The Destruction & Rebirth of Cities: Built Landscapes in the Age of Total War

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Chapter 2: The Interest of the SS in the Monumental Building Economy

As Albert Speer has written, the SS never efficiently maximized its use of forced labor even after 1942 when forced-labor operations were made a key part of centralized government wartime economic policy.1 But such a retrospective assessment misrepresents a crucial point: while SS economic managers and on-site camp administrations never efficiently used their forced-labor population, this population nevertheless was coerced into functioning productively. The SS did not temper the punitive and brutal goal of the camps in suppressing supposed enemies of the Party and state in order to address the individual needs of the forced-laborer to make him more efficient. Rather, it was through the day-to-day oppression of individual prisoners that the productive goals of SS administrators came together with the punitive initiatives of the on-site camp personnel.

But for what end were productivity and punishment combined? From the founding of major forced-labor operations in 1938 until their reorientation to the armaments industry in 1942–3, the predominant answer to this question is: to provide materials for the monumental building economy. The building economy in general was one of the most dynamic sectors of growth in National Socialist Germany. Monumental projects favored by Hitler provided a high-profile symbolic focus to contemporary discussions concerning the strength of the German economy. As one of Hitler’s major peacetime initiatives, the reconstruction of specific cities on a massive scale and with particular aesthetic materials (above all, stone) helped revive particular segments of the building economy, a revival that was thoroughly integrated with the broader policies of the state. Hence, an analysis of the involvement of SS companies in the production of building materials for individual monumental projects necessitates a triangulation of political, economic and architectural conditions. The effectiveness of the SS in linking its control over larger concentration camp populations, the productive output of these populations and the need for specific building materials can be critically assessed as material conditions for this moment in the political history of art. How these sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting conditions developed is the subject of this chapter on the SS interest in the Nazi monumental building economy.

Jaskot, Paul B.. The Architecture of Oppression : The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy, Routledge, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sciarc-ebooks/detail.action?docID=165458. Created from sciarc-ebooks on 2018-09-18 10:30:43.

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A history of the German Earth and Stone Works (DEST), the largest SS economic concern, affirms the connection of forced labor to state and Party architecture. DEST was set up in April 1938 to oversee the economic exploitation of concentration camp forced labor in the production of bricks and quarrying of stone. Through an institutional history, DEST’s development as an important influence on the reorganization of the camps after 1936 comes most clearly into focus with its expansion in the early war years. DEST economic activity stepped up in this period due to increased numbers of prisoners from the occupied territories and SS attempts to wield more power in the National Socialist political hierarchy. KL Flossenbürg and KL Mauthausen, the first and largest stone- quarry concentration camps respectively, were used to assert SS authority both by producing stone for specific projects and by punishing various peoples designated as enemies of the state. By orienting DEST’s production to the monumental architectural projects of Hitler and Speer, the SS competed in the expanding market for building materials and in the volatile political spheres of the Party and state.

Crucial to the development of the building materials enterprises in the concentration camps was the advantage DEST administrators took of developing political and economic conditions in the late 1930s and during the war. Oswald Pohl’s SS economic managers worked opportunistically to secure any leverage that extended the SS’s economic or political sphere of influence and to fight of encroachments on their authority from other administrations.2 For it was only by taking advantage of changing conditions that the long-term goals of ensuring the permanence of concentration camps could be pursued. The permanence of the institutions would guarantee, by extension, the endurance of the SS itself as a political and economic force in National Socialist Germany. Simply put, SS policy for the labor camps remained somewhat flexible in order to adapt to changing circumstances and to use its increasing political authority most effectively.

After 1936, the SS set up the concentration camps to punish physically those deemed ideologically or politically threatening to the state and, in the process, to build up a stable position within the German peacetime economy. The production of building materials in these camps was an attempt by the SS to make a brutally inefficient operation economically viable. Concerns for the individual laborer were rarely addressed in this period whereas the potential productivity of the entire inmate population was of greatest interest to DEST’s managers. Only through increasing production rates at camps such as Flossenbürg and Mauthausen could the decimation of the labor force continue to be justified in economic terms. The shrewd decision of Himmler and his advisors to target early on the privileged state and Party architectural projects as a potential market allowed for the focus on productivity late into the war. While other industries were forced to curtail their production or turn their enterprises over to armaments tasks, the SS retained its building materials industry through both its undiminished political authority and its economic orientation towards architectural policy. That this occurred at the expense of thousands of lives in the forced-labor camps is also part of the architectural history of National Socialist Germany.

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Chapter 2: The Monumental Building Economy

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SS AND THE CONCENTRATION CAMP SYSTEM

The choice of the building economy was not a predictable one for SS administrators; further, the use of forced labor for productive economic ends was of course neither an initial goal of the SS nor an impetus for the founding of the concentration camps. Rather, the interest in persecuting perceived enemies of the Party was only adapted to economic purposes after changes in the organization and administration of the camps as well as the development of the monumental building economy. The rise of forced labor as a driving force for the formulation of specific oppressive policies depended on key aspects of these early changes in the management of the camps.

A brief overview of the initial years of the concentration camp system indicates which developments would condition the introduction of DEST’s forced-labor operations. When the National Socialist government came to power in 1933, the three main Party- controlled policing forces of the Gestapo, the SS and the SA all opened temporary concentration camps to incarcerate individuals opposed or threatening to the NSDAP. These camps allowed the Party to avoid the potentially hostile government response that would have resulted had Party members resorted to the state’s established judicial and penal system. In the early stages of the concentration camps, the prisoners held there were almost exclusively political enemies from the German Communist Party or Social Democrats and union officials. Some felons were also put in the camps, though the politicals made up the vast majority of prisoners. The turn towards the secret police, the SS and the SA to crush the strongest elements of political opposition established early on the authoritarian character of the National Socialist state.3

German policing institutions, whether controlled by the state or by various Party groups, competed with one another for primacy in these years. By 1933, the SS had evolved from a small cadre of guards who protected Hitler in his appearances at public meetings in the Weimar Republic to become a formidable counter-balance to the SA. The year 1934 proved to be crucial for the SS in its pursuit of increased political authority in National Socialist Germany. In April, Hermann Göring made Himmler head of the powerful Gestapo in Prussia, and, after the purging of the SA in June of that year, Hitler elevated the SS to the status of an independent Party institution. As a result of these orders, the SS achieved total control over the concentration camps, securing the foundation of the eventual integration of the SS into the German state as the dominant policing force.4

When the SS took over the concentration camp system in 1934, the main camps were Columbiahaus, Dachau, Ersterwegen, Fuhlsbüttel, Lichtenburg, Oranienburg and Sachsenburg. Many of these camps were nothing more than warehouses acquired for the purpose of having detention centers separate from the German police. But Dachau became a model for subsequent larger concentration camps because of its construction as an independent complex outside of a major urban area and its centralized administration. Dachau had early on been established as the training center for guards (the Death’s Head Squads [SS Totenkopfverbände]) under the leadership of Theodor Eicke. Himmler appointed Eicke in July 1934 to head the office of the Inspector of Concentration Camps

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and SS Guard Units (Inspekteur der Konzentrationslager und SS-Wachverbände [Inspekteur der KL]). In this role, he was responsible for preparing the guards and commandants and overseeing the administrative organization of the camps. Through the Inspekteur der KL and the Death’s Head Squads, SS on-site camp personnel were trained in a quasi-military environment that emphasized the ideological goals of camp punishment separate from considerations of administrative efficiency. Eicke, because of his influence in setting up Dachau, would be crucial for providing the model for further concentration camp development after 1936.5

Work at the camps was rarely systematically organized before 1936. Dachau formed the exception to this rule. In this camp, Eicke introduced cultivation and peat collecting in the moor by summer 1933, while also in that year various labor details were set up to provide for the general maintenance of the camp. At this stage of development, work served the purpose of making the camp as self-sustaining as possible. The SS also occasionally contracted out some small groups of prisoners to private firms. The labor details within the camp were headed by Kapos, that is, prisoners (usually drawn from the criminal population) who oversaw the work groups. Kapos retained their position as long as the labor details remained productive. If not, they were replaced or disciplined.6

Unrelated to the concentration camps, the SS also began early on to acquire private businesses which legitimated the ideological goals of the SS and promoted its independent position in the state. In December 1934, the SS purchased its first firm, the Nordland- Verlag, responsible for publishing SS tracts and other texts. A porcelain manufacturer, Porzellan-Manufaktur Allach, was also taken over by the SS in 1936 and used private labor for its concern near Dachau (though some prison labor was used later in the 1930s). Allach was one of Himmler’s favorite projects and produced various figurines (soldiers, animals, etc.) to compete in the small but profitable German porcelain market. Throughout its history, the SS acquired a wide range of enterprises including works that produced mineral water, clothing, flower pots and other goods.7 Enterprises that relied on private labor, however, were not the focus of SS economic activity after the reorganization of the camp system and the beginning of the production of building materials.

The increase in the size of the SS administration and its interest in private economic activity resulted in the organization of a new office in June 1935. Administratively part of Himmler’s Personal Staff, the SS Administrative Office (SS-Verwaltungsamt) was created to deal with all budgetary considerations, economic enterprises, construction tasks, housing, clothing and other daily necessities of the SS. Himmler gave the leadership of this office to Oswald Pohl, who entered the SS in February 1934. Up until this time, Pohl had served as a naval officer and administrator. His political convictions were clear, however, as he had joined the NSDAP early on in 1926. With the development and extension of the Verwaltungsamt through the 1930s, Pohl began his quick rise to become one of the most powerful men in the SS (after Himmler and Heydrich).8

By 1935, the concentration camp system was organized and centralized in the SS offices in Berlin. Pohl had established control over a separate economic and administrative

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office for the potential exploitation of forced labor beyond the self-sustaining needs of the camps, and the SS as a policing institution was rapidly expanding its influence in Germany. In 1936, Hitler appointed Himmler as head of the German police force (controlled by the Ministry of the Interior) thus centralizing the state and Party policing apparatus. In the same year, the concentration camp system was reorganized on the Dachau model. The SS was clearly marked as an integral part of the National Socialist state. The question is, then, why did the SS specifically decide to use the output of forced labor for the monumental state and Party building projects, a decision that would affect both the enactment of economic goals and the consolidation of policing authority through the concentration camps?

