KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (75 page)

Pohl’s close ties to Heinrich Himmler—they corresponded frequently, and also regularly met up or talked on a secure phone line installed in the WVHA—strengthened his position; all Camp SS men knew that the Reichsführer held him in great respect. Pohl, in turn, was slavishly devoted to his younger mentor. He treated Himmler’s wishes
as hallowed commands and lambasted anyone who dared to question them.
3
Himmler was still the true master of the KL: no major initiative went ahead without his approval during the second half of the war. He received updates about prisoner numbers and deaths from the WVHA, and repeatedly demanded additional details.
4
Himmler even found time for further inspections, making at least five trips to
concentration camps in 1942.
5
Such visits were not empty ceremonies; Himmler remained an exacting, stern ruler. When he arrived unannounced in Dachau on May 1, 1942, for example, and passed a prisoner detail on a vegetable patch that worked too slowly (to his mind), he jumped out of his car, bawled out the Kapo, the sentries, and the SS commando leader, and ordered the prisoners to continue until
nighttime. Told that most of the inmates were priests, Himmler exclaimed: “These bastards shall work until they collapse!”
6

As the war dragged on, Himmler’s inspections and interventions grew less frequent. As a leading proponent of total war, he accumulated more and more power. Himmler became Reich minister of the interior (August 1943) and commander of the reserve army (July 1944), and his
new posts absorbed much of his time.
7
Yet he never forgot the KL, and continued to set their general direction. And as we will see, certain pet projects—such as human experiments and the exploitation of prisoners for the German war economy—still brought out the micromanager in him, stirring subordinates like Pohl to ever more radical initiatives.

OSWALD POHL AND THE WVHA

The absorption of the
concentration camps into Oswald Pohl’s WVHA coincided with major shifts in the German economy. At the beginning of 1942, Nazi leaders stared into an uncertain future. The army had suffered a dramatic setback in the USSR, war production stagnated, and Germany faced an open-ended global war. To increase its armaments output, the regime took several significant steps, symbolized by two key appointments.
In February 1942, Hitler installed his protégé Albert Speer as minister for armaments and war production, and in March 1942, he named the Thuringian Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel as the new general plenipotentiary for labor mobilization. Their fierce activism and ebullient rhetoric quickly made both men into major players in the German war economy.
8

This development spelled danger to Heinrich Himmler,
who worried that Speer and Sauckel would push him aside.
9
To keep his two rivals at bay, and away from KL labor, Himmler in early March 1942 hastily ordered the incorporation of the Camp Inspectorate into the recently established WVHA.
10
Mindful of appearances, Himmler justified the restructure on economic grounds. Absorbing the camps into Pohl’s WVHA would guarantee the utmost exploitation of
prisoners, harnessing “every last working hour of every person for our victory.”
11
Hitler was persuaded, at least for now, and personally agreed to the expansion of armaments production in concentration camps.
12

Putting the camps into Pohl’s hands made perfect sense to Himmler. Pohl was no stranger to the KL and had gained major influence over the previous years. And unlike the obscure camp inspector
Richard Glücks, who hardly ever got an audience with Himmler, Pohl was a close confidant and SS notable, reflected in his promotion to Obergruppenführer, agreed on in a meeting between Himmler and Hitler on March 17, 1942. He had great ambitions and the WVHA seemed destined to become a major force under his leadership. Deeply committed to the cause—he claimed to be a “National Socialist before
there even was National Socialism”—Pohl was single-minded, well connected, and politically astute, and had long cultivated a forbidding image; his subordinates marveled at his resilience and feared his temper. His second wife summed up her husband’s image, in a letter to Himmler, as “indestructible, robust, and utterly strong.”
13
Clearly, Himmler hoped that other Nazi bigwigs would think twice
before pushing Pohl around.

