Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

most prisoners the

occupation of Germany meant a further intensification of their torment, which

often continued for months. 246

The former ghettos and camps for Jewish forced labourers in the Baltic, which

had been turned into concentration camps on Himmler’s instructions, were

cleared in the summer of 1944. The clearance of the camp complex around the

Kaiserwald concentration camp in Riga began in June 1944. At first the sub-camps

were gradually closed, and the prisoners brought to Kaiserwald; the prisoners who

were no longer fit for forced labour, as well as all children, were separated from the

rest and murdered. From August until October the prisoners were brought by ship

to Danzig, where they were confined in the concentration camp. 247

From Kaunas concentration camp the surviving 8,000 Jews were deported to

the west by rail and on barges, the women to Stutthof, the men to sub-camps of

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

415

Dachau. Prisoners who were ‘unfit for work’ were separated out and taken to

Auschwitz. 248 Also in August 1944 all camps of the Vaivara complex were dissolved and most of the prisoners shipped to Tallinn and from there to

Stutthof. 249

In the summer of 1944 the camp commandant of Stutthof, Günther Hoppe,

received the order from the Department D inspector of the WVHA with respon-

sibility for the concentration camps, that all Jewish prisoners in Stutthof were to

be murdered by the end of the year. To this end, in autumn 1944 a clothes

delousing installation was turned into a gas chamber. Here, from September

1944 onwards, groups of between twenty-five and thirty-five people—mostly

female Jewish prisoners from the Baltic and Hungary—were murdered with

Zyklon B. A second gas chamber was set up in an abandoned railway wagon. 250

At the end of 1944, when the clearance of Stutthof camp began, to avoid the

approaching front, there were still 47,000 prisoners there, two-thirds of them

Jewish. 251

In mid-January at least 6,000 prisoners, predominantly Jewish women, were

driven out of the sub-camps of Stutthof concentration camp, situated in East

Prussia, towards the Baltic. Around 50 per cent of the prisoners lost their lives.

In the coastal town of Pamnicken the escort troops—supported by local Nazis and

members of the Gestapo from Königsberg—carried out a massacre among the

surviving prisoners, in which around 200 people were killed. As far as one can tell,

this murder was carried out on the initiative of the leader of the escort troops, who

wanted to get rid of the prisoners so that they could get away more quickly from

the advancing Red Army. 252

At the end of the year the first railway transports carrying prisoners left Stutthof

main camp, until Hoppe finally ordered the partial clearance of the camp on

25 January. Eleven columns, each of 1,000 prisoners, were formed, who marched

on foot towards Lauenburg, 140 km away. Only around a third of the prisoners

reached the town; when the Red Army reached Lauenburg in mid-March they

found around 15,000 survivors of the death march from Stutthof. 253

In the summer of 1944 the SS began moving about half of the prisoners from

Auschwitz concentration camp—there were about 130,000 people there at the

time—to other concentration camps. 254 The ‘evacuation’ of Auschwitz concentration camp, in which by then there were still 67,000 prisoners, began in mid-

January 1945. Over 56,000 prisoners were driven westwards in marching columns

of whom an estimated two-thirds were Jews. In accordance with an order from

HSSPF Breslau, Heinrich Schmauser, that no prisoners were to fall into the hands

of the enemy, the guards shot all prisoners who could not keep up with the

marching pace. Given the terrible conditions on the marches, an estimated quarter

of the prisoners fell victim to this practice. Some of the marching columns reached

Groß-Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia, which became the transit camp

for the camps and prisons cleared in the East. 255

416

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

The Groß-Rosen concentration camp complex, which had numerous

sub-camps, was cleared from January 1945 onwards, and the clearance of the

completely overcrowded main camp began in February: it is demonstrable that

44,000 prisoners were moved on rail transports to concentration camps further to

the west, an unknown figure dying on the way. 256

As a result of the clearance of the camps in the East, there was now a

large number of Jewish prisoners in the camps in the Reich. In Ravensbrück

concentration camp the camp authorities had been preparing for the evacu-

ation since January 1943—at this point 48,000 prisoners were crammed together

in the camp—and systematically murdered the weak prisoners by leaving

them to die in special death zones, giving prisoners injections of poison,

shooting them, and finally, in January 1945, converting a wooden barrack into

a provisional gas chamber, in which a total of several thousand prisoners were

murdered. 257

In March 1945 Himmler once again returned to the idea of using Jewish

prisoners as hostages. In the middle of that month, during a visit to Germany

by his personal doctor Felix Kersten, who had by now moved to Sweden and had

contact with the Swedish foreign minister, he told Kersten—or so Kersten

claimed—that the concentration camps would not be blown up as the Allies

approached, further killing of the prisoners was forbidden, and the prisoners

were instead to be handed over to the Allies. 258

For a short time Himmler ordered the camp commandants not to kill any more

Jewish prisoners, saying that they must combat death rates among the prisoners.

The order was personally passed on to concentration camp commandants by

Pohl. 259

During his meeting with Himmler in March, Kersten informed his contact at

the World Jewish Congress, Hillel Storch, that Himmler had also agreed to release

10,000 Jewish prisoners to Sweden or Switzerland. 260 And in fact large numbers of Jewish prisoners were able to reach Sweden. Since February Himmler had been in

direct contact with the vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Folke

Bernadotte, who was responsible for trying to secure the release of the Scandi-

navian concentration camp prisoners on behalf of the Swedish government. They

were first brought together in Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg

and finally Bernadotte managed to ensure that they were brought to Sweden

by columns of Red Cross medical orderlies—the legendary ‘white buses’—via

Denmark to Sweden. Above all because of the sustained pressure from the

Swedish government, but also possibly as the result of efforts by other parties, 261

far more than the 8,000 Scandinavian