KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (91 page)

These female prisoners also experienced
less extreme abuse from fellow inmates and officials. For the most part, the SS authorities felt that they had less to fear from women. Although some officers warned about their cunning nature, the Camp SS was not overly concerned about violent attacks and escapes. This was reflected in staffing levels; proportionally, the SS often deployed more than twice as many guards at satellite camps for men
as it did at camps for women.
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Moreover, camp compounds for female prisoners were mostly guarded by women.
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Unlike some male guards, none of them had been brutalized by frontline warfare. And although they often acted harshly and unpredictably, they committed relatively few excesses against female inmates; murderous violence remained the exception.
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The same was true, apparently, for many
of the older male reservists drafted as sentries. Female survivors of satellite camps often described these men as rather humane, allowing them extra breaks and additional food. Even some Jewish women recalled former soldiers as acting “very decently,” raising the key issue of anti-Semitic terror in satellite camps for women.
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When it came to survival in satellite camps, gender largely trumped
race: Jewish women were often more likely to survive than non-Jewish men.
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True, Jewish women in construction—clearing rubble, swinging pickaxes, digging trenches—often faced terrible odds; more than four thousand women (largely Hungarian Jews) were deported to Kaufering alone, where many joined the men on the deadly building sites.
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The majority of female Jewish KL prisoners in Germany, however,
worked in production, just like most other women in 1944, and their chances of survival were much higher.
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Jewish women in the Gross-Rosen satellite camps, for example, who mostly worked in textile and arms production, suffered a death rate of around one percent; by contrast, more than twenty-seven percent of Jewish men perished in the Riese construction camp complex.
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In this way, the manufacture
of munitions, weapons, and other goods for the Nazi war effort saved thousands of Jewish women from almost certain death, at least for the time being.

Many Jewish women were held in satellite camps together with groups of other female prisoners, and although they often faced additional abuse, they were not singled out for mass murder. In Leipzig-Schönefeld, a satellite camp of Buchenwald, where
more than 4,200 women of different nationalities and backgrounds worked in arms production in autumn 1944, the skilled Jewish prisoners were treated more or less the same as other inmates. One Jewish survivor of Leipzig-Schönefeld recalled that the camp leader, a veteran Camp SS man no less, had assured them on arrival that they would be judged on their performance, not the yellow star on their
uniforms.
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Other Jewish women found themselves in production camps reserved solely for Jews. One such camp, for the Siemens-Schuckert works, was set up in mid-October 1944 in Nuremberg, opposite the city’s large southern cemetery. Among the 550 women was Ágnes Rózsa, whom we encountered at the beginning of this chapter. Like Rózsa, the other female prisoners had been deported from Hungary to
Auschwitz, and onwards for slave labor to Nuremberg. Held in two barracks surrounded by barbed wire, Ágnes Rózsa and many of the others used precision tools to make electrical goods. In the world of the Nazi camps, this was a privileged detail and the women knew it. “We are no longer threatened by the daily selection or the fear of the gassings,” Ágnes Rózsa wrote on December 6, 1944. “I was dead
in Auschwitz,” she added a few weeks later. “Only here in Nuremberg, as I started to work, was I reborn.” Forced labor was strenuous—Rózsa worked up to fifteen hours a day—but not geared toward destruction. Living conditions were pitiful—prisoners sometimes shook with hunger and cold—but not lethal. Violence was common—with slaps during work and occasional beatings—but not deadly. This made all
the difference for the prisoners. Before the camp was closed down, following an Allied air raid on February 21, 1945, the SS recorded no more than three deaths.
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For most female Jewish prisoners, then, transfer to a satellite camp far inside Germany was an improvement.
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But these women only made up a small proportion of all imprisoned Jews. Far more were murdered in Auschwitz as “unfit for
labor.” Talking to Hitler on April 26, 1944, about the deportations of Hungarian Jews, Joseph Goebbels concluded: “If anything, the Führer’s hatred of Jews has grown, not diminished … Wherever we can get our hands on them, they won’t escape retaliation.”
