KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (52 page)

Höss was convinced that the Auschwitz SS had made an important discovery.
True, his men continued to use other methods to kill.
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But when it came to large-scale murder, Höss much preferred gassing over shooting, because it was less stressful for the SS. “Now I was relieved indeed,” he noted later, “that all of us would be spared these bloodbaths.” Höss also claimed that gassings were kinder on the victims, blanking out the terrible death struggle of all those crammed
into the gas chamber.
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After the Auschwitz SS pioneered the use of poison gas in concentration camps, other KL followed, just as they had imitated the Sachsenhausen neck-shooting apparatus. Camp SS officers, already familiar with the principle of gassings (from the T-4 centers), were keen to test the latest innovations in mass murder. Once again, Franz Ziereis in Mauthausen was especially eager.
From late autumn 1941, he oversaw the construction of a gas chamber, converting a cellar near the crematorium. The first large-scale gassing here took place in May 1942, killing 231 Soviet POWs with Zyklon B.
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Meanwhile, the Mauthausen Camp SS doctor requested a mobile gas van, built by the Criminal Technical Institute (KTI) of the Reich Criminal Police Office. The local SS used such a van,
probably from spring 1942, to murder hundreds of Mauthausen prisoners, among them sick inmates and Soviet POWs.
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Mobile gas vans had originally been developed during the Nazi search for more effective ways of murdering Jews in the Soviet Union. Before the vans were deployed in the occupied east, however, the KTI had tested them inside Germany in autumn 1941. The location of these lethal tests
was Sachsenhausen, and the victims were Soviet POWs, who were gassed instead of being shot. Camp SS men would force the naked prisoners into the van, customized to pump carbon monoxide from the engine into the hold. Then the van drove off. When it came to a stop outside the Sachsenhausen crematorium, all prisoners inside were dead, their bodies turned pink by the fumes.
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These experiments must
have piqued the interest of the Sachsenhausen SS officers, though it was not until later, probably summer 1943, that they constructed their own stationary gas chamber; the first victims were once again Soviet POWs.
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Several other concentration camps added gas chambers in 1942–43, too, following in the footsteps of Auschwitz. The Neuengamme SS, for example, murdered some 450 Soviet POWs in autumn
1942 by dropping Zyklon B pellets into its converted bunker.
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Although many concentration camps used poison gas, it never became the main weapon of choice of the Camp SS: it was just one among many in its deadly arsenal. The main exception was Auschwitz, where the victims of the gas chambers were soon counted in the hundreds of thousands.
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The separate path of Auschwitz was due to its transformation,
in 1942, into a camp of the Holocaust. Commandant Höss himself had briefed Adolf Eichmann from the RSHA about his experiments with Zyklon B, and both men agreed to use it for the genocide of Jews. Less than a year after the first gassings in Auschwitz, many thousands of Jews from across Europe were exterminated there each month.
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However, although the Auschwitz gas chambers have long since become
synonymous with the Holocaust, their origins lie elsewhere.
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SS Executioners

The mass extermination of Soviet POWs in 1941–42 turned hundreds of Camp SS men into professional executioners.
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Most were low-ranking members of the Commandant Staffs who had served in the KL since the prewar years and had long become used to terror and destruction.
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Several Sachsenhausen killers, for example,
had earned their spurs as block leaders in the notorious death squad; a man like Wilhelm Schubert had become a murderer long before he started shooting Soviet soldiers in the neck.
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And yet, the mass extermination of the POWs broke new ground, even for the most experienced SS men. Instead of occasional murders, they now participated in serial killings. Organized mass murder became part of the
daily routine.

Many Camp SS men quickly adjusted to the new demands. Their self-image as political soldiers—the cornerstone of their collective identity—must have helped them to construe the killing of defenseless men as a valiant act of warfare against the “Jewish Bolshevik” enemy; it was their contribution to the war in the east, continuing the Nazi campaign of extermination behind the barbed
wire of the camps. Such thinking was encouraged by widespread talk about Soviet atrocities. After the start of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi propaganda swamped the Third Reich with graphic reports about beastly Bolshevik crimes. Camp SS officers, too, told their men that Soviet “commissars” were savage insurgents and partisans, guilty of heinous crimes against German soldiers, and praised the SS executioners
for performing an important duty for the fatherland.
