KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (54 page)

Similar motives stood behind the creation, later in 1941, of a third new camp in occupied eastern Europe, near a small village called Stutthof (Sztutowo), near Danzig. In contrast to Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau, a camp already existed here.
The Stutthof camp, surrounded by thick forests, swamps, and canals, had initially been set up by a local SS unit on September 2, 1939, just after the German attack on Poland, to terrorize the local population. In early 1940, SS leaders briefly considered turning the site into a concentration camp. But after some discussion, Himmler decided against it. In autumn 1941, he changed his mind. During
a visit on Sunday, November 23, 1941, he concluded that it should become a KL proper. His order was implemented in early 1942.
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The new camp was designated as a regional provider of forced labor for German settlements in Danzig and West Prussia. Because the plans were more modest than for Majdanek and Birkenau, Himmler was thinking of allocating fewer Soviet POWs than to the other two new camps;
in late 1941, he proposed sending some twenty thousand men. Plans for a new compound on the site were duly drawn up in Berlin and sent to Stutthof in early March 1942, at a time when the building work in Birkenau and Majdanek was already under way.
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It is worth pausing to reflect on the magnitude of Himmler’s plans for Soviet POWs. What he was proposing in autumn 1941 was the greatest shake-up
of the KL system since the mid-1930s. He envisaged a colossal increase in prisoner numbers. At a time when the entire camp system held fewer than eighty thousand prisoners, Himmler wanted to add some two hundred thousand or more. The great majority would work in gigantic new camp complexes, towering over the existing KL. The main camp in Auschwitz (with some ten thousand prisoners, currently one
of the largest camps) would be dwarfed by the attached new camp in nearby Birkenau.
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And with so many Soviet POWs earmarked for new camps in occupied Poland, the balance of the entire concentration camp system would tip sharply eastward. This focus on the east pointed to the new function of concentration camps: the colonization of German living space. Making prisoners perform productive labor
was nothing new. Neither was their use in construction projects. But the plans in autumn 1941 were of a different order. Himmler envisaged an enormous program of forced labor, harnessing vast numbers of prisoners for a vital Nazi building program overseen by the SS. The KL would grow, the SS economy would grow, and Germany would grow. Once again, Himmler saw himself as acting in the best interests
of both the SS and the nation.

KL Graveyards

On October 7, 1941, a freight train pulled up at a ramp near the Auschwitz main camp and slowly came to a halt. Inside were 2,014 men, the first Soviet POWs dispatched to the camp for forced labor. The doors were flung open and the prisoners, dazed and dirty, staggered out of the stifling carriages into the bright light, gasping for air. Among them
was the twenty-eight-year-old infantry lieutenant Nikolaj Wassiljew from Moscow. “We did not know where we had arrived,” he said later, “and what kind of camp this was.” The SS guards soon showed them: screams and blows rained down on Wassiljew and the others. Some feared that they would be shot straightaway. Instead, the SS forced them to strip and jump into a vat filled with disinfectant. Wassiljew
recalled that those “who did not want to jump were kicked and pushed in with sticks.” Then the bone-thin POWs had to crouch naked on the floor.
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The newcomers had barely caught their breath when the Auschwitz SS ordered them to march to the camp. It was an icy autumn day, with frost on the roofs and patches of snow on the ground, and the Soviet soldiers were shivering with cold as they arrived
inside the compound, where more SS men lay in wait. Some pointed their cameras at the POWs and took trophy photographs. Others battered the prisoners and then forced them to line up. There were further disinfections, which spread more terror, and also more disease since they were performed ineptly. “Then we were chased into the barrack[s],” remembered Nikolaj Wassiljew. The new POW section in
the Auschwitz main camp consisted of nine completely bare blocks. “We remained without clothes for several days,” Wassiljew added, “we were always naked.” For warmth, the prisoners would huddle together in groups. The weakest leaned against the walls or lay on the concrete floors.
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More and more transports arrived over the coming days, and the small POW enclosure was soon desperately overcrowded;
between October 7 and 25, 1941, almost ten thousand Soviet soldiers were pressed inside, doubling the Auschwitz prisoner population in just eighteen days.
