KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps by Nikolaus Wachsmann

Author:Nikolaus Wachsmann
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9781429943727
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

SATELLITE CAMPS

In early April 1944, Oswald Pohl sent a large map of Europe to Heinrich Himmler, pinpointing all main concentration camps and their attached satellites. There were marks all over the map: the whole Nazi territory was covered in KL, from Klooga at the Gulf of Finland to the Loiblpass camp in occupied Yugoslavia, from Lublin in eastern Poland to the occupied British Channel Island of Alderney. In the accompanying letter to Himmler, Pohl could not resist a dig at his late rival, Theodor Eicke. In a handwritten comment in the margin, he compared his own empire to that of his predecessor: “In Eicke’s time, there were a total of 6 camps!” Himmler was duly impressed. Thanking Pohl, he noted with satisfaction “how our things have grown.”87 With the SS desire for ever more prisoners acting as a centrifugal force, many hundreds of satellites spread around the main camps and beyond. The climax came in the second half of 1944, when the gigantic relocation projects really took off; over a six-month period, as many satellite camps were erected as in all the preceding thirty months.88 By the end of 1944, no fewer than seventy-seven satellites were attached to the Dachau main camp alone, several of them located more than 125 miles away.89 The KL system was changing so fast, with satellite camps set up almost as quickly as they were abandoned, that even the WVHA could not keep count; in January 1945, the officials assumed that there were 500 satellite camps, when the real figure was nearer 560.90

A Shifting Landscape

There was no typical satellite camp, just as there was no typical main camp.91 Satellite camps came in all sizes, from small labor details with no more than a handful of prisoners to vast compounds holding thousands.92 Set up for specific projects and linked closely to other authorities—such as the OT, military, state, and private companies—most SS satellites focused either on construction (with prisoners digging tunnels and trenches, clearing rubble, building bunkers and factories) or production (with prisoners making batteries and munitions, assembling tanks and rockets). But not every satellite camp was geared for slave labor; a few functioned primarily as sites for dying prisoners or as holding pens for recent arrivals from evacuated KL.93

There was no common design. Many satellites took after main camps, with wooden barracks surrounded by barbed wire. Others looked very different, though. In their haste to establish new KL, the authorities used whatever sites they could find, forcing prisoners inside sheds, tents, factories, cellars, ballrooms, and former churches.94 The same spirit of improvisation governed the search for SS accommodation; in Ellrich, some guards slept in a popular local restaurant, which remained open for business.95 Some new satellites were even mobile. Between summer 1944 and early 1945, the SS set up eight traveling KL (so-called railway building brigades) for the repair of destroyed tracks; each camp consisted of a long train, with around five hundred prisoners crammed into modified boxcars.96 By 1944, then, the architectural model of the KL, as it had been developed in the late 1930s, gave way to a random assortment of sites.

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