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The feeling that the Nazi leadership had entrusted them with such a vital mission must have filled many Camp SS killers with pride and a sense of purpose.
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In addition to these ideological factors, the executions provided SS perpetrators with their biggest stage yet to impress comrades in the camps’ theater of cruelty. Participation in
the mass killings, which some SS men belittled as a “shooting match,” was seen as a test of character, and those who passed it without flinching received respect from their peers and praise from their superiors. Just as German air force pilots bragged to other soldiers about the number of enemy planes they had downed, Camp SS killers would boast about the number of commissars they had finished off.
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Some SS men also demonstrated their cold-bloodedness by mocking the dead and violating their bodies. What passed for SS humor knew no bounds of decency. On the Dachau shooting range, an SS man once grabbed a long wooden stick and aimed a swing at the genitals of a murdered Soviet prisoner, shouting to his colleagues: “Look here, he is still standing!”
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Other Camp SS men, however, felt far less
comfortable about all the bloodshed. Some were scared of infection, since Soviet “commissars” were widely suspected as carriers of dangerous diseases. SS killers in the neck-shooting barracks wore protective clothing and cellophane masks, but despite these precautions, several of them contracted typhus, brought inside from the abominable POW camps; one block leader died as a result.
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A number
of SS men harbored doubts about the righteousness of the whole operation. A Sachsenhausen official, who was not directly involved in the killings, warned that the Red Army would retaliate by executing German soldiers (a fear shared by some Wehrmacht officers). The mass murder in the Nazi camps was wrong, he told the camp elder Harry Naujoks in autumn 1941, and it meant that the Third Reich had already
lost the war, at least morally. Meanwhile, over at the shooting ranges and the execution barracks, several killers could not stand the carnage and fainted or broke down (just like some task force men in the occupied east). Others were very reluctant participants and tried to get out of the massacres; after their superiors announced the roster of designated killers for the next execution, they
reported late for duty, or quietly stole away when the execution commando assembled.
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But it was hard to do the right thing. The concentration camp was an inverted world, where those who showed courage—by challenging the murderous status quo—were branded as cowards. Several unwilling executioners cracked under pressure from gung-ho comrades, with group conformity continuing to fuse Camp SS
men into a large criminal gang. Any hesitation was seized upon with alacrity by the others. In Sachsenhausen, Wilhelm Schubert openly derided another SS block leader as a “wet blanket” for killing fewer POWs. SS men who tried to duck out altogether faced even more mockery about their manliness, and often caved. In the end, their fear of shame was stronger than their fear of killing. Nobody wanted
to be seen as a “limp dick,” one Sachsenhausen killer later said (using a revealing phrase).
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If social pressure was not enough, SS superiors brought reluctant killers into line.
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Only a handful of SS men continued to refuse. A few of them were probably excused, though punishment was another realistic prospect.
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Oberscharführer Karl Minderlein, a member of the Dachau SS since 1933, stubbornly
rejected calls to participate in the executions. Following a heated confrontation between Minderlein and the commandant, an SS court sentenced the disobedient SS man to imprisonment; he spent several months in solitary confinement in Dachau, before being transferred in summer 1942 to a penal company on the Eastern Front.
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Senior Camp SS officials were well aware that numerous killers struggled
with the murderous tasks, reflecting general concerns by SS leader Heinrich Himmler that his men might “suffer damage” when executing prisoners in concentration camps.
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In the case of the Soviet “commissars,” SS leaders could have limited the circle of perpetrators by assigning a few expert executioners (as they would later do at the Auschwitz gas chambers). Instead, they often roped in as many
men from the Commandant Staff as possible. “Almost all block leaders of the camp participated,” a Sachsenhausen SS man admitted after the war, and their duties in the neck-shooting barrack rotated, as another killer testified: “Each block leader did, at different times, shoot through the gap, play the doctor, clean away the blood, and so on.”
