KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (88 page)

The Gypsy Camp

During the Holocaust, Auschwitz turned first and foremost into a KL for Jews, who replaced Poles as the largest inmate group. Numbers shot up further in the wake of the Hungarian deportations; according to one estimate, around seventy-five percent of all the men, women, and children held in Auschwitz in late August 1944 were Jews.
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In popular memory, the move
of the camp to the epicenter of the Holocaust has sometimes overshadowed the fate of other prisoner groups. This is particularly true for Gypsies, the third-largest group in Auschwitz, whose treatment in some ways mirrored that of Jews.
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The so-called Gypsy camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau had grown rapidly from late February 1943, as the mass deportations from the German Reich arrived.
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Within weeks,
over ten thousand prisoners were held here, and numbers were still rising. There were thousands of children, making up half of all children registered in Auschwitz. The oldest prisoner, meanwhile, was said to be 110 years old. The Gypsies were held in sector BIIe, at the far end of Birkenau, just below the infirmary sector and close to the crematoria. Like most other sectors in Birkenau, the
Gypsy camp was almost two thousand feet long and four hundred feet wide, and contained two rows with barracks on either side of a muddy path. Inside the converted horse stables, it was dark (there were no windows except for small skylights), dirty (most floors consisted of clay), and overcrowded (with whole families crammed onto a single bunk). There was no separation by sex, one of several differences
from other Birkenau sectors. Also, the prisoners’ hair was not fully shaved and they often kept their clothes, too, marked with a red cross on the back.

When the deportations to Auschwitz started in spring 1943, the Gypsies’ fate had not been decided. Even so, the conditions in Birkenau condemned the vast majority to death. In addition to the usual SS tortures such as “sport,” many prisoners—labeled
“work-shy”—had to perform extremely heavy labor. Boys and girls as young as seven carried heavy bricks. As for sanitation, things were even worse in the Gypsy camp than elsewhere in Birkenau. In the early months, with the compound still under construction, there were no toilets or washrooms. “We washed when it rained,” the German Sinto Walter Winter recalled, “making do in the puddles … Adults
and children had to relieve themselves outside, to the rear of the blocks.” Conditions barely improved after the SS added rudimentary facilities; the overflowing latrines were rarely emptied, and water was scarce and contaminated.

Soon, disease ravaged the Gypsy camp. More and more space was set aside for sick and dying prisoners, and by autumn 1943 the infirmary inside the compound had grown
from two to six barracks. Perhaps the most terrifying sight was that of boys and girls suffering from Noma, an oral infection, caused by extreme deprivation, which cut deep holes into their cheeks. Hardly any medical treatment was available. Instead, the Camp SS relied on death. When a typhus epidemic spread through the Gypsy camp, with up to thirty prisoners perishing each day, the SS placed it
under quarantine and led many of the sick to the gas chambers. Some survivors tried to alert the outside world to their suffering; in a coded message, one of them referred to Baro Nasslepin, Elenta, and Marepin—the Romany words for “great illness,” “misery,” and “murder.”

Entire families died together in the Gypsy camp. Elisabeth Guttenberger, who had been deported from Germany in spring 1943,
later testified that she lost around thirty relatives. “The children were the first to die,” she said. “Day and night they cried for bread; soon they had all starved.” The morgue in the infirmary was piled high with corpses of children, covered with rats. Many of the dead babies had been born inside the Gypsy camp. In all, some 370 children were delivered here, with prisoner numbers tattooed on
their tiny thighs; more than half were dead within three months. Most parents soon followed their children. Elisabeth Guttenberger’s father starved to death early on, together with her four siblings, and her mother soon lost her life, too. Survival seemed almost impossible; by the end of 1943, around seventy percent of prisoners who had been locked into the Gypsy camp were dead.
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The final liquidation
of the Gypsy camp came in 1944, as mass murder in Auschwitz reached a fever pitch.
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The fate of the surviving prisoners became increasingly intertwined with that of the Hungarian Jews. Several Gypsies worked on the extension of the railway spur into Birkenau; and when the new ramp was completed and the trains from Hungary started to arrive, thousands of Jews were taken to the half-empty Gypsy
camp, which now doubled as a transit camp. One of the new arrivals from Hungary was Josef Glück, who recalled that the compound was divided “so that Jews were on one side and the Gypsies on the other.” Many of these Jews were later murdered in the nearby gas chambers, and the carnage was witnessed by the remaining Gypsies. “What I saw was so dreadful that I fainted,” testified Hermine Horvath, who
had come from Austria with her family in early April 1943. Many prisoners in the Gypsy camp had premonitions that they would be next, and their fears soon came true.
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Late on August 2, 1944, as darkness descended over Birkenau, the SS surrounded the Gypsy camp with a large number of uniformed men. Over the next few hours, all the remaining 2,897 Gypsies were driven by truck to crematoria II
and V; first up were the orphaned children, rounded up by drunken SS men. Some prisoners knew they would die; there were scuffles and shouts of “murderers!” To deceive their victims, the SS drove the trucks by a circuitous route. But after the prisoners were finally forced out, they all knew what would happen and their screams echoed across Birkenau all night. Some fought until the end. “It was not
easy,” Rudolf Höss later wrote, “to get them inside the [gas] chambers.” Obersturmführer Schwarzhuber, the Birkenau camp compound leader and an old confidant of Höss, reported that it had been the most difficult mass extermination action so far.
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Few Gypsies survived Birkenau. Only a small number of transports had left by the time the compound was liquidated. Between April and late July 1944,
the SS had moved no more than around 3,200 inmates to central Germany, mostly men selected for slave labor. Among them were a number of former Wehrmacht soldiers (and their immediate families), several of whom had been decorated for bravery on the Eastern Front prior to their deportation to Birkenau. Some of these war veterans had been incredulous at their treatment. “You coward!” one of them shouted
on arrival at an SS man. “You fight here against women and children, when you should be fighting at the front! I was wounded in Stalingrad … How dare you insult me!!” Some of the survivors of the Gypsy camp were taken to Ravensbrück. Many more ended up in Dora, the largest of the SS relocation camps. From here, many were sent farther on to a satellite camp in Ellrich. This was no coincidence.
The Camp SS often took Jews and Gypsies to lethal satellite camps, and Ellrich was one of the worst.
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SATELLITE CAMPS