THE GERMAN BUILDING ECONOMY, 1933–8

The centralization of the SS administration and the systematization of the concentration camps happened simultaneously with but separate from the resurgence of the German building economy. The German economy in general began sluggishly but significantly to pull out of its 1929 crash in the fall of 1932, months before Hitler came to power. In the initial recovery, however, unemployment remained high, and National Socialist candidates made the issue central to their campaign promises and criticism of the Weimar Republic. Employment had significant political import because by 1932–3 only two out of every five people with a job in 1929 were still working. This ratio was even higher in some geographic areas of Germany with strong building industries. In the southern state of Bavaria, for example, rural crises and a disenchantment with the parliamentary democratic system proved influential in turning citizens to vote for the NSDAP in the 1932 elections (with support at just over 37 per cent in July 1932). But economic distress and unemployment became crucial factors as well for voters rejecting the republican political parties. As the largest sector of the Bavarian industrial economy, the building trades suffered from the Depression at even higher rates than many other comparable industries; according to the 1933 census, 39 per cent of building trade workers were unemployed.9 A crucial campaign issue, the unemployment situation provided fodder for NSDAP leaders in general, and for propaganda aimed specifically at sectors of the building economy.

As a major concern of the new NSDAP regime, the unemployment situation and stimulation of production formed the core of economic policy as they had in the previous republican governments. From 1933 to 1936, work-creation schemes and the stimulation of trade were astonishingly successful in aiding the recovery of the German economy. But, as Richard Overy points out, this was less a result of instigating any particularly new kind of “fascist” economic policy as it was due to Hitler’s decision to stimulate growth through directed government spending with the “linkage effects it produced and the stimulus it offered to particular areas of private business.”10 Such a policy was undertaken by any number of different political systems, from democratic to fascist. As with other regimes, Hitler also promoted the construction industry as a central component of this

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directed spending effort. In this regard, while no one sector of the economy was sufficient on its own for causing the recovery, construction grew at a much higher rate than the economy as a whole. As of 1932, RM 2 billion were invested in construction; by 1936, that number had multiplied to RM 9 billion with a concomitant employment of 2 million workers. The bulk of this construction was in new housing and road construction (particularly the Autobahn), but industrial and commercial construction as well as a few high-profile public buildings made a significant contribution to the overall economic effect. Government expenditure in the construction industry not only had the desired economic impact of stimulating businesses related to and reliant on building activity but also helped achieve the political goal of marking the NSDAP as the party that had brought Germany back from the economic brink.11

Through such means as work creation and directed state investment, the employment situation was eventually stabilized by 1936. At that time, the reverse problem arose of an increasing demand on the available labor pool. Public works projects (particularly the Autobahn and building construction) and the growing importance of armaments production as a percentage of total economic output strained the labor market even further.12 NSDAP National Treasurer (Reichsschatzmeister) Franz Xaver Schwarz pointed out the continuing problem in a memorandum of 1939: “The lack of manpower, especially in the building economy, demands a planned use of the available manpower.”13 The competition for labor in these years had considerable influence on decisions concerning state and Party construction projects and there was infighting over labor allocation between government administrations pursuing individual and institutional interests. The emphasis on labor- intensive industries such as construction solved the unemployment situation but created other problems for the productivity of the German economy.14 The worker shortage became a primary condition that affected the SS mobilization of forced labor in the concentration camps.

In addition to tight labor markets, the intensification of production in certain sectors of the economy led to shortages of key materials. By 1936, as preparations for war began to dominate state economic policy, attempts were made to correct these problems through the centralization of the distribution of material resources as well as the work force through Hermann Göring’s Office of the Four Year Plan. In April 1936, Hitler appointed Göring to organize the economy and put all available state and Party institutions at his disposal. This resulted in Göring’s Four Year Plan (announced at the Party Rally in September 1936) which promoted a rapid militarization of industry. The centralization of the allocation of workers and materials– the key to the plan’s success–also increased the influence of the large private conglomerates involved in the military and economic drive. Though the German economy continued to operate under competitive market conditions, the conjunction of increased political control over the economy and the interests of the larger conglomerates tended towards a highly managed economic system, distinct from that of democratic industrial states and socialist economies.15 This tendency helped a politically powerful institution like the SS to pursue its economic goals.

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The same process of centralization affected the building industry, most intensely by the reduction of its access to iron and cement as well as the stricter control of labor markets. In addition to the implicit effect that the allocation of materials and labor for military industries had on supplies of each for other trades, the building industry became an institutionalized part of the Four Year Plan when Göring on 9 December 1938 named Fritz Todt as the General Plenipotentiary for the Regulation of the Building Economy (Generalbevollmächtigter für die Regelung der Bauwirtschaft [GBBau]). Todt, who had previously organized the building of the West Wall (a series of bunkers and defenses on the western border of Germany), became responsible for the construction of all necessary military projects, important armaments factory sites, canals, Autobahn, railroads and housing estates for workers in Four Year Plan firms. The GBBau also secured materials and workers for those concerns determined crucial to national defense. Finally, Todt’s administration was meant to manage the construction of the designated monumental building projects in Berlin, Nuremberg and Munich. Though Speer saw to it that Todt was never able to bring the control of the city rebuilding projects under his jurisdiction, Todt’s grip on the iron market and worker allocation in particular made the GBBau central to monumental building schemes in Germany.16

As a high-profile segment of the building economy, monumental Party and state construction prospered from the initial impetus to direct government spending towards building; yet after 1936, such construction was also restricted by the crisis in labor markets and limitations on materials. Hence, aesthetic choices combined with political economic policies. This situation can be elucidated by looking at the stone industry, stone being the key aesthetic material promoted by Hitler and his architects. Paul Ludwig Troost’s House of German Art (Haus der deutschen Kunst [Figure 1]) in Munich, Hitler’s first major commission after he came to power in 1933, relied on vast quantities of German limestone for its façade, a material Hitler had chosen himself. Hitler also influenced Werner March’s use of stone instead of steel and glass in his re-working of the initial design for the Olympic Stadium (1936 [Figure 2]) in Berlin. In these cases as in others, Hitler’s belief in the permanence of stone and its connection (unlike modernist structures) to a craft tradition which he associated with powerful political regimes and a “German” style obviously influenced aesthetic choices made by state and Party architects. Though many types of buildings and materials were used throughout the National Socialist period, the high-profile projects of the Party and state remained exclusively stone buildings with modified neo-classical forms.17

Moreover, the most important projects were constructed almost in their entirety from granite, limestone and marble. In Nuremberg and in Berlin, Hitler ’s direct approval via Speer was required for major designs, and they both consistently favored granite or limestone façades with marble interiors or detailing, as was the case with Speer’s New Reich Chancellery. These preferences for stone led to a

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strong revival of the quarrying industry up to the outbreak of war in 1939, but only for specific types of stone. For example, in a letter of April 1937 from the Labor Ministry to the NSDAP administration for Koblenz-Trier, the local basalt industry was cited as one area of stone production where conditions were becoming worse because of a lack of government contracts.18 The building materials market, when it came to stone, depended on aesthetic decisions made by Party and state leaders who, in turn, took their cues from Hitler and his architect Speer.

Figure 1 PAUL LUDWIG TROOST, HOUSE OF GERMAN ART, MUNICH, 1933–7 Source: G. Troost, Bauen im neuen Reich, 1938

Figure 2 WERNER MARCH, OLYMPIC STADIUM, BERLIN, 1936 Source: G. Troost, Bauen im neuen Reich, 1938

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But in spite of exceptions, the stone industry prospered with the broader state economic policies. By 1936, industry specialists had already noted a significant increase in the production of marble, granite and limestone as a result of state-directed funding. Further, one critic noted that the reliance on foreign stone imports had been greatly reduced in favor of a renewed emphasis on production within Germany itself (autarky being one of Hitler’s key nationalist policies).19 Such optimism was tempered only after 1936 when even architectural-quality stone had to be registered with the state to monitor its production, and the work force came under the same pressure as in other industries in the German economy. Particularly of concern was where the new generation of laborers was going to come from, i.e. the apprentices for stone masonry, quarrying work and construction.20 The conclusion that we can reach from this situation is that the increase in the political management of the economy resulting from Göring’s Four Year Plan significantly affected seemingly non-military industries that nevertheless also relied on labor-intensive work and the use of specific materials. Clearly, by the late 1930s, the stone industry and architects working on monumental projects were feeling just such an effect.

All in all, then, when the SS set up its economic concerns, the building industry was subject to political manipulation by state and Party institutions greatly stressed by the huge demands of rearmament and architectural policy. Gradual centralization of the industry allowed for the protection of fewer and fewer projects and for a concentration on those enterprises deemed absolutely crucial to the state. Further, the pressure on employment markets left the private economy and state projects eager for ways to maximize the output of a limited labor force. A building economy faced with restrictions on its workers and the kinds of materials available for construction as well as expanding in all sectors provided an opportunity for an institution like the SS that unilaterally controlled people in its camps. It indicated a potential choice for SS economic administrators newly concerned after 1936 with directing the abuse of those people to the broader German economy.

SS CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND THE FORMATION OF DEST

Demands placed on the German economy due to the Four Year Plan came about just as the SS had consolidated its power over the entire police force of Germany and was reorganizing the concentration camp system. When Hitler appointed Himmler to head the German police in June 1936, Theodor Eicke had already been working for two years on planning the construction of large institutions throughout the Reich based on the model of KL Dachau. These plans for consolidation and expansion were fully implemented after Himmler’s appointment. By August 1936, the camps at Oranienburg, Fuhlsbüttel, Esterwegen and Columbiahaus had been consolidated into the facility at KL Sachsenhausen just outside of Berlin. A year later, the SS closed down Sachsenburg and moved its prisoners to the new camp at KL Buchenwald near Weimar. Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen

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were modeled after Dachau in their administrative structure and their capacity to hold up to 8,000 prisoners each. The other remaining camp, KL Lichtenburg, had been reserved exclusively for women since the summer of 1937.21

The extension of the camps and choice of sites indicate that Himmler’s goal was not simply to set up an effective penal system but to establish the long-term viability of the camps as political and economic tools of the SS. Inmate populations in 1934 and 1935 had been steadily decreasing as the initial political prisoners arrested after January 1933 were released. Planning for larger camps depended in 1936–7 on a view of their permanent importance to the state as well as on the potential prison populations determined from ideological criteria. Economically, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald were chosen for their proximity not only to population centers (Prussia, Saxony/Thuringia), but also to clay deposits suitable for brick making. Early on, the SS oriented these camps to their potential production of materials for the building industry. In the case of Buchenwald, for example, the location near Weimar was suggested by the Thuringian Geological Provincial Examination office (Thüringische Geologische Landesuntersuchung) because of the availability of clay deposits. It was only after this suggestion that Eicke and Pohl made a visit to the site in May 1937 and approved the location of a camp here.22 In 1937, these economic plans remained vague in terms of how they were to be implemented; nevertheless, the interest in the economic use of forced labor for the building economy influenced this extension of the concentration camp system.

