939 with “shaping the new German settlement areas” through major population transfers, replacing dangerous “racial aliens” with
ethnic Germans.
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Himmler took his cue from Hitler. Backed by a large new organization, he oversaw the brutal deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles and Polish Jews eastward, as well as the influx of ethnic Germans into the western parts of Nazi-occupied Poland.
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After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Himmler lost no time in staking his claim on these possessions, too. As the
head of the Nazi terror apparatus, Himmler was in charge of policing the newly conquered areas.
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And as the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of the German People, he tried to transform this territory along the lines of Nazi racial thinking. On June 24, 1941, just two days after the German invasion, Himmler charged his chief planner, Professor Konrad Meyer, with drawing up a blueprint
for “new settlement planning in the East.”
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Himmler’s men set to work on the so-called General Plan East, which gained, over the coming weeks and months, truly monstrous proportions. It aimed to reconstruct the entire face of eastern Europe. The SS planners did not advocate cosmetic changes but butchery, with whole cities razed, vast regions Germanized, and tens of millions of civilians deported,
enslaved, and killed.
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These plans for Germany’s colonial future required a gigantic construction effort, an assignment tailor-made for the expanding SS economy under Oswald Pohl. By early 1942, Himmler had put Pohl in charge of all SS peacetime building projects in the east, a huge task that included the construction of dozens of new bases across the former Soviet Union.
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Back in mid-December
1941, Pohl had already presented Himmler with a comprehensive postwar building program for Germany and much of Nazi-controlled Europe. The estimated cost was a staggering thirteen billion Reichsmark, with almost half of it earmarked for SS and police structures on former Soviet territory. But in January 1942 Himmler rejected these plans, not because they were too outlandish, but because they
were too cautious. One had to think even bigger, Himmler lectured Pohl, to create the “mammoth settlements” with which “we will make the east German.” At Himmler’s insistence, the SS building program went through ever more gargantuan drafts over the coming months.
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Much of the projected building work was supposed to be carried out by concentration camp prisoners. This made economic sense, as
far as the SS leaders were concerned. The war had severely strained Germany’s financial resources, Himmler reminded Pohl, and the German state would have to spend prudently after the victorious war. At the same time, the SS plans could not wait. Himmler’s solution was simple: costs would be kept down by upping production in SS quarries and brick factories.
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This vision was grounded in the colonial
euphoria and genocidal utopianism that gripped the SS, from the highest echelons down to foot soldiers like the Mauthausen Hauptscharführer who ordered prisoners to draw detailed plans for a castle in Crimea.
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Like all true zealots, the SS believers wanted to turn their dreams into reality as fast as possible. Even though their most ambitious plans were scheduled for after the war, they felt
that construction should start straightaway; after all, they expected a swift victory. And because prisoners were critical to their plans, they set out to transform the KL system.

There was no mistaking the stronger emphasis of Camp SS leaders on forced labor. To begin with, they launched one of their periodic restructures of KL labor. In late September 1941, the ineffectual bureau for prisoner
labor, set up the previous year in Pohl’s SS Main Office for Budgets and Building, was incorporated directly into the IKL, together with its local representatives in camps, the so-called labor action leaders (
Arbeitseinsatzführer
). Although the immediate impact was negligible, the move demonstrated the growing preoccupation of the Camp SS with “major visionary, economic and war-essential tasks,”
as Inspector Richard Glücks put it.
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The main focus of SS leaders was not on organizational matters, but on the prisoners themselves. Himmler zeroed in on their training. Earlier SS initiatives to teach practical skills had not amounted to much. Now Himmler demanded the creation of an army of skilled inmates. In early December 1941, he ordered Pohl to have at least fifteen thousand concentration
camp prisoners trained as stonemasons and bricklayers. Himmler added that this program should be completed by the end of the war, so that the prisoners were ready for deployment in “large-scale construction which would then be undertaken,” such as Hitler’s monumental city building projects, which had been the main stimulus of the SS economy since the late 1930s.
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But Himmler’s gaze had already
shifted from rebuilding Germany to settling the conquered east, which would require even more inmate labor. And so prisoner training became an idée fixe for Himmler and his managers. One senior IKL official stressed in late 1941 that
“every healthy inmate”
had to become
“a skilled worker.”
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Like many of Himmler’s favorite projects, this remained a pipe dream. Proper training would have required
decent treatment, adequate food, and reasonable conditions—the exact opposite of what the KL stood for. If Himmler’s plans had been realized, the camps would no longer have been the camps, and no SS manager was willing to contemplate this. In any case, prisoner training alone would never be enough to create the workforce required for the SS construction program. What the SS leaders really needed
were masses of new slave laborers.

