Nazi Death Camps and C.S. Lewis

Emily, Me and Cliff

Since 2017, I have visited sixteen different Nazi death camps in Germany, Poland, Czechia and France.  A few of them twice.  I have also visited Holocaust memorials including Yad Vashem and the Deportation Memorial in Paris on the same island as Notre Dame Cathedral.  Since 1977, I have read all the works of C.S. Lewis, many of them several times.  When I visited death camps, it is with a mind very much formed by Lewis’s view of the world.  Lewis did not write about the camps or the Holocaust, but he has given me the ability to tour the camps and learn the details of the torture and murder committed in these places and maintain my sanity. 

The three books in particular are in the back of my mind if not in conscious thought when I visit Nazi death camps. They are The Four Loves, The Great Divorce, and The Screwtape Letters. The first death camp I visited was Auschwitz-Birkenau.  In 2017, I rode a bicycle to the city of Oswiecim from Belgrade the continued on to Lviv, Ukraine. I learned from reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder that Auschwitz was the center of industrial murder of Jews. Lviv was the place where the Nazis did almost nothing. Residents of the city raped, robbed and murdered all the Jews in the city and disposed of the bodies.  My intention was to see the worst sites of the Holocaust. Then I flew to Israel and visited Yad Vashem.  I returned to Europe and spent a week with my best friend. He and I were roommates in Wiesbaden, West Germany, in the Cold War US military in the late 1970s.  I left the Army and went to college. Sgt Cliff Almes upon discharge joined the land of Kanaan Lutheran monastery in Darmstadt and became Bruder Timotheus. 

In the years since my first visits in 2017,  Cliff and I visited death camps together.  It was wrenching to go alone, but with Cliff, we could discuss what we saw afterwards.  In The Four Loves Lewis says the posture of friendship is side-by-side, sharing the same journey.  Cliff and I went to a dozen death camps together and also spent a week in Israel. Lewis says facing a hard task together is much better than facing it alone. (He also says shirking is best done with companions.) On our most recent journey Cliff and I were joined by a mutual friend who was deployed to Poland and got a four-day pass to join us.  I taught ESL with Emily a decade ago in Lancaster. She visited Kanaan in 2019. In 2020 she joined the Army and became a combat medic. She was running a medic team in Poland.  The three of us went to the Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno and Majdanek death camps.  A pair of friends can always be joined by another.

Every death camp different. Many people asked me why go to so many death camps? Because each death camp is unique. While the ultimate goal was death to the Jewish people and all deemed unfit to live by the Nazis, each camp was run differently.  In Auschwitz-Birkenau more than a million Jews from all over Europe were murdered: gassed or worked to death. It was also a huge slave labor camp.  Some inmates lived more than a year and survived their terrible confinement. Treblinka, by contrast, was death machine.  Trains ran back and forth from Warsaw to Treblinka.  Those on the train were murdered on arrival, and another train rolled in. More than 800,000 were murdered in just two years. Another contrast in these camps: Treblinka was hidden from view in a remote forest.  Auschwitz is right in the city of Oswiecim. One of the strangest things about visiting Auschwitz is hearing the church bells.  The Catholic Church is adjacent to the camp.

The camps were all run by human beings.  As I see the barracks, the gas chambers, the cremation ovens, the kitchens, the latrines, the guard towers, the work rooms, I see places that were run by men and women who had eternal souls.  The people who ran the camps were not another species of evil beings, they were no different from us in substance, just different in the way they chose to live their lives.  I am aware that choice is limited in a totalitarian regime, but there was resistance.  German police were mobilized in thousands to murder Jews with gunshots and shove them into mass graves.  Some few refused. They were allowed other duties. Lewis made clear there are no ordinary persons. We are all eternal. Including murderers of innocents. Someday they will join the queue for the tour bus.  If they board they will travel to the edge of Heaven and a victim of their crimes will make the long journey to offer them forgiveness.  How many will heed that offer?

Which brings me to the bespeckled embodiment of Nazi evil. A failed Austrian salesman with a talent for logistics who joined the Nazi Party in Germany soon after Adolph Hitler took power because he needed a job.  Adolph Eichmann became a Nazi official and by 1935 was organizing the deportation of Jews from the Reich. In an irony of obeying orders, Eichmann saved the lives of thousands of Jews by deporting them.  Many Jews wanted to leave but could not navigate the approvals necessary. Eichmann organized a large arena where all the agencies were under one roof, completing all the paperwork in a day or two.  The Jews he processed lost all their property but escaped with their lives. 