For Eicke, and seemingly for Himmler as well, the founding of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen was first and foremost a manifestation of the political gains achieved by the SS in 1935–6. Economic goals remained secondary (and Pohl remained in the background) while the SS consolidated its power to regulate German society through policing institutions. Himmler had fought off the Justice and Interior Ministries’ attempts to establish authority over the concentration camps and had received Hitler’s approval to make the camps permanent institutions. Finally, the extension of arrest categories after 1936 enhanced the necessity for the KL by drastically increasing the numbers of inmates. The largest extension of categories occurred only after Himmler gained control of the police and reorganized the camps in 1936. Through a series of orders and laws from 1937– 8, the SS began defining and arresting occupational criminals, so-called asocials (beggars, Sinti and Roma [Zigeuner], vagrants, prostitutes, alcoholics and others), homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Himmler based these extra-juridical arrests on the Law for the Protection of the People and State (Gesetz zum Schutzvon Volk und Staat) of February 1933. First enacted to legitimize the arrest of large numbers of Communists after the burning of the Reichstag, the SS used this law to lay its hands on all people who were seen as destructive to the Party or state. The exact categorization of those arrested was left up to the local police and Gestapo officials. With Hitler’s approval in hand, the SS had gained not only an established control over policing institutions but also had increased its ability

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to punish and incarcerate greater numbers of people cast as political or ideological enemies.23

Through such means, the SS legitimated once again the need for the concentration camp system which it unilaterally controlled.

The political authority won by the SS allowed for the pursuit of other interests that would contribute to the consolidation of the concentration camps as integral institutions in the German state. By 1937, Himmler, through his administrator Pohl, began to place increasing emphasis on securing the permanence of the camps by adapting them to a comprehensive economic program. It was already clear to Himmler that larger camps would be needed in times of war, but a growing emphasis on economic enterprises would give the SS a reason to expand the camps in peacetime as well. Though the intent to exploit penal labor was part of the organization of the camps from the very beginning, it was only in 1937–8 that the SS addressed the economic potential of forced labor as a key means of guaranteeing its role in a peacetime Germany. After regulations concerning who could be taken into custody were broadened, the SS could and did actively target prisoners who met its economic needs. The opening of KL Buchenwald, for example, was aided by a direct order in June 1938 from Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SS-Reich Central Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt [RSHA]), to the effect that every local police district arrest at least 200 male so-called asocials who also were considered ready and able to work. Through such measures, Buchenwald’s population rose from an initial 2,295 inmates in August 1937 to 7,776 one year later.24 Prepared as they were to select prisoners based on political, ideological and economic criteria, the SS could attempt to maximize its economic potential. This policy was also clearly in line with the need to extend the productivity of all labor as defined by the state’s economic goals and those of Göring’s Four Year Plan.25

Extending the function of the camps to include grander schemes of developing an economic empire occurred first with the brickworks established at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen in 1938. It was in 1937–8, again a time when severe labor and material shortages were common, that the SS began seriously to orient forced-labor operations to the building materials market. At first, SS brickworks were linked only to the necessities of the Four Year Plan. For example, Hellmuth Gommlich (Minister of the Interior in Thuringia) wrote in a letter of 24 April 1937: “The camp inmates should be occupied, within the framework of the Four Year Plan, with the production of bricks.”26 Yet by the time construction began on the brickworks in 1938, the SS had turned to the more exclusive and increasingly powerful patronage of Speer by linking the quarries and some of the brickworks to Speer’s needs as head of the Inspector General of Building for the Reich Capital Berlin (Generalbauinspektor für die Reichshauptstadt Berlin [GBI]).

The decision to focus the majority of forced-labor operations on the production of large-scale brickworks and stone quarries came at the initial meeting of Speer, Himmler and Hitler, that occurred after Buchenwald opened in July 1937 but before Pohl’s trip to Flossenbürg and Mauthausen in March 1938.27 With the support of Speer and Hitler, the use of the prisoners to make bricks and to quarry stone became institutionalized in the

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founding of DEST on 29 April 1938. The business was officially registered on 10 June 1938 under the management of SS-Obersturmbannführer Arthur Ahrens (who in September 1938 appointed SS-Standartenführer Walter Salpeter as deputy manager). Two agents (procurators) were also named, SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Mummenthey and SS- Untersturmführer Hans Clemens Tietjen. On paper, the business always had a double organization. DEST personnel administered the concern as a private enterprise but, as SS members, they were also politically responsible to the SS-Verwaltungsamt under Pohl, although at this stage Pohl played little more than an overseeing role in the firm.28

The goals of DEST were spelled out in the corporate resolution (Gesellschaftsvertrag): (1) the opening of stone quarries and quarrying of natural stone;29

(2) the production of bricks; (3) street building (later dropped as a potential assignment); and (4) the running or acquiring of other enterprises related to quarrying or brick making. These goals were set up not only to “re-educate” the inmates of the concentration camps but also, in the process of punishment, to serve the massive demands of the German construction industry. Mummenthey, in a report on the organization of the administration of DEST in July 1940, stated the goal succinctly: “In the general interest, its [DEST’s] task primarily consists in employing the labor power of the concentration camp prisoners for the job of the production of building materials.”30

But such a company was of dubious legality as it involved a Party institution getting involved with the private economy, a point that had been ignored with the small- scale operations prior to 1937–8 but now became of crucial importance to the NSDAP Treasurer Schwarz as the SS expanded into national building materials markets. The German state had such a restriction on economic activity precisely because, among other reasons, a political institution was perceived to have an unfair advantage and, hence, must be banned from investing in the private market. SS administrators avoided this criticism by using the loophole that their concerns were not, like private businesses, engaged in maximization of profit but rather served the dual political goals of punishing or “reforming” inmates through labor as well as providing needed materials for the monumental building projects prioritized by Hitler. Specifically, Speer’s plans for Berlin (Figure 3) were continuously cited by the SS in its reports and contracts as a justification for the unlawful entry of a Party institution into private business. For example, in a memorandum of 15 June 1938 sent to Schwarz from his staff, Pohl is quoted as defending the legality and purpose of the brickworks at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Pohl declared that the SS entry into the brick-making business was justified in two ways: (1) to keep the inmates busy, especially as the recent annexation of Austria had greatly contributed to the number of prisoners; and (2) to supply Speer with building materials for the “Führerbauten,” as the output of the German brick-making industry could meet only 18 per cent of Speer’s need of 2 billion bricks a year.31 The memorandum indicates how the SS justified its economic operations by pointing to Speer’s special needs as well as casting its enterprise in terms of the political function of managing the prison population. With this cultural and political legitimization, no mention need be made of legal debates.

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Administratively, DEST was organized at first under Pohl’s SS-Verwaltungsamt. However, with the rapid expansion of the economic enterprises, this office quickly developed into the SS-Central Administration and Economic Office (Hauptamt Verwaltung und Wirtschaft [SS-HAVW]), established 20 April 1939 on the organizational model of Heydrich’s RSHA. Unlike the SS-Verwaltungsamt, which only had jurisdiction within the SS itself, a Hauptamt had a dual status as a Party position (e.g. overseeing the administrative organization of the

Figure 3 ALBERT SPEER, MODEL OF THE NORTH–SOUTH AXIS, BERLIN, c. 1940 Source: Ullstein Bilderdienst

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SS and its concerns) and a position within the Ministry of the Interior (e.g. administering finances of the state for the formation of an SS army and the KL). The HAVW had three divisions corresponding to Pohl’s areas of authority: legal, economic and a department for the inspection of all SS administrations and concerns. The economic division oversaw the bureaus that managed the SS-controlled businesses. Eight of these bureaus existed by 1940, covering the building materials firms in the Reich and occupied territory, the porcelain works, the mineral water works and the other SS concerns.32 DEST itself made up Amt W III A/1 in the economic division.

This reorganization came also as Pohl was professionalizing the managerial staff of the SS economic division especially in the face of bungled operations in the first year of DEST.33 Although he was a brickworks owner before he came to the SS, Ahrens proved to be a disaster as a leader of DEST, and in 1939 Pohl replaced him with Salpeter, a man who came to the job prepared with administrative and financial management experience. Salpeter, assisted by Mummenthey, directly administered the enterprise. Amt W III A/1 was further broken down into the two main divisions of the brickworks under the leadership of Erduin Schondorff, and the granite works under Heinz Schwarz, both of whom were technical professionals in their fields. The administrative breakdown indicates the way the SS rationalized management of production and centralized the direction of the enterprises in its economic administration. While ideologically committed to the punishment of inmates, Pohl’s economic administrators also focused on ways of increasing the output of DEST by concentrating on the economic organization of the operations.34

Although set up in April 1938, DEST lacked significant funding for development in the concentration camps until a major contract was signed with the GBI on 1 July 1938. This was to be the first of many contracts, large and small, that the SS made and attempted to make with the GBI, establishing a predominantly architectural orientation to DEST’s economic concerns. The GBI agreed to extend RM 9.5 million in credit to DEST in 1938 in exchange for deliveries of at least 120 million bricks annually over a ten-year period from the brickworks at KL Sachsenhausen. So clearly connected was the enterprise to state architectural policy that Speer even took credit for suggesting the construction of a brickworks for Berlin when funding became an issue with the Economic Ministry after the initial contract was signed. (Notably, Speer repeatedly emphasized in his post-war work that SS economic aspirations were entirely motivated by administrators within the SS. He avoided in his writing all mention of GBI initiatives with the SS.)35 The delivery of bricks was to begin by October 1938. However, due to problems that immediately beset production at Sachsenhausen, the GBI had paid less than RM 6 million of its promised support. In a renegotiated contract signed by Speer, Pohl, Salpeter and Mummenthey on 27 August 1940, the terms of the original agreement were somewhat altered. The GBI promised to pay DEST RM 10 million (minus what had already been paid) on annual deliveries of 100 million core bricks and 20 million façade bricks. This new contract came at a time when the confidence in victory during the war reached its peak and the viability of the KL firms had to be reasserted after the failure of the new brick-making technology

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at Sachsenhausen. Whereas the original contract simply listed the terms of agreement, the later contract specifically linked the public interests of the SS and state architectural policy: the brickworks at Sachsenhausen was set up to “occupy” the prisoners of the KL and, simultaneously, to “help out” with the great pressures placed on the building materials industry by the rebuilding of Berlin.36

The GBI was the first and largest single patron of DEST during its entire history as a provider of building materials. Beginning with base payments in 1938 for pre-approved brick orders and additional payments through 1941 totaling over RM 9 million, no other customer was so crucial to DEST’s success. Though credit funds were received from other sources including the Reichsbank, the GBI retained its role as the predominant architectural client through its payments to the SS.37 Financing the enterprises at the camps rested largely on the advantage taken by the SS of the GBI’s need for an ever larger share of the building materials market in Germany.

