KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (69 page)

After the meal, Pohl spoke to the assembled senior members of the Auschwitz Camp SS. He thanked them for turning Auschwitz into the most important SS concentration camp, and reassured them that their work was no less important than frontline service
in the Death’s Head divisions (to whom the Camp SS felt chronically inferior). Himmler’s orders for the KL were extremely important for victory, Pohl stressed, whatever the strain on individual officers. He was thinking, not least, about the mass murder of European Jewry, which he alluded to as “special assignments, about which no words have to be lost.” An inspection of bunker 2 in Birkenau
had been on Pohl’s agenda during the previous afternoon, and he cannot have missed the dark plumes of smoke rising from the nearby open ditches, where the SS was burning corpses. Considering the so-called Final Solution, Pohl lauded his men for their dedication and their commitment to the cause.
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Straight after his speech, Pohl demonstrated his appreciation by offering a special reward. He approved
the construction of a brothel for the Auschwitz Camp SS, the first of its kind, so that his men could seek some diversion after a long day of mass murder.
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Foreigners in the Camp SS

During his speech on September 23, 1942, Oswald Pohl praised the exemplary comradeship of the Auschwitz SS, firmly united under Commandant Rudolf Höss. But this was just an empty phrase: it was well known in the
WVHA that there was plenty of friction within the Auschwitz ranks.
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The acrimonious tone was set by the unforgiving Höss himself, who clashed frequently with his men. His disdain remained undimmed after the war. Sitting in his prison cell in Krakow, he wrote withering pen-portraits of Auschwitz officials who had crossed his path, dismissing them as devious, duplicitous, or plain dumb.
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The
loathing between Höss and some of his men was mutual. There was much bickering behind his back, with subordinates complaining about his cold, prim, and ruthless manner.
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Of course, the Camp SS had never been a band of brothers; the picture of close comradeship was always a projection of SS leaders, covering up conflicts between Guard Troop and Commandant Staff, between officers and rank-and-file.
Still, the spirit of the Camp SS became ever more fractured as the war wore on, especially in occupied eastern Europe.