 When the Nazis invaded Poland, Eichmann was on hold for two years from late 1939 until early 1942 when the Final Solution became Nazi policy.  The same Eichmann who got Jews out of the Reich used his same logistic skill to round up Jews and send them to death camps. Eichmann took three million Jews from their homes and sent them to death camps.  He was efficient and thoughtless.  Screwtape, the mid-level bureaucrat in the lowerarchy of Hell does what his Father Below orders.  As I visit camps, I look at the rail sidings, the offices, the barracks, and feel the presence of clerks doing their jobs. Reading and rereading The Screwtape Letters I was amused by the wit that assembled these advice letters to Wormwood.  But the evil hovers there.  Eichmann was a small and vain man. When he did his job well he bragged and expected praise.  He would fit perfectly within Screwtape’s world. 

My friends Bruder Timotheus and Sergeant Emily Burgett are with me at Belsen, Treblinka, Buchenwald and all the other camps helping me to navigate the near-infinite evil of these camps. And C.S. Lewis is there also.

 

Mittelbau Dora--The Death Camp That Made V-2 Rockets

 Mittelbau-Dora, located near Nordhausen in central Germany, was one of the most brutal and technically driven camps in the Nazi system. Established in late 1943 as a subcamp of Buchenwald, it became an independent concentration camp in October 1944. Its creation was tied directly to Germany’s desperation in the later years of World War II, as Allied bombing made above-ground weapons production increasingly vulnerable.

The camp’s central purpose was the underground manufacture of V-2 rockets, the so-called “vengeance weapons” developed under Wernher von Braun’s program. Production was moved into a vast network of tunnels carved into the Kohnstein mountain. Prisoners—drawn from across occupied Europe—were forced to excavate, expand, and work within these tunnels under horrific conditions. Unlike camps designed primarily for extermination, Mittelbau-Dora was a labor camp, but the distinction is misleading. The labor itself became a method of mass death.

In its early phase, prisoners were not even housed in barracks. They lived and slept inside the tunnels where they worked, without sunlight, adequate ventilation, sanitation, or sufficient food. The air was thick with dust, chemicals, and smoke. Disease spread quickly. Exhaustion was constant. Those who could not keep up—through illness, injury, or simple collapse—were beaten, executed, or sent to other camps to die.

By the time the camp was liberated in April 1945, more than 60,000 prisoners had passed through the Mittelbau system, including its many subcamps. An estimated 20,000 died. Many were Soviet prisoners of war, along with Poles, French, Dutch, and other European detainees, as well as political prisoners and resistance members. Jews were also among the victims, though the camp’s population was more mixed than extermination camps like Auschwitz.

The irony at Mittelbau-Dora is stark and enduring. The V-2 rockets produced there represented one of the most advanced technological achievements of the war—an early step toward spaceflight. Yet they were built through conditions of almost unimaginable human degradation. More people died constructing the rockets than were killed by their use.

When American forces approached, the SS evacuated much of the camp, sending prisoners on death marches. Those who remained were liberated on April 11, 1945.

Mittelbau-Dora stands as a reminder that the Nazi system was not only about ideology and extermination, but also about the ruthless exploitation of human beings in service of technological ambition. It is a place where modernity and barbarism existed side by side—indistinguishable in practice.

Another sad example of Nazis making money on slave labor is Flossenburg.

Sachsenhausen Nazi Death Camp.

Sachsenhausen occupies a grim but central place in the Nazi camp system. Located just north of Berlin near the town of Oranienburg, it was established in 1936 as a model concentration camp—designed not only to imprison enemies of the regime but to demonstrate how the entire terror apparatus was meant to function. Unlike Auschwitz or Treblinka, Sachsenhausen was not primarily built as a mass extermination center, but it became a central node in the machinery of murder, forced labor, and bureaucratic control that made the Holocaust possible.

Because of its proximity to Berlin, Sachsenhausen took on a special role. It housed many political prisoners, resistance figures, and high-profile detainees, including German dissidents, foreign politicians, clergy, and later Allied prisoners of war. Just as important, it was the administrative and training hub for the SS-run camp system. The SS Inspectorate of Concentration Camps was headquartered nearby, and Sachsenhausen became the place where guards were trained and procedures standardized. What was learned here—how to break prisoners, how to organize forced labor, how to manage mass death—was exported to camps across occupied Europe.

