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Books April
6, 2015 Issue Two new
histories show how the Nazi concentration camps worked. By Adam
Kirsch One night in
the autumn of 1944, two Frenchwomen—Loulou Le Porz, a doctor, and
Violette
Lecoq, a nurse—watched as a truck drove in through the main gates of
Ravensbrück, the Nazi concentration camp for women. “There was a
lorry,” Le
Porz recalled, “that suddenly arrives and it turns around and reverses
towards
us. And it lifts up and it tips out a whole pile of corpses.” These
were the
bodies of Ravensbrück inmates who had died doing slave labor in the
many
satellite camps, and they were now being returned for cremation.
Talking,
decades later, to the historian and journalist Sarah Helm, whose new
book,
“Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women”
(Doubleday), recounts the stories of dozens of the camp’s inmates, Le
Porz says
that her reaction was simple disbelief. The sight of a truck full of
dead
bodies was so outrageous, so out of scale with ordinary experience,
that “if we
recount that one day, we said to each other, nobody would believe us.”
The only
way to make the scene credible would be to record it: “If one day
someone makes
a film they must film this scene. This night. This moment.” Le Porz’s
remark was prophetic. The true extent of Nazi barbarity became known to
the
world in part through the documentary films made by Allied forces after
the
liberation of other German camps. There have been many atrocities
committed
before and since, yet to this day, thanks to those images, the Nazi
concentration camp stands as the ultimate symbol of evil. The very
names of the
camps—Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz—have the sound of a
malevolent incantation. They have ceased to be ordinary place
names—Buchenwald,
after all, means simply “beech wood”—and become portals to a terrible
other
dimension. To write the
history of such an institution, as Nikolaus Wachsmann sets out to do in
another
new book, “KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps” (Farrar,
Straus &
Giroux), might seem impossible, like writing the history of Hell. And,
certainly, both his book and Helm’s are full of the kind of details
that
ordinarily appear only in Dantesque visions. Helm devotes a chapter to
Ravensbrück’s Kinderzimmer, or “children’s room,” where inmates who
came to the
camp pregnant were forced to abandon their babies; the newborns were
left to
die of starvation or be eaten alive by rats. Wachsmann quotes a
prisoner at
Dachau who saw a transport of men afflicted by dysentery arrive at the
camp:
“We saw dozens . . . with excrement running out of their trousers.
Their hands,
too, were full of excrement and they screamed and rubbed their dirty
hands
across their faces.” These
sights, like the truck full of bodies, are not beyond belief—we know
that they
were true—but they are, in some sense, beyond imagination. It is very
hard,
maybe impossible, to imagine being one of those men, still less one of
those
infants. And such sights raise the question of why, exactly, we read
about the
camps. If it is merely to revel in the grotesque, then learning about
this evil
is itself a species of evil, a further exploitation of the dead. If it
is to
exercise sympathy or pay a debt to memory, then it quickly becomes
clear that
the exercise is hopeless, the debt overwhelming: there is no way to
feel as
much, remember as much, imagine as much as the dead justly demand. What
remains
as a justification is the future: the determination never again to
allow
something like the Nazi camps to exist. And for that
purpose it is necessary not to think of the camps simply as a
hellscape.
Reading Wachsmann’s deeply researched, groundbreaking history of the
entire
camp system makes clear that Dachau and Buchenwald were the products of
institutional and ideological forces that we can understand, perhaps
all too
well. Indeed, it’s possible to think of the camps as what happens when
you
cross three disciplinary institutions that all societies possess—the
prison,
the army, and the factory. Over the several phases of their existence,
the Nazi
camps took on the aspects of all of these, so that prisoners were
treated
simultaneously as inmates to be corrected, enemies to be combatted, and
workers
to be exploited. When these forms of dehumanization were combined, and
amplified to the maximum by ideology and war, the result was the
Konzentrationlager, or K.L. Though we
tend to think of Hitler’s Germany as a highly regimented dictatorship,
in
practice Nazi rule was chaotic and improvisatory. Rival power bases in
the
Party and the German state competed to carry out what they believed to
be
Hitler’s wishes. This system of “working towards the Fuhrer,” as it was
called
by Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw, was clearly in evidence when it
came to the
concentration camps. The K.L. system, during its twelve years of
existence,
included twenty-seven main camps and more than a thousand subcamps. At
its
peak, in early 1945, it housed more than seven hundred thousand
inmates. In
addition to being a major penal and economic institution, it was a
central
symbol of Hitler’s rule. Yet Hitler plays almost no role in Wachsmann’s
book,
and Wachsmann writes that Hitler was never seen to visit a camp. It was
Heinrich
Himmler, the head of the S.S., who was in charge of the camp system,
and its
growth was due in part to his ambition to make the S.S. the most
powerful force
in Germany. Long before
the Nazis took power, concentration camps had featured in their
imagination.
