KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (86 page)

This was not the only major OT project using concentration camp labor. In April 1944, the OT took over the construction of a big network of bunkers for Hitler and the top echelons of the regime (code-named Riese, or “giant”). Turning a large wooded area of Lower Silesia into a building site, KL prisoners and other forced laborers had
to erect huge underground structures and infrastructure. In all, thirteen thousand Jewish men were held in some twelve new satellite camps of Gross-Rosen, known collectively as “Work Camp Riese”; around five thousand of them lost their lives.
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Elsewhere, KL prisoners were exploited during desperate Nazi efforts to protect the fuel supply. Following major Allied bombing raids on German hydrogenation
plants in May 1944, Hitler invested Edmund Geilenberg, a top official in Speer’s Armaments Ministry, with special powers to keep tanks rolling and planes flying. The main aims of the new Geilenberg Staff were the repair of damaged hydrogenation plants, the construction of new plants, and the underground relocation of production. Many of the construction projects were once again run by the
OT, but the SS was involved, too, managing some sites and supplying slave labor to others. By late November 1944, an estimated three hundred and fifty thousand workers toiled on the Geilenberg sites, including tens of thousands of KL prisoners, dispersed across several satellite camps. Some of these camps had originally been erected for other purposes; in Ebensee a huge fuel refinery was set up in
the tunnels originally intended for the V2 development works. Other sites were hastily set up from scratch. In Württemberg, for example, the SS created three new Natzweiler satellites to push ahead with project “Desert” (
Wüste
), extracting local shale oil for fuel production. Together with inmates from associated satellite camps, over ten thousand KL prisoners were forced into project “Desert,”
mostly working in construction; thousands died.
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The relocation of the German war industry transformed concentration camp slave labor. It is impossible to say exactly how many prisoners were deployed in this way, but numbers were very substantial. At the end of 1944, according to an estimate by Pohl, around forty percent of all the working KL prisoners came under Kammler’s authority, the vast
majority of them in relocation camps; many more worked on similar projects managed by the OT.
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In all, hundreds of thousands of KL inmates were forced into the new relocation camps, and while there were many differences between individual sites, all of them placed inmates in mortal danger. To keep alive their hopes of a miraculous German victory, Nazi leaders sacrificed entire armies of prisoners.

War and Slave Labor

Heinrich Himmler liked to sing the praises of KL labor. His boasts about its contribution to the war economy became set pieces in speeches to senior Nazi officials in 1944. Typically, Himmler pictured the concentration camps as brutally efficient modern arms factories, with long hours and strict discipline; after listening to one of his speeches, Joseph Goebbels summed up
Himmler’s approach as “pretty rigorous.” But the Reichsführer SS stressed that there was no reason to pity prisoners: though it was hard to believe, he told an audience of army generals in June 1944, inmates in his camps were better off than “many workers in England or America.” As for their output, the prisoners put in millions of hours each month, supposedly turning out a vast arsenal of high-tech
armaments. Himmler was particularly proud of the underground missile and fighter plane factories, where “this race of subhumans produces the weapons for the war.” The startling successes were due, Himmler concluded, to the technical brilliance of the SS and the productivity of the prisoners, who worked twice as hard as foreign workers.
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None of these claims bore any resemblance to reality, though
given Himmler’s capacity for self-delusion it is possible that he believed his own hype.