Sachsenhausen was also a killing site in its own right. Tens of thousands of prisoners died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, beatings, and execution. In 1941, the camp was used to murder at least 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, many shot in a specially constructed execution facility known as Station Z. Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others deemed “undesirable” were imprisoned and killed here. While it did not have the industrialized gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sachsenhausen had gas vans, shooting installations, and crematoria designed to process bodies efficiently.

The camp’s layout itself reflected Nazi ideology. Prisoners’ barracks were arranged in a fan shape around a central parade ground, allowing guards in a single watchtower to survey the entire compound. This was not accidental. Sachsenhausen was built as a demonstration of how surveillance, discipline, and terror could be made architectural. The prisoner was never meant to escape being seen—or being controlled.

Sachsenhausen’s role in the broader death-camp system was therefore structural as well as lethal. If Auschwitz was the industrial heart of genocide, Sachsenhausen was part of its brain. Procedures for registration, punishment, labor deployment, and extermination were refined here before being implemented elsewhere. The men who ran Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz often trained in or passed through Sachsenhausen.

When Allied forces closed in during 1945, tens of thousands of Sachsenhausen prisoners were forced on death marches westward; many died along the roads. Those left behind were liberated by the Red Army in April 1945. The site later became a Soviet special camp, where thousands more prisoners died, adding another tragic layer to its history.

Sachsenhausen is the place where bureaucratic murder was organized, tested, and perfected—a reminder that genocide does not begin with gas chambers, but with offices, training programs, and men who learn how to make cruelty efficient.

 

Natzweiler: The Only Nazi Death Camp in France

 

Natzweiler-Struthof was the only major Nazi concentration camp built on French soil, perched high in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace. Its location was chosen for two reasons: remoteness and a nearby granite quarry the SS wanted to exploit. 

What emerged in May 1941 was a camp that combined relentless forced labor, starvation, sadism, and a series of medical crimes that still stand among the worst of the era.

Unlike the Operation Reinhard death camps, Natzweiler was not designed solely for extermination, but death was everywhere in its daily operations. Prisoners—political detainees, resistance fighters, Jews, Roma, homosexuals, “asocials,” and later evacuees from camps farther east—were driven up the mountain and packed into steeply terraced barracks. The camp clung to the hillside in rows, with the crematorium and punishment cells at the bottom and the commandant’s quarters at the top, symbolizing the hierarchy the SS enforced. Winters were brutal; winds cut through the wooden barracks, and temperatures regularly dropped well below freezing.

Labor was the core of Natzweiler’s system. The quarry sat just below the camp, and prisoners were forced to haul massive granite blocks up and down slopes so steep they later defied reconstruction. The work was designed to break bodies. Fatigue, crushed limbs, and fatal falls were common. As the war went on, the SS expanded the camp into a nerve center for dozens of satellite labor camps—KZ Aussenstelle Walldorf among them—supplying slave labor for weapons plants, synthetic fuel projects, tunnel systems, and airfields. Prisoners were treated as expendable material; when one died, another transport filled the gap.

Natzweiler also became a site for medical atrocities. Under the direction of SS doctors such as August Hirt of the Reich University of Strasbourg, prisoners—especially Jews—were selected, murdered, and dissected for a planned anatomical collection. Others were subjected to experiments involving poison gas, vaccines, and exposure to infectious diseases. The most appalling episode was the murder of 86 Jewish men and women specifically selected and transported to Natzweiler, gassed in a small chamber, and sent to Strasbourg for “research.”

Conditions in the camp deteriorated sharply after 1943. Crowding worsened as transports arrived from across occupied Europe, including evacuated prisoners from Auschwitz, Dachau, and other camps threatened by the advancing Allies. Starvation rations, contaminated water, and rampant disease meant the death rate climbed steadily. Guards and Kapos enforced discipline with arbitrary beatings, hangings, and torture in the bunker cells.

By September 1944, with American forces nearing Alsace, the SS began evacuating Natzweiler. The main camp was abandoned on September 1, but the system of satellite camps continued operating deep into 1945. Prisoners were shipped eastward to Dachau, Allach, Buchenwald, and other collapsing camps, where many died in transport or in the chaotic months before liberation.

When U.S. troops entered Natzweiler shortly after its abandonment, they found a site battered but largely intact: crematorium, execution walls, the gas chamber, and barracks still clinging to the slope. Unlike Sobibór or Treblinka, Natzweiler could not be erased.