Wachsmann finds Hitler threatening to put Jews in camps as early as
1921. But
there were no detailed plans for building such camps when Hitler was
named
Chancellor of Germany, in January, 1933. A few weeks later, on February
27th,
he seized on the burning of the Reichstag—by Communists, he alleged—to
launch a
full-scale crackdown on his political opponents. The next day, he
implemented a
decree, “For the Protection of People and State,” that authorized the
government to place just about anyone in “protective custody,” a
euphemism for
indefinite detention. (Euphemism, too, was to be a durable feature of
the K.L.
universe: the killing of prisoners was referred to as Sonderbehandlung,
“special treatment.”) During the
next two months, some fifty thousand people were arrested on this
basis, in
what turned into a “frenzy” of political purges and score-settling. In
the
legal murk of the early Nazi regime, it was unclear who had the power
to make
such arrests, and so it was claimed by everyone: national, state, and
local
officials, police and civilians, Party leaders. “Everybody is arresting
everybody,” a Nazi official complained in the summer of 1933.
“Everybody
threatens everybody with Dachau.” As this suggests, it was already
clear that
the most notorious and frightening destination for political detainees
was the
concentration camp built by Himmler at Dachau, in Bavaria. The
prisoners were
originally housed in an old munitions factory, but soon Himmler
constructed a
“model camp,” the architecture and organization of which provided the
pattern
for most of the later K.L. The camp was guarded not by police but by
members of
the S.S.—a Nazi Party entity rather than a state force. These guards
were the core of what became, a few years later, the much feared
Death’s-Head
S.S. The name, along with the skull-and-crossbones insignia, was meant
to
reinforce the idea that the men who bore it were not mere prison guards
but
front-line soldiers in the Nazi war against enemies of the people.
Himmler
declared, “No other service is more devastating and strenuous for the
troops
than just that of guarding villains and criminals.” The ideology of
combat had
been part of the DNA of Nazism from its origin, as a movement of First
World
War veterans, through the years of street battles against Communists,
which
established the Party’s reputation for violence. Now, in the years
before
actual war came, the K.L. was imagined as the site of virtual
combat—against
Communists, criminals, dissidents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses,
and Jews,
all forces working to undermine the German nation. The metaphor
of war encouraged the inhumanity of the S.S. officers, which they
called
toughness; licensed physical violence against prisoners; and accounted
for the
military discipline that made everyday life in the K.L. unbearable.
Particularly hated was the roll call, or Appell, which forced inmates
to wake
before dawn and stand outside, in all weather, to be counted and
recounted. The
process could go on for hours, Wachsmann writes, during which the S.S.
guards
were constantly on the move, punishing “infractions such as poor
posture and
dirty shoes.” The K.L. was
defined from the beginning by its legal ambiguity. The camps were
outside
ordinary law, answerable not to judges and courts but to the S.S. and
Himmler.
At the same time, they were governed by an extensive set of
regulations, which
covered everything from their layout (including decorative flower beds)
to the whipping
of prisoners, which in theory had to be approved on a case-by-case
basis by
Himmler personally. Yet these regulations were often ignored by the
camp
S.S.—physical violence, for instance, was endemic, and the idea that a
guard
would have to ask permission before beating or even killing a prisoner
was
laughable. Strangely, however, it was possible, in the prewar years, at
least,
for a guard to be prosecuted for such a killing. In 1937, Paul Zeidler
was
among a group of guards who strangled a prisoner who had been a
prominent
churchman and judge; when the case attracted publicity, the S.S.
allowed
Zeidler to be charged and convicted. (He was sentenced to a year in
jail.) In
“Ravensbrück,” Helm gives a further example of the erratic way the
Nazis treated
their own regulations, even late in the war. In 1943, Himmler agreed to
allow
the Red Cross to deliver food parcels to some prisoners in the camps.