In early April 1944, Oswald Pohl sent a large map of Europe to Heinrich Himmler, pinpointing all main concentration camps and their attached satellites. There were marks all over the map: the whole Nazi territory was covered in KL, from Klooga at the Gulf of Finland to the Loiblpass
camp in occupied Yugoslavia, from Lublin in eastern Poland to the occupied British Channel Island of Alderney. In the accompanying letter to Himmler, Pohl could not resist a dig at his late rival, Theodor Eicke. In a handwritten comment in the margin, he compared his own empire to that of his predecessor: “In Eicke’s time, there were a total of
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camps!” Himmler was duly impressed. Thanking Pohl,
he noted with satisfaction “how our things have grown.”
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With the SS desire for ever more prisoners acting as a centrifugal force, many hundreds of satellites spread around the main camps and beyond. The climax came in the second half of 1944, when the gigantic relocation projects really took off; over a six-month period, as many satellite camps were erected as in all the preceding thirty months.
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By the end of 1944, no fewer than seventy-seven satellites were attached to the Dachau main camp alone, several of them located more than 125 miles away.
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The KL system was changing so fast, with satellite camps set up almost as quickly as they were abandoned, that even the WVHA could not keep count; in January 1945, the officials assumed that there were 500 satellite camps, when the real figure
was nearer 560.
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A Shifting Landscape

There was no typical satellite camp, just as there was no typical main camp.
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Satellite camps came in all sizes, from small labor details with no more than a handful of prisoners to vast compounds holding thousands.
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Set up for specific projects and linked closely to other authorities—such as the OT, military, state, and private companies—most SS satellites
focused either on construction (with prisoners digging tunnels and trenches, clearing rubble, building bunkers and factories) or production (with prisoners making batteries and munitions, assembling tanks and rockets). But not every satellite camp was geared for slave labor; a few functioned primarily as sites for dying prisoners or as holding pens for recent arrivals from evacuated KL.
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There
was no common design. Many satellites took after main camps, with wooden barracks surrounded by barbed wire. Others looked very different, though. In their haste to establish new KL, the authorities used whatever sites they could find, forcing prisoners inside sheds, tents, factories, cellars, ballrooms, and former churches.
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The same spirit of improvisation governed the search for SS accommodation;
in Ellrich, some guards slept in a popular local restaurant, which remained open for business.
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Some new satellites were even mobile. Between summer 1944 and early 1945, the SS set up eight traveling KL (so-called railway building brigades) for the repair of destroyed tracks; each camp consisted of a long train, with around five hundred prisoners crammed into modified boxcars.
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By 1944, then,
the architectural model of the KL, as it had been developed in the late 1930s, gave way to a random assortment of sites. There were strong echoes here of the emergence of the camps back in 1933. At both ends of the Third Reich, its terror camps were characterized by improvisation. In 1933, the KL system had not yet formed; in 1944, it was starting to fray.
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The final decision to set up a new
satellite camp was normally made inside the WVHA. Once it was up and running, however, such a new KL rarely reported to Berlin. Instead, relocation camps often coordinated prisoner deployment through regional SS Special Inspectorates (
Sonderinspektionen
), which reported further up the chain to Kammler’s office in Berlin. Even closer links existed between satellites and their respective main camp.
Many prisoners arrived via the main camp. In addition, SS officials in each main camp took on administrative tasks for its satellites, including the distribution of prisoner clothing and medicine. The result was the emergence of a layer of regional supervision that removed direct control from the WVHA.
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Main camps came to resemble huge transit hubs. New prisoners rarely stayed for very long,
but were quickly shunted on to one of the satellites. In the Ravensbrück main camp, 12,216 new inmates were registered in September 1944; in the same month, 11,884 moved on to satellite camps.
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Satellites drew the great bulk of new prisoners in 1944, swelling like a malignant growth. The result was a decisive shift in balance between main camps and their satellites. Take the Buchenwald complex.
When war broke out in 1939, only a small number of prisoners—less than ten percent—had been held permanently outside the main camp. During the early war years, this figure had increased, but only slowly, and by summer 1943, it was still no higher than fifteen percent. Within a year, however, the picture changed completely, as the proportion of Buchenwald prisoners in satellite camps shot up to
thirty-four percent (October 1, 1943), forty-six percent (December 1, 1943), and fifty-eight percent (August 15, 1944).
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A similar shift occurred in other camp complexes, with striking results: by late 1944, most KL prisoners were held in satellite camps.
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Traffic between main camps and their satellites in 1944 was not all one-way. A large number of prisoner transports also went in the opposite direction, as we have seen, bringing seriously ill, injured, and exhausted inmates back to main camps; most of them had worked in construction and were seen as easily replaceable.
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In addition to the dying, many satellite camps also returned the dead,
for incineration in the main camp. Until Dora completed its own crematorium in April 1944, for example, thousands of corpses were driven to Buchenwald, some fifty miles away; later on, the dead were burned in Dora itself, which also began to receive transports of bodies from other satellites nearby.
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In sum, the general movement of KL inmates often looked something like this: new prisoners departed
from main camps to satellites for slave labor, and returned when they were dead or dying.