Slave labor in the concentration camps was far less effective than Himmler claimed. Many prisoners were not employed at all, either because they were too sick or because there was no work; according to SS figures from spring 1944, more than one in four Auschwitz prisoners were either invalids or ill in infirmaries.
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As for the majority of working prisoners, they were much weaker than regular laborers. Food rations for KL inmates (and other Nazi prisoners) were cut once more in 1944, by central order of the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture, condemning more inmates to exhaustion and death; some prisoners now received no more than around seven hundred calories per day.
25
WVHA efforts to improve matters
remained largely cosmetic; empty words could not feed any prisoners.
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The overall productivity of KL prisoners fell far behind the expectations of the SS and industry.
27
True, some skilled and better-fed prisoners delivered outputs approaching those of other workers.
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But this was impossible for the great mass of inmates. Compared with that of regular German workers, their productivity reached
an estimated half in industrial production, and even less in construction, perhaps one-third.
29
And despite some exceptions, such as the Heinkel works in Oranienburg, concentration camp labor was not particularly cost-effective, either. Once all the overheads were deducted, it often came no cheaper than free German labor. But it was still useful: Why else would so many firms have pursued KL prisoners
so energetically in 1944? The decisive factor here was not that prisoners came cheap, but that they were available, allowing state and private companies to take on additional arms and building projects.
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Although it had secured a more prominent place for the KL system in the German arms industry by 1944, the mass exploitation of its prisoners came at a cost to the SS. Internal rivalries broke
out within the WVHA, as Hans Kammler pushed aside Gerhard Maurer (from Office Group D) as the main manager of slave labor; in a new camp like Dora, it was Kammler who had the final say.
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Meanwhile, armaments minister Albert Speer extended his own reach over forced labor, culminating in a decree on October 9, 1944, that put him in charge of prisoner deployment. New requests for KL labor no longer
went to the WVHA but to Speer’s ministry, a significant loss of power and prestige for the SS.
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Private industry chipped away at SS control, too, with managers traveling directly to concentration camps to select slaves. Above all, the managers wanted strong and skilled prisoners, ideally with some knowledge of German. “We were chosen like cattle on a market,” the Ukrainian prisoner Galina Buschujewa-Sabrodskaja
recalled after Heinkel employees descended on Ravensbrück in late 1943: “They even forced us to open our mouths, and inspected our teeth.”
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An ambitious attempt by the WVHA to steer prisoner deployment by creating a modern machine-readable database in 1944, using punch-hole cards and number codes (the so-called Hollerith technology), was soon abandoned and did nothing to help the WVHA regain
the initiative.
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The more the Camp SS became involved in the German war industry, the less control it had over its prisoners.

What is more, the contribution of the camps for the war economy remained marginal, despite Himmler’s bombastic claims. In summer 1944, when German armaments production reached its highest output during the war, KL prisoners working in the arms industry made up no more
than around one percent of the Third Reich labor force. To be sure, the SS presence was more marked in relocation projects.
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But most of these projects were strategically pointless even before they got under way; the move of war production underground was the last throw of the dice in a game that was already lost.
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The SS was the perfect partner for such a doomed plan. Undeterred by previous
failures, SS leaders like Oswald Pohl still harbored delusions about their economic prowess.
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Even the most high-profile projects launched with SS involvement made little difference to the progress of the war. Despite the investment of hundreds of millions of Reichsmark and the abuse of tens of thousands of slave laborers, the huge IG Farben complex under construction in Auschwitz was never
completed and failed to produce any synthetic rubber or fuel.
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Similarly, few projects of the Geilenberg Staff went past the initial stage. The first factories of project “Desert,” provisionally operational from early spring 1945, turned out an oily sludge that was useless for the remaining German tanks.
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And Dora never became the high-tech underground factory of Himmler’s dreams, either. The
number of the much vaunted V2s manufactured, around six thousand by spring 1945, remained well behind schedule. And although the rockets killed thousands of civilians abroad and proved a potent propaganda tool inside Germany, their strategic impact was negligible. The uniqueness of the weapon lay elsewhere, as the historian Michael J. Neufeld has pointed out: “More people died producing it than
died from being hit by it.”
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This verdict sums up the SS involvement in the war economy as a whole. Its main output was not fuel or planes or guns, but the misery and death of its prisoners.
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Far more registered prisoners died in 1944 than during the previous year. The general conditions claimed countless victims, and the SS also extended its murderous selections (which had been cut back during
the previous year), because the sick were seen as obstacles to effective war production and as threats to the health of other slave laborers. Many died inside satellite camps. Other victims returned to the main camps, after they had been worked to complete exhaustion, and perished in one of the fast-expanding sectors for the weak and ill.
42
Or they were deported to their deaths elsewhere. In Mauthausen,
where those isolated in the infirmary sector sometimes outnumbered all other inmates, the SS took a particularly radical step. It renewed its links to the Hartheim killing center, dating back to Action 14f13, and sent at least 3,228
Muselmänner
to the gas chambers between April and December 1944.
43
More commonly, transports of doomed prisoners went to other parts of the KL system. Deportations
to Auschwitz, for example, now included weakened Jewish prisoners selected in satellite camps inside the old German borders.
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In addition, two other main camps—Majdanek and Bergen-Belsen, both largely untouched by the economic mobilization for war—were designated for dying inmates from other KL. Majdanek had lost much of its purpose in November 1943, following the murder of its Jewish prisoners,
and was used from December onward as a dumping ground for men and women from concentration camps inside the Third Reich. Some died en route, thousands more inside; in March 1944 alone, when around nine thousand prisoners were held in Majdanek, the SS registered more than 1,600 deaths.
45
Bergen-Belsen took over from spring 1944 onward, as Majdanek prepared for evacuation in advance of the Red Army.
By January 1945, some 5,500 sick prisoners from other KL—judged “an unnecessary burden on the industrial firms” that employed them, in the words of Camp SS leaders—had been taken to Bergen-Belsen.
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The first transport had arrived in late March or early April 1944 from Dora. The frail men, many of them with bandaged arms and legs, had been thrown into the trucks “like sacks of coal,” according
to one Dora prisoner; the screams started before the train had even pulled away. After their arrival in Bergen-Belsen, the survivors were left for days inside empty barracks without food or blankets. “We wasted away very quickly,” the French prisoner Josef Henri Mulin recalled later.
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The Prisoner Population