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In this way, the burden of the killings was widely
shared, leaving many Camp SS men with blood on their hands. Their shared complicity bound the killers ever closer together and made it harder to step outside the group.

To help the killers forget their grisly experiences, Camp SS leaders held regular comradeship evenings. After a long day of mass shootings in Sachsenhausen, block leaders would say “Come on, let’s grab some food,” and head for
the SS canteen, where delicacies like pork schnitzel with fried potatoes were waiting.
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Free schnapps and beer was even more popular.
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Alcohol had fueled outrages in the camps since the early days. There was always plenty to drink, especially for younger and unmarried rank-and-file men, who spent much of their spare time in the canteen. On weekdays, alcohol was served at lunchtime and again
in the evenings until late, and on Sundays the tap often ran all day.
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Not only was alcohol an enabler of violence, it helped to deaden scruples after the deed. Just as Nazi murderers on the Eastern Front dulled their conscience with drink, so, too, did Camp SS men who murdered Soviet POWs.
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But some killers continued to struggle with their conscience, however hard they tried to silence it.
The Sachsenhausen block leader Max Hohmann, who was known as a reluctant killer, once drunkenly asked a political prisoner whether he looked like a murderer. When the prisoner answered in the negative, Hohmann replied: “But I am one!” and unburdened himself about the shootings.
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To lift the morale of their executioners, Camp SS leaders promised riches and glory. To show the appreciation of
the fatherland, IKL bosses distributed a one-off payment in November 1941; the SS killers in Gross-Rosen, for instance, shared the tidy sum of six hundred Reichsmark between them. In the same month, the IKL asked commandants for the names of all “SS members involved in the executions,” so that they could be awarded military decorations. In the eyes of Heinrich Himmler, shooting Soviet POWs in the
neck, gassing them, or giving them lethal injections merited an award for bravery, the Kriegsverdienstkreuz 2nd Class with Swords—an honor previously reserved in the Camp SS for commandants.
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The biggest reward for the executioners was a holiday abroad, an unheard-of luxury for most SS men. Their destination was Italy. In spring 1942, more than two dozen Sachsenhausen killers set off for a
trip to the south; a few months later, a party from Dachau went the same way, heading for the Isle of Capri. The killers celebrated in SS style; some Sachsenhausen guards trashed their hotel rooms in a drunken stupor, causing considerable damage. In the small town of Sorrento, the men found time to pose for a German magazine, which later printed one of the photos on its title page: an Italian girl
dances the tarantella, while several Sachsenhausen block leaders—in full regalia, with hats, black leather gloves, and ceremonial sabers—relax in the background, slumped into wicker chairs. Even a holiday in the sun could not clear the minds of all killers, however. On his return, at least one of the Sachsenhausen shooters confessed to a colleague that he was still plagued by nightmares about the
murdered POWs.
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In the end, mass murder proved harder than some SS men had imagined. Coming face-to-face with their helpless, naked victims, they had struggled to live up to the ideal of the merciless political soldier.
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Even so, the murderous operation largely proceeded as planned. Occasional SS scruples did not create any real obstacles, and neither did the growing awareness of the killings
by regular prisoners. Within weeks, well-informed inmates knew what was going on. Kapos in camp laundries received truckloads of Soviet army shirts, coats, and uniforms, and Kapos in the crematoria, who helped to burn the bodies, found Soviet medals and coins among the ashes.
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Soon the murders were an open secret inside the KL. “We are all shattered by these mass murders, which have already
claimed more than a thousand [Red Army soldiers],” political prisoners in Sachsenhausen wrote in a secret note on September 19, 1941. “We are currently unable to help them.”
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Once more, prisoners were confronted with their helplessness. And they also feared for their own lives. Now that the SS had moved to mass murder inside the camps, who would be next? Rudolf Wunderlich, a Communist Kapo in
Sachsenhausen, recalled not long after that all prisoners were “gripped by impotent fury, also fear and depression.”
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The Camp SS leaders, meanwhile, saw their first foray into mass extermination as a success and soon turned to even more expansive programs of abuse and mass murder.