The conflicts had much to do with personnel changes and shortages. Although the number of Camp SS men grew during the war, it never caught up with the huge expansion of the prisoner population. In March 1942, there had been around 11,000 prisoners and 1,800 SS men in Auschwitz
(6:1). Two years later, there were some 67,000 prisoners and 2,950 SS personnel (23:1).
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The WVHA was well aware of the resulting strain on its staff. One solution was to reduce demands on them, by handing more powers to Kapos, by rationalizing procedures, and by using more guard dogs.
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The WVHA also tried hard to recruit new officials, especially for its expanding camps in eastern Europe.
Expectations were low. Since he was no longer allowed to recruit men fit for frontline service as sentries, Camp Inspector Glücks was resigned to receiving “more and more physically disabled and cripples,” as he put it in 1942.
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Some vacant posts in eastern Europe were filled with experienced KL staff from inside Germany; in Auschwitz, around a hundred SS men arrived in 1941 from other concentration
camps farther west. Such transfers to the east promised rapid advancement, since the SS had to fill many senior positions. The NCO Hans K., for example, moved in spring 1943 from a lowly position in Sachsenhausen to become labor action leader in Riga.
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Nonetheless, many German KL staff resented such transfers. They complained about being stuck in primitive backwaters and saw their new posting
as a punishment (there was some truth in this, as Camp SS managers often reassigned officials to the east as a disciplinary measure).
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Additional men arrived from Waffen SS divisions, including injured fighters and invalids, though not all local commandants welcomed these veterans with open arms. Rudolf Höss, for one, complained about Eicke dumping men on the camps for whom he had no use anymore.
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The WVHA knew that it could never fill its needs with German nationals alone. Among the foreign associates of the Nazi regime during World War II were many tens of thousands of men who joined the ranks of the Waffen SS. As German losses at the front mounted from 1942, SS efforts to recruit from abroad redoubled, and before long, foreigners made up a large proportion of the Waffen SS.
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Many
thousands of them became KL staff; often, they were dispatched to the camps after no more than two or three weeks’ perfunctory training.
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The vast majority of them hailed from eastern and southeastern Europe.
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Most were “ethnic Germans,” an amorphous term applied to those foreigners who were embraced by the Nazi authorities as part of the German people, though they were not normally German
citizens. By autumn 1943, around seven thousand such “ethnic Germans”—around three thousand from Romania, the others largely from Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia—served as sentries in the SS Guard Troops, accounting for almost half of their total strength.
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In addition, the KL recruited so-called alien auxiliaries, who joined not the Waffen SS but the SS retinue. Among them were several thousand men—mostly Soviet POWs—who had gone through the notorious SS training camp in Trawniki near Lublin. Many of these Trawniki men had first served in Globocnik’s death camps and were later redeployed, after the closure of these sites, as KL sentries in the
occupied east and inside the old German borders.
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The transformation of the Camp SS into a multinational force—most pronounced in the eastern European camps—hastened its fragmentation, with deep rifts between German staff and foreign recruits.
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All across the occupied east, German officials held their foreign helpers in barely concealed contempt, and it was no different inside the KL. German
superiors widely regarded the new Camp SS recruits as simpletons, brutes, or potential traitors.
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The newcomers’ poor command of German was held against them as well, and resulted in numerous dismissals. Despite half-hearted appeals by SS leaders to treat the foreigners as comrades, regular German staff were not afraid to vent their frustrations. When SS Private Marschall, who worked in the
Birkenau administration, was stopped one day by block leader Johann Kasaniczky, an ethnic German, at the entrance of the women’s camp and asked why he wanted to enter, he gave him a sharp dressing-down: “That’s none of your damn business, and you better learn to speak proper German first if you want to talk to me.”
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Not surprisingly, foreign Camp SS men often felt alienated. For a start, many
of them were not volunteers but had been drafted or pressed into SS service.
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Once inside the KL, they stood at the bottom of the staff hierarchy. In addition to the derision by their German colleagues, who occupied almost all positions of authority, they had few prospects of promotion. SS managers even canceled the leave of ethnic Germans, afraid that they would not return to the camps.
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Frustration must have been widespread among foreign guards, and in early July 1943, it boiled over among a company of Ukrainian sentries in Auschwitz. Not long after their arrival, fifteen of them escaped from the camp, armed with weapons and ammunition; the ensuing firefight left eight Ukrainians and three SS pursuers dead.
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It is hard to gauge what all this meant for the prisoners. Foreign
SS men generally joined the Guard Troops around camps and work sites, and therefore had less direct contact with inmates. Some of the sentries still committed acts of extreme violence; prisoners suspected that ambitious ethnic Germans wanted to prove themselves as “real Germans” through displays of violence.
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On the whole, however, foreign SS men may have acted somewhat less maliciously than
most of their German colleagues.
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Some openly pitied the inmates and admitted their own dissatisfaction with the Nazi regime and their miserable duties in the camps.
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Prisoners were always delighted to see such cracks in the SS armor, not least because it raised their hopes of striking deals for extra food and privileges. Such illicit contacts were eased by the fact that foreign guards and
prisoners often spoke the same language.
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A shared language could also be dangerous, however. In Gross-Rosen, an eighteen-year-old prisoner from Kursk, who had taunted a Ukrainian guard as a traitor, was hanged in front of all assembled prisoners; the aggrieved guard watched the execution from the front row.
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Female Guards