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As for those Jewish women and men selected for slave labor, one should not forget that Nazi leaders had been swayed by short-term economic
or strategic considerations before.
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Such exceptions did not alter the fundamentals of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, and the survival of some Jews as forced laborers in satellite camps in 1944 was meant to be a temporary stay of execution only.
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The prisoners themselves were well aware of their perilous existence. “When all is said and done,” Ágnes Rózsa wrote in her diary on December 22, 1944,
“I am only alive because at the moment no one wants to kill me.”
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THE OUTSIDE WORLD

Fritz Güntsche was ashamed and angry. Looking back in 1951 at the last years of the Third Reich, the Nordhausen teacher attacked the willful amnesia of his fellow citizens, who often feigned ignorance about the violent history of the nearby Dora concentration camp. “Whoever says that kind of thing is lying!”
Güntsche bristled. What about the prisoners who had marched right through the town? What about the corpses driven toward Buchenwald? What about the prisoners who had worked with locals in factories and on building sites? All this was proof enough, Güntsche wrote, “that we knew something about the Dora camp and its browbeaten inhabitants! We did not interfere with things there, we did not dare to
kick against the pricks. We are responsible for what happened there.” A lone voice drowned out in the stubborn silence about Nazi crimes that enveloped much of Germany in the early 1950s—his unpublished manuscript was kept under lock and key in an East German archive—Güntsche pointed to the many ways in which the camps had become public toward the end of the Third Reich.
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As more and more satellite
camps spread across the country, a vast number of Germans had witnessed the crimes committed in their name. And it was not only the German population that learned more about the camps; the Allies, too, saw SS terror more clearly than ever before.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind?

The KL were never cut off from the outside world, least of all from the communities surrounding them. Having tried to isolate
the camps in the late 1930s, the SS could not stop them from becoming more transparent again after the war started. It could not hide completely the murder of Soviet POWs and other Nazi victims, as columns of starved prisoners marched toward the camps, followed by telltale smoke from inside. “The chimney of the crematorium,” a Dachau woman recalled after the war, “stank and stank, day and night.”
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Another local point of contact was slave labor. In theory, the SS still tried to stop onlookers; any spectators who failed to disperse, Dachau sentries were instructed around 1942, should be dragged before the camp authorities.
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But such rules were already impossible to fully enforce in the early 1940s, as the outside deployment of prisoners increased (well before the proliferation of satellite
camps).
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Often, the initiative for such employment had come from local officials and traders. Farmers, in particular, petitioned concentration camps for help with the harvest, a well-established custom in state prisons. One of these farmers was Gretel Meier from Flossenbürg, who asked the commandant in June 1942 for “approval of a prisoner mowing detail of four prisoners” because “my husband
is at the front” (the request was granted by the WVHA). Shortages among agricultural workers led the SS to rent out sizable numbers of prisoners; in autumn 1942, around thirteen percent of female prisoners from Ravensbrück worked locally in farming.
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Occasionally, KL prisoners also worked for small companies, local towns, and cities.
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Their presence grew from autumn 1942 onward, following
Himmler’s decision to deploy the new SS Building Brigades to clear rubble and ruins. In their striped uniforms—long associated in the public mind with criminality—the prisoners were highly visible, as were SS abuses. The former inmate Fritz Bringmann recalled an unusual incident on the streets of Osnabrück in late 1942. As an SS man battered an unconscious prisoner, a woman stepped from the crowd
that had gathered, placed herself before the prisoner, and berated the SS man; later that evening, the prisoners talked excitedly about this intervention as proof that there were still Germans “who had not forgotten the difference between humanity and inhumanity.”
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In the minds of the vast majority of Germans, however, the camps and their prisoners remained abstractions during the early years
of the war. Direct contacts with prisoners were rare, as were references in the press; even the foundation of a large new camp like Auschwitz was suppressed in local and regional papers.