KL inmate numbers reached record heights in 1944, relentlessly pushed upward by Heinrich
Himmler. He promised Kammler as many prisoners as he wanted and became obsessed with statistics charting the growth in inmate figures: Himmler’s mantra, Rudolf Höss recalled, became “Armaments! Prisoners! Armaments!”
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The camps just kept on growing, and even some of the smaller sites now expanded exponentially; the number of prisoners registered in Flossenbürg, for instance, grew more than eightfold,
from 4,869 (December 31, 1943) to 40,437 (January 1, 1945).
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The momentum behind the camps’ expansion was only stopped by the Allied armies.

Secret SS statistics reveal two major trends. First, after the balance of the KL system had tilted eastward from 1942, it now swung back again. As the Red Army gained ground, more and more camps in occupied eastern Europe closed down in 1944. Auschwitz
was gradually emptied, too, and consequently lost its status as the biggest site. By January 1, 1945, the largest KL complex of all was Buchenwald, in the heart of Germany; 97,633 prisoners were registered there, compared to 69,752 in Auschwitz. Second, the sharp rise in female prisoners, which had begun with the mass deportations of Jewish women during the Holocaust, continued. By the end of 1944,
there were almost 200,000 female KL prisoners (up from 12,500 in late April 1942), making up twenty-eight percent of the total prisoner population. They were distributed across the whole KL system. Back in 1939, female prisoners had been confined to a single purpose-built camp, Ravensbrück; now they were registered in every camp complex, except for Dora.
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The vast rise in prisoner numbers cannot
be reduced to Himmler’s hunger for slave laborers alone. Just as in previous years, economic motives coincided with other matters of national interest, as defined by the Nazi regime. Police arrests broadly followed the pattern established in 1942–43. As defeat came closer, Nazi paranoia about the home front grew even more intense. There were further crackdowns on Germans suspected of criminal
activity, defeatism, and subversion. In August 1944, shortly after the failed bomb plot on Hitler’s life, more than five thousand left-wing activists from the Weimar period, as well as some one-time officials of Catholic parties, were dragged into the KL as part of Operation Thunderstorm; some, like the sixty-six-year-old former SPD Reichstag deputy Fritz Soldmann, had already been tormented in the
KL several times before.
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The police also focused on resistance activities by foreigners inside Germany and expanded its general assault on foreign workers: many tens of thousands were arrested in 1944 for “breach of contract” and often taken straight to concentration camps, in line with Himmler’s orders.
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