To send a
parcel, however, the Red Cross had to mark it with the name, number,
and camp
location of the recipient; requests for these details were always
refused, so
that there was no way to get desperately needed supplies into the
camps. Yet
when Wanda Hjort, a young Norwegian woman living in Germany, got hold
of some
prisoners’ names and numbers—thanks to inmates who smuggled the
information to
her when she visited the camp at Sachsenhausen—she was able to pass
them on to
the Norwegian Red Cross, whose packages were duly delivered. This game
of
hide-and-seek with the rules, this combination of hyper-regimentation
and
anarchy, is what makes Kafka’s “The Trial” seem to foretell the Nazi
regime. Even the
distinction between guard and prisoner could become blurred. From early
on, the
S.S. delegated much of the day-to-day control of camp life to chosen
prisoners
known as Kapos. This system spared the S.S. the need to interact too
closely
with prisoners, whom they regarded as bearers of filth and disease, and
also
helped to divide the inmate population against itself. Helm shows that,
in
Ravensbrück, where the term “Blockova” was used, rather than Kapo,
power
struggles took place among prisoner factions over who would occupy the
Blockova
position in each barrack. Political prisoners favored fellow-activists
over
criminals and “asocials”—a category that included the homeless, the
mentally
ill, and prostitutes—whom they regarded as practically subhuman. In
some cases,
Kapos became almost as privileged, as violent, and as hated as the S.S.
officers. In Ravensbrück, the most feared Blockova was the Swiss ex-spy
Carmen
Mory, who was known as the Black Angel. She was in charge of the
infirmary,
where, Helm writes, she “would lash out at the sick with the whip or
her fists.”
After the war, she was one of the defendants tried for crimes at
Ravensbrück,
along with S.S. leaders and doctors. Mory was sentenced to death but
managed to
commit suicide first. At the
bottom of the K.L. hierarchy, even below the criminals, were the Jews.
Today,
the words “concentration camp” immediately summon up the idea of the
Holocaust,
the genocide of European Jews by the Nazis; and we tend to think of the
camps
as the primary sites of that genocide. In fact, as Wachsmann writes, as
late as
1942 “Jews made up fewer than five thousand of the eighty thousand KL
inmates.”
There had been a temporary spike in the Jewish inmate population in
November,
1938, after Kristallnacht, when the Nazis rounded up tens of thousands
of
Jewish men. But, for most of the camps’ first decade, Jewish prisoners
had
usually been sent there not for their religion, per se, but for
specific
offenses, such as political dissent or illicit sexual relations with an
Aryan.
Once there, however, they found themselves subject to special torments,
ranging
from running a gantlet of truncheons to heavy labor, like
rock-breaking. As the
chief enemies in the Nazi imagination, Jews were also the natural
targets for
spontaneous S.S. violence—blows, kicks, attacks by savage dogs. The systematic
extermination of Jews, however, took place largely outside the
concentration
camps. The death camps, in which more than one and a half million Jews
were
gassed—at Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka—were never officially part of
the K.L.
system. They had almost no inmates, since the Jews sent there seldom
lived
longer than a few hours. By contrast, Auschwitz, whose name has become
practically a synonym for the Holocaust, was an official K.L., set up
in June,
1940, to house Polish prisoners. The first people to be gassed there,
in
September, 1941, were invalids and Soviet prisoners of war. It became
the
central site for the deportation and murder of European Jews in 1943,
after
other camps closed. The vast majority of Jews brought to Auschwitz
never
experienced the camp as prisoners; more than eight hundred thousand of
them
were gassed upon arrival, in the vast extension of the original camp
known as
Birkenau. Only those picked as capable of slave labor lived long enough
to see
Auschwitz from the inside. Many of the
horrors associated with Auschwitz—gas chambers, medical experiments,
working
prisoners to death—had been pioneered in earlier concentration camps.
