KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (89 page)

The gradual disintegration of established KL structures was reflected in the satellites’ administrative makeup, which was no perfect copy of the traditional main camp model. There were fewer SS staff and posts, and the internal organization was much simplified, too. Normally, there was no political or administrative
department, and in smaller satellites there was not even an SS doctor, an infirmary, or a prisoner kitchen. The most powerful local figure was the so-called camp leader. In charge of the day-to-day running of a satellite camp, he was the de facto commandant, assisted by a report leader. These local SS men enjoyed plenty of autonomy. True, they were appointed and supervised by officers
from the respective main camp, or by experienced Camp SS officers in charge of a regional cluster of satellites. But despite frequent inspections and correspondence, these senior officers could not keep a tight rein on all the new sites. As each camp complex expanded, adding more and more satellites, it became ever more difficult to exercise central control, giving greater independence to the local
officials.
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Soldiers into Guards

The face of the Camp SS changed almost beyond recognition in 1944, with tens of thousands of new guards joining the KL. SS demand was huge. All the new satellite camps had to be staffed, and what was more, they required proportionally more guards than main camps, because of inferior security installations.
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The need for new staff put great pressure on WVHA
managers, who had wrestled with personnel shortages since the war began. The competition for manpower was more intense than ever in 1944, and the KL system was still losing some of its younger sentries to frontline service.
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Nonetheless, the WVHA managed to bolster its force. By April 1944, the KL staff already numbered more than twenty-two thousand, probably growing to over fifty thousand by
the end of the year.
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The bulk of the new personnel came from the military. Since KL slave labor was meant to benefit the armed forces, the WVHA insisted that the military should provide soldiers as guards. Supported by Hitler and Speer, it was in constant negotiations with the military authorities, resulting in a massive influx of soldiers from spring 1944 onward. By summer, more than twenty
thousand soldiers had joined the concentration camps, and more arrived over the following months. Most of these new recruits were dispatched to satellites, after some brief training in a main camp. By early 1945, more than half the male KL staff was made up of former soldiers; in satellite camps, they far outnumbered seasoned SS officials.
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Most of them served as sentries, who now came into
closer contact with prisoners than before. Not only did they march prisoners to building sites and guard them there, they were more visible inside the compounds, too, as the difference between these Guard Troops and the Commandant Staff became more blurred.
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Most of the soldiers had been reservists, only recently called up for active duty. On average, they were in their forties or fifties—some
prisoners called them “grandpas”—and they often struggled with the physical demands of KL service. The initial training was “very rigorous and hard to bear for a man my age,” the fifty-six-year-old Hugo Behncke wrote after joining the Neuengamme Camp SS. Men like him had not arrived from the battlefields but from regular jobs on the home front. Behncke had worked as a clerk for a large Hamburg
undertaker when he was called up in June 1944. Another new recruit, the fifty-five-year-old Wilhelm Vierke, had been employed as a gardener when he was ordered to report to Sachsenhausen in November 1944. These recruits were less ideologically invested than SS volunteers—Vierke was not even an NSDAP member—and often made more reluctant guards; the end of the war was near and they feared that they
would be punished by the Allies for crimes in the camps.
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The changes among the KL staff were compounded, in the eyes of Camp SS veterans, by the further influx of female staff. By January 1, 1945, there were almost 3,500 female KL guards, reflecting the recent rise in female prisoners. Like most of the new male guards, these women differed from previous recruits. In the early war years, many
female guards had volunteered for service in the camps. But from 1943, the authorities increasingly relied on pressure and coercion, drafting women from labor exchanges or directly from the factories where female prisoners would be deployed.
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Though the SS rejected some of these women as unsuitable (just as it sent back a number of soldiers), it could not afford to be too demanding. Evidence
of ideological commitment, for example, was no essential requirement, and only a fraction of female KL guards were members of the Nazi Party.
