KL Quotes

“But Hans Beimler survived Dachau, escaping certain death just hours before the SS ultimatum expired. With the help of two rogue SS men, apparently, he squeezed through the small window high up in his cell, passed the barbed wire and electric fence around the camp, and disappeared into the night.7 After Private Steinbrenner unlocked Beimler’s cell early the next morning, on May 9, 1933, and found it empty, the SS went wild. Sirens sounded across the grounds as all available SS men turned the camp upside down. Steinbrenner battered two Communist inmates who had spent the night in the cells adjacent to Beimler, shouting: “Just you wait, you wretched dogs, you’ll tell me [where Beimler is].” One of them was executed soon after.8 Outside, a huge manhunt got under way. Planes circled near the camp, “Wanted” posters went up at railway stations, police raids hit Munich, and the newspapers, which had earlier crowed about Beimler’s arrest, announced a reward for recapturing the “famous Communist leader,” who was described as clean-shaven, with short-cropped hair and unusually large jug ears.9 Despite all their efforts, Beimler evaded his hunters. After recuperating in a safe house in Munich, he was spirited away in June 1933 by the Communist underground to Berlin and then, in the following month, escaped over the border to Czechoslovakia, from where he sent a postcard to Dachau telling the SS men to “kiss my ass.”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“Although the specifics remained vague, there was apparently no place for the concentration camps in these genocidal plans, neither as extermination centers nor as hubs for lethal labor. The KL were not on the agenda at Wannsee, and no representative of the concentration camp system had been invited to the gathering.”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“Nazi leaders set the direction of policy, and their followers bettered one another with ever more radical attempts to realize it.”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“During a mass rally in mid-March, the new Württemberg state president Wilhelm Murr, an old Nazi veteran, went even further: “We don’t say: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. No, if someone knocks out one of our eyes, we will chop off his head, and if someone knocks out one of our teeth, we will smash in his jaw.”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“Nazi Party (NSDAP)”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“Terror stood at the center of the Third Reich, and no other institution embodied Nazi terror more fully than the KL.”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“1957, when reminiscing in Buenos Aires about the SS camps, “It’s pretty easy to get inside, but awfully hard to get out.”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“For the most part, the prisoners’ story is not an uplifting account of the triumph of the human spirit, but a tale of degradation and despair.”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“Within ten years of liberation, the camps had been sidelined—a result not of survivors unable to speak, but of a wider audience unwilling to listen.”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“What is more, religious practices provided a lasting link to their pre-camp lives. And it helped them to find meaning in their suffering, seeing the camp as the culmination of centuries of persecution, or as a divine test of faith, or as penance for the sins of mankind. 50 Some atheist inmates felt that the religious believers had an advantage over them, because their faith gave them a fixed point in the universe to unhinge the world of the SS, at least in their minds.”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“Yes, we practiced religion even in a death camp,” Wiesel wrote later. “I had seen too much suffering to break with the past and reject the heritage of those who had suffered.”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“Within ten years of liberation, the camps had been sidelined— a result not of survivors unable to speak, but of a wider audience unwilling to listen.”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“all, some ninety percent of inmates survived the Gulag; in the KL, the figure among registered prisoners was probably less than half. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt put it in her pioneering study of totalitarianism, the Soviet camps were purgatory, the Nazi ones pure hell.”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“Denunciations to the SS were indeed frequent and could result in swift punishment—as in the Hanover-Misburg satellite camp, where a Belgian and a French prisoner were summarily executed in early 1945 after a German worker complained to the Camp SS supervisor that his sandwich had been stolen.”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“Heinrich Himmler was a mass murderer greatly concerned with decorum. He”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“Among them were the so-called NN prisoners, held in almost total isolation. To discourage resistance in northern and western Europe, Hitler had ordered that some suspects should secretly be deported to Germany, never to be seen again by their families; they would disappear in “night and fog” (Nacht und Nebel, or NN).”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“The promise of national rebirth, creating a new Germany out of the ashes of the Weimar Republic, lay at the heart of the popular appeal of Nazism in the early 1930s.”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“The KL system did not swell like an avalanche, gathering ever more destructive force as it hurtled toward the abyss; its trajectory sometimes slowed and even reversed. Conditions did not always go from bad to worse; occasionally they improved, both before and during the war, only to deteriorate again later on. A close analysis of this development will give new insights into the history of the camps, and indeed of the Nazi regime as a whole.”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“What is needed is a study that captures the complexity of the camps without fragmenting, and sets them into their wider political and cultural context without becoming reductive. But how to write such a history of the KL?”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

“Meanwhile, the suffering of Ernst Heilmann in Börgermoor continued. Once, he had to spend an entire day smeared from head to toe in human excrement. Another time, he crawled on all fours into the prisoner barracks, led on a chain by an SS man, barked loudly, and exclaimed “I am the Jewish Parliamentary Deputy Heilmann from the SPD!” before he was maimed by guard dogs.”
― Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps