KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (101 page)

To gather material about the Nazi Final Solution, the prisoner underground in Auschwitz needed the help of Special Squad members, who witnessed the daily mass murder close-up. Getting evidence out of the strictly guarded zone of death around the crematoria meant “risking the life of the entire group,” one of them, Salmen Lewental, wrote in 1944; but he felt compelled to tell the world about the
Nazi crimes “because without us nobody will know what happened, and when.”
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The most daring operation came in late August 1944, when one Special Squad prisoner, helped by others, documented the murder of Lodz Jews with a hidden camera. Concealed inside the gas chamber of Birkenau crematorium V, he photographed the burning of corpses in pits outside; later, he stepped in the open air to capture
other victims as they undressed among the trees; four of the images have survived, smuggled out of Auschwitz within days, and they remain some of the most poignant testaments of the Holocaust.
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Like other acts of prisoner defiance, the efforts to document KL crimes were extremely courageous. After all, prisoners knew that the SS was hunting everyone engaged in subversive activites. In fact,
SS officers even conjured up plots where none existed. “He saw a seditious act of sabotage in every triviality,” an SS man from the Auschwitz political office later said about his former boss, Maximilian Grabner.
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Often, the SS alarm was raised by denunciations from fellow prisoners, as local commandants built up a network of informants (acting on WVHA instructions); the Sachsenhausen SS alone
is said to have used almost three hundred “stoolies.”
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Suspects were dragged to the bunkers and tormented by SS men from the political office. And although the evidence they gathered was often negligible, they demanded extreme punishment; when the Dora SS got wind in autumn 1944 of an alleged plot to blow up the tunnel, it tortured hundreds of innocent prisoners and eventually executed over
150 Soviets, as well as some German Kapos, among them four former Communist camp elders.
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The authorities were equally uncompromising when it came to suspected sabotage, another SS obsession. Sanctions were swift and severe, even for harmless acts. A joke could cost a prisoner’s life, as could purely symbolic acts; in Dora, the SS once strung up a Russian prisoner for allegedly urinating into
the body of a V2 rocket.
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The SS even twisted acts of desperation into sabotage, executing prisoners for using parts of their bedsheet as gloves or socks.
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In this way, most prisoners were forced into submission. Although they generally hated working for the enemy, there was no widespread obstruction in the KL. “I would have never committed sabotage,” a former inmate summed up the feelings
of many, “because I wanted to survive.”
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Insubordination and Escapes

Direct challenges to the SS were madness, most veteran prisoners agreed. It was dangerous enough to charm, bribe, or trick SS officials, but to defy them directly could only lead to disaster. After a Flossenbürg prisoner was beaten senseless for insulting the SS during an evening roll call, Alfred Hübsch wondered what had
possessed this “lunatic” to swim against the tide. “Everyone here must have learned a long time ago that any resistance will be broken!”
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Inevitably, acts of open defiance remained very rare during World War II. When they did occur, they burned themselves deep into the memories of survivors.

Some newcomers stood up to the SS because they did not yet understand the KL.
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When thirty-nine-year-old
Josef Gaschler from Munich was taken to Sachsenhausen, in the early months of the war, and saw SS men punch other new arrivals in the face, he shouted: “What on earth is going on here? Have we fallen among thieves or do you still claim to be cultivated people?” The SS men answered him with feet and fists, dragged him to the penal company, and killed him (the official death certificate stated
that he died of “insanity and raving madness”).
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Such assaults were enough to persuade most new prisoners to fall into line. Still, even veterans defied the SS on occasion. Some simply snapped; overwhelmed by despair, grief, or anger, they temporarily lost all self-control.
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Others were guided by moral or religious convictions. A hard core among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, remained
firm in their refusal to carry out any work related to the German war effort. The SS fury about their obstinacy, which reached all the way to Himmler, hit these prisoners hard and several lost their lives.
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These brutal SS responses ensured that prisoner strikes remained exceedingly rare.
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One of the most deadly demonstrations of SS resolve came in spring 1944 in the Flossenbürg satellite
camp Mülsen St. Micheln, set up a few months earlier in a disused textile plant near Zwickau. Its inmates worked on fighter plane engines on the main floor of the building, and slept in a crowded cellar below. The men never left the factory. Conditions were particularly poor for the hundreds of starving Soviets, who made up the majority of the prisoner population. On the night of May 1, 1944, some
of them, delirious with hunger, set alight straw mattresses in the basement, perhaps hoping that this would allow them to flee. SS men made sure that there would be no way out of the inferno. They locked the prisoners inside, shot at those trying to escape, and prevented the local fire brigade from entering. “The smoke was rife with the stench of burning bodies. I could see nothing at all and I
struggled for air,” one prisoner recalled, who survived by clinging for hours to the bars of a cellar window, with flames scorching his body. When the fire finally died down, around two hundred men lay dead and many more were badly burned. But the SS was not finished yet. Over the following months, it executed dozens of Soviets who had survived the blaze. The message was clear: open defiance would
be met with absolute terror.
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Given the futility of physical resistance, a couple of bold inmates submitted written protests to the SS instead. In March 1943, several Polish women, who had been mutilated during human experiments, petitioned the Ravensbrück commandant. In their letter, they challenged him to justify the carnage caused by the operations: “We are asking you to grant us a meeting
in person or to send us an answer.” Predictably, Commandant Suhren never replied. But the women did not give in. When the SS tried to continue the experiments, a few months later, the intended victims hid in their barrack, sheltered by fellow prisoners. “We decided among ourselves that it would be better if they would shoot us,” one of them later testified, “rather than have them cut us up all
the time.” Once again, though, the SS imposed its will. The so-called rabbits were dragged to the bunker, and several were operated on; the other rebels were locked into their barrack for days without food or fresh air.
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With open challenges all but impossible, some prisoners came to see escape as their only chance to cheat death. During his imprisonment in Auschwitz, Stanis
ł
aw Fr
ą
czysty had
a recurring dream, during which he turned into a small animal and slid with ease through the fence around the camp, leaving it and all its horror behind.
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Escape was on the minds of many inmates, and not just when they were asleep. In the end, though, only a few—mostly men—took the risk of fleeing, though figures were growing during the final years of the Second World War.
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The number of runaways
from the Mauthausen camp complex, for example, rose from 11 (1942) to more than 226 (1944). In the Buchenwald complex, meanwhile, the SS reported the flight of 110 prisoners during a particularly turbulent two-week period in September 1944—though with over eighty-two thousand prisoners held there at the time, this was still an infinitesimal proportion of the inmate population.
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The rise in
escapes reflects the changes in the KL system during the war. While it remained very hard to abscond from the established main camps—not a single prisoner seems to have managed to flee from Neuengamme until April 1945—the chances of success stood higher in hastily erected and poorly secured satellite camps.
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The proliferation of prisoner transports also offered greater opportunities for escape,
as did the lack of veteran SS guards. As a Polish prisoner explained, after successfully absconding in July 1944, the staff shortages had “caused me constantly to think of escape.”
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The circumstances of escapes varied greatly. Some prisoners used force, drugging, beating, or killing guards to clear their way.
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More commonly, they relied on deception, climbing into trucks that left the camp
or hiding in safe places until the SS called off its search. Disguises worked, too, with several prisoners dressing up as SS officials. One such escape unfolded in June 1942 in Auschwitz. Sneaking past the guards, four Polish prisoners broke into the SS storerooms, grabbed uniforms and weapons, and then drove off in a limousine. When they were flagged down at a checkpoint, the ringleader, dressed
as an Oberscharführer, leaned out of the window and gesticulated impatiently at sentries at the barrier, which was quickly lifted. “A few minutes later, we were driving through the city of O
ś
wi
ę
cim,” one of the conspirators recalled. After camp compound leader Hans Aumeier found out how his men had been duped, he “went almost crazy, tearing out his hair,” according to the Auschwitz underground
leader Witold Pilecki.
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The ultimate success of escapes depended on many variables, with luck the most important ingredient, followed by outside connections. Once prisoners had left the immediate vicinity of the KL, they needed support, and quickly. In occupied Europe, some fugitives received shelter from members of the resistance, and often joined the underground themselves; following his
own escape from Auschwitz, Witold Pilecki fought during the doomed Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Other escapees remained in hiding until the end of the war. After he fled from Monowitz in summer 1944, helped by his girlfriend and a German civilian contractor, Bully Schott changed into regular clothes and traveled on a packed night train to his hometown, Berlin. Here he survived, as one of a few thousand
Jews hiding in the German capital, with the help of old friends, who moved him to different safe houses and provided him with false papers.
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A few runaways even crossed enemy lines. Among them was Pavel Stenkin. One of the few survivors of an attempted mass escape of Soviet POWs from Auschwitz-Birkenau in November 1942, he rejoined the Red Army and triumphantly entered Berlin as a liberator
in 1945.
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Another was a Polish lieutenant by the name of Marcinek. Carrying forged papers, a pistol, and an SS uniform, he traveled by train and car from Berlin to the front line in Normandy, where he crossed over to the Allies on July 19, 1944, under heavy artillery fire. A German called Schreck, who accompanied Marcinek, had meticulously prepared their escape. To the surprise of the British
troops, Schreck was no prisoner but a Sachsenhausen SS man; entangled in a corruption affair, he preferred Allied captivity to punishment by the SS.
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Escapes always prompted manhunts by the Nazi authorities, and although it is impossible to establish how many prisoners managed to evade the clutches of SS and police, the odds were stacked against them, at least until the final months of the
war. Take the following example of 471 men and women who fled from the Auschwitz complex between 1940 and 1945. In all, 144 stayed on the run and mostly survived the war. But 327 were arrested and delivered back to the camp, where they faced draconian punishment.
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SS Responses

