Introduction
Concentration Camp Commandants is a reassessment of the men who were in charge of many of the largest work and mass murder camps in Europe, where they often ordered the killing of tens of thousands of people. Drawing on published and unpublished material and the handwritten memoirs of some of these commandants, the book is a compelling and chilling story told through the eyes of these terrible men, and those who knew them. The book describes vividly daily life at these camps and reveals diaries from staff and friends, describing in detail their brutal hold over the camps both against their own staff and those interned. This book reassesses their psychological personalities and produces evidence that sometimes these men were not all sadistic unhinged brutes like many other concentration camp commanders. Yet many of them were mass murderers. Most of the commandants were eager to please, and keen to show their superiors they were great innovators in the way they organised the killing process. They often undertook their mammoth tasks of extermination like competent businessman. For instance, Rudolf Höss had, within just three years of becoming commandant of Auschwitz, turned the previously quiet and secluded complex there into the largest mass murder factory in the history of the world. But behind this barbarism Höss was a husband and father. On the edge of the Auschwitz main camp Frau Höss and her well-groomed children lived ‘in more or less harmony’. Here she baked cakes, cooked German homemade dishes, ensured the gardens were tended lovingly and the wine cellar was well stocked. Each day Rudolf would arrive home following a hard day masterminding the killing of thousands. And yet he clearly struggled with his task. Often he would take himself off at night and stand out at the gas chambers or at the burnings, and was forced to think of his wife and children without connecting them to the horrors that were taking place nearby. But in spite of the constant pressures Höss, like so many other commandants, remained throughout fixated to the last on command and obedience. The commandants believed whole-heartedly that no one else could perform as well as they could in such terrible circumstances. In the end, whilst waiting sentence for their crimes, no shock could disturb their conviction that in their eyes they had always done right and that they had done their duty conscientiously, attentively, and to everyone’s satisfaction.
The story of Concentration Camp Commandants from early beginnings to the mass murder of millions of innocent souls is a gripping narration and a valuable addition to Holocaust studies. It is a disturbing portrayal of some of the most notorious men in the Nazi regime and an incredible insight into the mind of mass murderers.
The first concentration camps were erected in Germany in February 1933. Primarily these camps were used to house and torture political opponents and union organisers. The camps held some 45,000 prisoners and during the mid-to late-1930s these camps were greatly expanded. When SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler took control of the concentration camp system throughout Germany he started using the camps’ facilities and personnel to purge German society of so-called racially undesirable elements such as Jews, criminals, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, Gypsies and any other elements deemed a threat to Nazi rule. The concentration camps were administered by the Concentration Camps Inspectorate which in 1942 was merged into SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt and were guarded by SS-Totenkopfverbände.
As early as1940 the situation in the concentration camps had become untenable due to the new policies of arresting and detaining enemies of the State. News had already circulated through SS channels that government officials were now demanding immediate action in the expansion of the concentration camp system throughout Germany and its new conquered territory, Poland. The German authorities quickly pressed forward to establish various camps where the arrested could be incarcerated and set to work as stonebreakers and construction workers for buildings and streets. It was envisaged that these people would remain as a slave labour force, and it was therefore deemed necessary to erect these so called ‘quarantine camps’ in order to subdue the local population. Initially, it had been proposed that the ‘quarantine camps’ were to hold the prisoners until they were sent to the various other concentration camps in the Reich. However, it soon became apparent that this purpose was totally impracticable. So it was approved that these camps were to function as a permanent prison for all those who were unfortunate enough to have been sent there.
The thousands of concentration camps that were built across Europe functioned as a whole very well, albeit run barbarically by the individual camp commandants. Under their strict command a number of the camps were constructed by the inmates themselves. Every day the prisoners were forced to work in all weather conditions often without a break and continuously being subjected to appalling brutality. Despite the conditions the commandants were determined to get the prisoners to complete the buildings no matter how it was done. Most of the buildings that were built served merely to house and provide the basic needs of the prisoners, guards and SS staff that ran the camp.
Once the camps were built some of them were used not just to incarcerate the prisoners, but to force them to work as slave labour. This consisted of making them work either inside the camp itself, or in moving them to various sub-camps where the prisoners would work in factories, often for large German-owned companies. This was very lucrative for the SS and the companies that became involved.
As the concentration camp system grew and new polices evolved some of the camps became dual purpose: labour and death camps. Other camps too were constructed as death camps: their only function was to murder. In direct response to the growing demand in concentration camps the SS needed civilian expertise to help install heating systems, electrical gear, and sewage systems, and also to build chimneys, and other buildings such as crematoria. Many civilian companies were involved, in their professional capacity, with genocide, with lots of them eager to produce the goods for the SS for financial reward.