KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (98 page)

With greater powers came greater privileges. It was easy to spot the Kapos, and not just because of the insignia or colored armbands that signaled their position. The more senior they were, the more they stood out—especially in camps for men, where social differences were particularly pronounced. These Kapos often sported longer hair, instead of shaven heads,
and wore clean clothes, complete with leather shoes or boots. Not for them the rags worn by others. Some senior Kapos had their prisoner uniforms altered, wore civilian outfits stolen from SS depots, or ordered made-to-measure suits in the tailors’ workshops. “They are better dressed,” wrote David Rousset, “and consequently a little more like human beings.”
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Kapos looked more vigorous, too,
the “only healthy people in the camp,” as another survivor put it in 1945.
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They were largely exempt from exhausting manual labor and less exposed to disease. Senior Kapos often slept separately, sharing an enclosure near the barrack entrance or their own special barrack. For the time being, they had escaped the disease-infected quarters where prisoners were crammed on bunks and straw sacks.
They slept in clean beds surrounded by precious reminders of civilization—vases, flowers, curtains—and ate from neatly laid tables laden with food.
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Kapos often enriched themselves through corruption and theft. They took from the rations and parcels of others, and from the SS storehouses. “Well, so much stuff came with the Jews, and we filched from it, of course we did,” the Auschwitz Kapo
Jupp Windeck said after the war, adding that “as Kapos, we always got ourselves the best.”
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Blackmail and profiteering were rampant, as Kapos turned the misery of others to their own advantage. When the starving Haim Kalvo approached his work supervisor in an Auschwitz satellite camp for extra food in November 1943, more than six months after his arrival on a deportation train with almost 4,500
Greek Jews, the Kapo promised him a few loaves of bread in return for a gold tooth. The innkeeper from Salonika was so desperate that he offered a golden crown still in his jaw, whereupon the Kapo “took some pliers and, after we had walked aside, pulled out the golden tooth,” as Kalvo explained a few days later to the SS, who had got wind of the deal (Kalvo apparently survived the KL).
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Sex
was also largely the preserve of Kapos, and not only in the camp brothels. In the compounds, too, some of them used their power to get what they wanted. Men forced themselves on female prisoners, though the spatial separation between sexes made same-sex relations far more frequent. Most common were relationships between Kapos and young inmates, known as Pipel, who often submitted for pragmatic reasons,
hoping for food, influence, and protection in return.
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At the same time, sexual violence left deep scars and worse, as a few predatory Kapos tried to murder their victims to avoid detection. After the teenager Roman Frister was raped in his bunk by a Kapo one night in an Auschwitz satellite camp, he realized that his attacker had stolen his cap, without which Frister would face punishment during
the next roll call; to save himself, Frister stole the cap of another prisoner, who was executed by the SS the following morning.
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Kapos were not shy about parading their power and privilege. Such demonstrative displays—one Mauthausen Kapo insisted on wearing white gloves as he strolled through the camp—reinforced their standing and put other prisoners into place. The disdain some of them felt
for fellow inmates is summed up by the gesture of a German Kapo who, without thinking, cleaned his dirty hand on Primo Levi’s shoulder.
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At times, the Kapos’ pride in their positions was palpable. For a man like Jupp Windeck, the appointment as Monowitz camp elder in autumn 1942 marked the climax of a staggering social rise. After a miserable life on the margins of German society, with long
spells of unemployment and imprisonment for minor property offenses, this unskilled laborer now stood above thousands of inmates. He had been the lord of the manor, Windeck recalled fondly more than twenty years later, when he was tried for his crimes.
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The responses by the mass of ordinary prisoners varied. Some inmates ridiculed the powerful and their grand airs, though they normally tried
to get out of the way of the most notorious Kapos like Windeck, literally clearing the path for them. There were also hangers-on, who hoped that toadying might elevate them, or at least help them to a few crumbs of food; this is why regular prisoners fought for the privilege of carrying the soup kettle for block orderlies.