Soviets as Slaves

With his planners busily redrawing the map of Europe, turning entire countries upside down, Heinrich Himmler did not hold back when it came to forced labor, either. He envisaged huge concentration camps filled with slaves to realize his monumental vision; the new settlements in the east would be erected on soil soaked with the sweat and blood
of KL inmates. Himmler’s main push came in September 1941, when his eyes fell on Soviet POWs.
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At the time, there seemed to be an infinite supply of Soviet prisoners. Vast numbers had fallen into German hands, with many more on their way (by mid-October 1941, the Wehrmacht had captured more than three million men), and Himmler identified them as an untapped resource. Nazi leaders had previously
banned their deployment for the German war economy, so they had often remained idle in the hands of the Wehrmacht. When this resolve to shut out Soviet POWs was weakening in late summer 1941, Himmler saw his chance: Why not exploit some as forced laborers in concentration camps?
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Himmler moved fast for Soviet POWs, supported by Hitler.
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On September 15, 1941, he evidently discussed his plans
with his closest confidant, Reinhard Heydrich, and with Oswald Pohl; he probably also raised them with the godfather of the KL, Theodor Eicke, that same day. The following morning, he telephoned Pohl once more; we do not know the details of their conversation, but Himmler’s notes reveal the magnitude of his plans: “100,000 Russians take over into concentration camps.”
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Enormous as these figures
were, Himmler soon doubled them. On the drawing boards of the SS, radical plans were quickly torn up and replaced by even more radical ones. By September 22, 1941, when Himmler met with Camp Inspector Glücks (who had been briefed some days earlier), he wanted two hundred thousand POWs for the KL.
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Discussions were already under way with the Army High Command, and it did not take long to reach
a deal: in late September the army agreed to leave up to one hundred thousand Soviet POWs to Himmler.
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It seemed as if the Reichsführer SS had reached his initial goal with speed and ease.

Even before the negotiations with the army were concluded, the Camp SS prepared for the influx of Soviet soldiers. Some of these prisoners, Himmler decided, would be diverted to existing camps. On September
15, 1941, the same day he talked to Heydrich, Pohl, and Eicke, the IKL sent an urgent telex to commandants, asking them how many POWs they could accommodate. The plan was to put them in new barracks—as basic as possible—but to speed things up the local Camp SS also cleared some old barracks of other inmates. By October 1941, special areas, separated from the rest of the compounds and identified
by signs such as “Prisoner of War Labor Camp,” had been hastily completed in Neuengamme, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau, as well as in Mauthausen, which was earmarked as the largest such site within the prewar German borders.
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The bulk of Soviet POWs, however, were assigned elsewhere, after SS planners decided to build two massive new concentration camps on
occupied Polish soil. The first was established in Lublin, some one hundred miles southeast of Warsaw, and became known as Majdanek (from the Majdan Tatarski district to the north). Majdanek was the first KL in the General Government. In the early phase of the occupation of Poland, Nazi leaders had decided against such a camp. As governor Hans Frank told senior German police officials in May 1940,
it would be redundant: “Any suspects on our patch should be liquidated straightaway.” But during a visit on July 20, 1941, Himmler selected Lublin as the site of a big new concentration camp, to help turn the region into a major outpost for German settlements. His order was not immediately implemented, perhaps because it was not yet clear where all the prisoners would come from. Only two months later,
during Himmler’s quest for Soviet POWs, did the SS push ahead with the plan. On September 22, 1941, Dr. Hans Kammler, recently appointed as the head of the construction office in Pohl’s SS Main Office for Budgets and Building, ordered the erection of the camp on the edge of Lublin, with a projected capacity of fifty thousand prisoners; construction began on October 7, 1941. But the blueprint
for Majdanek was outdated as soon as it had been drawn up. As Himmler’s appetite for Soviet POWs grew, so did the projected prisoner figures for Majdanek. By early November 1941, Dr. Kammler already expected some 125,000 POWs, rising to 150,000 by early December.
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The second major new camp in occupied Poland was set up on land already controlled by the Camp SS. On September 26, 1941, just days
after the construction order for Majdanek had gone out, Dr. Kammler ordered the building of a huge new camp near the town of Auschwitz. During a local inspection on October 2, 1941, Kammler chose the location of the new POW camp, less than two miles west of the main Auschwitz camp, to which it was subordinated. The spot was slightly moved a few days later, on the insistence of Commandant Höss:
the new camp would grow on the site of a village called Birkenau (Brzezinka), inside the large SS interest zone that had been cleared of all inhabitants several months earlier. Construction began on October 15, 1941, and just like in Majdanek, the SS planners set their sights high. In late September 1941, the SS already expected fifty thousand prisoners, a figure revised within weeks to a hundred
thousand.
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There were no signs yet that Birkenau would one day stand at the center of the Holocaust.
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The new subcamp was not built to murder the Jews of Europe, but to exploit vast numbers of Soviet POWs in the quest for German living space. In part, the SS hoped to turn the city of Auschwitz into a model settlement. More important, no doubt, were the plans for settlements elsewhere. As the
most easterly established KL, Auschwitz would be a good base for the expansion of the SS, following in the footsteps of the revered Teutonic Knights.
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