In the
late thirties, driven largely by Himmler’s ambition to make the S.S. an
independent economic and military power within the state, the K.L.
began a
transformation from a site of punishment to a site of production. The
two
missions were connected: the “work-shy” and other unproductive elements
were
seen as “useless mouths,” and forced labor was a way of making them
contribute
to the community. Oswald Pohl, the S.S. bureaucrat in charge of
economic
affairs, had gained control of the camps by 1938, and began a series of
grandiose building projects. The most ambitious was the construction of
a brick
factory near Sachsenhausen, which was intended to produce a hundred and
fifty
million bricks a year, using cutting-edge equipment and camp labor. The failure
of the factory, as Wachsmann describes it, was indicative of the
incompetence
of the S.S. and the inconsistency of its vision for the camps. To turn
prisoners into effective laborers would have required giving them
adequate food
and rest, not to mention training and equipment. It would have meant
treating
them like employees rather than like enemies. But the ideological
momentum of
the camps made this inconceivable. Labor was seen as a punishment and a
weapon,
which meant that it had to be extorted under the worst possible
circumstances.
Prisoners were made to build the factory in the depths of winter, with
no coats
or gloves, and no tools. “Inmates carried piles of sand in their
uniforms,”
Wachsmann writes, while others “moved large mounds of earth on rickety
wooden
stretchers or shifted sacks of cement on their shoulders.” Four hundred
and
twenty-nine prisoners died and countless more were injured, yet in the
end not
a single brick was produced. This debacle
did not discourage Himmler and Pohl. On the contrary, with the coming
of war,
in 1939, S.S. ambitions for the camps grew rapidly, along with their
prisoner
population. On the eve of the war, the entire K.L. system contained
only about
twenty-one thousand prisoners; three years later, the number had grown
to a
hundred and ten thousand, and by January, 1945, it was more than seven
hundred
thousand. New camps were built to accommodate the influx of prisoners
from
conquered countries and then the tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers
taken
prisoner in the first months after Operation Barbarossa, the German
invasion of
the U.S.S.R. The enormous
expansion of the camps resulted in an exponential increase in the
misery of the
prisoners. Food rations, always meagre, were cut to less than minimal:
a bowl
of rutabaga soup and some ersatz bread would have to sustain a prisoner
doing
heavy labor. The result was desperate black marketing and theft.
Wachsmann
writes, “In Sachsenhausen, a young French prisoner was battered to
death in
1941 by an SS block leader for taking two carrots from a sheep pen.”
Starvation
was endemic and rendered prisoners easy prey for typhus and dysentery.
At the
same time, the need to keep control of so many prisoners made the S.S.
even
more brutal, and sadistic new punishments were invented. The “standing
commando” forced prisoners to stand absolutely still for eight hours at
a time;
any movement or noise was punished by beatings. The murder of prisoners
by
guards, formerly an exceptional event in the camps, now became
unremarkable. But
individual deaths, by sickness or violence, were not enough to keep the
number
of prisoners within manageable limits. Accordingly, in early 1941
Himmler
decided to begin the mass murder of prisoners in gas chambers, building
on a
program that the Nazis had developed earlier for euthanizing the
disabled.
Here, again, the camps’ sinister combination of bureaucratic
rationalism and
anarchic violence was on display. During the following months, teams of
S.S.
doctors visited the major camps in turn, inspecting prisoners in order
to
select the “infirm” for gassing. Everything was done with an appearance
of
medical rigor. The doctors filled out a form for each inmate, with
headings for
“Diagnosis” and “Incurable Physical Ailments.” But it was all mere
theatre.
Helm’s description of the visit of Dr. Friedrich Mennecke to
Ravensbrück, in
November, 1941, shows that inspections of prisoners—whom he referred to
in
letters home as “forms” or “portions”—were cursory at best, with the
victims
parading naked in front of the doctors at a distance of twenty feet.
(Jewish
prisoners were automatically “selected,” without an examination.) In
one
letter, Mennecke brags of having disposed of fifty-six “forms” before
noon.
