KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (92 page)

Despite their enforced blandness, the letters still mattered
to prisoners, as did the eagerly awaited replies they sometimes received; knowledge that their loved ones were alive proved a source of great strength. “I read [your letter] again and again,” Chaim Herman of the Birkenau Special Squad wrote in November 1944 in a final note meant for his wife and daughter in France, “and won’t part from it until my last breath.”
189
Meanwhile, prisoners continued
to subvert the SS rules. Some allusions—such as questions about how “Uncle Winston” was getting on—were so obvious that only dim-witted censors could overlook them. Other references were more subtle, requiring knowledge of foreign cultures. “Mrs. Halál [“death” in Hungarian] is very busy here,” Alice Bala wrote from Birkenau in July 1943.
190
Some prisoners even managed to smuggle secret messages
outside, in which they expressed themselves more openly. In his last letter from Auschwitz, written in April 1943, just three months before his death, twenty-year-old Janusz Pogonowski told his family that his best friend had recently been shot dead, and pleaded for more packages from home because “my current food situation is in a very bad way.”
191
Messages such as this fed rumors on the outside
about the concentration camps. Other details came from former prisoners, following their return from the camps.

Release and “Probation”

Hopes of KL inmates of being freed had faded as soon as war broke out. In autumn 1939, Reinhard Heydrich ordered that prisoners should normally not be released from protective custody during wartime. Exceptions may be allowed, he added, but police officials
had to make sure that no committed political activists, dangerous criminals, or “particularly asocial elements” were freed.
192
And just a few months later, as we saw, Heinrich Himmler put a stop to releases of Jews, an order implemented almost to the letter. According to top-secret SS statistics drawn up for Himmler, only a single Jewish inmate was released from Auschwitz between June 1940 and
December 1942.
193

And yet, there was no complete ban on prisoner releases. In 1940, for example, 387 women were discharged from Ravensbrück and 2,141 men from Sachsenhausen. This was only a small proportion of the prisoner population in these camps, but it was enough to keep alive the dreams of others trapped inside.
194
Among the lucky few were individual German prisoners wearing green, black,
and red triangles, as well as some foreign prisoners, including Czechs and Poles; one of the largest releases came on February 8, 1940, when one hundred professors from Krakow University were freed with Himmler’s agreement, following significant foreign pressure.
195
Some released German men were drafted straight into the army. Since summer 1939, prisoners eligible for army service had been examined
by military commissions inside the KL, and could be called up upon their release, to the disbelief of the new recruits themselves.
196

Releases became even rarer from 1942 onward, as police fears about crime and insurrection redoubled. According to SS figures, an average of around eight hundred prisoners a month were released from the KL system during the second half of 1942.
197
At times, releases
came to an almost complete standstill. In the first week of November 1943, for instance, just three of over thirty-three thousand Buchenwald prisoners were set free.
198
Mass releases, meanwhile, rather common in the prewar KL, stopped almost altogether. One of the few exceptions was the quick release of former democratic functionaries rounded up in summer 1944 during Operation Thunderstorm. The
police authorities let most of the prisoners go after a few weeks, following some popular disquiet and criticism, coming even from senior Nazi officials, about the seemingly arbitrary arrests of elderly Germans who had not been involved in any oppositional activities.
199

Not all released KL prisoners actually won their freedom: several thousand men were sent to the Special Formation Dirlewanger,
a notorious SS unit that turned some former prisoners into killers. The Dirlewanger Formation had been set up in 1940, after Hitler ordered the creation of a special unit of poachers held in state prisons for illegally hunting wild animals. In May and June 1940, dozens were transported for training to Sachsenhausen (more followed in 1942). The small force was led by its eponymous commander Oskar
Dirlewanger, one of the most odious characters in the pantheon of SS villains, who had already attracted attention for his avid criminal appetite, which ranged from extreme political violence to embezzlement and sex crimes. As commander of his own SS unit, he now branched out into pillage, rape, and massacres, specializing in the killing of defenseless civilians in the occupied east.
200

