The Theory and Practice of Hell (10 page)

At the very outset of Nazi rule the SA developed the habit of collecting its political enemies—chiefly Communists or people called Communists—in army barracks, abandoned factories, remote depots, ancient castles, where it gleefully proceeded to inflict all manner of tortures on its victims. Goring’s own bully boys (known until 1934 as the Field Police and including some of the choicest fiends) installed their own agony plant in Berlin’s General Pape Street. This Columbia House witnessed perhaps the ghastliest atrocities the human mind can picture.

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More and more people were arrested in those tempestuous months when Nazism had its first fling. Relatives were unable to trace them. The courts, the police, and certain ad ministrative agencies were flooded with inquiries and com plaints. Occasionally there were outright protests even from nationalist sources. The SA soon grew to hate “ reaction” as violently as it did the left, if not more so.

The chief of Goring’s newly established Gestapo, Rudolf

Diels, convinced his master that these excesses could in the long run only harm the prestige of the Nazi government. The regular prisons, moreover, were crowded to the bursting point. He proposed the establishment of regular camps, to be turned over to the Gestapo, the police and other law-enforcement agencies, to “ normalize” the situation.

Goring was by no means averse to these excesses
per se
—unless they happened to enmesh some of his special pets—but he dreaded the growing power of the SA. He agreed to the proposal. Diels gradually took over virtually all the wildcat camps of the early period and by March 1934 had dissolved all but a few, excluding the Columbia House.

Outstanding among those that remained were the camps at Oranienburg and Dachau, where the SS had quartered its “ protective custody” prisoners in a few barracks on abandoned factory or gravel-pit sites. Heydrich called them concentration camps from the very start. No sooner had he taken over the Berlin Gestapo as Himmler*s deputy in March 1934, than he began to admit to these camps police prisoners he had singled out for “ special treatment.” After June 30, 1934, he began to organize both camps systematically, especially Dachau, which soon became a byword throughout Germany. When anyone was put in a concentration camp, the people said simply: “ He’s in Dachau,” even if it happened to be another camp.

A small number of camps on the Oldenburg Heath (Papen-burg, Esterwege and a few others) remained nominally out side the authority of the SS and under the control of the old law-enforcement agencies. All prisoners, nevertheless, stood in holy terror of these so-called
Emsland
camps. Only criminals under sentence were supposed to be sent there, but actually they held many political prisoners. Toward the end these camps numbered some forty thousand inmates. Their

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exemption from SS control had long since lost all practical significance, since all German law-enforcement agencies had become subordinate to Himmler.

Except for Dachau and the Emsland camps, the early con centration camps never exceeded a maximum of one thousand inmates each. Often they held only a few hundred, the smaller number all the more at the mercy of its tormentors. Accounts by the few surviving old “ concentrationaries” agree that there was scarcely a form of perversion and sadism which the SA failed to practice. These, however, were always acts of in dividual bestiality. The system had not yet reached the stage of mass organization. That accomplishment remained for the SS.

From 1936 on, the Death-Head Units began to pick fixed headquarters, planned for permanence from the start. Camp, SS barracks, and SS housing projects were planned as a unit. In this way the three main camps of the SS came into being: Dachau near Munich, which was maintained and expanded; Buchenwald near Weimar, started in the summer of 1937; and Sachsenhausen near Berlin-Oranienburg. They were located in southern, central and northern Germany, respectively. The smaller camps were partly dissolved, their inmates transferred to the larger ones, partly attached to the latter as subsidiary details. Later the following camps were added: Gross-Rosen near Striegau in Silesia; Flossenbiirg near Weiden in Bavaria’s Upper Palatinate; Ravensbruck in Mecklenburg (for women); and after the occupation of Austria, Mauthausen near Linz.

