KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (90 page)

For thousands of Dora prisoners, the final station was the construction camp in Ellrich. The camp—also known as Ellrich-Juliushütte or “Erich,” its SS camouflage name—had been hastily established in early May 1944, less than ten miles north of Dora.
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Always overcrowded,
Ellrich quickly held eight thousand men and more, almost twice as many as the surrounding town. Set up on the grounds of two derelict gypsum factories, the site was practically uninhabitable. Everything was covered in mud as soon as it rained, and prisoners had to sleep in wrecked buildings and huts, initially without a roof. There were no sanitary facilities to speak of and the latrines
became “a veritable cesspool,” a French survivor later wrote. The infirmary was added late and little effort was made to keep prisoners alive; the occasional operations were carried out with dirty instruments and medicine apparently ran out altogether in early 1945.
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In summer 1944, a regular day in Ellrich started at 3:20 a.m., when prisoners were woken for the first roll call. Two hours later,
they were taken in boxcars to building sites, mostly nearby tunnels for SS relocation projects. Here they toiled for thirteen hours, from 6:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m. (with a one-hour break), longer than in any other Dora camp. Many men worked deep inside the tunnels, sometimes barefoot. Afterward, they often waited for hours for trains back to Ellrich. This delay, following a grueling day of labor,
“was for me personally perhaps the most terribly sad thing I have ever lived through, the most extreme point, not of suffering, but of human distress,” the French survivor Jean-Henry Tauzin wrote in 1945. When the prisoners finally returned to Ellrich, often late at night, they had to endure another roll call; at best, they could hope for five hours’ sleep on crammed bunks and filthy sacks of
straw. Few lasted longer than eight weeks working underground.
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Having already written off the Ellrich prisoners, the SS withheld vital supplies. There were chronic shortages of prisoner clothing. Vilmos Jakubovics, a seventeen-year-old Hungarian Jew who arrived in August 1944, never once received fresh clothing during almost eight months in the camp: “We were stiff with dirt and terribly lice-ridden.”
By autumn 1944, many prisoners were naked and covered themselves with thin blankets. The SS bureaucrats in Ellrich duly added a new category to their internal prisoner statistics—“Without Clothing.” In the unheated barracks, inmates often awoke with icy limbs; some froze to death. Others starved to death. Prisoners sometimes went for days without their small ration of bread, with food
consisting of no more than coffee substitute and watery soup; on average, they received just eight hundred calories a day and went almost insane with hunger.
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The hell of Ellrich was completed by violent excesses. Almost all guards were former airmen, but the camp was dominated by a handful of hard-line SS men who surpassed one another in brutality, forever hitting, kicking, and beating prisoners.
One of the camp leaders was Karl Fritzsch, the self-declared inventor of the Auschwitz gas chambers; by the time he arrived in Ellrich in summer 1944, he was one of the most experienced Camp SS men. Following Fritzsch’s departure in autumn 1944, the dominant figure was camp compound leader Otto Brinkmann, another veteran who proved no less cruel. On one occasion, he forced a prisoner to cut
off the testicles from a corpse and eat them, garnished with pepper and salt. “I just wanted to find out,” Brinkmann said after the war, “if something like that was possible.”
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Ellrich was all about labor and death. During several months, it had the highest mortality rate within the Dora camp complex and the mass death of its inmates was clearly part of SS calculations. After all, the SS selected
prisoners for Ellrich who were already exhausted; the only thing they were still good for, in the eyes of the SS, was a short spell of ruinous labor. “Irreversibly, one [prisoner] after the other has the mark of death branded on the forehead,” an inmate noted in his secret diary on December 26, 1944. By then, some three thousand Ellrich prisoners—almost half of the inmate population—were so
ill that they could no longer work at all. In January 1945, more than five hundred Ellrich prisoners died, at a monthly mortality rate of around seven percent. When he had first arrived in Ellrich, Vilmos Jakubovics worked with a group of other Jews from Hungary; “out of these 30 from my hometown,” he testified in summer 1945, “only I stayed alive.”
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Not all construction camps were as infernal
as Ellrich.
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Prisoners who moved through several such camps saw major differences. In May 1944, when the sixteen-year-old Hungarian Jew Jenö Jakobovics came to the small satellite camp Erlenbusch, part of the Riese complex, he was probably relieved. Labor was very hard—for twelve hours a day, he worked on a new railway station building—but at least there was food, clothing, and warm water. Conditions
were far worse at the nearby Wolfsberg camp, where Jakobovics was transferred in autumn 1944. This was the largest and most important Riese camp, holding 3,012 prisoners on November 22, 1944 (510 of whom were aged between fourteen and eighteen, like Jakobovics). Most had to sleep in flimsy wooden huts and toiled in tunneling and other building work. More than anything, it was the guards’
brutality that shocked Jakobovics: “Here, one aimed directly at the extermination of prisoners.”
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This raises a critical issue, for Wolfsberg was a camp reserved for Jews. As we have seen, most registered Jewish KL prisoners had faced murder through labor in 1942–43. Did this SS approach remain in place during 1944, as the case of Wolfsberg suggests, at a moment when vast numbers of Jews were
pressed into the war economy inside Germany?

