Army of Evil: A History of the SS (17 page)
Read Army of Evil: A History of the SS Online
Authors: Adrian Weale
Altogether, about a hundred Dachau inmates were killed in under five months of high-altitude experiments. The Institute of Aviation Medicine in Berlin was kept informed of Rascher’s results throughout.
Rascher’s second series of human experiments began almost as soon as the first set ended. This time, he wanted to test the effects of extremely low temperatures on the human body, and to investigate how to warm up patients who had been subjected to extreme chilling. The intention was to find treatments for Luftwaffe pilots who had crash-landed in the sea and become hypothermic.
One survivor of these experiments, a Polish priest, gave evidence during the post-war Nuremberg trials:
On 7 October, 1942, a prisoner came and told me that I was to report to the hospital immediately. I thought I was going to be examined once more, and I was taken through the malaria station to block 5 in Dachau, to the fourth floor of block 5. There, the so-called aviation room, the aviation experimental station, was located there, and there was a fence, a wooden fence so that nobody could see what was inside, and I was led there, and there was a basin with water and ice which floated on the water…
Now I was told to undress. I undressed and I was examined.
The physician then remarked that everything was in order. Now wires had been taped to my back, also in the lower rectum. Afterwards I had to wear my shirt, my drawers, but then afterwards I had to wear one of the uniforms which were lying there. Then I had also to wear a long pair of boots with cat’s fur and one aviator’s combination. And afterwards a tube was put around my neck and was filled with air. And afterwards the wires which had been connected with me—they were connected to the apparatus, and then I was thrown into the water. All of a sudden I became very cold, and I began to tremble. I immediately turned to those two men and asked them to pull me out of the water because I would be unable to stand it much longer. However, they told me laughingly, “Well, this will only last a very short time.” I sat in this water, and I had—and I was conscious for one hour and a half. I do not know exactly because I did not have a watch, but that is the approximate time I spent there.
During this time the temperature was lowered very slowly in the beginning and afterwards more rapidly. When I was thrown into the water my temperature was 37.6. Then the temperature became lower. Then I only had 33 and then as low as 30, but then I already became somewhat unconscious and every fifteen minutes some blood was taken from my ear. After having sat in the water for about half an hour, I was offered a cigarette, which, however, I did not want to smoke. However, one of those men approached me and gave me the cigarette, and the nurse who stood near the basin continued to put this cigarette into my mouth and pulled it out again. I managed to smoke about half of this cigarette. Later on I was given a little glass with Schnapps, and then I was asked how I was feeling. Somewhat later still I was given one cup of Grog. This Grog was not very hot. It was rather lukewarm. I was freezing very much in this water. Now my feet were becoming as rigid as iron, and the same thing applied to my hands, and later on my breathing became very short. I once again began to tremble,
and afterwards cold sweat appeared on my forehead. I felt as if I was just about to die, and then I was still asking them to pull me out because I could not stand this much longer.
Then Dr. Prachtol came and he had a little bottle, and he gave me a few drops of some liquid out of this bottle, and I did not know anything about this liquid. It had a somewhat sweetish taste. Then I lost my consciousness. I do not know how much longer I remained in the water because I was unconscious. When I again regained consciousness, it was approximately between 8 and 8:30 in the evening. I was lying on a stretcher covered with blankets, and above me there was some kind of an appliance with lamps which were warming me…
15
The low-temperature experiments concluded in the spring of 1943 amid disagreements between the SS and the Luftwaffe. Some of Rascher’s data had proved useful to the Luftwaffe, but the experiments had become increasingly strange. In order to test whether human body heat could be used to warm up subjects, Rascher had used pairs of prisoner-prostitutes from the Dachau camp brothel. These women would be ordered to sandwich the frozen subject in a sleeping bag; then, once he had warmed up a little, on Rascher’s command, they would attempt to have sexual intercourse with him. However, Rascher sufficiently impressed Himmler for the National Leader to find him an academic post at the University of Strasbourg. While there, Rascher worked on projects for the
Ahnenerbe
(see
Chapter 9
).
16
I
N THE MID-1930S
, these medical experiments lay in the future, but Dachau was still a brutally harsh environment, especially for Jewish inmates. Eicke was an ardent anti-Semite, and he ensured that copies of Julius Streicher’s virulently anti-Semitic newspaper
Der Stürmer
(
The Stormer
) were readily available for both guards and non-Jewish
prisoners. He also imposed collective punishment for Jewish inmates whenever articles that were critical of the concentration camps appeared in the foreign press.
During the first year of his command at Dachau, both Eicke and the camp itself were subordinated to SS-Regional Command South, based in Munich (just as other concentration camps were subordinated to their local SS regional headquarters). From Eicke’s point of view, this was far from ideal. He had a deep, obsessive hatred towards those he regarded as rivals, and he resented anyone placed in authority over him. Consequently, he complained to Himmler that he did not have sufficient supplies and that the men sent to him as guards were not up to the task.
17
Himmler took these criticisms seriously, and started to contemplate a wholesale reorganisation of the existing camp system. In the 30 January 1934 promotion round,
*
Eicke was promoted to senior rank as an SS-brigade leader, indicating that he was now firmly back in favour with Himmler. By May, the National Leader had decided to centralise control of the SS camps within an “Inspectorate of Concentration Camps,” based near the Berlin satellite town of Oranienburg, with Eicke as the Inspector. Then, on 20 June, Eicke was appointed to Himmler’s personal staff, pending the formal announcement of his new role. This came on 5 July, four days after Eicke had murdered Ernst Röhm in his prison cell in Munich. A week later, Himmler promoted him to SS-group leader,
†
at that time the second-highest rank in the SS.
18
Eicke was now in a position to expand the concentration camp system and run each camp strictly on his organisational model.