Foreign men were not the only new faces among the Camp SS. As more
and more Jewish women were detained during 1942–43, SS managers dispatched German women as guards to all main camps in eastern Europe and to many satellite camps as well; some were veterans from Ravensbrück, while others had been hurriedly trained for their new roles. Although the SS still drew the line at admitting these women to the ranks (they were consigned to the SS retinue), and although the
total number of female German guards sent to the occupied east was small (in Majdanek, around twenty women worked opposite 1,200 men), their influx changed the Camp SS. Many male veterans saw the arrival of armed and uniformed women as an affront to their all-male paramilitary ideals. The fact that some female guards did not back down in conflicts with male superiors only heightened the anger of
SS men.
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Insubordination and ill discipline of female staff were punished frequently by male commandants, so strictly that the WVHA called for more restraint.
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Rudolf Höss spoke for many chauvinistic Camp SS men when he dismissed the new female colleagues as lazy, dishonest, and incompetent, running around the compounds like “headless chickens.”
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Höss himself engaged in a particularly bitter
dispute with the first senior supervisor of the Auschwitz women’s camp, Johanna Langefeld. In Ravensbrück, Langefeld had overseen the daily life of female prisoners. She expected similar powers in Auschwitz but met with strong opposition. In July 1942, Himmler waded into the row during his visit to Auschwitz, siding with Langefeld. But Höss had the last laugh, as Himmler’s order that a women’s
camp should be led by a woman, assisted by a male SS officer, was torpedoed by Camp SS men. After all, Höss asked acidly in his memoirs, which male officer would subordinate himself to a woman? As for Langefeld, she was eventually ordered back to Ravensbrück and reprimanded by Pohl; in spring 1943, she was kicked out of SS service altogether and arrested.
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There was another side to the relationship
between men and women in the service of the Camp SS, beyond spats and quarrels. The SS staff also enjoyed plenty of fun and banter, and just as in Ravensbrück and other mixed camps, romance blossomed in the eastern European KL. In Majdanek, the wooden barrack for female guards stood conveniently opposite the compound for male Guard Troops, and the official ban on illicit meetings could not
put a stop to intimate liaisons. The young female guards enjoyed unusual liberties, compared to their more restricted lives back home (as did the few young women who had volunteered as SS telegraph and radio operators). In the end, four female guards ended up marrying SS men in Majdanek. There were also broken hearts, of course; one jilted Oberscharführer is even said to have attempted suicide in
the Majdanek gas chamber.
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Prisoners often talked about the private lives of the SS guards. This was more than idle gossip, since these entanglements could have serious repercussions for the inmates. After all, SS violence often carried a theatrical element, as we have seen, and such performances were particularly pronounced in mixed camps, with male and female guards trying to impress each
other through terror. Female guards often showed added venom in the presence of male colleagues, keen to prove that they were as tough as the men. This gendered dynamic went the other way, too. In a working environment where a cold heart and an iron fist were seen as essential parts of the male anatomy, SS men were all the more determined to appear hard in front of the supposedly weaker sex. The
chief of the Majdanek crematorium, Erich Muhsfeldt, one of the Camp SS experts in the disposal of corpses, often indulged in macabre jokes, waving body parts of corpses at passing female guards. Such acts could be described as monstrous deeds of a sadistic madman. Or they could be read differently: as an attempt to get a rise out of “weak” women and a demonstration of what passed for masculine strength
within the Camp SS.
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Camp SS men tried to demarcate some strictly male spheres. Traditionally, the use of firearms had been a male preserve, and this custom was jealously guarded in the KL. While uniformed female guards carried guns, too, social practice dictated that their use was left to SS men. In addition, female guards were excluded from the business of gassing and burning prisoners in
Birkenau and Majdanek; apparently only men were thought to have the stomach for mass murder. Nonetheless, female guards in eastern European KL participated in selections and committed violent excesses—more so than in Ravensbrück—by slapping, hitting, whipping, and kicking the prisoners on a daily basis.
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Some of these assaults were so extreme that superior officers took the unusual step of issuing
reprimands.
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Violence

Kurt Pannicke looked like a poster boy of Nazi propaganda. He was an attractive young man, tall and slender, with blond hair and blue eyes; the small scar on his cheek only enhanced his dashing looks.
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Pannicke was also a drunken thug and a thief, a torturer, and a mass murderer. As SS camp leader in Vaivara and several of its satellite camps in 1943–44, he committed
countless crimes. This NCO in his mid-twenties saw himself as omnipotent—one of his nicknames was “King of the Jews”—and he knew no limits. Here was a man who would chat casually with inmates and dish out privileges to his favorites, before murdering them. “I shoot my Jews myself!” he told the prisoners over and over again.
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Pannicke’s public persona as a god of virtue and vengeance may have
been unusual, but his overall conduct was hardly exceptional. He was one of many young and lower-ranking Camp SS men who basked in their powers, erecting a regime of terror across the KL of occupied eastern Europe.