All the German concentration camps were administered and controlled from Berlin. As early as the fall of 1934, Heydrich had created the office of Inspector of Concentration Camps, occupied by Eicke, chief of the Death-Head Units and now promoted to SS brigadier general. He functioned from Gestapo headquarters, 7 Prince Albrecht Street. In 1939 his office was incorporated into the SS Main Office for Economics, which in turn, in 1942, when Pohl was at the head, became the SS Main Economic and Administrative Of fice. The offices of this agency, meanwhile grown to mon strous proportions, were located in Oranienburg, adjoining the concentration camp. The Main Economic and Ad ministrative Office autonomously controlled the entire ad

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL 25

ministration and finances of the SS. All other mat ters—personnel, training, medical service, racial policy, etc.—were assigned to the SS Operational Main Office. In the end there was so much duplication and overlapping that even the SS itself could not find its way through the maze. Personal pull was the decisive factor in getting anything done.

The chief of the Main Economic and Administrative Of fice, SS Lieutenant-General Pohl, was universally feared as an inexorable disciplinarian. He organized his own Department D, which administered the concentration camps and published all central directives. Department D, in turn, grew so autonomous that it developed branches of its own, actually within the jurisdiction of the Operational Main Office. Thus it had a Chief Medical Officer for Concentration Camps. Not a finger could be lifted in the concentration camps without at least the general authority of Department D. Its first head was SS Lieutenant-Colonel Liebehenschel, later appointed com mandant of the Auschwitz camp. His successor was SS Colonel Maurer.

The SS officers of Department D were generally a type distinct from the camp personnel. The business of the central office was to plan and calculate—though this too, of course, was a matter of life and death. But these gentlemen could afford to watch their manners. Their role was similar to that of an army general staff.
Their
tunics were never splattered by muck or blood. True, the chief bureaucrat of death, Pohl himself, bore the typical stamp of unrestrained brutality. He was a product of the German armed forces of the First World War, a former navy paymaster.

The Main Economic and Administrative Office designated three progressive classes of concentration camps. Class I

(labor camps) represented the mildest form. Class II meant that living and working conditions were more rigorous. Class III stood for the “ mills of death” which the prisoners seldom left alive. The Gestapo never fully achieved its goal—to place all criminals, homosexuals, Jews and political prisoners deemed especially dangerous in Class III camps. The regional Gestapo offices differed in their evaluation of cases. The camps themselves often refused to surrender prisoners whose work they had found useful. It was also held to be advisable

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EUGEN KOGON

to keep the prisoner categories in all the camps unsegregated, to deprive the political prisoners of any chance for en trenching themselves.

The central classification scheme never applied to any more thaji a general degree and altogether fails to convey a true pic ture. The actual situation in a given camp, whether infernal or merely barbaric, depended on many other circumstances. Dachau, for example, was always a Class I camp, which can only bring a grim smile to the lips of those who knew the camp. Buchenwald was assigned to Class I on April 29, 1944, but even when it was still Class II, it had long enjoyed better general conditions than Dachau. The only halfway tangible advantage that could arise from a more favorable classification was a somewhat better ration allotment. Even so it would be a fallacy to conclude that this meant a better diet for the individual inmate. All that can be said is that con ditions invariably deteriorated even further whenever a camp was assigned to a lower class, and that the individual initially fared far worse if he was admitted to a lower-class camp. Few of the prisoners even knew that there was such a classification system. Certain camps were known to be “ better,” others “ worse,” quite apart from this scheme. The only exception was the outright labor camps, a large number of which were organized by the SS entirely separate from the concentration camps proper. There the prisoners enjoyed one supreme ad vantage. They knew that they would stay for only six to twelve weeks and would then be permitted to leave this hell. That knowledge alone made most of the torments bearable.

Of far greater practical importance than the classification scheme was the age of the individual camps. Whether before or during the war, the initial phase, when the camp was being built and organized, was always the worst. After the initial phase, misery at least consolidated itself. One knew, so to speak, what risks and dangers had to be taken into account. The factor of uncertainty remained relatively constant. Oc casionally it was even possible actually to improve conditions in some narrow sphere or other. Newcomers could adapt themselves with less shock, and more of them survived the dif ficult period of adjustment.

By and large, however, it was true in all the camps that the first few months after the outbreak of the war—from Sep