Inside the WVHA

The WVHA was a large outfit, with up to 1,700 officials in five main departments overseeing tens of thousands of workers across Europe. Its remit went far beyond the KL; as its name suggests, it was involved in all aspects of SS business and administration, from the acquisition of real estate to the provision of accommodation for SS troops. Nonetheless,
all five WVHA departments had close links to the concentration camps. Office Group A dealt with personnel matters, budgets, and payrolls, and with the transfer of funds to individual camps. Among the duties of Office Group B was the supply of food and clothing. Office Group C, meanwhile, was involved in construction projects, including the gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz; it was led
by SS Oberführer Hans Kammler, who was poised to become a dominant figure in the camp system. As for Office Group W, headed by Pohl himself, it oversaw SS enterprises such as the German Earth and Stone Works (DESt), which continued to rely heavily on KL slave labor; at its height in 1943–44, the SS economy included around thirty different companies, which exploited up to forty thousand camp inmates.
14
The administrative heart of the KL system, however, was Office Group D, the former Camp Inspectorate, still based in the so-called T-Building in Oranienburg.

Compared to the other WVHA offices, Office Group D was rather small.
15
In early September 1944, it had no more than 105 employees. Among them were nineteen officers; the rest were auxiliary staff, like secretaries, telex and telephone operators,
caretakers, and canteen staff, as well as drivers (Camp SS cars had their own registration numbers, running from SS-16 000 to SS-16 500).
16
The atmosphere inside the T-Building reflected the martial values of the Camp SS. Officials normally wore boots and uniforms to work, and put in long hours, until six or seven o’clock in the evening, with some working well into the night; a few officers even
slept in private rooms in the T-Building, probably after a meal and some drinks in the local Waffen SS mess hall (other officials lived in Oranienburg or nearby Berlin).
17
Like most concentration camps, the KL headquarters were an almost exclusively male workspace. In September 1944, just one woman, a Frau Bade, was listed among the staff members; working as a personal assistant, she was also
the only civilian employee and non-SS member.
18

Office Group D had four departments.
19
Every two weeks or so, the four department heads would meet in the large office of Richard Glücks on the first floor of the T-Building. Glücks’s deputy Arthur Liebehenschel ran department D I, the so-called central office. Most of the correspondence went through this office. It collated statistics about prisoner
numbers, transfers, releases, and deaths, and ruled on applications by commandants for official punishments of individual prisoners. Department D I also transmitted many other orders—from Office Group D, the RSHA, Pohl, and Himmler—to the KL, and kept some oversight of executions and systematic killings inside.
20
For example, the officials in D I received the figures of Jews sent to Auschwitz,
divided into those gassed on arrival and those selected for labor; Glücks regularly presented a summary of these figures to Pohl.
21
The Nazi Final Solution was common knowledge among WVHA officials, and so were many other crimes: “down to the last little clerk,” Pohl testified after the war, “they all must have known what went on in the concentration camps.”
22

Department D II managed KL slave
labor, and as the camps’ economic significance increased, so did its status. Its remit was enormous: to oversee the deployment of prisoners across all concentration camps. The D II officials supplied prisoners for SS-owned enterprises, operating as the “labor exchange” of the SS economy, as one former manager put it. Later on, the Oranienburg officials allocated hundreds of thousands of prisoners
to state and private industry. To keep track of its slave labor force, D II regularly collected data from the KL about prisoners no longer available for work—because of death, illness, exhaustion, or other reasons—and about the current deployment of their prisoners; executive summaries went to Glücks and Pohl.
23

Health matters in the KL were coordinated through department D III. Its officials
liaised with Camp SS doctors—several hundred SS physicians worked in concentration camps at one time or another—by sending orders and checking reports; a monthly summary of prisoner illnesses and casualties by D III was presented to Pohl.
24
Dr. Enno Lolling, the chief of D III, frequently traveled to the camps and initiated doctors into various killing programs that required their participation.
25
Despite his tough demeanor, however, Lolling’s position was weak. He had the fewest staff in Office Group D, and his Oranienburg colleagues repeatedly encroached on his turf.
26
What is more, his department held an outsider status inside the WVHA, because it also reported to the medical office of the Waffen SS (based in the SS Leadership Main Office), which provided the camps with equipment and
medical supplies.
27
The standing of D III was further damaged by Lolling himself. His superiors showed some goodwill toward him, but other Camp SS officials were less charitable about his abilities. To boot, a scandalous reputation preceded him. Stories about his morphine and alcohol addiction were legend, and he was said to suffer from syphilis. “He was so easy to deceive during inspections,”
Rudolf Höss later wrote, “especially, as happened most times, when he had been plied with alcohol.”
28