Bank credits and advances from the GBI allowed the SS to build and develop its ventures from 1938 to the beginning of the war in September 1939. Construction had begun on the brickworks at KL Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald by the summer of 1938 and the initial quarries at KL Flossenbürg and Mauthausen were either leased or acquired by this time. The 1938 annual report shows a loss, but in 1939 the operating budget jumped and a small profit of RM 135,850 was achieved. These initially optimistic figures were compromised by the mistakes made at KL Sachsenhausen, but nevertheless reflect the growth of the concerns. Payments were also received in these years for relatively small orders from (among others) the Reichsautobahn and the “Buildings at Adolf Hitler Platz” Association in Weimar. Both of these orders were for stone, the brickworks not yet being operational, and indicate the relative success of the granite works in this period (profit of over RM 390,000) in relation to the brickworks (loss of more than RM 390,000).38

Thus, by the time the war began, four of the six concentration camps were producing or being readied to produce building materials, some of which were already making their way to the monumental building projects of the Party and state. The SS attempt to obtain a major share of the building materials industry in Germany was well under way before September 1939 due to consistent financial backing and the increased authority to arrest extended categories of people. With Speer’s GBI and the centralized organization of the seemingly unlimited forced labor, these concentration camps were filled and the inmates put to work.

DEST AND THE MONUMENTAL BUILDING ECONOMY DURING THE WAR

The outbreak of war in September 1939 did little to dampen the development of DEST and the pursuit by the SS of a share in the German building economy. Not only did the SS expect the war to end quickly, but it had been exempted from turning over its economic operations to armaments industries. Hence, DEST extended its operations, acquired new quarry sites and brick-making facilities and directed its production to specific monumental

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projects. Punishing prisoners through the development of the forced-labor camps continued at a rapid pace.

Three periods of economic activity can be distinguished, which correspond to state architectural policy, economic conditions and military circumstances. First, the quarries and brickworks went through a phase of accelerated expansion geared to the production of architectural materials (1939–42). Second, DEST, in its attempts to be flexible in the face of military setbacks, extended only particular works based on the shrinking number of architectural projects (1942–3). Finally, DEST redirected labor and resources towards the armaments industry economy, though it still had access to the occasional commission for architectural materials (1943–4). With its authority extended through greater policing powers gained during the war, the SS took advantage of the crucial importance of architectural policy to the state and adapted to the economic crises and priorities inherent in a wartime market economy.39

With the intent to achieve Nazi ideological and military goals, the war led to further political management of the private economy. The regulation of wages, costs of basic materials, etc., became central factors for the military economy. But the difference between pre- and post-1939 was significant; not only were certain production costs fixed but the state also implemented increasingly stringent measures in terms of the prioritization of “useful” projects. That is to say, a clear hierarchy was established based on determining the necessity of the project to the war effort and, from the business side, the effectiveness of the firm at carrying through the project. A firm’s ability to compete was based less on competitive pricing and more on productivity. In such a situation, the larger firms– particularly the cartels–were favored as they had the means to maximize productivity with their expansive use of resources and mobilization of labor.40

The building economy was no different. In the optimistic war years before 1942, articles in the architectural trade journal of Der Deutsche Baumeister emphasized the need of architects to become more knowledgeable about the use of diverse building materials, the availability of building materials and the relation between the building economy and the war effort. But as most materials were already regulated by the GBBau, the variable of greatest concern to the building economy was the labor force. Already within the first war year, the state encouraged architects and construction professionals to maximize labor output at all costs. While the curtailment of peacetime building projects during the war (excepting after June 1940 Hitler’s favored projects for Berlin, Nuremberg, Munich, Linz and Hamburg) led to some relief from the worker shortage in other areas of the building economy, construction was seriously threatened by the loss of skilled and unskilled workers to the military. Replacements needed to be found, and state officials discussed publicly the use of more foreign civilian labor from occupied territories and the use of prisoners of war. In article after article, professionals emphasized the quantity and quality of the labor force as the most pressing need in the war economy and, up to 1942, for the presumed post-war needs of the monumental building projects which seemed to be only a battle victory or two away. Thus, in the early war years, the efficient use of regulated

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materials as well as the expansion and maximization of labor productivity dominated the concerns of the state and its architects. At least up until the clear military setbacks on the Eastern Front, such concerns were used to urge architects and construction managers to prioritize their efforts in order to pursue the goals both of the wartime building economy and Hitler’s favored architectural projects.41

Such an emphasis on productivity and specific monumental projects proved useful for DEST administrators in their efforts to expand their economic operations. In contrast to other industries that were immediately affected by restrictions due to the war, SS ventures were negatively influenced more by the failure of the new brick-making process implemented at the KL Sachsenhausen facility (named Oranienburg I) than by external factors. This brickworks’ technological failure resulted in the need to rebuild the facility and became the basis for the formulation of SS economic strategy in 1939–40. For example, in July 1940, Pohl decided on the advice of Salpeter and Hans Hohberg to collect the majority of SS firms in a holding company called the German Economic Concerns (Deutsche Wirtschaftsbetriebe GmbH [DWB]). The immediate purpose of the organization was to offset DEST’s losses at Oranienburg I with the collective profits from other SS firms. The reorganization allowed the SS to reduce taxes on the individual profit-making concerns. Hohberg more generally introduced modern accounting techniques and other practices gained from his pre-SS knowledge of management and administration.42 Thus, the SS rationalized its enterprises in 1940, becoming more efficient by using business practices of private industry (like the holding company) to cut costs and raise levels of production.

This rationalization helped the development of DEST, though it faced a loss based on the performance of the brickworks. The operating budget gained in relation to the previous year, and monthly production at Mauthausen and Flossenbürg slowly increased. Both of these camps began to show a profit well above the proceeds of the brickworks. The GBI agreed to pay an additional RM 5 million in credit towards DEST’s operating budget, RM 1 million of which was designated for the granite works in May 1940. Further payments were agreed upon for the brickworks in a new contract of August 1940 between the GBI and DEST. The augmentation of funds, and small but growing profit in the granite works, contributed to the general optimism among the officials of DEST in this first war year, leading Himmler in October 1940 to order an increase in production. At the end of the budget year, Salpeter stated that the leadership of DEST had operated on the assumption that the war would end victoriously by late fall 1940 and be followed by an unimaginable rise in the need for building materials. DEST attempted to position its firms to take advantage of this need.43

As the GBI financing indicates, much of the development costs of DEST and the promise of its continued success during the war was linked to the brickworks and their potential capacity to provide a stable basis of productive activity for the peacetime years to come. Aside from the Oranienburg work at Sachsenhausen and the Berlstedt work at Buchenwald, the SS had also acquired a brickworks near Hamburg in 1938 that led to the planned development and creation of KL Neuengamme in 1940. Two other brickworks

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within the Reich were purchased in the first years of the war near KL Stutthof (Danzig) and Prambachkirchen near Linz. Prambachkirchen, however, did not use prison labor and quickly focused its production on armaments tasks.44

Hitler furthered the SS expansion into the brick industry when he appointed Himmler to the post of Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood (Reichskommissar für die Festigung Deutschen Volkstums) in December 1939. In this position, Himmler was given exclusive authority over all brickworks in the occupied territories that were not owned or controlled by German citizens or by people of German descent. Salpeter administered the takeover of these properties through the new concern of the East German Brickworks (Ostdeutsche Ziegeleibetriebs GmbH). By May 1940, the works included those at Bielitz, Kalisch, Posen, Zichenau and the ghetto at Lodz (Litzmannstadt). Though not centered around concentration camps, the eastern brickworks nevertheless often had brutal labor conditions and extreme production schedules carried out by Polish civilians or Jewish forced labor. The SS planned to use these brickworks particularly to establish building brigades later in the war for its own construction projects in the occupied territory. As in 1935–6, the increased political authority of the SS was followed by grander schemes for economic development.45

Bricks were important to the German building industry because of the restrictions placed particularly on iron first by Göring’s Four Year Plan and then the material needs of the war economy. Ideologically, the construction of brick buildings was often associated with local architectural projects (such as those in Hamburg) or with particular “German” academic traditions (most notably, that of Schinkel). However, SS production never centered on high-quality bricks necessary for façade work except at KL Neuengamme, where the clay deposits were particularly good. Though aspiring to tap the market for façade bricks, the SS quickly reconciled itself to producing bricks in most of the works that would mainly serve as structural material.46

Whereas the brickworks provided the impetus for the SS’s entrance into the building materials industry, the stone quarries were more specifically aligned with particular building projects. As a result, they had a greater rate of success in meeting DEST’s economic goals. In addition to Mauthausen and Flossenbürg, KL Natzweiler and KL Gross-Rosen were also set up around quarry systems in 1940. A quarry at Marburg was acquired by DEST in 1942, though it employed only civilians. DEST, under the guidance of Speer’s administration, also set up a stone-processing center (Oranienburg II) in 1941 near KL Sachsenhausen. Oranienburg II used prisoners to cut stone in preparation for the monumental building projects in Berlin. The SS created similar stone-mason programs for inmates at Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen and Natzweiler.47 Himmler and Pohl’s decision to erect a system of quarries connected to concentration camp labor was quite practical in relation to the overwhelming importance of stone to the monumental buildings in National Socialist Germany. It also corresponded to the general conditions of the early-war building economy in which Hitler continued to privilege his high-profile projects.