During
1943–44, around two thousand German KL prisoners joined the ranks of the Dirlewanger Formation, which grew into a larger SS force. They included so-called asocial and criminal prisoners (among them several homosexuals who had recently been castrated because of their “degenerate sex drive”). Not all of them were keen to exchange the familiar surroundings of the KL for the unknown dangers of the front.
“By then, we had it reasonably well in the camp,” one veteran “criminal” prisoner later wrote, “and we could have just waited for the war to end.” Some were soon sent back to the KL; others went into hiding or joined the partisans. But the majority entered one of the Third Reich’s darkest areas, which erased the difference between victim and perpetrator. Having suffered for years as social outcasts
in the camps, these men now fought for the Nazi cause and committed dreadful crimes, and yet remained subject to SS violence themselves. Dirlewanger deployed extreme terror against his men (Himmler spoke approvingly of “medieval” methods against “our camp ne’er-do-wells”), and deployed the former prisoners as cannon fodder. The “blood sacrifices” of “incriminated people,” Himmler believed,
would spare the lives of a good few “German boy[s].”
201

One of the casualties was thirty-five-year-old Wilhelm K. from Munich. A destitute father of five who had started poaching to support his family, he had been imprisoned in Dachau since 1942, following a prison sentence. Despite his Communist sympathies and his hatred of the SS, he saw no choice but to join the Dirlewanger Formation in summer
1944. “You and the children,” he wrote to his wife in a secret letter in late August, “need decent support and for the time being I have no other option but to join up, so don’t be angry, sweetheart.” Just a few weeks later Wilhelm K. was killed during the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, in which the Dirlewanger Formation played a savage part.
202

In autumn 1944, the first political prisoners
entered the ranks of the Dirlewanger Formation. Desperate to shore up German defenses, Himmler was now willing to deploy open enemies of the regime like German Communists, straight from the KL. The prisoners were rounded up through a mixture of false promises and coercion. Many were dismayed about their fate, as were fellow inmates who stayed behind. “I could have cried when I saw them like this,”
Edgar Kupfer wrote in his Dachau diary after meeting former comrades dressed in SS uniforms, complete with the Death’s Head insignia. In mid-November 1944, almost eight hundred former KL prisoners arrived in Slovakia to join the Dirlewanger Formation. Most aimed to escape as soon as possible, and they succeeded faster than they could have hoped. Within a month, almost two-thirds had crossed over
to the Red Army—probably the largest desertion by German troops up to this point in the war. But the euphoria about their flight from the SS was short-lived: most of the escaped German anti-Fascists ended up in Soviet forced labor camps, where many of them would die.
203

Close Encounters

When Himmler told German generals on May 24, 1944, about the deportations of Hungarian Jews to the Third Reich,
he insisted that ordinary Germans would remain oblivious. The SS would lock these prisoners away as invisible slaves in underground factories. “Not one of them,” Himmler pledged, “will somehow end up in the field of vision of the German people.”
204
But the old SS policy of concealing KL sites—never entirely successful—was unworkable by 1944, thanks to the huge rise in inmate numbers and satellites.
Whether Himmler wanted it or not, his camp system became enmeshed in the fabric of German society. In the Linz region, for example, the sprawl of the Mauthausen complex meant that there would eventually be one prisoner for every five inhabitants.
205

The closest contacts came during forced labor, as most KL prisoners worked near, and under, German civilians. In Dora, the production of V2 rockets
in summer 1944 involved five thousand concentration camp prisoners and three thousand German workers, many of them locals.
206
One of the Dora prisoners, the French student Guy Raoul-Duval, later tried to summarize the attitude of these German workers:

Some of them were swine, some were good men, but most often they were stupid bastards, not really malicious but fierce, worn out by an interminable
war,… terrorized by the police and the engineers, profoundly weary, and convinced of the inevitability of the Reich’s defeat, yet not resigned to believing the disaster was imminent, and thus continuing, out of habit, the pace they had acquired.
207