Those selected were taken to an undisclosed location for gassing; their
fate
became clear to the remaining Ravensbrück prisoners when the dead
women’s
clothes and personal effects arrived back at the camp by truck. Under this
extermination program, known to S.S. bureaucrats by the code Action
14f13, some
sixty-five hundred prisoners were killed in the course of a year. By
early
1942, it had become obsolete, as the scale of death in the camps
increased. Now
the killing of weak and sick prisoners was carried out by guards or
camp
doctors, sometimes in gas chambers built on site. Those who were still
able to
work were increasingly auctioned off to private industry for use as
slave
labor, in the many subcamps that began to spring up around the main
K.L. At
Ravensbrück, the Siemens corporation established a factory where six
hundred
women worked twelve-hour shifts building electrical components. The
work was
brutally demanding, especially for women who were sick, starved, and
exhausted.
Helm writes that “Siemens women suffered severely from boils, swollen
legs,
diarrhea and TB,” and also from an epidemic of nervous twitching. When
a worker
reached the end of her usefulness, she was sent back to the camp, most
likely
to be killed. It was in this phase of the camp’s life that sights like
the one
Loulou Le Porz saw at Ravensbrück—a truck full of prisoners’
corpses—became
commonplace. By the end
of the war, the number of people who had died in the concentration
camps, from
all causes—starvation, sickness, exhaustion, beating, shooting,
gassing—was
more than eight hundred thousand. The figure does not include the
hundreds of
thousands of Jews gassed on arrival at Auschwitz. If the K.L. were
indeed a
battlefront, as the Death’s-Head S.S. liked to believe, the deaths, in
the
course of twelve years, roughly equalled the casualties sustained by
the Axis
during the Battle of Stalingrad, among the deadliest actual engagements
of the
war. But in the camps the Nazis fought against helpless enemies.
Considered as
prisons, too, the K.L. were paradoxical: it was impossible to correct
or
rehabilitate people whose very nature, according to Nazi propaganda,
was
criminal or sick. And as economic institutions they were utterly
counterproductive, wasting huge numbers of lives even as the need for
workers
in Germany became more and more acute. The
concentration camps make sense only if they are understood as products
not of
reason but of ideology, which is to say, of fantasy. Nazism taught the
Germans
to see themselves as a beleaguered nation, constantly set upon by
enemies
external and internal. Metaphors of infection and disease, of betrayal
and
stabs in the back, were central to Nazi discourse. The concentration
camp
became the place where those metaphorical evils could be rendered
concrete and
visible. Here, behind barbed wire, were the traitors, Bolsheviks,
parasites,
and Jews who were intent on destroying the Fatherland. And if
existence was a struggle, a war, then it made no sense to show mercy to
the
enemy. Like many Nazi institutions, the K.L. embodied conflicting
impulses: to
reform the criminal, to extort labor from the unproductive, to
quarantine the
contagious. But most fundamental was the impulse to dehumanize the
enemy, which
ended up confounding and overriding all the others. Once a prisoner
ceased to
be human, he could be brutalized, enslaved, experimented on, or gassed
at will,
because he was no longer a being with a soul or a self but a biological
machine. The Muselmänner, the living dead of the camps, stripped of any
capacity to think or feel, were the true product of the K.L., the
ultimate
expression of the Nazi world view. The impulse
to separate some groups of people from the category of the human is,
however, a
universal one. The enemies we kill in war, the convicted prisoners we
lock up
for life, even the distant workers who manufacture our clothes and
toys—how
could any society function if the full humanity of all these were taken
into
account? In a decent society, there are laws to resist such
dehumanization, and
institutional and moral forces to protest it. When guards at Rikers
Island beat
a prisoner to death, or when workers in China making iPhones begin to
commit
suicide out of despair, we regard these as intolerable evils that must
be
cured. It is when a society decides that some people deserve to be
treated this
way—that it is not just inevitable but right to deprive whole
categories of
people of their humanity—that a crime on the scale of the K.L. becomes
a
possibility. It is a crime that has been repeated too many times, in
too many
places, for us to dismiss it with the simple promise of never again. ♦ Adam Kirsch
directs the master’s degree in Jewish studies at Columbia University
and is a
columnist for Tablet.
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