The conditions of the camps killed prisoners as effectively as the gas chambers, only more slowly. The two principal causes of non-violent prisoner death were starvation and disease, and the two were closely related: a starved prisoner had no resistance to typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis or any of the other diseases endemic to the camp environment. The SS understood this and built it into the design of the camp regime. The conditions were not neglect. They were policy.
The water supply
Camps had limited and intermittent running water. Prisoners had access to a few standing taps, often shared between hundreds, and the water was frequently contaminated. The SS prohibited prisoners from drinking from the taps and provided a daily ration of an ersatz herbal tea or coffee that could be drunk safely. Prisoners often drank from the taps anyway because the official ration was insufficient. They got sick from the water.
The water for washing was even more limited. Most prisoners could not wash properly, ever. The SS issued a daily morning ration of perhaps ten seconds at a tap, with no soap, no towel and no privacy. Personal hygiene was effectively impossible. Lice multiplied unchecked. Bedbugs colonised every barracks. Survivors describe the constant itching as one of the defining background sensations of camp life.
The sanitation
The latrines were communal pits with wooden boards across them. There were not enough latrines for the prisoner population. Use was permitted only at fixed times, usually morning and evening. Prisoners suffering from dysentery, who needed to use the latrine constantly, faced a choice between fouling themselves where they stood and being beaten by an SS guard for leaving their work column without permission. Many fouled themselves. The smell in the barracks at night, with hundreds of dysentery cases lying in their bunks unable to control themselves, is described by every survivor who writes about the camps.
The camp authorities provided no sanitary supplies whatsoever for women. Many women stopped menstruating after a few weeks in the camp because of the starvation and the stress, but those who continued to menstruate had no way of managing it. They tore strips from their uniforms, used straw, used leaves, and washed themselves with the rationed water at the few moments they could. Those who could not adequately manage it were beaten by guards for being filthy.
Typhus
Typhus was the principal epidemic disease of the camps. It is transmitted by body lice, and the camp lice population was effectively limitless. Outbreaks killed prisoners by the thousand. The Bergen-Belsen typhus epidemic of late 1944 and early 1945 killed around 30,000 prisoners in three months and was still going at the moment the British liberators arrived; another 14,000 prisoners died of it in the weeks after liberation, despite British medical intervention.
The SS response to typhus outbreaks was usually to seal off the affected barracks and let the disease run its course. Sometimes the affected prisoners were killed in mass executions to stop the spread. The SS also used typhus as a justification for the disinfection routines on arrival, the shaving of all body hair and the showers, which the prisoners were told would keep them safe from infection. The disinfection was real and partly worked; the typhus protection was real for the SS men, who were vaccinated, and not for the prisoners, who were not.
Dysentery and cholera
Bacterial dysentery and cholera both spread through the camp water and food supply. Prisoners with dysentery dehydrated rapidly and died within days if untreated, which they almost always were. The Birkenau camp in 1944 was reported to have a continuous low-level dysentery outbreak that killed around a hundred prisoners a week as a baseline, with major spikes in summer.
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis ran constantly in the camp population. The combination of malnutrition, overcrowding, cold, and continuous exposure to coughing fellow prisoners produced an environment in which TB rates rose to several times the normal civilian population rate. A prisoner with active TB had perhaps a few months to live. Many of the deaths recorded as starvation in the camp registers were in fact deaths from tuberculosis triggered by the starvation.
The medical infirmaries
Each camp had an infirmary, the Krankenbau or Revier, where sick prisoners could nominally seek treatment. The infirmaries were staffed by Jewish doctor-prisoners, often distinguished medical men in their pre-war careers, who treated their fellow prisoners with whatever they could improvise. The infirmaries had almost no medicines, no proper equipment, and very limited authority. They were also a focus of SS selection: when the camp population needed thinning, the SS would visit the infirmary and select the worst-off patients for the gas chambers. Going to the infirmary was therefore a serious risk: a sick prisoner might be saved, or might be killed for being sick.
The bodies
The death rate in the camps in normal periods was around five to ten per cent per month. In bad periods, particularly in the final winter, it was much higher. The bodies were collected each morning by the prisoner work details and carried to the crematoria. The Sonderkommando handled the bodies of the gas chamber victims. The Leichenkommando, the corpse work details, handled the dead from the barracks. By the spring of 1945, in camps that had been overwhelmed by evacuations from further east, the dead were lying in piles unburied because the crematoria could not keep up. The photographs taken by Allied liberators at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald in April 1945 show what this looked like.
What the conditions tell us
The conditions described above were not the result of a system overwhelmed by circumstance. They were the result of design. The food rations were calculated. The water shortage was deliberate. The latrine arrangements were chosen. The exposure of prisoners to typhus and TB was a known consequence of the housing arrangements and was not corrected because the deaths it produced were useful to the regime. The Holocaust was not only the work of the gas chambers. Most of the prisoners who died in the camp system died slowly, of conditions designed to kill them.
Sources
- Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015
- Joanne Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp, Routledge, 1998
- Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, Basic Books, 1986
- USHMM: Conditions in the Camps