Despite the low number of successful KL escapes, Heinrich Himmler was concerned. Anxious about the safety of the German
public, he ordered his men in 1943 to use any means necessary to stem the flow, from planting land mines to training dogs that tore prisoners to pieces. To turn up the pressure, he also insisted that every KL had to inform him personally about escapes.
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Fearing Himmler’s wrath, Richard Glücks—who anxiously asked his managers in the T-Building each morning if any prisoners had run away—made the
fight against escapes a priority.
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His WVHA office exhorted the local Camp SS “never to trust a prisoner” and tightened up procedures.
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Although official regulations for sentries required them to shout “stop” before discharging their weapons, an internal Camp SS manual instructed guards to shoot without warning.
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Superiors praised vigilant men who had foiled escapes, awarding furloughs and
other bonuses, while they issued threats against negligent ones.
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The SS had a message for the prisoners, too: anyone who tried to escape would face a terrible fate.

Deterrence was the most important element in the Camp SS fight against escapes. Some recaptured prisoners were maimed by dogs, as Himmler had hoped; afterward, the SS displayed the mangled corpses on the roll call square.
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More
often, the unfortunates were dragged back alive. First the SS tortured them, to find out who had helped them and how they had beaten the defenses.
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Then they were publicly humiliated, followed by the punishment proper. Some prisoners got away with fifty lashes or transfer to the penal company (apparently, the SS showed such “leniency” to inmates who had run away on impulse).
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Many more paid
with their lives.

Some local SS men took matters into their own hands.
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At other times, the recaptured inmates were executed in line with official protocol, after commandants applied for, and received, permission to kill from their superiors.
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Starting in 1942, Camp SS officials carried out numerous such ritualized hangings of condemned prisoners, which resembled the first KL execution, of
Emil Bargatzky in summer 1938. The killing of the Austrian prisoner Hans Bonarewitz is a case in point. Bonarewitz had escaped from Mauthausen around noon on June 22, 1942, hidden inside a crate on a lorry. Recaptured some days later, he faced a torturous death. For a week, he was paraded in front of the other prisoners, together with his wooden crate; on it, the SS had written mocking words like
Goethe’s saying “Why stray far away, when everything good is right here.” Then, on July 30, 1942, the SS forced Bonarewitz on the cart used for taking corpses to the crematorium. Some prisoners slowly pulled it toward the gallows on the roll call square, while the others stood to attention. The procession, which lasted more than one hour, was led by a prisoner acting as master of ceremonies, and
by ten inmates from the camp orchestra, who played songs such as the children’s classic “All the little birds are back.” Along the way, an SS man took photographs, documenting Bonarewitz’s final moments. At the gallows, the SS whipped and tortured him, and finally had him hanged; the rope broke twice before he died, accompanied by music from the orchestra.
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