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All this was the result of Himmler’s deal with the army. Following the general agreement in late September, the High Command of the Wehrmacht had started to make good on its promise to hand over Soviet POWs. On October 2, 1941, it ordered
the transfer of twenty-five thousand prisoners for labor inside the Third Reich; the ensuing transports to the KL started within days—mostly heading for Auschwitz—and were completed by the end of the month. An additional two thousand Soviet POWs were dispatched to Majdanek in the General Government.
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The incoming Soviet POWs faced infernal conditions, not just in Auschwitz. In Sachsenhausen,
they were also crammed inside empty barracks. There were “no beds, no cots, no chairs or tables, no blankets,” recalled Benjamin Lebedev, who arrived with 1,800 other Soviet soldiers on October 18, 1941. “We slept on the ground, our wooden shoes as a cushion.”
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In Gross-Rosen, the first arrivals were not even allowed inside their barracks and had to spend several nights outside; between two
hundred and three hundred men are said to have lost their lives during the first night alone.
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In Majdanek, too, some Soviet POWs had to sleep out in the open, as there were not yet enough barracks; desperate for shelter, the prisoners dug holes in the hard ground.
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In line with Himmler’s plans, the Camp SS soon pressed some of the POWs into forced labor. In Auschwitz, Soviet prisoners had
to prepare the new Birkenau compound from autumn 1941 onward. They cleared woods, dug trenches, and dismantled old farmhouses to gather bricks for the new camp buildings. Toiling with their bare hands in icy temperatures, many prisoners collapsed and died. “They froze en masse,” a Polish resistance fighter wrote in a secret note; other POWs were shot or beaten to death during work. As the survivors
dragged themselves back each evening from the Birkenau building site to their quarters in the main camp, they were accompanied by a cart that carried the corpses of their comrades.
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The majority of Soviet POWs were too weak to work at all. In Flossenbürg, it took several months before the Camp SS deployed any of the 1,700 POWs who had arrived in mid-October 1941.
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In Gross-Rosen, the SS sent
only 150 of the 2,500 Soviet men into the camp’s quarry, and even they produced almost nothing, as the local DESt office complained in mid-December 1941: “These Russians are in such bad physical shape that one can barely demand any labor from them. They are worse than the worst prisoners so far.”
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Having already suffered at the noxious hands of the German army, the Soviet soldiers were in a
desperate state even before they entered the concentration camps. “I was already ill when I arrived,” recalled Nikolaj Wassiljew. “I had a kidney infection, pneumonia, and dysentery.” After a week in Auschwitz, he was moved to an infirmary for Soviet POWs, which resembled a morgue more than a hospital. There was almost no hope of treatment, with prisoner orderlies reduced to using toilet paper as
bandages.
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Most Soviet POWs joined the ranks of the dying—such were the conditions in most concentration camps. Many starved to death, since the Camp SS had reduced their rations well below those of other prisoners, until there was almost no food left at all; probably for the first time in the history of the KL, some inmates became so desperate they resorted to cannibalism. In Auschwitz, Commandant
Rudolf Höss viewed the death struggle of Soviet soldiers like an anthropologist, as if it had nothing to do with him. “They were no longer human beings,” he wrote in 1946. “They had become animals, only on the hunt for food.” Some Camp SS men amused themselves by throwing bread into the POW enclosures, watching the frantic prisoners fight for every scrap.
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Starvation soon bred more illness.
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And epidemics were rampant, too; by late November 1941, half of all Soviet soldiers in Majdanek were suffering from typhus and its aftereffects.
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The Camp SS did not hesitate to kill ill, infectious, and weak Soviet soldiers, perhaps aware that Himmler approved such murders as a radical solution to epidemics and supply shortages.
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In Auschwitz, Nikolaj Wassiljew, who worked in the infirmary
after his health had improved, witnessed a large SS selection among POWs in early 1942. Stripped naked, they had to run past SS men, sitting behind a table, who singled out the weakest ones. The victims were led, one by one, into the operating room and murdered by lethal injection.
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In other camps, too, SS men routinely murdered sick POWs (just as they started to murder other so-called invalids,
too). In Majdanek and Mauthausen, for example, SS men responded to typhus outbreaks by killing large numbers of Soviet soldiers in autumn and winter 1941; murder was seen as the surest method of disease control.