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It is thus hardly surprising that DEST quarries were sited on high-quality granite deposits. The SS specifically targeted the monumental representational building sites, acquiring contracts for (among others) the German Stadium in Nuremberg and the Soldiers’ Hall in Berlin. Speer also advised DEST managers in choosing sites based on the type of granite for Natzweiler and Gross-Rosen, and possibly for Flossenbürg and Mauthausen as well. The focus of quarrying efforts on Hitler and Speer’s major projects also provided a reason for justifying further developmental funds for DEST, funds which could be related only to the potential output of the brickworks. From 1938 to 1943, the total turnover of the granite works was at least double that of the brick producers.48 Though bricks were always a crucial component of the production plans, DEST’s quarries were connected more consistently with specific monumental state and Party projects. This optimism concerning the productivity of the quarries and the expansion of DEST’s concerns coincided with enlarged camp populations resulting from the extension of Gestapo and police authority to arrest individuals for reasons of “internal state security during the war.”49 The political function of the camps coincided with the economic adaptation of DEST enterprises to the military situation and the wartime building economy’s focus on labor and productivity.

Nevertheless, the simultaneous expansion of DEST enterprises and centralization of administration at the beginning of the war did not go unchallenged. In 1940, the Finance Ministry confronted Pohl with the need to raise SS payments to the state for support of prisoners engaged in laboring for SS concerns. This issue was central to the ability of the SS to use almost all of its revenue for development rather than for the welfare of the laborers. Discussion of this issue took place at a meeting between the SS and the Finance Ministry on 20 October 1940. Until this time, SS payments to the state of RM 0.30 per inmate per day were meant as a means of funding the upkeep of the inmates and institutions. Finance Ministry representatives compared SS payments to the RM 3.00–4.50 per prisoner per day paid by the judicial prison system in an attempt to convince the SS that it, too, had to raise its support. They also noted that prisoners hired out to armaments firms and private businesses netted the Waffen-SS RM 5.00–6.00 per day. This amount went directly into funds controlled by Pohl. Though the Finance Ministry wanted to limit SS revenue and force it to abide by restrictions like the judicial penal institutions, the meeting produced only a promise to take the matter up in the 1941 budget year.50 That the issue was raised at all, however, indicates the kind of administrative maneuvering typical of the National Socialist government which, in this case, attempted to limit the growing economic power of the SS–in vain, as it turned out.

In addition to the administrative and technical challenges faced by the SS in 1940, Germany’s failure to defeat the British air force in the fall indicated that the war would continue for some time. Yet, throughout 1941, DEST persisted in expanding its economic activities in order to position itself more strongly in the market for building materials. As long as the military successes (especially in France and at the beginning of the Soviet campaign in 1941) were more frequent than defeats, building professionals could still talk

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about the demands of the monumental building projects, and SS economic administrators remained optimistic about the extension of their empire. In a report from the HAVW early in 1941, goals continued to be set confidently, not only in relation to the development of the enterprises but also to the German building market as a whole. DEST meant to increase production of stone in the granite works by 30 per cent, securing a 12.5 per cent share of the German granite industry, the largest of any firm. The stone-processing center of Oranienburg II and the quarry at Natzweiler were also scheduled to open this year. The HAVW set goals for the brickworks as well: Oranienburg I at Sachsenhausen was to be brought up to half its total production capacity, Buchenwald’s output was to increase qualitatively and quantitatively and Neuengamme was to be completed.51 DEST requested funding for these developments from the Deutsche Golddiskontbank through the Reichsbank, receiving an RM 8 million credit in May 1941.52

Production increased noticeably, though not at the rate projected by the HAVW. Mauthausen doubled its rate while Flossenbürg remained relatively even. Gross-Rosen continued to develop but slowly, and the brickworks still had technical problems though they were producing. DEST, on the basis of sales and development, resumed talks with the GBI for further stone contracts. At this stage, as Salpeter wrote to Mummenthey, top priority was given to making the concerns ready to take advantage of the rush on the building materials market expected as soon as the war ended.53 The loss for the year totaled over RM 3.3 million as the costs for rebuilding Sachsenhausen were absorbed, while turnover reached above RM 2.1 million, once again mostly from the granite works.54

The SS could continue production in 1941 based on the function of the forced-labor camps as oppressive institutions and on Hitler’s decision to favor certain sectors of the monumental building economy. Yet economic exceptions granted to DEST because of the political function of the concentration camps once again came up as an issue in the administrative struggle over tax regulations with the Stone and Earth Economic Division (Wirtschaftsgruppe Steine und Erde) in the Reich Economic Professional Organization (Reichswirtschaftskammer). In January and February 1941, Schondorff, for DEST, wrote to the Economic Professional Organizations that DEST should be freed from paying any export-extraction duties on its products. Schondorff justified this position by stating that DEST represented no competitive threat to private concerns. Prisoners produced bad quality work and the costs such as watch personnel were significantly higher than those in the private sector. Furthermore, DEST should be freed from paying the duties because judicial prisons were not required to pay taxes on goods produced.55 Whereas previously DEST administrators had drawn a distinction between the concentration camps and prisons of the judicial system (as with prison laborer support payments), now they were relating the two and playing down all notions of income. The flexibility to redefine the enterprises was meant here as before to establish SS control over the largest share of development income available through the manipulation of its labor camps.

The Reich Economic Professional Organization ultimately rejected DEST’s request, claiming that DEST was too big and would disrupt the competition in the market whatever

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the claims to the opposite might be. As a registered private concern, DEST had to follow the rules set up by the Ministry of Economics for other members of the organization. However, as a compromise, a flat-rate payment on earned revenue was suggested for DEST similar to that paid by the air transport industry.56 But even with this compromise, the Economic Professional Organization showed itself to be fully aware of DEST’s potential to achieve the aims that Himmler himself had envisioned: a substantial share in the building materials market.

DEST’s expansion and its consistent struggles with other administrations led in September 1941 to the reorganization and further rationalization of the HAVW. All concerns of the SS were placed in Amt W, the granite quarries and brickworks being assigned Amt W I under Salpeter assisted by Mummenthey. (Salpeter had been called up for war duty, so Mummenthey continued as the actual leader.) These changes were short-lived but important for the final manifestation of the SS economic administration in the form of the SS Economic and Administrative Central Office (Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt [WVHA]), founded in February 1942. The WVHA united the administrations of the SS Central Budget and Building Office (Hauptamt Haushalt und Bauten [HAHuB]) and the HAVW, forming one organizational entity for all administrative and economic concerns. Such a reorganization corresponded to the unprecedented plans for SS control over expansion and settlement in the east as well as the growing pressures for mass mobilization placed on the German war economy, particularly by the armaments industries. The reorganization was further a result of SS administrators still being optimistic about a potential post-war building market and plans proposed for their own massive institutional building needs in the post-war German order. With the rise in requests for forced labor from armaments industries as well as the expansion of SS enterprises, Pohl could now place the administration of these tasks under a prioritized and rationalized economic policy.57

This reorganization proved successful for increasing the ability of the SS to adapt to wartime economic conditions and simultaneously to extend its economic operations. Since Speer turned away from architecture after his appointment in February 1942 as Minister of Armaments and Munitions Production and head of the GBBau, he delegated most of his architectural duties to his staff.58 The important market planned for SS building materials–especially the state projects of Berlin, Nuremberg and Linz–appeared to be losing support from those planning the wartime economy. Hence, Pohl’s rationalization extended his ability to act in all areas of the SS use of forced labor and became crucial as the priority given to architectural policy crumbled in the face of mounting difficulties posed by the war. DEST was still an important component but only one of the myriad and expansive goals set by the WVHA.

In 1942 some monumental building project managers were still ordering materials and the perceived need for stone and bricks in the potential post-war building economy provided enough impetus for the continued development of DEST concerns. During 1942, the SS consolidated its hold on properties that it had previously leased or

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administered and took over the management of several new concerns. Stutthof, a camp outside of Danzig, was made an independent KL in April 1942 and two brickworks were purchased there and nearby at Hopehill. Stutthof concentrated on brick production, while Hopehill also produced roofing tiles and ceramic pipes. The gravel works at Auschwitz, administered by DEST since 1940, was bought outright in March 1942. DEST also acquired the private quarries at Marburg in February 1942, though they were never fully developed. Thus, 1942 continued to be a year of expansion and consolidation for the building materials concerns of the SS.59

DEST had a total turnover in 1942 of over RM 9.1 million, almost 7 million of which came from the production at the granite works alone. Still troubled by the reconstruction of the brickworks at KL Sachsenhausen, the holding company of the DWB absorbed over RM 1 million in losses. Negotiations were begun for setting prisoners to work on armaments production–at Oranienburg II, recycling of cable and machine parts; for Flossenbürg a Messerschmitt works; and Mauthausen inmates were put at the disposal of Steyr-Daimler Puch AG. However, this did not affect DEST enterprises. Their production remained focused on building materials, and above all stone. The SS maintained its building materials market orientation even to the point of displaying the various stones, brick and ceramic products at an industry trade fair in October 1942.60 Though most accounts of the KL system describe this year as marking a shift towards armaments production, the reorganization and expansion of SS enterprises indicates a consistent effort to maintain the DEST building material operations throughout 1942 even while the WVHA was shifting its organizational focus to armaments tasks under the impetus of Speer’s ministry.61

It was only in 1943 that the SS succeeded in changing the focus of production from building materials to armaments. Even then, however, DEST still attempted at every turn to expand and develop its building materials concerns. That the SS simultaneously promoted both armaments work and its own building materials firms this late in the war is indicated by a DEST audit report:

Actually, an analysis of the profit results shows that returns for 1943 and 1944, for

the most part, stem from the armaments production taken on by DEST in 1943.

