Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (92 page)

collapse of the Third Reich could be delayed or even prevented as a result.

Hitler did not agree with this approach as Himmler was forced to recognize:

the Führer reacted with great indignation when he subsequently learned of

the release of the Jews to Switzerland, and forbade similar steps in the

future.
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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

The Clearing of the Concentration Camps and the Death Marches

As early as 17 June 1944 Himmler transferred to the Higher SS and Police

Commanders the right of command over the concentration camps in the event

of ‘A Case’ (initially an uprising by inmates, but then above all the approach of

enemy troops).
245
Accordingly, the HSSPF established precisely when the clearance was to take place and organized it in collaboration with Department D of the

WVHA. As to the further fate of the inmates, organizational measures taken at an

intermediate level were to prove crucial. Thus, right into the final phase of the war

the perpetrators had a great deal of room for manoeuvre as far as the murder of

Jews and other prisoners was concerned.

The clearance and evacuation led to a new selection of the prisoners. While in

some concentration camps German prisoners were released, weak and sick

prisoners—mainly Jewish—were generally murdered in the camps before the

order to evacuate was given. The evacuation marches then ordered by the camp

authorities—in some cases there were also railway transports—generally occurred

in winter conditions, with inadequate provisions or none at all. There were

inadequate breaks and accommodation and the escorting troops, often with

local help, murdered the prisoners who were left behind. In these columns,

generally composed of members of all categories of prisoners, the chances of

survival of the Jewish prisoners were worst because of their generally advanced

exhaustion.

As a rule the sub-camps were cleared first and the prisoners brought to the

main camp. The goal of the so-called ‘evacuations’ of the main camps was in turn

the concentration camps in the centre of the German Reich. Bringing together a

large number of prisoners in fewer and fewer camps generally led to an almost

total breakdown of supplies for the prisoners in the camps and a further worsen-

ing of already almost unbearable conditions. Instead of the imminent liberation

that many prisoners expected from the Allied advance, for most prisoners the

occupation of Germany meant a further intensification of their torment, which

often continued for months.
246

The former ghettos and camps for Jewish forced labourers in the Baltic, which

had been turned into concentration camps on Himmler’s instructions, were

cleared in the summer of 1944. The clearance of the camp complex around the

Kaiserwald concentration camp in Riga began in June 1944. At first the sub-camps

were gradually closed, and the prisoners brought to Kaiserwald; the prisoners who

were no longer fit for forced labour, as well as all children, were separated from the

rest and murdered. From August until October the prisoners were brought by ship

to Danzig, where they were confined in the concentration camp.
247

From Kaunas concentration camp the surviving 8,000 Jews were deported to

the west by rail and on barges, the women to Stutthof, the men to sub-camps of

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

415

Dachau. Prisoners who were ‘unfit for work’ were separated out and taken to

Auschwitz.
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Also in August 1944 all camps of the Vaivara complex were dissolved and most of the prisoners shipped to Tallinn and from there to

Stutthof.
249

In the summer of 1944 the camp commandant of Stutthof, Günther Hoppe,

received the order from the Department D inspector of the WVHA with respon-

sibility for the concentration camps, that all Jewish prisoners in Stutthof were to

be murdered by the end of the year. To this end, in autumn 1944 a clothes

delousing installation was turned into a gas chamber. Here, from September

1944 onwards, groups of between twenty-five and thirty-five people—mostly

female Jewish prisoners from the Baltic and Hungary—were murdered with

Zyklon B. A second gas chamber was set up in an abandoned railway wagon.
250

At the end of 1944, when the clearance of Stutthof camp began, to avoid the

approaching front, there were still 47,000 prisoners there, two-thirds of them

Jewish.
251

In mid-January at least 6,000 prisoners, predominantly Jewish women, were

driven out of the sub-camps of Stutthof concentration camp, situated in East

Prussia, towards the Baltic. Around 50 per cent of the prisoners lost their lives.

In the coastal town of Pamnicken the escort troops—supported by local Nazis and

members of the Gestapo from Königsberg—carried out a massacre among the

surviving prisoners, in which around 200 people were killed. As far as one can tell,

this murder was carried out on the initiative of the leader of the escort troops, who

wanted to get rid of the prisoners so that they could get away more quickly from

the advancing Red Army.
252

At the end of the year the first railway transports carrying prisoners left Stutthof

main camp, until Hoppe finally ordered the partial clearance of the camp on

25 January. Eleven columns, each of 1,000 prisoners, were formed, who marched

on foot towards Lauenburg, 140 km away. Only around a third of the prisoners

reached the town; when the Red Army reached Lauenburg in mid-March they

found around 15,000 survivors of the death march from Stutthof.
253

In the summer of 1944 the SS began moving about half of the prisoners from

Auschwitz concentration camp—there were about 130,000 people there at the

time—to other concentration camps.
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The ‘evacuation’ of Auschwitz concentration camp, in which by then there were still 67,000 prisoners, began in mid-

January 1945. Over 56,000 prisoners were driven westwards in marching columns

of whom an estimated two-thirds were Jews. In accordance with an order from

HSSPF Breslau, Heinrich Schmauser, that no prisoners were to fall into the hands

of the enemy, the guards shot all prisoners who could not keep up with the

marching pace. Given the terrible conditions on the marches, an estimated quarter

of the prisoners fell victim to this practice. Some of the marching columns reached

Groß-Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia, which became the transit camp

for the camps and prisons cleared in the East.
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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