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The mass influx of new staff in 1944 damaged the Camp SS self-image beyond repair. The propaganda picture of an elite troop of political soldiers was finally destroyed by the realities of total war. Theodor Eicke’s principles for recruitment and ideological
training had been gradually abandoned ever since 1939, and they were entirely obsolete by late 1944. Instead of bright-eyed SS volunteers, many guards were elderly soldiers who had been drafted into the camps; instead of proven fanatics, the KL employed thousands of women not even eligible for SS membership; and instead of the pride of Germany, there were masses of foreign guards. Eicke’s
veterans were now in a tiny minority, especially inside satellite camps.
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There was plenty of grumbling among the new KL recruits, although tellingly, their discontent largely centered on the rigors of their job, not the fate of the prisoners. They complained about their tedious and regimented lives, their cramped and primitive quarters, and their long hours. The SS was a “club of sadists,”
the former airman Stefan Pauler wrote in a letter from Ellrich in January 1945, furious about being denied leave. In a glaring breach of protocol, a few female guards even lodged official complaints about their working conditions with SS superiors. More commonly, dissatisfied recruits kept their heads down and sought diversions. “Sunday we received a bottle of wine for 3.80 Mark,” Stefan Pauler noted
in November 1944. “I drank it up immediately.”
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On paper, most new recruits became SS members, with some important exceptions (notably female guards and navy personnel). But in practice, sharp divisions remained between the newcomers and the more experienced staff. By no means were all former soldiers eager to swap their military uniforms for the black clothing of the SS. When old SS uniforms were eventually handed out in Ellrich, Stefan Pauler
complained that they made ex-soldiers like himself look “like clowns.” And Pauler and other military men still stood apart, since they had to wear special insignia on their uniforms to distinguish them from the Camp SS proper. Even an eager supporter of the Nazi regime like Hugo Behncke saw himself primarily as a soldier and kept his distance, admitting privately that the SS colleagues were “at
times very unpleasant.”
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The distrust between former soldiers and hardened Camp SS men was mutual. SS veterans mocked the newcomers as clueless and frail, and worried that their disciplinary failings might cause prisoner escapes or uprisings. Not only did the soldiers engage in conversations with prisoners, blasted Richard Glücks, they even showed them “pity,” failing to realize that “every
prisoner is an enemy of the state and has to be treated as such.”
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To counter such dangerous tendencies, Glücks looked to the local SS men from department VI. An add-on to KL Commandant Staff since 1941–42, these offices for staff instruction came into their own in 1944. Instead of indoctrination, however, the emphasis was put on basic KL duties, and even such practical lessons were often dropped
in favor of entertainment, designed to distract the staff from their daily drudgery and gloomy future.
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There was a kernel of truth in the vociferous SS complaints about the new recruits. Compared to experienced Camp SS men, some former soldiers really did treat prisoners a little better.
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The abbé Jacques Boca, imprisoned in the Wolfsburg-Laagberg satellite camp of Neuengamme, noted in a
secret diary how his life had improved after the new camp leader, a former army captain, set up a special barrack for recuperating prisoners: “I spend wonderful days there,” he wrote. “I don’t freeze, I don’t work.”
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Even the treatment of Jewish prisoners, the pariahs of the KL, could be affected. Years after the war, Efim K. still remembered his astonishment when a former German colonel in
the Vaivara satellite camp Aseri led him and other prisoners to a table laden with food, and said: “Now dig in, my children, I think you need it.”
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While individual inmates benefited, the overall impact of the deployment of former soldiers on prisoner lives in satellite camps was surprisingly small. Like main camps, these sites were largely characterized by destitution and abuse, raising the
crucial question of how the spirit of the Camp SS was exported to the satellite camps. Apparently, the key role was played by a small group of experienced officials, mostly Camp SS veterans. Even though these men were vastly outnumbered by new recruits, they filled most of the top positions inside the new satellites (just as they did in the Commandant Staff of main camps). Supported by trusted Kapos
from main camps, these veterans ruled life inside. They had internalized the values of the Camp SS and knew that satellite camps offered unique career prospects, with more power and pay. Even NCOs could become camp leaders ruling over thousands of prisoners—as long as they ruled with terror.