In the early part of 1934, members of the SS were involved in making plans to take over a number of camps that were still being run to
hold “protective custody” inmates on behalf of the provincial authorities, the police and the SA. In April 1934, the Reich Ministry of the Interior had established national rules for imposing protective custody, confirming the Gestapo’s key role in the detention process.
19
This was accelerated following the “Night of the Long Knives” in July 1934, when SS units seized control of three camps from the SA. A fourth came under SS control in August.
By the summer of 1935, the number of active concentration camps across Germany had fallen to five (of which Dachau was the largest), holding about 4,000 prisoners between them. (By contrast, the regular German prison system at the time held more than 100,000 prisoners, including some 23,000 political prisoners). Further consolidation of SS control over existing camps in the summer of 1936 increased this number to six, but by the end of the following year, just two of these—Dachau and Lichtenberg—were still operational. The rest had been closed and superseded by a new wave of “model” concentration camps purpose built under Eicke’s guidance.
20
The first of the model concentration camps was Sachsenhausen, built alongside the Inspectorate headquarters itself, in September 1936. It became the specialist training centre for SS personnel assigned to the concentration camp system. Some 200,000 prisoners are believed to have passed through the camp in the course of its existence, with approximately 30,000 of them dying—by execution, casual brutality, untreated disease or overwork; many of them in and around the nearby brickworks, established by the SS to exploit prisoner labour. Sachsenhausen was the first camp to use the motto “
Arbeit macht Frei
” (“Work Will Free You”) at its entrance, later copied by Rudolf Höss above the main gate at Auschwitz.
Buchenwald, located close to Weimar in Thuringia, opened in July 1937. More than 250,000 prisoners are estimated to have passed through its gates, with more than 56,000 of them dying. It is particularly notorious as the fiefdom of SS-Colonel Karl Koch, the camp’s first commandant. Koch was arrested by the Gestapo in August 1943—by
which time he was commandant of the Majdanek camp in Lublin, Poland—on charges of forgery, embezzlement, mismanagement and insubordination. He was executed at Buchenwald in April 1945, shortly before the arrival of US troops. Koch and his wife, who was chief women’s overseer, had brazenly looted Buchenwald throughout their tenure there, and had organised the murder of at least one inconvenient witness. The camp’s motto, inscribed above the gates in wrought ironwork, was “
Jeden das Seine
” (colloquially, “Everyone Gets What They Deserve”).
The prisoners incarcerated in these camps were a heterogeneous group. Alongside political prisoners, in March 1937, Dachau and Sachsenhausen received some 2,000 “habitual criminals” rounded up by the civil police after a trawl through criminal records. The next year, the much wider category of “Asocials” was added to those being identified, arrested and detained within the system. Between April and June 1938, 12,000 men with irregular work records, beggars, vagrants and itinerant labourers were rounded up and detained. These groups were joined, from 1938 onwards, by Jews. Hitherto, they had largely been arrested as political opponents, not simply because of their religion or ethnicity; now this became a basic reason. In the wake of
Kristallnacht
(Night of the Broken Glass), some 26,000 Jews were incarcerated in the camps.
The fourth major concentration camp was Flossenbürg, in the Oberpfalz, Bavaria, which opened in May 1938. From then until April 1945, 96,000 prisoners are believed to have been incarcerated there, of whom approximately 30,000 died. It was here that some of the last survivors of 1944’s bomb plot against Hitler, including Admiral Canaris, were executed in April 1945.
Mauthausen was the first concentration camp to be opened by the SS on Austrian soil following the
Anschluss
. Located approximately fifteen miles east of Linz, it was built by prisoners from Dachau. Conditions here were among the harshest in the whole concentration camp system, and at least 150,000 prisoners are believed
to have died in either the main camp—where prisoner labour centred on a stone-quarrying operation—or its network of more than fifty sub-camps.
The last of the pre-war camps was the women’s camp at Ravensbrück. It opened in May 1939 to replace Lichtenberg, which had previously acted as the camp for women. Overall, it incarcerated some 130,000 women, more than half of whom are believed to have died either there or elsewhere within the system. The majority of the SS’s uniforms were assembled at an SS economic “enterprise” at Ravensbrück. It was also here that women employed by the SS (they were not allowed to be
members
of the organisation) were trained to be guards and overseers of female prisoners for the rest of the camps.
As the population subject to German control expanded during the early part of the war, so the requirement for concentration camp space grew and with it the number of camps. Neuengamme, near Hamburg, opened in early 1940; Auschwitz, near Crakow, in June 1940; Gross-Rosen, also in Silesia, opened in May 1941, as did Natzweiler in Alsace. These were followed in October 1941 by the camp at Lublin/Majdanek and, shortly afterwards, by the conversion of the existing detention facility at Stutthof, near Danzig, into a main concentration camp. These were supplemented by a huge network of sub-sites: smaller camps and labour groups administered by the main camps that also supplied their guards.
21
The rise in numbers of those detained in the camps is instructive. In November 1936, the figure was 4,761; in December 1937, 7,750; in June 1938, 24,000; in November 1938, 50,000; in September 1939, 21,400; in December 1940, 53,000; in September 1942, 110,000; in August 1943, 224,000; in August 1944, 524,286; in January 1945, 714,211.
22
This huge expansion in the concentration camp system is indicative of the scale on which the SS’s ideological and racial war was being fought, at least in the minds of the SS itself. The majority of those who were detained within the system—whether Jews, Freemasons, Jehovah’s
Witnesses or the homeless—were not in any sense active opponents of the regime that imprisoned them, but simply its nominated targets. Real opponents of National Socialism, domestically at least, had almost all been dealt with within a few months of the beginning of the National Socialist regime.