But there is likewise no doubt that the profit situation also has improved beyond the

scope of the armaments business; for not only the works in which important

military products were made but also the works that have kept to their peacetime

production [e.g. granite quarries] show a favorable development of returns.62

Even though 1943 proved to be a year of restructuring for the entire forced-labor industry, the SS continued to hold on to a belief in the eventual usefulness of DEST building materials enterprises for architectural products.63

The change in emphasis from the production of building materials to armaments work came quickly but with uneven results in the various DEST enterprises. By the beginning of 1943 half of the planned new work at KL Neuengamme was finished and

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operating, raising the output from 4.3 million bricks in 1942 to 15.2 million in 1943. Notably, the majority of these bricks were of a very high quality, suitable more for the planned rebuilding of Hamburg than simply for the repair of bomb-damaged structures. It was not until the first air raids in Hamburg began in summer 1943 that the bricks from KL Neuengamme were used for reconstruction efforts. Up to that point, they had been saved for the eventual end of the war and continuation of the city’s redesign. Orders continued to be filled at KL Mauthausen, KL Flossenbürg and KL Natzweiler as well. Though by this time private quarries (unlike brickworks) were not consistently protected as a war- important industry, DEST quarries received and maintained exceptional status to continue their work throughout 1943. While 33 per cent of Flossenbürg’s c. 8,000 prisoners (including Soviets) were working for Messerschmitt by September 1943, 1,000 prisoners continued to quarry stone even in early 1944.64

By 1943, the issue of payment to the state to support forced laborers was again brought up and settled in an attempt to improve the output of what no longer appeared to be an unlimited inmate population. Though populations grew rapidly from c. 60,000 in all KL in 1942 to over 300,000 by the end of 1943, increased pressure was put on the camps by both top SS officials and external administrations (particularly Speer’s ministry, as well as the Plenipotentiary for Labor Allocation headed by Fritz Sauckel) to make forced labor more productive. Pohl, through an order of 30 December 1942, implemented a new payment support scale that ranged from the standard RM 0.30 per day to RM 2.50 per day depending on the classification of the prisoner. The order sought to obviate problems similar to those brought up by the Ministry of Finance in 1940: the appearance on the part of the SS of having excessive advantage over private firms, and disturbances of the market caused by its undercutting prices. This order changed the overall cost of support for prisoners in many of the camps. As many prisoners who lived through the experience attest, some advantages did accrue directly to them as a result (including allowing them to acquire small quantities of tobacco or receive extra food rations for heavy labor and armaments work in camp canteens) but these supposed advantages were sometimes fictitious or irregular at best. Yet, for the majority, their labor did change from the murderous production of building materials to the relatively more valued armaments tasks.65

Although little expansion took place during 1943 in the capacity of the DEST works to direct output towards the monumental state and Party projects, fewer cutbacks in this area were made than the historical literature suggests. While in 1943 much of the remainder of concentration camp labor was turned towards armaments production, the DEST works still produced their highest turnover yet with almost RM 9 million coming from the granite quarries alone. Revenues for DEST also remained high for the first half of 1944, totaling c. RM 6.6 million.66 However, by 1944, the development of DEST’s building materials business was almost entirely stopped. The quarries filled only a few orders and had been idle for the most part, while the brickworks continued producing for air-raid shelters and for the eventual rebuilding of bomb-destroyed cities. Whereas a large clay deposit was purchased in summer 1944 at Zehlendorf for brick production at KL

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Sachsenhausen, an attempt to buy a quarry previously leased by DEST for KL Flossenbürg was put of until the end of the war.67

Yet even the total mobilization of DEST and the other KL concerns for the war economy was short-lived, as the organization of the camps came under increased pressure with the advance of the Soviets on the Eastern Front. By January 1945, KL Stutthof had been evacuated as had other eastern camps, sending thousands of prisoners on a murderous march west to camps like Flossenbürg and Mauthausen or leaving them to die along the road.68 The orientation of DEST economic enterprises at the concentration camps to the architectural projects of the Party and state could not compete with the total mobilization of the German economy by 1943. As a producer of building materials, DEST quickly faded away, for the military defeats eroded its basis of support in state contracts for the monumental building economy.

What is evident from this institutional overview of DEST is that the SS interest in the production of building materials was subject to the political pressures on the building economy beginning as early as 1936 and extending into the crucial war years. As an important economic sector of pre-war and wartime Germany, the building economy itself was integrated into the developing political economy of the state. But as long as this political economy could be adapted and expanded to include the variable needs of monumental state architectural projects, the pre-war development of DEST around high- quality granite concerns and brickworks could continue. Further, these concerns could be extended during the war due to the increased control of new numbers of forced laborers sent to the concentration camps as a result of military operations. Only in 1942–3 did DEST administrators reluctantly give up this politically determined advantage of controlling the largest labor force of any building materials concern in the German economy. However, just as the wartime setbacks undermined Hitler and Speer’s pursuit of architectural construction so too did these wartime conditions promote a further militarization of the German economy including that of the building industry. The results of this institutional development would prove crucial for the day-to-day life of the prisoners in the key forced-labor camps geared to the production of building materials for DEST.

PRODUCTIVITY AND PUNISHMENT AT THE DEST STONE QUARRIES

Having analyzed the development of DEST in relation to monumental architectural policy and the militarized economy, the question remains as to how these developments were affected by the punitive policies implemented in the camps themselves. Because the granite quarry concentration camps were more dependent than the brickworks on the monumental Party and state projects, an analysis of the two major DEST quarry camps– KL Flossenbürg and KL Mauthausen– indicates most clearly how the economic goals of the SS amounted to an architectural policy. It also indicates the extremely variable results

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of those economic goals. Once the first stages of camp construction and development were completed, both quarry systems became active in producing stone for local and state needs. From 1938 to at least mid-1943, the majority of forced labor performed by the prisoners was devoted to the production of building materials for DEST. Because of the increased flow of prisoners to the camp, the SS was least concerned about the conditions of laborers in this period. Thus, the number of work-related injuries and deaths in the forced-labor concentration camps remained high while DEST pursued its interests in the building materials economy. Output rather than maximization of labor potential remained the primary criteria for the abuse of labor. The productivity of that labor was won not at the expense but as a result of the camp’s main function of punishing the inmates. The political practice of policing the prisoners was significantly influenced by the economic policy of productivity.69

KL Flossenbürg and KL Mauthausen (Figures 4, 5) were the fifth and sixth concentration camps set up in National Socialist Germany, after Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and (at that time) Lichtenburg. On 24 March 1938, Eicke, Pohl and the building engineer Hubert Karl (SS-Verwaltungsamt) visited the land around Flossenbürg and then Mauthausen. The group decided in favor of both sites for the formation of new concentration camps, above all because of the available granite. In the case of Mauthausen, an additional justification for its location near Linz was the purported need to employ the expected number of new prisoners resulting from the annexation of Austria on 12 March 1938. By 30 March 1938, the Gauleiter for Oberdonau, August Eigruber, triumphantly spoke of the honor Austria had received in being allocated its own concentration camp in a speech picked up by the international press.70

KL Flossenbürg originally included three leased quarries with a fourth acquired in 1941, all near the camp itself. The total planned output was 12,000 cbm (cubic meters) of stone a year, 90 per cent of which was to be architectural quality stone while only 10 per cent was to be for street building material. The stone consisted of coarse-grained blue-gray and gray-yellow granite of an average grade. KL Mauthausen was made up of three quarries, all acquired or leased in 1938: Wienergraben immediately outside of the camp complex and leased from the city of Vienna; Kastenhof, also a leased quarry but several kilometers from the camp; and Gusen, the land of which was partly leased and partly purchased from the local quarry firm Poschacher and also far from the camp. The granite was blue-gray, fine-grained and of a higher quality than that of Flossenbürg, though only 42,000 cbm of the planned output of 290,000 cbm a year was suitable for high-profile architectural projects.71 Since the quarrying industry by definition was heavily reliant on labor-intensive work, achieving such fantastic production goals for both camps would require the effective organization of thousands o f i n m a t e s . T h a t t h e p o l i t i c a l f u n c t i o n o f t h e c a m p w o u l d , o n t h e o n e

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hand, hinder economic effectiveness (through a focus on physical and arbitrary punishment) while, on the other, guarantee control over a large productive labor force did not at the time appear to DEST administrators as a contradiction.

Hitler’s and Speer’s aesthetics and the massiveness of the ceremonial building projects secured the market for Flossenbürg and Mauthausen granite and its production in quantity. Granite and stone in general had been favored by Hitler even as early as Mein Kampf (1925). In his book, Hitler contrasted the worthy endurance of stone monuments of the past with the plaster and temporary tenements and department stores “of a few Jews” in the Weimar Republic. German architects and architectural administrators had argued long before Hitler for the ideological significance of stone, even if what, exactly, stone architecture signified was disputed. Hitler’s favored projects posed no less of a contradiction in that stone buildings

Figure 4 WATCH TOWER AT KL FLOSSENBÜRG, c. 1940 (present condition) Source: Author

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could be discussed simultaneously in terms of an imagined reference to Greek society (and, hence, Aryan racist roots) or to Roman precedents (emphasizing a comparison of the contemporary German “empire” with those of the past). But whatever the ideological significance, the importance of certain kinds of stone remained a dominant feature of Hitler’s aesthetic commitments and, by extension, a key symbolic component of the German building economy. Because the aesthetic preferences of Hitler and Speer determined the materials chosen for the building projects of the “Führer Städte,” the blue-gray granite at each DEST quarry could easily serve these projects. This aesthetic also guided the further purchase of quarries at KL Gross-Rosen and KL Natzweiler.72

But the organization and institutional socialization of camp personnel, from the commandant to the guards, worked against the efficient production of stone to fulfill the aesthetic choices of state and Party architecture. Particularly apparent was the contradiction between the economic goals set out by the trained management personnel of DEST’s central office and the emphasis placed on punishment by commandants and guards who had worked their way through the ranks of the Death’s Head Squad under Eicke’s Dachau model. From the beginning, Dachau was known for its random physical abuse of prisoners, a characteristic that was common to concentration camps during their entire period of existence. In the camps, Himmler took care that the punishments would be controlled by SS personnel, away from the interference of the Justice Ministry but also outside of the control of DEST. At Dachau, Eicke early on instituted a standard hierarchy of punishment and an organization of the camp administration that remained relatively constant until the end of the war and de-emphasized an efficient use of forced labor. The use of forced labor was subject to the approval of the commandant, though the camp administration as a whole remained under the authority of the central SS office in Berlin.73

The hierarchy of the camp administration indicated the potential means by which the prisoners would be punished and also made productive. Those who determined the

Figure 5 SOUTHWEST FAÇADE OF KL MAUTHAUSEN, c. 1942 (present condition) Source: Author

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lives of the prisoners were organized in the five departments of the inner administration. First was the Kommandantur, including the commandant who was responsible for both the guards and the overall camp administration. After the organization of the WVHA in early 1942, commandants were also meant to manage the economic enterprises at the camps. At both Mauthausen and Flossenbürg, however, management of the works remained mostly under the control of the DEST administrators even after 1942. The second department of the camp was the Political Division controlled by the Gestapo and responsible for the registration of new prisoners and any release of so-called reformed inmates. The camp administration made up another division (including the camp building engineer) and the camp doctor formed a fourth division.74

The fifth section, the Protective Custody Camp Leader (Schutzhaftlagerführer), supervised the economic function of the camps. The Schutzhaftlagerführer had the most immediate and direct control over each prisoner’s life and was therefore central to the effectiveness of the forced labor in the camps. Because of the size of the camps, more than one person frequently led this division. The Schutzhaftlagerführer oversaw the work assignments as well as the Block leaders and the Commando leaders, who were responsible for the prisoner Kapos. Kapos were directly chosen from the prisoners and held accountable for the inmates under their control. Till 1943, Kapos were invariably German criminals used by the SS to ensure that most day-to-day punishments would be conducted by the inmates themselves. The orders from the central offices of DEST in Berlin went directly to the Schutzhaftlagerführer, then were carried out in the quarries through the work assignments. This process allowed for much abuse of the system, as the Schutzhaftlagerführer was rarely held responsible for any deaths or injuries to the prisoners on the job as long as the assigned task was done.75 This division of the camp thus embodied the dual goal of the organization of forced labor for economic production and the oppression of the prisoners. While the emphasis on punishment denied the efficient maximization of labor it did not preclude the possibility of productive forced labor used to achieve DEST’s economic goals. In this sense, work and the destruction of prisoners were related goals of DEST managers and on-site SS personnel.