Camp SS veterans initiated some new recruits by ordering them to perform violent acts. More often, the
process of hardening was gradual, and like other guards before them, many newcomers became accustomed to the inverted morality of the KL. After several months as a guard, Hugo Behncke, who rarely mentioned the inmates in his letters home to his wife, made a telling throwaway remark about a recent invalid transport from his satellite to the Neuengamme main camp, describing the prisoners as dirty,
sick, and stupid skeletons: “all they were good for was incineration in the Neuengamme crematorium.” It required moral fiber to resist the corrosive effects of daily immersion in extreme KL terror. “Worst of all,” the unusually self-aware Private Stefan Pauler wrote to his mother in mid-January 1945, “one becomes completely apathetic here with all these figures of human misery.”

All that was
required for the system to function was for the new KL staff to perform their basic tasks. They may have sometimes done their jobs less brutally than seasoned SS men, but they still did them. In his last long letter to his wife, in early April 1945, Hugo Behncke explained that the best thing was to hope for a German victory, “put one’s head in the sand,” and “continue to fulfill my duty here as a
guard.”
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The overall conclusion is chilling: the KL system did not require a vast army of political soldiers, as Theodor Eicke had assumed. In the satellite camps, a small band of Camp SS veterans, deeply committed to violence, was enough to sweep along a much larger group of more ordinary men and women. This highlights one of the most striking aspects about the KL toward the end: the terror
continued even as the SS presence diminished.

Production and Construction

Since the beginnings of the KL system, the fate of individual prisoners had been shaped by the work details they found themselves in. Conditions could vary enormously and prisoners were forever scheming to escape the worst jobs or to hold on to more desirable ones. The contrast between labor details became even greater
during the war. Moving to another detail was often the difference between life and death, and crucially, so was moving to another camp.

Measured against satellite camps geared toward production, those concentrating on construction generally proved more lethal. The great mass of unskilled slaves in relocation camps was regarded as expendable; during building work, the authorities pushed for maximum
output at minimal expenditure, expecting many prisoners to die. The smaller number of prisoners in production, by contrast, were often skilled, and replacing them cost more time and effort. As a result, they could hope for less abuse, more food, and better medical care. A former prisoner of Lütjenburg—a small Neuengamme satellite camp, set up in autumn 1944, where two hundred highly trained
prisoners worked on compasses for V2 rockets—later said that conditions had been “like in a sanatorium” compared to other KL.
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Production camps were far from benign, of course. Lodgings were poor and slave labor was strenuous, especially in low-skilled posts such as transportation. Neither was there sufficient food. “The soup in Buchenwald was wonderful, compared to the one here,” the French
resistance fighter Robert Antelme wrote about his transfer to the Gandersheim satellite camp in autumn 1944, where some five hundred prisoners made fuselages for Heinkel fighter planes. “Hunger spread slowly and stealthily,” he noted, “and now we are possessed by it.” In some production camps, death rates rivaled those of construction camps, especially from late 1944 onward.
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Nonetheless, there
were often stark differences, leading to a functional division of satellite camps. This division was particularly obvious inside the Dora complex. Here, the SS normally separated new arrivals in the main camp; a small proportion of skilled and strong prisoners were picked for production jobs, while most others were sent to construction details. Prisoners were continually reexamined, and as they
weakened they were shunted to camps with worse conditions. In this way, a prisoner might start out in a more desirable production detail in the main camp; as he became exhausted, and less productive, he was sent as a construction worker to a satellite camp; here, the SS tried to press the last remaining labor power out of him, before sending him to yet another camp (or compound) for the dying.
As a result, most prisoners at the Dora complex went through more than one camp, and with each move, they came closer to death.
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