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Camp SS men also executed Soviet POWs on political grounds, even though they had been sent for work. Within weeks of their arrival in October 1941, the RSHA, still obsessed with the
danger of commissars, had dispatched Gestapo commissions to concentration camps to root out supposed enemies hiding among the new arrivals. In Auschwitz, Gestapo officials screened all Soviet slave laborers, and selected one thousand “fanatical communists” and “politically unacceptable [elements]” for execution; the Camp SS shot and gassed the victims from late 1941 onward.
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The line between
Soviet POWs who came to concentration camps for forced labor and those who came for execution became ever more blurred. In November 1941, Heinrich Himmler even agreed to temporarily exempt “commissars” from execution if they were fit for work. From now on, the local Camp SS could pick out physically strong men from execution transports for labor in quarries; soon these prisoners would be dead, too,
but not before the SS had harnessed their last strength.
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This was an early appearance of the concept of “annihilation through labor,” which SS leaders were also considering as a weapon against Jews, and which would claim countless lives in the KL over the coming years.
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But this was still in the future. Back in autumn and winter 1941, the Camp SS gained almost nothing from the suffering
of Soviet soldiers who arrived as slave laborers. The scale of death was stunning. In Majdanek, hardly any of the two thousand Soviet POWs were still alive in mid-January 1942.
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In Auschwitz, too, the young soldiers “dropped like flies,” as Commandant Rudolf Höss noted. Around eighty percent—some 7,900 men or more—were dead by early January 1942, less than three months after the first transport
had reached the camp; the worst day came on November 4, 1941, when 352 Soviet POWs died in Auschwitz.
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The mass death of Soviet soldiers in late 1941 was not confined to the KL in the occupied east. In Sachsenhausen, almost thirty percent of Soviet POWs are said to have perished within their first month inside (not counting “commissars” executed in the neck-shooting barrack).
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And in Gross-Rosen,
just 89 out of 2,500 Soviet POWs were still alive on January 25, 1942.
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At the time, the local Camp SS saw these deaths, which far exceeded all previous Camp SS records, largely as a logistical problem. This was true above all in Auschwitz, which claimed the lives of more Soviet slave laborers than any other KL. The Auschwitz SS initially struggled to identify all the dead, as army tags were
lost in the chaos of the POW enclosure and numbers written on bodies quickly rubbed off. To prevent cases of mistaken identity, the SS took a drastic step. From November 1941 onward, Soviet slave workers had their prisoner number tattooed onto their skin. A special metal stamp was punched into the prisoner’s chest, with ink wiped into the wound; the men were so weak they were propped against a wall,
lest they collapse under the blow of the stamp. The notorious Auschwitz tattoo was born and later extended to most inmates in the camp (no other KL used tattoos, though some had used ink stamps in the past).
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The Auschwitz SS also searched for new ways to dispose of the dead. The existing crematorium in the main camp could not burn all the dead POWs, and as corpses were piling up all over the
enclosure, a sickening smell of decomposing bodies began to spread through the camp and beyond. On November 11, 1941, the recently appointed head of the Auschwitz SS building office, Karl Bischoff, sent a cable to the camp’s furnace supplier in Germany: “Third incinerator urgently needed.” Because it would take months before the new oven was installed, the Camp SS in the meantime decided to dump
the bodies in ditches in Birkenau, hastily dug by other POWs. Birkenau became a vast graveyard for Soviet soldiers.
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Himmler Thwarted

In autumn and winter 1941, a gulf opened up between Himmler’s megalomaniac plans for the mass deployment of Soviet POWs, which envisaged their exploitation for gigantic German settlements, and the reality inside his concentration camps, which was all about death.
Even a few Camp SS men were alert to the apparent contradictions of SS policy. Their doubts were summed up by a Sachsenhausen official, who asked himself out loud: “So have these people come here to die or to work?”
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As an advocate of “annihilation through labor,” Himmler’s answer would have been “both.” But in the case of the Soviet POWs who arrived for slave labor in October 1941, the SS succeeded
only in part; the soldiers were annihilated all right, but long before most of them could be exploited. The RSHA warned the Camp SS not to confuse POWs arriving
“for labor deployment”
with those destined “
for execution
.”
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Not all local SS men could see the difference; after all, Nazi propaganda had long painted all Soviet soldiers as dangerous subhumans.
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