But how did this organizational emphasis on production and punishment work in practice at Flossenbürg and Mauthausen? Of the two camps, Flossenbürg opened first at the end of April or early May 1938. The initial Commandant was SS-Sturmbannführer Jakob Weiseborn, who committed suicide in January 1939 and was replaced by SS- Obersturmführer Karl Künstler. Künstler, a career soldier, directed the camp from May 1939 to August 1942 in its most active period of development and success in granite production. However, after a drunken brawl in April 1942, he was strongly censured by Pohl and Himmler at which point he entered the Waffen-SS division Prinz Eugen to fight at the front. He was replaced in September 1942 by the Commandant from Natzweiler, SS-Sturmbannführer Egon Zill. Zill proved ineffectual in his duties, however, and was replaced in April 1943 by Max Koegel who had been trained, like many, at Dachau. The Schutzhaftlagerführer, SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Aumeier, also came from Dachau and

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performed well enough at Flossenbürg to be sent to Auschwitz in the same role at the end of 1941. He was replaced by SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch who held the post till March 1944. The work leader for the DEST quarries was SS-Mann Max Schubert, who was replaced in January 1942 by SS-Obersturmführer Alois Schubert.76 The socialization of these men was varied, from rural to urban, lower class to middle class, and reflected the general heterogeneity of the SS. However diverse their backgrounds, though, the administration of Flossenbürg provided them with an opportunity to achieve their personal, political or ideological goals by punishing inmates and making them productive.77

At the end of April 1938, the first prisoners arrived from Buchenwald and were used to build the camp and prepare the stone quarries. Prisoners were sent from Dachau between May and July, from Buchenwald between August and November, and from Sachsenhausen in late November, bringing the total to 1,500 inmates by the end of 1939. The initial work led by Schubert at the stone quarries was heavy labor with primitive tools, since the modernization of methods did not occur until 1940–1. The clearing of the camp site itself and the construction of necessary buildings for the prisoners also occupied much of the initial stage of forced labor. By the end of 1939, enough of the quarries had been cleared for stone orders to begin.78

At Mauthausen, the SS administration was changed less often and the quarries themselves started production for outside contracts earlier than was the case at Flossenbürg. The camp opened under the command of SS-Sturmbannführer Albert Sauer, who lasted only until April 1939. His post was taken over by SS-Sturmbannführer Franz Ziereis, an SS member trained at Dachau, who remained Commandant until the liberation of the camp. Ziereis had been a career soldier since 1924 and was praised by his superiors for his seemingly organized development of the camp. At times, Mauthausen, because of its size and many subsidiary camps, had three Schutzhaftlagerführer, the most important for the quarries being SS-Hauptsturmführer Georg Bachmayer, who oversaw much of the granite production after he came to the camp in January 1939. The DEST work leader was a certain SS-Hauptsturmführer Spichalsky, replaced in March 1941 by a civilian Otto Walther, who entered the SS only in June 1944.79

The camp began operations at the end of May 1938 or the beginning of June, when the first work teams were sent from Dachau and began construction on the site. Unlike Flossenbürg, where the majority of prisoners were transported from other camps before the war, Mauthausen quickly received prisoners from Germany and Austria directly. The prisoners were also categorized by occupation as early as March 1939, facilitating the distribution of work duties by the Schutzhaftlagerführer though by no means guaranteeing a rationalized assignment of labor. In 1938, the work at the camp concentrated on the construction of the facilities; the quarries did not begin their full operation until 1939. Between January 1939 and the end of the year, the number of prisoners working in the quarries rose from 400 to 1,066, reaching c. 40 per cent of the total population. As with Flossenbürg, the work began with arduous manual labor that only later included the use of modern machinery.80

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Until the outbreak of war, the prison populations at Flossenbürg and Mauthausen were, for the most part, those defined above. With the coming of the war, however, the prison populations increased exponentially as Germany’s territorial expansion began in earnest, supporting the optimism of DEST’s leaders. Non-German prisoners arrived in KL Flossenbürg for the first time in April 1940, including Czech students and intellectuals as well as Poles, the latter group making up the largest percentage of non-German prisoners. At least since mid-1940, the SS sent some German, Polish and Czech Jews to the camp, who were subjected to especially cruel treatment. By the time Himmler enacted his order of October 1942 sending any remaining Jews to Auschwitz or Lublin, only twelve Jews remained at Flossenbürg to be transported to the death camps. Most Jews sent to Flossenbürg were either executed immediately or died within the first week through abuse while they labored. This situation did not change until 1944 when the necessity of mobilizing labor for armaments also included Jewish labor for Flossenbürg. Receiving similar treatment, 2,000 Soviet prisoners of war were sent to the camp in October 1941, kept in a special section to themselves and not included in the general SS camp registration lists. By February 1943, the camp held 4,004 inmates (not including Soviet prisoners of war) and reached its highest population during the death marches in February 1945 with c. 11,000.81 Camp populations reflected the military advances of the German army through Europe and the Soviet territory as well as the expanded authority of the SS to control ever larger groups of people.

The concentration camp population at Mauthausen was somewhat different from that of Flossenbürg. As of May 1940, 2,674 German and Austrian prisoners remained at Mauthausen, this number rising in Mauthausen-Gusen to 14,838 by March 1943. Foreign prisoners began arriving in early summer 1940 and, as with Flossenbürg, Poles formed the largest national group that was not German/ Austrian. Almost to a person, Polish nationals were placed in the worst work commandos, including site-clearing in the quarry. Mauthausen also received major transports of Soviet prisoners of war, beginning with 2,000 in October 1941, who were given the most difficult work assignments. Soviet prisoners of war totaled 5,000 by early 1942, of whom only 80 were still alive by March. Unlike at Flossenbürg, another national group almost as large as the Poles was formed by exiled Spanish Communists and Republicans, trapped in France after the German invasion in 1940. The Spanish were rounded up and sent to various concentration camps beginning in early 1941. Around 8,000 arrived at Mauthausen in that year, only 1,600 of whom were still alive at the end of the war. French political prisoners, picked up in the “Night and Fog” action on 7 December 1941, formed a significant segment of the population before 1943. Until 1940, Jews made up an even smaller percentage of the population than at Flossenbürg; the first Jew registered in the SS records was a gay man from Vienna who died in the camp in March 1940. Jewish transports began arriving in greater numbers in 1941, the majority of whom came from Holland. Of the 900 incarcerated, only eight were

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still alive in December.82 Compared to Flossenbürg, Mauthausen became a center for the internment and punishment of a higher percentage of political prisoners from the variety of SS arrests and actions throughout the occupied territories.

Punishing prisoners was inseparable in the early war years from the development of SS economic policy. Of the five camps existing at the beginning of the war in which economic concerns played a significant role, Flossenbürg was the first and most consistent in producing development income from forced labor. Though the quarries had been worked from the opening months of the camp, it was not until January 1940 that orders began to be filled and deliveries to be made (see Table 1). In 1940–1, the most consistent stone orders were for the rebuilding efforts in Berlin, guaranteeing contracts for camp production as long as architectural policy was still a priority at the state level. In November 1940, stone-mason workshops set up to train prisoners also began providing limited amounts of cut stone for the Party Rally Grounds at Nuremberg, another privileged wartime project. The four quarries and stone-mason training program remained in full production until the first quarry was closed and its workers turned towards the manufacture of armaments in May 1943.83 DEST goals had to be constantly modified due to wartime economic and military conditions. Nevertheless, DEST could pursue its interests through the attachment of its Flossenbürg enterprises to major state architectural commissions and the extension of production to include stone-cutting to adapt to the German building economy.

Production was, of course, successful in these years for DEST because it was based on the exploitation of a camp labor force that, at this stage in the war, seemed unlimited to the SS administrators. While the guards of the Death Head’s

Table 1: Comparison of known stone production at KL Flossenbürg and KL Mauthausen, 1940–2

Source: DEST Annual and Monthly Reports, BA, NS3/341; NS3/1347.

1942 1942

FlossenbÜrg Mauthausen Total 1940

FlossenbÜrg Mauthausen Total 1941

FlossenbÜrg Mauthausen Total 1942

Total 1940-2

1940 1940

1941 1941

production year

2,897.924 1,017.932 3,915.856

2,848 2,635.951 5,483.951

1,690 (June-Dec) 1,111.248 (June-Dec) 2,801.248 (June-Dec)

12,201.055 (minimum)

production in cubic meters

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Squad were bent on punishment as an end in and of itself, DEST managers saw punishment as the means of guaranteeing productivity. The contradiction of killing laborers used simultaneously to create an economic empire was maintained as long as the SS continued to increase its political authority over prisoners in the early war years.84

DEST’s unwillingness to address the conditions of labor during this period meant that both intentional and unplanned injuries and deaths occurred frequently in the stone quarries. Stone quarrying itself was extremely labor intensive, even with the use of machinery, exposing workers to dangerous working conditions where being injured was a constant reality. In addition to the conditions of stone quarrying, the punitive agenda of the guards and the oversight of brutal Kapos resulted in random abuse, ill treatment and frequent beatings used to make the laborers work harder. Further, the brutal weather conditions of the winter months and the lack of basic nutrition or health care were conditions faced regularly in the camp, setting one prisoner against the next in a struggle for survival. Quarry commandos were not only seen as the worst possible job by the prisoners, because of the arduous work and conditions, but they were used as well to carry out reprisals against prisoners especially during Künstler’s command. Even the camp doctor, SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr Schmitz, remarked in a memo to the Commandant and Schutzhaftlagerführer in June 1940 that the seemingly accidental injuries to prisoners in the quarries had reached unendurable proportions. This was a situation not in the interest of production or of “the people as a whole” (notably, the doctor is not interested in the individual good of the prisoner).85 Prisoners marked for punishment were often forced to carry exceedingly heavy stones on their backs from the quarries to the camp at the end of a day, collapsing with fatigue or dying with heart failure from the exertion. Such activity did not stop in the stark winter of 1939/40, when temperatures dropped to -30º Celsius and work was only halted when fog or the depth of the snow made guarding the prisoners difficult. In this period, very few prisoners were exempted from working in the stone quarries. When dysentery broke out at the same time, the quarry was closed for a month but the prisoners received little medical attention; the camp was simply quarantined and, as soon as the epidemic was over, the prisoners were back in the quarries.86 Yet because of the control over more prisoners (particularly from the occupied territories) in these years, camp administrators still managed to maintain and even increase levels of productivity, in spite of the destructive conditions of labor.