Nazi Racial Hierarchies

The Third Reich was a racial state and many historians believe that for Nazi leaders, the primacy of racism remained unalloyed to the end.
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Applying this conclusion to the concentration camps, it has been argued that the rigid prisoner hierarchies, based on Nazi ideology, continued to determine the survival of inmates, even
as the regime made a last final frantic bid to win the war.
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Recent research paints a more complex picture, however, suggesting that economic pressures started to dilute the full impact of Nazi racial policy, at least temporarily, as the mobilization of the KL system for total war gathered pace.
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The partial “erosion of the ideological,” as the historian Jens-Christian Wagner calls it, was
evident in many satellites. In Ellrich, and the Dora complex as a whole, survival rates among French and Belgian prisoners were far lower than those of Gypsies, Poles, and Soviets, despite the fact that the latter occupied an inferior place in the Nazi racial hierarchy.
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Dora was no isolated case. In the Neuengamme satellite camps, too, prisoners from western European countries were often more
likely to die than those from eastern Europe.
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What caused this apparent breach of Nazi racial orthodoxy? Two aspects were decisive, it seems. First, there was the time of arrival in satellite camps. In Farge, for example, French prisoners arrived after others had already occupied the key Kapo positions, shutting out the newcomers from life-saving posts.
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Second, a prisoner’s professional
background could now count for more than his nationality. French prisoners, in particular, often came from the intelligentsia. Having learned no trade, they were frequently forced into manual labor. A number of Soviet prisoners, by contrast, were skilled and thus more likely to work in production. They were also better equipped to withstand hard work because of their youth, their familiarity with
physical labor, and their experience with hunger and shortages back home. The French prisoner Jean-Pierre Renouard recalled a revealing incident at the Neuengamme satellite camp Hanover-Misburg. Ordered to operate a heavy pneumatic drill, he stumbled twice and was beaten unconscious by a furious supervisor; when he came to, a strong and skilled Russian prisoner was doing the job with apparent ease,
attracting no blows.
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But there were limits to the ideological flexibility of the SS: economic pressures did not turn prisoner hierarchies upside down. German inmates stayed near the top of the pecking order, while Jewish prisoners largely remained at the bottom, and for them, forced labor still often meant death. The lethal exploitation of Jews in satellite camps was already well established
in occupied eastern Europe, and from spring 1944, in the wake of the mass deportations to the German heartland, such SS abuse spread westward. In many mixed KL, the authorities singled out Jews for the worst treatment. “When the Jew swallows too much food,” the SS camp leader of a Neuengamme satellite camp for men is said to have announced, “he becomes fat, lazy, and, in the end, brazen.”
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The SS reserved many new satellites almost entirely for Jews. Mostly, these were deadly construction camps like Kaufering in Upper Bavaria, set up from June 1944. Attached to the Dachau main camp, Kaufering was probably the largest satellite complex for Jewish prisoners within Germany’s prewar borders, with eleven separate camps. Over less than one year, some thirty thousand KL prisoners were taken
here, overwhelmingly Jewish men, to work for the Fighter Staff. Prisoners labored in shifts around the clock, largely on the construction of three huge bunkers (two were later abandoned) for aircraft factories; long lines of inmates carrying bags of cement crossed the sprawling building sites, while others worked the cement mixers. Their suffering continued inside the hurriedly thrown-together compounds.
Instead of standard-issue barracks, they slept in wooden huts, set up above holes in the ground, with leaking roofs covered by earth; one prisoner likened the conditions to the darkest Middle Ages. A WVHA directive from late 1944, which permitted urgent operations on Jewish prisoners in nearby civilian hospitals (to bolster the slave labor force), went unheeded. Instead, the local authorities
cut the rations of the sick. Salamon Fülöp, a young Hungarian Jew, later noted sarcastically that the SS had relied on “starvation cures” to treat the ill; the inmates ate anything they could find, including grass and dry wood. There were also repeated selections; in autumn 1944, for example, more than 1,300 prisoners were deported to the Auschwitz gas chambers. No one knows exactly how many
Kaufering inmates died in all, but estimates of almost fifteen thousand dead—around half of those taken to the site—are probably not far off.
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Camp complexes like Kaufering were built on prisoner lives, and for the SS no lives held less value than those of Jews. In many satellite camps, guards continued to indulge in anti-Semitic excesses, seemingly oblivious to the wider economic pressures.
As a result, construction camps with Jewish prisoners often had higher death rates than those holding other prisoner groups. This is not the whole story, however. As in the past, some skilled and trained Jewish prisoners were temporarily protected from the worst abuses. Also, senior SS officials did not always send Jews to satellites with the worst conditions. The allocation of slave laborers was
often more haphazard, driven not by racial thinking but by the need to fill short-term vacancies. In Neuengamme, for instance, most Jews ended up in production camps, escaping the worst construction sites.
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Evidently, anti-Semitism was not the only factor determining the fate of Jews in satellite camps. And of all the other factors, none proved more decisive than gender.