The Groß-Rosen concentration camp complex, which had numerous

sub-camps, was cleared from January 1945 onwards, and the clearance of the

completely overcrowded main camp began in February: it is demonstrable that

44,000 prisoners were moved on rail transports to concentration camps further to

the west, an unknown figure dying on the way.
256

As a result of the clearance of the camps in the East, there was now a

large number of Jewish prisoners in the camps in the Reich. In Ravensbrück

concentration camp the camp authorities had been preparing for the evacu-

ation since January 1943—at this point 48,000 prisoners were crammed together

in the camp—and systematically murdered the weak prisoners by leaving

them to die in special death zones, giving prisoners injections of poison,

shooting them, and finally, in January 1945, converting a wooden barrack into

a provisional gas chamber, in which a total of several thousand prisoners were

murdered.
257

In March 1945 Himmler once again returned to the idea of using Jewish

prisoners as hostages. In the middle of that month, during a visit to Germany

by his personal doctor Felix Kersten, who had by now moved to Sweden and had

contact with the Swedish foreign minister, he told Kersten—or so Kersten

claimed—that the concentration camps would not be blown up as the Allies

approached, further killing of the prisoners was forbidden, and the prisoners

were instead to be handed over to the Allies.
258

For a short time Himmler ordered the camp commandants not to kill any more

Jewish prisoners, saying that they must combat death rates among the prisoners.

The order was personally passed on to concentration camp commandants by

Pohl.
259

During his meeting with Himmler in March, Kersten informed his contact at

the World Jewish Congress, Hillel Storch, that Himmler had also agreed to release

10,000 Jewish prisoners to Sweden or Switzerland.
260
And in fact large numbers of Jewish prisoners were able to reach Sweden. Since February Himmler had been in

direct contact with the vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Folke

Bernadotte, who was responsible for trying to secure the release of the Scandi-

navian concentration camp prisoners on behalf of the Swedish government. They

were first brought together in Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg

and finally Bernadotte managed to ensure that they were brought to Sweden

by columns of Red Cross medical orderlies—the legendary ‘white buses’—via

Denmark to Sweden. Above all because of the sustained pressure from the

Swedish government, but also possibly as the result of efforts by other parties,
261

far more than the 8,000 Scandinavian prisoners were saved in the end, namely

more than 20,000 people, including several thousand Jews.
262

However, contrary to Himmler’s pledge, the camps of Dora-Mittelbau and

Buchenwald—on the express orders of the Reichsführer SS—were not handed

over to the Allies, but also cleared at the beginning of April. The SS managed to

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417

bring around 28,000 from a total of 48,000 prisoners in Buchenwald out of the

camp, at least a third of whom had lost their lives by the end of the war.
263

The camp of Bergen-Belsen with its 60,000 prisoners, around 90 per cent of

them Jewish, was handed over to the British army by the SS on 15 April 1945.

Food supplies in the camp had completely collapsed, and there had been an

outbreak of typhus. Between January and the liberation of the camp, 35,000

prisoners had lost their lives, and a further 14,000 died in the first five days after

the liberation.
264

Also in mid-April, the department responsible for the concentration camps

held one last conference in which—in accordance with Himmler’s order—the

evacuation of the last concentration camps not liberated by the Allies must have

been discussed: these were Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Neuengamme, Flossenbürg,

and Ravensbrück. In mid-April there is evidence that Himmler directly instructed

Flossenbürg camp that no prisoners could fall alive into the hands of the enemy,

an order that must also have applied to other camps. Over the next few days the SS

leadership refused to comply with the requests from the International Red Cross

and hand over the last camps.
265

The last death marches went in two directions: the prisoners from the

camps of Flossenbürg and Dachau marched southwards, those from Ravens-

brück, Sachsenhausen, and Neuengamme northwards, according to the div-

ision of the still unoccupied Reich territory into two parts, which was still

under way. The motives for these last violent marches are unclear: perhaps

the objective was to deploy the prisoners as slave labourers in the construc-

tion of fortresses (for example, for a planned alpine fortress that was never

realized), and another factor must have been the SS’s intention to hand over

as few prisoners as possible, but instead to take them along on the retreat for

as long as possible, to be able to use them as hostages in last-minute

negotiations.

On 19 April 25,000–30,000 prisoners set off on a march towards Dachau, which

only some of the prisoners reached, while the remaining columns remained stuck

in the chaos prevailing in Upper Bavaria.
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Of the 32,000 Dachau prisoners more than 8,500 were driven towards Austria, and at least 1,000 died. On 2 May the

guards left and the camp was liberated by American troops.
267

In the overcrowded Mauthausen camp and its sub-camps, which held many

Jewish prisoners, some 41,000 prisoners died in the first months of 1945 leading up

to the camp’s liberation in early May. In addition, around 2,000 people were

murdered in the gas chambers of Mauthausen camp.
268

The Sachsenhausen prisoners, 33,000 of them, were forced to march towards

Schleswig-Holstein on 20 April, and from Ravensbrück 20,000 prisoners were also

sent northwards towards Schleswig-Holstein on 18 and 24 April. In the chaos of

collapse, however, the marching columns gradually dissolved, the guards disap-

peared, and the hour of the prisoners’ liberation had arrived.
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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

The clearance of Neuengamme began on 19 April: 9,000 prisoners also had to

march to Schleswig-Holstein. Prisoners deemed ‘unfit to march’ and ‘sick’ were

murdered in the camp itself.
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