Agent of Grace

Hitler charged Heinrich Himmler with carrying out the "Final Solution" - the Nazis' plan to rid Germany of all Jews and other political undesirables. A master of terror, Himmler was more than adept at carrying out his assignment. The "Final Solution," in part, included concentration camps that practiced genocide on a daily basis. Follow this link to a report on the camps, originally authored by an S.S. general.

Unspeakable horrors occurred in concentration camps. Some were nothing more than places of execution where innocent people were exterminated because of race or political status. At other camps prisoners performed backbreaking work - slave labor - and even those camps had crematoria.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was now a political undesirable. Initially sent to Buchenwald, a German camp northeast of Frankfurt, Bonhoeffer was soon transferred south to Flossenburg, the concentration camp nearest Nuremberg. Flossenburg inmates either toiled in a nearby Messerschmidt plane factory or labored at a stone quarry.

Crammed inside flimsy barracks, as many as 1,500 people tried to live with some shred of dignity. Nearly 4,000 people had to use the same outside latrine. Most did not feel the heat of the single stove located at the end of each building.

Eight hundred S.S. troops ran Flossenburg. Camp officials piled into supply rooms the clothing of prisoners who could not survive the harsh conditions.

Like most concentration camps, Flossenburg had a crematorium and a courtyard where prisoners were shot. It also had a working gas chamber. In the last 14 months of its operation, about 14,000 people died at Flossenburg.