The fourth and final department, D IV, dealt with administrative issues, including budgets and accommodation. Collaborating with Office Group B, it was also involved in the supply of food and clothes to Camp SS troops and prisoners.
29
Initially led by Anton Kaindl, D IV was later headed by Wilhelm
Burger.
30
Born in 1904, Burger had trained in business and joined the SS in September 1932. Before long, he worked full time as an SS bureaucrat, eventually in the administration of the Death’s Head troops (his rise was not impeded by an ideological blot on his SS résumé: until his divorce in 1935, Burger had been married to a woman of Jewish descent). Following a spell with the Death’s Head division
in the early war years, Burger moved to the KL. In June 1942, he became director of administration in Auschwitz, just as the camp turned into a major site of extermination. Burger proved himself there—he was one of the few senior officials to gain unreserved praise from Commandant Rudolf Höss, who commended his “organizational abilities,” “ruthless zeal,” and “hard will”—and after less than
one year, on May 1, 1943, Burger was promoted to his new post in the WVHA.
31

This was no exceptional move: several SS officers gained senior positions in Office Group D after first serving in concentration camps. The most prominent was Höss himself, who left Auschwitz in November 1943 to head department D I. Known as “Rudi” to his colleagues, he was one of the zealous officials who often slept
in the T-Building. As a hugely experienced practitioner of terror from the largest KL, Höss had much to offer the WVHA and became Pohl’s main troubleshooter.
32
Conversely, many men from Office Group D moved in the opposite direction, with two senior managers leaving Oranienburg to take up the top position inside camps. Arthur Liebehenschel became commandant of Auschwitz (in November 1943), effectively
swapping jobs with Höss, while Anton Kaindl became commandant of Sachsenhausen (in September 1942), next door to the T-Building. Senior posts within the WVHA may have been better remunerated, but Kaindl’s move still advanced his career. Little more than a year after his transfer, he was promoted to Standartenführer, climbing one rank above Höss in the SS hierarchy.
33

There were pragmatic reasons
for moving SS managers like Kaindl from headquarters to the camps. KL staff were in short supply and it made sense to plug sudden gaps with experienced officers.
34
However, the rotation of staff—which affected more than half of all the officers working in the Oranienburg T-Building—was about more than expedience.
35
Oswald Pohl dreamed of “soldierly officials” who combined bureaucratic skills with
experience on the battlefields of the Third Reich, and was keen to employ KL veterans as managers; many of his Oranienburg officials had served apprenticeships inside the camps.
36
As for the men transferred from WVHA-D to the concentration camps, there was an expectation that they would prove themselves anew as “political soldiers” at the “front,” lest they become “comfortable, fat, and old” in
their office jobs, as Theodor Eicke had once put it.
37
Just like the terror experts in the RSHA, the Camp SS managers saw themselves as part of a “fighting administration,” wielding both pen and sword in the name of the SS.
38

Managing the KL

Immediately after the collapse of the Third Reich, the mighty Oswald Pohl fled from his wife’s Bavarian manor before U.S. soldiers could catch him. He set
off on foot to northern Germany, at the other end of the country, where two daughters from his first marriage (both married to SS men) hid him.
39
After British soldiers finally arrested him in May 1946, Pohl had another stab at escaping his past. Facing the gallows at his forthcoming trial at Nuremberg, he disowned any responsibility for the crimes in the camps. He had had little involvement,
he protested, even after the KL system had come under his WVHA. Apart from labor deployment, which Himmler had asked him to supervise, it was Richard Glücks who had continued to direct “the whole internal operation”; this was why, Pohl added, the Camp Inspectorate had been left unchanged, except for its new name as Office Group D.
40
Although some historians have since echoed this claim, presenting
Pohl as a rather peripheral character, his self-serving account had little basis in fact.
41