Flossenbürg, a camp of terror

By Paul R. Bartrop, Professor Emeritus of History, Florida Gulf Coast University

By the winter of 1936-1937, the SS State that was being constructed in Nazi Germany was becoming more and more established, with permanent structures built along tightly constructed and organized lines. Across Germany, the administration of concentration camps had been consolidated under a government body known as the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, running the entire apparatus under centralized control. This meant nothing other than the institutionalization of the concentration camp as part of the overall social system.

Earlier, in 1935, the camp at Oranienburg — not far from Berlin — had been terminated to make way for a new one a few miles away at Sachsenhausen, which was finally instituted in September 1936. The month of August 1937 saw the establishment of a large camp at Buchenwald, near Weimar, and for nearly a year thereafter, there were just four camps in all of Germany: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and a camp for women at Lichtenburg. The first three of these camps blanketed most of Germany. Sachsenhausen covered north Germany and Berlin, Buchenwald guarded the socialist heartland of Thuringia, and Dachau served Bavaria and the south.

In the spring of 1938, a new camp was built at Flossenbürg, in northeastern Bavaria, not far from the Czech border, together with Mauthausen, near Linz, which opened immediately after the Nazi invasion of Austria on March 12 that year.

Flossenbürg camp was situated outside a village of the same name. The surrounding area had large deposits of granite, which Nazi economic planners anticipated could be quarried using forced labor from the camp once it had been built and the inmate population settled on a proper footing.

Flossenbürg’s main camp received its first prisoners — 100 individuals from Dachau — on May 3, 1938, 85 years ago this month. Administered by the SS, the camp was first designed to be a prison for German men who were considered “asocial” as well as for repeat criminal offenders. It was not intended to be a camp for Jews and, in fact, it was not until 1944 that Jews were sent to Flossenbürg in any numbers.

Having been established in May 1938, by the end of the year, the prisoner population had grown to about 1,500.

In early 1940, after the start of World War II, Czech and Polish prisoners, among them captured resistance fighters, began arriving at the camp. By the end of 1941, Flossenbürg had a prisoner population of 3,150; an additional 1,750 Soviet prisoners of war were housed in a separate compound. More political prisoners and resistance fighters arrived during 1942 and 1943 from France, Germany, the Soviet Union and the Netherlands.

Inmates worked in the quarries as originally intended but, as the war progressed, more were put to work in German aircraft factories and other SS-operated installations nearby. Nearly 100 subcamps were erected to accommodate these workers, all under the Flossenbürg umbrella.

Before August 1944, perhaps only 100 Jews had been imprisoned at Flossenbürg, but from the start of that month, Jews, mainly from Poland and Hungary, began to be sent to camp. By January 1945, at least 10,000 were concentrated there, while in the winter of 1945 another 13,000 Jews flooded Flossenbürg and its subcamps. Many had been forcibly moved from camps in the east as Soviet troops pushed German forces westward. By now the camp’s population had swelled to nearly 40,000, including some 11,000 women. It peaked at 53,000 (with 14,500 in the main camp) in March 1945.

Conditions were horrific. Meager food rations, lack of proper sanitary facilities and virtually no medical care doomed thousands to death from starvation, disease and overwork. Beatings and harsh punishments killed hundreds of others, and the more senior inmates, most of them habitual criminals who had been locked up for years, preyed on newer detainees. Rape and sexual exploitation were commonplace, and the corrupt camp administration did nothing to stop such activities.

The mortality rate at Flossenbürg, while never reaching the levels seen at other death camps, was nonetheless shocking. In 1941, more than 1,000 Soviet prisoners of war were executed there. That same year, 500 Poles were shot dead and, in March 1945, 13 Allied prisoners of war, including an American, were hanged. These deaths did not include the thousands who died in other ways; the total number who died at Flossenbürg and its subcamps is estimated to be about 30,000 (of whom 3,515 were Jews), out of a total of 97,000 who had been in the camp at one time or another.

In April 1945, as United States troops closed in on Flossenbürg, the Nazis ordered an immediate evacuation of the entire camp complex. All ablebodied prisoners were sent on a forced march toward Dachau; those unable to undertake the journey were shot or left for dead. At least 7,000 prisoners died in this process, principally by starvation and exhaustion. When Flossenbürg was finally liberated on April 23, U.S. troops found just 1,500 people, many of them by now wracked by hunger and disease and barely alive.