The subsection concerned with the Jews, controlled by Eichmann and Günther, had no doubts about its objective. In accordance with the orders given by the Reichsführer SS in the summer of 1941, all Jews were to be exterminated. The Reich Security Head Office raised the strongest objections when the Reichsführer SS, on Pohl’s suggestion, directed that able-bodied Jews were to be sorted out from the rest.
The Reich Security Head Office was always in favor of the complete extermination of all Jews, and saw in the creation of each new work camp and in every further thousand Jews selected for work the danger that circumstances might arise that would set them free and keep them alive.
No department had a greater interest in raising the Jewish death rate than the Jewish subsection of the Reich Security Head Office.
As against that, Pohl had been authorized by the Reichsführer SS to provide as many prisoners as possible for the armaments industry. Accordingly he laid the greatest emphasis on the delivery of the maximum number of prisoners, and this also meant that as many Jews capable of work as possible were to be removed from the transports earmarked for extermination.
He also attached the greatest importance to the preservation of this labor force alive, although without much success.
The Reich Security Head Office and the Economic Administration Head Office were thus at loggerheads.
Nevertheless, Pohl appeared to be the stronger, for he was backed by the Reichsführer SS who, bound in his turn by his promises to the Führer, was constantly and ever more urgently demanding prisoners to work in the armaments factories.
On the other hand the Reichsführer SS also wished to see as many Jews as possible destroyed.
From 1941 onward, when Pohl took over the concentration camps, the camps were incorporated into the Reichsführer SS’s armaments program.
As the war situation grew ever more total, the Reichsführer SS’s demands for prisoner labor became more ruthless.
The bulk of the prisoners were those from the East and, later, the Jews. They were mainly sacrificed to the armaments program.
The concentration camps were a hone of contention between the Reich Security Head Office and the Economic Administration Head Office.
The Reich Security Head Office delivered prisoners with the object of destroying them. It was a matter of indifference to them whether this objective was realized straight away by execution or by way of the gas chambers, or rather more slowly through diseases brought about by the unwarrantable conditions in the concentration camps, which were deliberately not put right.
The Economic Administration Head Office wanted the prisoners preserved for the armaments industry. Since, however, Pohl allowed himself to be led astray by the Reichsführer SS’s continual demands for ever more labor, he unintentionally played into the hands of the Reich Security Head Office. For because of his insistence on the fulfillment of these demands, thousands of prisoners died at their work, since virtually all the basic necessities of life for such masses of prisoners were lacking.
I guessed at the time that this was happening, but was reluctant to believe it.
But today I can see the picture more clearly.
I have now described what was the true and only background to it all, the dark shadows that lay behind the concentration camps.
Thus the concentration camps were intentionally, though sometimes unintentionally, transformed into huge-scale extermination centers.
The Reich Security Head Office issued to the commandants a full collection of reports concerning the Russian concentration camps. These described in great detail the conditions in, and the organization of, the Russian camps, as supplied by former prisoners who had managed to escape. Great emphasis was placed on the fact that the Russians, by their massive employment of forced labor, had destroyed whole peoples. For example, if, during the construction of a canal, the inmates of one camp were expended, thousands of fresh kulaks or other unreliable elements would be produced, who after a time would be expended in their turn.
Was the purpose of these reports to accustom the commandants gradually to their new task? Or was it to render them insensitive to the conditions gradually developing in their own camps?
As DI one of my regular jobs was to undertake distasteful inquiries in the various concentration camps, and even more often in the work camps. These were not always pleasant for the commandants. I was also responsible for the necessary changes in personnel, as for example at Bergen-Belsen. Up till then the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps had paid no attention to this camp. It was used by the Reich Security Head Office mainly for the so-called “delicate” Jews, and it was only regarded as a temporary transit camp. The commandant, Sturmbannführer Haas, a grim, taciturn man, directed and governed the place as he saw fit. He had actually been for a time at Sachsenhausen, in 1939, as commander of the protective custody camp, but he came from the General SS and had not much knowledge of concentration camps.
He made no attempt to improve the state of the buildings or the grim hygienic conditions prevailing at Bergen-Belsen, which was an old prisoner-of-war camp taken over from the army. He had to be relieved of his post in the autumn of 1944 because of the way he neglected the camp and carried on with women, and I had to go there and install Kramer, previously commandant of Auschwitz II, in his place.[90]
The camp was a picture of wretchedness. The barracks and the storerooms and even the guards’ quarters were completely neglected. Sanitary conditions were far worse than at Auschwitz.
By the end of 1944 it was no longer possible to do much in the way of building, although I managed to extract a most capable architect from Kammler. We could only patch up and improvise. Despite all his efforts, Kramer was not able to rectify the results of Haas’s negligence. Thus when Auschwitz was evacuated, and a large proportion of the prisoners came to Bergen-Belsen, the camp was at once filled to overflowing and a situation arose which even I, accustomed as I was to Auschwitz, could only describe as dreadful. Kramer was powerless to cope with it. Even Pohl was shocked when he saw the conditions, during our lightning tour of all the concentration camps which the Reichsführer SS had ordered us to undertake. He at once commandeered a neighboring camp from the army so that there would at least be room to breathe, but conditions there were no better. There was hardly any water, and the drains simply emptied into the adjoining fields. Typhus and spotted typhus were rampant. A start was immediately made on the building of mud huts, to provide additional accommodation.[91]
But it was all too little and too late. A few weeks after our visit the prisoners from Mittelbau began to arrive, so it was little wonder that the British found only dead or dying or persons stricken with disease, and scarcely a handful of healthy prisoners in a camp that was in an unimaginably disgusting condition.[92]
The war, and above all the war in the air, produced a cumulative effect on all the camps. Each new shortage as it appeared caused a further deterioration in their general condition. The building of work camps in connection with important armaments projects—always rush jobs—suffered particularly on account of such shortages and dislocations.
The air war and the bombing attacks on the armaments factories caused countless deaths among the prisoners. Although the Allies did not attack any concentration carnp, as such, that is to say the actual protective custody camp, yet prisoners were employed in all the more important war factories. They thus shared the fate of the civilian population.
From the beginning of the intensified air offensive in 1944, not a day passed without casualty reports being received from the camps as a result of air raids. I cannot give a rough estimate of the total number, but it must have run into many thousands. I myself lived through plenty of air attacks, usually not in the safety of a “hero’s cellar.” Attacks of unprecedented fury were made on factories where prisoners were employed. I saw how the prisoners behaved, how guards and prisoners cowered together and died together in the same improvised shelters, and how the prisoners helped the wounded guards.
90
Joseph Kramer, a member of the SS-Totenkopf organization, had been employed in concentration camp duties since 1934. In 1940 he was, for five months, Hocss’s adjutant at Auschwitz. Transferred to Natzweiler, he returned in May 1944 to Auschwitz, where he succeeded Hartjenstein, who then became commandant of Natzweiler, as commandant of Auschwitz II or Auschwitz-Birkenau. In December 1944 he was made commandant of Bergen-Belsen, where he remained until the end.
91
Bergen-Belsen was created in the spring of 1943 as a concentration camp for privileged Jews, by which was meant the so-called “exchange” Jews, persons with British or American nationality or with papers of a neutral power, as well as Jews who were believed to have some sort of bargaining value. Until late in 1944 the number of jews in Bergen-Belsen did not exceed 15,000 and at that time conditions in the camp were relatively good, certainly far better than in the other camps. But in the winter of 1944-45 Bergen-Belsen was made into a reception camp for sick prisoners. During the evacuation of the camps located in the East and West, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, etc., a steady stream of prisoners, most of whom were sick, began to pour into Bergen-Belsen, until its population reached some 50,000, living in the most appalling conditions and with a daily death roll of 250 or 300. The camp was liberated by the British on April 15, 1945.
92
The visit in question took place in March 1945. “Mittelbau” was the name given, in the summer of 1943, to the complex of work camps, underground factories, etc., controlled by the Mittelwerke Company and located in the Harz mountains, principally near Salza. The major part of the work was the production of V-weapons, and very large numbers of prisoners were employed in this, being drawn in the main from Buchenwald concentration camp. This complex of camps was also known as Dora, and the Jiving and working conditions that prevailed there, even as early as 1943, were catastrophic. On October 28, 1944, the majority of the prisoners engaged in work in this area were concentrated into one camp, which was called Dora, and which then contained some 24,000 persons, while a further 8,000 prisoners who continued to live in work camps were now controlled from Dora. By the spring of 1945 Dora, or Mittelbau, contained some 50,000 prisoners, despite an exceptionally high mortality rate. When in April of 1945 American troops approached the southern Harz mountains, Himmler ordered that all the inmates of Dora be gassed in the subterranean installations. A series of accidents prevented the implementation of this order, and finally in mid-April the inmates were evacuated to Bergen-Belsen.