Today the camp is a memorial complex with the original crematorium preserved, the terraced layout still visible, and exhibitions inside reconstructed barracks. Its location—high on a mountain ridge with sweeping views—stands in stark contrast to the brutality once practiced there. That contrast underscores the truth at the heart of Natzweiler: beauty of landscape offered no protection against human cruelty, and even the most remote place could be turned into a factory of suffering.

KZ--Aussenstelle Walldorf Labor Camp

 

KZ-Außenstelle Walldorf was one of the lesser-known but brutally efficient satellite camps of Natzweiler-Struthof, created during the final phase of the war when the Nazi regime was desperate to fuel its military projects. It operated for less than four months—August to November 1944—but in that short time it chewed through the lives of 1,700 Jewish women, most of them Hungarian, most of them transported from Auschwitz after surviving earlier selections. Their purpose in Walldorf was simple and merciless: build the runways and service roads for the jet-fighter aircraft the Nazis hoped would save them.

The camp was set up in the forest near the village of Walldorf, just south of Frankfurt am Main, and only a few kilometers from the expanding Frankfurt Flughafen. The Luftwaffe and the SS had designated the area for a major construction project: hardened, extended runways capable of handling the Messerschmitt Me 262—the world’s first operational jet fighter. The Me 262 required long, reinforced surfaces for takeoff and landing, and Germany needed them fast. The women brought to Walldorf were the expendable labor force to make that happen.

The prisoners arrived in August 1944 after a chaotic transport from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Many had already survived the annihilation of the Hungarian Jewish community earlier that summer. They were marched under guard into a fenced-off patch of forest, where crude barracks, pit latrines, and watchtowers had been thrown together. SS-Männer and female guards (Aufseherinnen) ran the camp with the usual mix of indifference, violence, and daily humiliation. Food was minimal: watery soup, scraps of bread, and occasional ersatz coffee. Disease, starvation, and exhaustion were constants.

Every day the women were marched several kilometers to the airport worksites. There they hauled gravel, broke stone, pushed overloaded wheelbarrows, mixed cement, and laid the foundations for runways and taxiways. The work was bone-shattering—ten, twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day. They labored in heat, rain, and cold, under the whip and rifle butt of overseers. Collapse meant a beating. Repeated collapse often meant being removed from the work detail and left to die in the camp infirmary, which had neither medicine nor heat. The SS distinguished between those still “useful” and those who were no longer worth feeding.

Despite everything, the camp did not collapse into total chaos. Prisoners tried to help each other, shared scraps of food, and kept each other alive however they could. A handful survived simply because the camp’s lifespan was so short. By late November 1944, Allied air attacks on Frankfurt intensified, and the Me 262 program was unraveling. The SS shut down Walldorf, forced the surviving women on a death march, and dispersed them to Ravensbrück and other camps.

Roughly 50 of the original 1,700 women lived to see liberation.

The runways they built remained in use after the war; the airport grew around them. For decades almost no one spoke about Walldorf. Only in the 1990s did serious research and survivor testimony bring the camp back into public memory. Today a memorial marks the forest clearing—a reminder that even the world’s first jet fighters were built on the backs of starving, brutalized women dragged from Auschwitz and worked to the edge of extinction.

The Majdanek Nazi Death Camp--Horror in Plain Sight

 

Majdanek was unlike any of the other death camps we visited on this trip. The others were hidden in the woods, operating in secret.  This camp, built on the outskirts of Lublin—so close to the city that streetcars once ran within sight of its fences—was never hidden. The chimneys of its crematoria, the rows of barracks, the watchtowers, all stood in plain view of civilians. Unlike Sobibór or Treblinka, where almost nothing remains, Majdanek endures as one of the most complete and chilling physical testimonies of the Holocaust.

Construction began in October 1941, originally as a prisoner-of-war camp for captured Soviet soldiers. But by 1942, under Operation Reinhard, Majdanek was expanded into a full-scale concentration and extermination center. It became both a labor and death camp—part of the machinery of genocide that included Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Jews, Poles, Soviet POWs, and political prisoners from across occupied Europe were imprisoned here. Estimates of the dead vary, but at least 78,000 people—about 60,000 of them Jews—were murdered at Majdanek between 1941 and 1944.