Among the minority of German civilian workers described as “swine” by Raoul-Duval would have been those supervisors who basked in their powers. They
did not even have to lay hands on prisoners; more often than not, they used Kapos as their enforcers. Still, some supervisors joined in themselves, especially in construction camps, where prisoner lives came particularly cheap. Occasionally, the violence became so pervasive that managers issued written prohibitions to their staff: if prisoners stepped out of line, employees should report them instead
of beating them.
208
Denunciations to the SS were indeed frequent and could result in swift punishment—as in the Hanover-Misburg satellite camp, where a Belgian and a French prisoner were summarily executed in early 1945 after a German worker complained to the Camp SS supervisor that his sandwich had been stolen.
209

There were also German civilian workers who came to the aid of prisoners, providing
food and other supplies (though this did not stop them from acting more obediently on other occasions).
210
Some of these Germans acted out of self-interest, making profitable deals with desperate prisoners on the black market.
211
Others were moved by kindness. The stench of the camps did not rub off on everyone who touched them; just as some workers hardened over time, others softened as they
came to know individual prisoners.
212
A few even defended prisoners against SS suspicions. When the Auschwitz SS accused a Jewish inmate of sabotage because he had ruined precious metal parts by drilling to the wrong depth, his German foreman explained the incident away as an innocent mistake by an otherwise “reliable worker.”
213
Most famously, and most exceptionally, the German businessman Oskar
Schindler helped to save hundreds of lives, by securing better working conditions for Jewish prisoners in his metal wares and munitions plant, and by protecting them from extermination, first at the Plaszow satellite camp Zablocie (established on the grounds of his factory), and then, following the relocation of the business and many of its prisoners in autumn 1944, at a new satellite camp in
Brünnlitz in Moravia (attached to Gross-Rosen).
214

Beyond terror and support, there was distance and detachment. These were no doubt the most common reactions among the civilian workers. “In fact, we are the untouchables to the civilians,” Primo Levi wrote about his encounters with German workers around Monowitz.
215
Uncomfortable about the prisoners’ proximity, many civilians tried to ignore
the wretched figures in striped uniforms; they literally learned to overlook the inmates. At Gandersheim, Robert Antelme once cleaned the floor in an office full of local men and women. “I did not exist for them,” he later wrote. One of the men shifted automatically as Antelme picked up a piece of paper next to him. “The German pulled back his foot, in the way you shoo away a fly from your forehead
when asleep, without waking up.” Only one woman could not look away; she stared at Antelme and became increasingly agitated. “I weighed on her, I made her lose her composure. Had I brushed against the sleeve of her blouse, she would have been sick.”
216

Such anxieties were fed by prejudice toward members of enemy nations in general and KL prisoners in particular; in the eyes of many German workers,
the sight of the shaven-headed and disease-ridden prisoners simply confirmed the stereotypes of Nazi propaganda. The Camp SS added fuel to the flames, warning civilians that the male prisoners really were dangerous criminals and the women prostitutes ravaged by sexual disease.
217
Cultural differences, with the bulk of foreign prisoners unable to speak German, only heightened suspicions. Linguistic
barriers were not insurmountable, however. At the Continental rubber works in Hanover, where German civilians worked next to political prisoners in the production of gas masks, the hatred of dictators provided common ground. “Hitler
Scheiβe
,” some German workers said. “Stalin
Scheiβe
,” came the prisoners’ reply.
218

Any such collusion was strictly outlawed, of course. Managers warned employees
that private conversations with prisoners were forbidden, on Himmler’s personal orders; all those who broke the rule would themselves end up in protective custody.
219
These threats were mostly about deterrence, no doubt, but the authorities did back them up with occasional sanctions: a number of German workers really were arrested for talking to prisoners.
220
Even harsher punishment—including
detention in Gestapo camps—hit German civilians caught smuggling letters for prisoners or giving them food and drink. As early as February 1942, the Sachsenhausen commandant Hans Loritz informed his officials that he had recently handed over to the Gestapo several civilian workers guilty of such offenses. The remaining workers, Loritz insisted, had to “
regard each prisoner as an enemy of the state
.”
221
In turn, many civilians learned to keep their heads down.