By mid-1940, cranes and machines had been purchased to improve output as the DEST administration demanded an increase of stone production to an eventual 12,000 cbm a year (a comparatively huge amount of stone; note that the major commission of the New Reich Chancellory used 5,000 cbm).87 To secure this increase, the DEST work leader Max Schubert encouraged the destruction of physically exhausted or injured prisoners. With these persons out of the way, he could use the fittest laborers until they, too, gave out under the strenuous work program. Schubert and other on-site personnel viewed productivity and punishment as the same goal. At the end of 1940, conditions of some prisoners improved with their induction into a training program as stone-masons that

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included 400 inmates by March 1941. Conditions also changed slightly after Künstler was replaced by Zill in 1942 and the Commandant was required by the WVHA central offices to be the manager responsible for the production of the DEST concern. But the effort to increase output at any cost led to the continued abuse of the prisoners. Finally, by February 1943, when the camp numbered around 4,000 (not including Soviets) and the first 200 prisoners were taken from the DEST concern to work for Messerschmitt, labor conditions seemed to improve.88 Punishment of inmates by using them to fill orders for the architectural projects of the Party and state was on the wane.89

Unlike Flossenbürg’s reliance on the Berlin projects, Hermann Giesler and Roderich Fick’s monumental redesign of Linz, for which production at KL Mauthausen was initially designated, remained only in the planning stages. Stone was not ordered for this project from the camp in central Austria. However, as with other camps, DEST administrators and the work leaders adapted by taking advantage of other architectural commissions during the war and attempting to link their production to important state projects. Even more so than at Flossenbürg, this was done at great expense to the lives of the prisoners. Heydrich had designated the camp for individuals not intended to be released and this, along with Mauthausen’s size, led to correspondingly worse conditions, while punishment and work in the quarries resulted in the highest mortality rate of any of the labor camps.90

Production in the three stone quarries of Mauthausen began in earnest by October 1939, when orders were already being filled. By 1940, the quarry at the subsidiary camp of Gusen was producing so much that barracks were set up for the prisoners there rather than losing an hour of productive work by having them walk the 3 kilometers to and from the main camp. Gusen established itself as the quarry where most of the architectural quality stone was produced. Kastenhof and Wienergraben produced some stone, though the majority of their output was used for roads and rough building materials. In 1940–1, Mauthausen quarries noticeably increased their output although production totals were below the planned improvement to 3,500 cbm (see Table 1). Nevertheless, the quarries showed a significant gain for DEST during wartime.91

Work continued throughout 1941, abetted by the increase in the number of prisoners sent to the camp since the beginning of the war. In Wienergraben alone, 3,844 prisoners were working by May 1942, though the number was reduced in 1943 to 4,800 in all three quarries. Modern machinery had been brought in to expedite production by 1940, and the training of prisoners as stone-masons began in February 1941. The SS also enlisted specific prisoners designated as specialized skilled labor such as draftsmen and architects from other camps to help with the stone-mason work in 1941. In 1942, DEST purchased more machinery as iron contingents were procured from the GBBau under Todt, probably through the influence of Himmler and Speer. In the same year, DEST began planning to fulfill a potential contract for the rebuilding of Linz although no stone seems ever to have been quarried directly for this project. Orders remained plentiful, though complaints were frequently made by the DEST work leaders of insufficient transportation opportunities

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due to the necessities of war and the need for more prisoners. By March 1943, however, the armaments industries had begun to dominate production interests.92

The continuation of production during these years at KL Mauthausen, as at Flossenbürg, was dependent on the abuse and exploitation of prison labor. After the war began and production increased in the quarries, the life expectancy of the prisoners dropped to an average of six months from the time they entered the camp. The influx of huge numbers of prisoners before this date meant that the SS did not deem necessary any correction of the work conditions as long as production continued to rise. In 1940, Polish prisoners were sorted out for special punishment in the quarries, as were the Spanish partisan fighters. Soviets were also designated for almost immediate execution, though Himmler issued an order as of 15 November 1941 that this should not take place if they were physically able to work in the quarries. However, they, like the Spanish, the Polish and the political prisoners, were inevitably assigned the most arduous tasks in the stone quarry.93

Many survivor testimonies describe the actual type of labor and abusive actions that took place in the quarry during the development of the SS economic enterprise. They make clear that the day-to-day punishment in the quarries both inhibited efficiency as well as compelled productivity. For example, Milos Vitek, a university professor sent to Mauthausen in 1941 on charges of revealing information about the armaments industry and attempts to support Spanish partisans, stated:

On the steps [into the quarry], the Block Leader began to lay into the last five

[prisoners in line]. These five, evading the punches, threw the row going in front of

them to the ground and the entire group of a hundred formed a tangle of bodies in

the stone quarry into which the Kapos struck with clubs. As the quarry was worked in

wooden shoes, we lost them repeatedly in the confusion and had to work the whole

day barefoot. We Czechs and also the Jews were used mostly for the most difficult

work in the Special Commando for Milling, where stones were broken up and which

stood under the leadership of the Kapo Nagel. But also with Ritter, Willi Steiner or

Bertl it was not better. It was here an awful struggle for the preservation of life,

where the person suffered hunger, was weak and was almost dead from exhaustion

and, in spite of this, must work, as otherwise he would be beaten. During the summer,

we were on our feet up to 16 hours, working daily 10 to 12 hours and the rest we

spent at the roll call. Often also at night we were “exercised”. So shattered, we lay

down at night. . . . The work hours appeared to us endlessly long and indeed when it

concerned a very difficult job, we measured the time in minutes. The duration of our

lives numbered in weeks.94

Vitek’s testimony indicates the way certain groups were selected out for the hardest work and how the quarry could be used as a general site for the SS to punish or destroy.

Yet by late 1942, the decimation of the prisoners had become a cause of concern to SS administrators who then carried out several orders designed to ameliorate the conditions

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Chapter 2: The Monumental Building Economy

under which the prisoners worked. However, these orders were given as a means of increasing output not as a means of maximizing the labor potential of the prisoner. With the move to armament production, conditions were changed and the prisoners grudgingly accorded some improvements. These changes included the limited ability to acquire goods (instituted in December 1943) and a slight improvement of health and nutritional conditions. Yet, increasing productivity still did not guarantee respect for the condemned prisoner’s life, only his labor. For example, an experiment run on 370 inmates from December 1943 to July 1944 intended to see which of three different diets kept prisoners alive and working longest. Results indicated that the normal prison meal with 30 grams of a complex B-Vitamin food was best for the “prisoners employed in the camp.” While the outcome was used to increase work, 116 inmates who participated in the experiment died in the process including seventeen fed the supposedly better meal. For this experiment, the life of the inmate in general was of no concern but rather the productive capacity of the laboring inmate in scientific nutritional terms became the priority. Productivity was reduced to a medical and numerical problem that was independent of the oppression faced by individual prisoners.95 The punishment of the inmates remained a priority even while the SS searched for methods to increase productivity.

In both camps there were multiple ways in which these prisoners died or were killed, intentionally and accidentally, by SS personnel and through the planned conditions of the concentration camps themselves. Undernourishment killed the most prisoners in the forced-labor camps, ahead of epidemics and disease. Suicide was also prevalent for prisoners who could no longer stand the physical or psychological punishment, though often such supposed suicides as running into the electric fences surrounding the camps were people cajoled into death by the SS men in charge. By 1939, the average of deaths in the camps stood at more than one per day; by 1942, that number had risen in Mauthausen to almost forty per day. At least 14,293 people died in the camp that year.96

Though these averages reflect the intentionally brutal living circumstances of the work camps in general, the quarry camps had significantly more deaths associated directly with the working conditions than did the brickworks. Thus, death at Mauthausen and Flossenbürg often came together with the orientation of the camp economy to the architectural projects of the Party and state. About 10 per cent of the approximately 30,000 deaths at KL Flossenbürg and 25–30 per cent of the 113,575 at KL Mauthausen can be accounted for in the period from 1938 to 1943. These percentages seem low only because the vast majority of deaths at the camps occurred in the last few months of the war when the SS was herding inmates in from the east in huge numbers (with hygienic conditions deteriorating even further). From 1938 to late 1944, however, these percentages were high in relation to deaths recorded after armaments work was begun in 1943.97

In these years, the stone quarries were significant in contributing to the conditions that led to physical and psychological breakdown or that exposed inmates to the vagaries of the SS and its designated Kapos. It was not without reason that, in both camps, a prisoner feared being assigned to the stone-quarry work details of DEST, for it implied

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The Architecture of Oppression

almost certain death. In the early stages of the war, the symbolic importance of Hitler’s building programs could be maintained at the expense of the prisoners’ lives. Work conditions were at their worst precisely in those years when DEST policy regarding the production of building materials was being most consistently developed and implemented. Before 1943, the forced-labor conditions at Flossenbürg and Mauthausen indicate the connection of architectural policy to the political function of the camps through the SS pursuit of an economic empire. A productive use of forced labor, the quarrying of high-quality granite and the punishment of prisoners were complementary goals even if they conflicted in practice. In spite of the SS guards’ practical disregard for DEST management ideals, the process of punishment led to a level of productivity that sustained SS hopes in developing forced-labor operations through their connection to the monumental building economy.

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