The camp covered nearly 700 acres, divided into six large prisoner fields surrounded by double barbed-wire fences and dozens of guard towers. Within those fences stood barracks built for 50 but often crammed with hundreds, their wooden walls soaked with lice, disease, and despair. Prisoners were forced into brutal labor—building roads, sorting belongings from the murdered, maintaining the camp itself. For many, starvation, exposure, or random execution preceded the gas chambers.

Majdanek’s gas chambers still stand today. They were small, primitive structures with steel doors and blue stains left by Zyklon B pellets. Nearby is the crematorium, where bodies were burned on open grates or in brick ovens. When the Soviets liberated Majdanek in July 1944, they found everything largely intact—records, canisters of gas, mountains of shoes, and thousands of unburned corpses. The Nazis had not had time to destroy the evidence. It was the first major camp liberated, and the world saw immediately what the Germans had done. Soviet journalists and Allied investigators documented the site within days; photographs of the crematoria shocked even those already aware of Nazi atrocities.

The most horrific single event at Majdanek was “Operation Harvest Festival” (Erntefest), on November 3, 1943. In a single day, 18,000 Jews were shot in trenches outside the barracks to the sound of loudspeakers playing music to drown out the gunfire. It was the largest single-day massacre of Jews during the entire Holocaust.

Today, Majdanek remains almost eerily preserved. The barbed wire still coils along the perimeter, and the long rows of barracks line up against the Lublin skyline. At the far end of the camp stands a vast concrete mausoleum containing the ashes of victims—gray, powdery, and exposed beneath a dome that reads: “Let our fate be a warning to you.”

Unlike the hidden forest camps, Majdanek confronts the visitor directly. It is not a place reclaimed by silence, but one where the machinery of death remains visible—rusted, weathered, and undeniable. Its proximity to the living city of Lublin serves as both accusation and memorial: a reminder that genocide can unfold not in remote secrecy, but in plain sight.

The Sobibor Nazi Death Camp

Sobibór, deep in the forests of eastern Poland near the Bug River, was one of the most secret and lethal of the Nazi death camps. Built in the spring of 1942 as part of Operation Reinhard—the codename for the systematic extermination of Polish Jewry—it functioned solely for mass murder. Between April 1942 and October 1943, an estimated 250,000 Jews were killed there, most from Poland, and others from the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, and France. Unlike Auschwitz, Sobibór had no vast complex or barracks for slave labor. It existed for one purpose: to kill as efficiently and invisibly as possible.

The camp was divided into three sections. Camp I held the SS staff quarters and workshops; Camp II served as a reception and sorting area for those arriving by train; Camp III—surrounded by tall fences and thick forest—contained the gas chambers and mass graves. Victims were transported in sealed freight cars that arrived directly at a small rail spur leading into the camp. Deceived into believing they had reached a transit station for “resettlement in the East,” deportees were forced to undress in a so-called “undressing yard.” 

Men, women, and children were then driven down a fenced and camouflaged path cynically called the Schlauch (“tube”)—a narrow, 150-meter corridor leading straight to the gas chambers. There, carbon monoxide from an engine killed hundreds at a time. Their bodies were first buried in mass pits, later exhumed and burned on open pyres to erase evidence.

In October 1943, the prisoners staged one of the most remarkable revolts of the Holocaust. Led by a group of Jewish inmates that included Soviet POW Alexander Pechersky and Polish Jew Leon Feldhendler, the plan was both desperate and daring. They secretly armed themselves, lured SS officers into workshops and killed them quietly, and then cut through the perimeter fences. When the alarm sounded, hundreds of prisoners made a mad dash across the minefields and into the woods. About 300 escaped, though most were recaptured or killed. Fewer than 50 ultimately survived the war.

After the uprising, Heinrich Himmler ordered Sobibór dismantled. The gas chambers were torn down, the ground plowed over, and trees planted to disguise the site. Only faint traces remained—railway embankments, bits of concrete, scattered bones in the sandy soil. For decades, Sobibór seemed to vanish into silence.

Today, that silence has been reclaimed as sacred ground. The entire area where the murders and burials took place is now blanketed with thousands of white stones—a sea of pale, uneven rock that both shields and reveals. The stones make it impossible to walk casually over the killing fields. They serve instead as a physical barrier between the living and the dead, a quiet admonition never to tread on the graves. Seen from above, the stones gleam like bleached bones, marking the outline of a place where civilization broke apart.

At Sobibór there are no buildings to tour, only absence and the memory of what happened there. The forest presses close again, as it did in 1942, but the stones ensure that this time, nothing is hidden.