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The most common reaction, though, was envy and loathing, which provoked
some Kapos to reaffirm their powers. “I have the authority,” one Sachsenhausen Kapo warned his fellow prisoners every morning, “to smash each and every one of you.”
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Judging a Kapo

It is easy to think of Karl Kapp as a typical Kapo. He had first become a supervisor in 1933, aged thirty-five, during a brief spell in Dachau after his arrest as a union activist and SPD city councilor, but his
Kapo career really took off when he returned in 1936 as a recidivist political prisoner. Over the coming years, the trained butcher from Nuremberg, who spoke in the strong local dialect, rose steadily from block elder to labor supervisor (overseeing 1,500 prisoners) and finally to camp elder.
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During his long spell as a Dachau Kapo, Kapp gained a reputation for severity. Slight but forceful,
he was forever screaming at prisoners. He slapped and hit suspected shirkers or reported them to the SS, with potentially lethal consequences. What is more, he killed on command, participating in SS executions inside and outside the camp. The authorities rewarded him with privileges, and like a few other Kapos who had exceeded SS expectations, he finally walked away with the ultimate prize—freedom.
Released and reunited with his family in 1944, Kapp spent the final year of World War II as a building contractor for the Ravensbrück SS.
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But Karl Kapp was not a typical Kapo, for there was no such thing. Some prisoners, it is true, conformed to the fearsome image of Kapos. They seemed to copy the SS, Margarete Buber-Neumann wrote about the most brutal and greedy supervisors in Ravensbrück,
until they resembled them in all but uniform. But there were also their opposites, she added, kind women who made things better for their fellow inmates.
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And although male Kapos resorted more frequently to violence than their female counterparts, there were decent ones among them, too, including some who refused on principle to lay hands on other prisoners; many more only turned strict when
SS guards came near.
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Often Kapos struggled with their conscience as they were drawn deeper into SS schemes, suffering what the young Herzogenbusch prisoner David Koker described in his diary in November 1943 as a “moral hangover.”
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SS attempts to turn them into torturers and killers proved a watershed for many. In Dachau, not all Kapos submitted to the order, enforced by Kapp, to dish out
corporal punishment. During a heated meeting among block elders, there were cheers for one Kapo who lambasted Kapp’s stance and exclaimed that he would rather be beaten himself than hit a fellow prisoner. Like-minded Kapos, in Dachau and elsewhere, subverted SS orders by pretending to whip their victims much harder than they really did.
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Others openly challenged the authorities. In July 1943,
the camp elder in the Dachau satellite camp Allach, the Communist Karl Wagner, refused outright to hit another inmate; he was whipped twenty-five times and thrown into the bunker for several weeks.
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Karl Kapp’s role in SS executions was particularly controversial among Dachau prisoners and earned him the lasting contempt of several senior Kapos, though when they confronted him, he just shrugged
and walked off.
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Unlike Kapp, some Kapos stood up to the SS: they would not kill. When the Dora SS told the two camp elders, Georg Thomas and Ludwig Szymczak, to hang a Russian inmate on the roll call square, they defied the orders. Furious SS men ripped the Kapo armbands off their uniforms and dragged them away; neither man survived the war.
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As for Kapos who did succumb to extreme SS pressure—threatened
that they would be executed, too, if they did not act as henchmen—not all shrugged off their deeds in the manner of Kapp. In Buchenwald, a Communist Kapo hanged himself after he had been forced to kill another prisoner, unable to bear the guilt.
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Even a man like Kapp was a more complex figure than he appears at first sight. There were rational reasons for Kapos like him to do as they were told.
In the first place, it was a simple case of self-preservation, as the Camp SS did not think twice about demoting and punishing those who appeared too lenient.