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Of course, the KL system was not altogether forgotten. It made occasional appearances in public speeches and popular culture. In the 1941 Great German Art Exhibition in Munich, for example, a large oil painting
depicted dozens of KL prisoners—recognizable by their caps, uniforms, and colored triangles—who slaved in the Flossenbürg quarry (the painting was acquired for four thousand Reichsmark in Hitler’s name).
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Local Nazi bigwigs also still threatened “troublemakers” with the camps, so much so that Himmler issued a formal warning in summer 1942. The German people were too decent, he insisted, to put
up with constant threats of such harsh punishment.
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And yet, most Germans still pushed the concentration camps to the backs of their minds, just as they had done in the late 1930s. When they thought about the inmates at all, they probably imagined dangerous criminals and other enemies of the state—an image so firmly entrenched by now that it often endured long into the postwar years.
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The
role of the camps in the Nazi Final Solution did not fully penetrate public consciousness, either. To be sure, the secrecy surrounding the genocide in Auschwitz was never as complete as the perpetrators wanted.
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Knowledge must have been particularly widespread within SS circles. After Dr. Johann Paul Kremer participated in his first selection in September 1942, he noted in his diary: “It is
not for nothing that Auschwitz is called the camp of annihilation!”
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Beyond the SS, some regular German soldiers witnessed the crimes in Auschwitz, and by 1944, several senior army officers were well aware that mass gassings were carried out here.
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Railway workers and other state employees gained insights, too. In January 1943, Germany’s top legal officials—who had kept some distance from
the KL in the prewar years—toured the Auschwitz camp, led by Reich minister of justice Thierack.
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Many local civilians, too, had some knowledge of the mass murder in the nearby camp. Indeed, rumors spread across the whole region, though the main victims were sometimes thought to be Poles, not Jews.
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Through friends and relatives, and Allied radio broadcasts, word about Auschwitz carried inside
the Reich. As for German Jews who had not yet been deported, the reports about the death of friends and acquaintances left little doubt in the minds of some that Auschwitz was “a fast-working slaughterhouse,” as Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary on October 17, 1942.
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Despite all this, Auschwitz was no household name across Nazi Germany. While many ordinary Germans had some general knowledge
of the mass murder of European Jews in the east, they mainly heard about massacres and shootings, not about camps. Most Germans only learned about Auschwitz after the war.
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Such ignorance owed much to the Nazi authorities’ strenuous efforts to hush up KL crimes. Camp SS officials were banned from sending blood-soaked prisoner clothes by regular mail, lest a packet spill open, and from sending
death notices to relatives of deceased Soviet forced laborers, after rumors about the high mortality in the camps had spread in the occupied east.
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In addition, the SS began to use a secret code for disguising the number of deaths recorded by camp registry offices, so as not to arouse suspicion.
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As for public gossip, the Nazi authorities probably regretted a Gestapo order of October 1939
that had encouraged the spread of “rumor propaganda” about hardships inside the KL to increase their “deterrent effect.”
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In fact, public talk about violence and murder was still punished. Loose-tongued Camp SS officials were let off most lightly, though even they sometimes faced imprisonment. Others were less fortunate. After a Hanover dentist, a Nazi Party member since 1931, told a patient
in summer 1943 that he deplored the “medieval torture methods” in concentration camps and the murder of a million Jews, he was sentenced to death by a German court.
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To control popular knowledge about the KL, the Nazi authorities continued to enforce stringent rules about prisoner access to the outside world. Letters, which could be posted at best every two weeks (many prisoner groups wrote
less often or were barred altogether), were still rigorously controlled. They had to be written in legible German—shutting out most foreign prisoners—and any references to illness, slave labor, and camp life were strictly prohibited. Often, the inmates were even forbidden to mention the fact that they were in a concentration camp.
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