Gender and Survival

“
Women in the camp,” Edgar Kupfer noted in his diary in September 1944, after he heard rumors that French women were being detained inside the main Dachau compound: “Unthinkable!”
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German main camps like Dachau, which had previously held no women at all (with the exception of a few forced sex workers in brothels), were suddenly teeming with female prisoners, even if most of them did not stay
for long; once they were registered, the SS normally dispatched them to satellite camps for slave labor.
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The mass influx of women into the KL system was accompanied by several concessions. The SS discarded its ban on male and female prisoners working together in arms production, and it relaxed its rules for the supply of slave labor, deferring to industry demands for smaller prisoner details;
instead of providing only groups of one thousand or more, the SS reduced the minimum “order” to five hundred in the case of women, paving the way for more requests.
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Female prisoners were held in satellite camps all across Germany. Until summer 1944, the great majority of such camps were attached to Ravensbrück. But as the satellite camps mushroomed, the WVHA simplified their administration.
In autumn and winter 1944, the supervision of around half the Ravensbrück satellites, holding some fourteen thousand women, was handed to other main camps (though some links remained, as camps like Buchenwald and Flossenbürg regularly deported “invalid” women back to Ravensbrück). Because these main camps established yet more satellites, the network of female camps continued to expand. By the end
of 1944, there must have been well over one hundred satellite camps holding female prisoners; some were reserved for women only, others held male prisoners, too.
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Even in these joint camps, however, male and female prisoners largely lived and worked apart.

The most striking difference between the sexes lay in the survival rates. Male prisoners in satellite camps were far more likely to die
than women, bringing to mind the gendered delay in SS terror in the years before 1942.
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It is hard to believe that, as some historians have argued, it was the experience of women as homemakers that put them at a significant advantage over men.
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It is equally unlikely that closer bonds among female prisoners made a decisive difference.
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Far more important was the type of labor inmates had
to perform: unlike most men, most women worked in production; in the Ravensbrück satellites, the split between production and construction was around 4:1 among women, and the reverse among men. Companies often preferred women for precision work in arms manufacturing, drafting female prisoners to make munitions, gas masks, warships, and fighter planes.
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