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The loss of their Kapo positions meant not only the loss of vital privileges, it could also expose them to the wrath of their fellow inmates. Their victims often fantasized about turning the tables and, if they got the chance, exacted
revenge. The SS saw such vigilante justice as a bonus, as it forced Kapos into greater compliance. As Heinrich Himmler explained to Nazi generals in 1944: “As soon as we are not satisfied with [a Kapo], he is no longer a Kapo, he sleeps again with his men. He knows that they will beat him to death in the first night.”
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In this way, some Kapos became trapped in a vicious circle. Once other inmates
saw them as willing tools of the SS, they felt that they had little choice but to redouble their abuses, lest they lose the life-saving protection of the SS.
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But Karl Kapp had his eyes on more than his own survival, and used his powers to aid some fellow prisoners. As camp elder, he allowed prisoners to smuggle food into the penal company and helped some inmates gain better positions.
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There
were limits to what he could do, of course, and his efforts probably involved an element of self-interest, as they created a circle of grateful allies.
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Nonetheless, Kapp’s favoritism was wide-ranging, extending as it did to prisoners from other backgrounds. At great risk, he saved several prisoners he did not personally know and whose political views he did not share.
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And like many senior
Kapos, Kapp firmly believed that any of his abuses prevented worse. Interrogated after the war, he insisted that he had only ever reported prisoners to the SS as a last resort, if their actions threatened the collective; in all other cases, he had made sure to hand out penalties himself. And what some inmates saw as mindless brutality, Kapp added, had actually been calculated efforts to keep the
SS at bay. If he had not enforced strict order during regular barrack inspections, murderous SS block leaders would have descended on the prisoners instead. If he had not hit individuals who were late for roll call, the SS would have made all inmates suffer. If he had not kicked lazy prisoners, the SS would have tortured them and punished the rest of the labor detail, too.
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Karl Kapp arrived
at a jarring conclusion: to prevent SS abuses he had to play the part of the SS himself.
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This view was shared by many ordinary prisoners. They agreed that Kapo attacks were the lesser evil, drawing away the attentions of the SS, and they applauded Kapos who punished suspected thieves and traitors.
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“With his screaming, Kapp kept away the thugs,” a pastor who survived Dachau later said. Even
some of Kapp’s victims defended him. Paul Hussarek, whom Kapp had hit on the neck for talking during the march to roll call, was certain that he had been saved from a far worse fate at the hands of the SS. “I am still grateful to Kapp for this punch,” he said years later.
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Many other survivors spoke up for Kapp, too, and even some of his detractors, who saw him as a bully, conceded that he had
averted SS excesses.
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The actions of Karl Kapp were dissected in a Munich courtroom in 1960, where he stood accused of prisoner abuse and murder. In the end, the court found Kapp innocent of all charges. Far from being a willing tool of the SS, the judges declared, he had been loyal to fellow prisoners, protecting them heroically.
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This was an unduly clear-cut verdict, given the complexities
of his case. The judges imposed moral certitude on actions fraught with ambiguity and gave an emphatic reply to a question—“Was Kapp a good man or not?”—that defies an easy answer. After all, had Kapp not reported fellow inmates to the SS? Had he not helped to whip and hang innocent prisoners?

Even those who would have condemned Karl Kapp, however, should remember that he had not made a free
choice. He was a victim of Nazi terror, too, trapped for almost nine years inside the KL.
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The same was true of other prisoners in positions of power. Some of the cruelest Kapos had gone through hell at the hands of the SS. When a prisoner confronted a female Kapo in Auschwitz for beating an inmate who was old enough to be her mother, the woman replied: “My mother was gassed, too. It is all
the same to me.”
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The daily exposure to the camps left indelible marks, and so did the corruption by power, as Kapos rose through the ranks; any veteran who retained moral integrity seemed like a saint to other prisoners.
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This is not to excuse every act, however violent; after all, Kapos had some degree of agency. Nonetheless, even the worst Kapo was still a prisoner, hoping to survive a
day at a time. In this respect, at least, all inmates were alike: none of them knew whether they would still be alive the next day.
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