The SS officers who ran Nazi Germany’s concentration camps demanded entertainment, and they found it in the most brutal way imaginable: by using the prisoners themselves. Between 1933 and 1945, more than a hundred camps spread across Europe became places where political opponents, Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and those deemed social outcasts were stripped of their identity and humanity. The camps were built to eliminate threats to the regime, and the Nazis justified their cruelty as a necessary struggle against moral resistance. But beyond the systematic killing, forced labor, and torture lay another hidden layer: pleasure.
For the guards, the camps became places of recreation, and the prisoners became objects for their amusement. Boxing was one of the most valued forms of entertainment within these walls of hell. Heinrich Himmler, the SS leader and architect of the Final Solution, believed that keeping his guards’ morale high was essential and encouraged sporting activities to achieve it. The Nazis had long used boxing as a propaganda tool, celebrating German champions like Max Schmeling and using their victories to reinforce theories of racial superiority.
In the camps, SS officers identified potential fighters by consulting inmate files or asking prisoners during interrogations whether they had ever boxed. Some prisoners lied and claimed they had, only to be soundly defeated by those who actually knew the sport. Young Perez was a French Jew born in Tunisia who became world middleweight champion in 1931. In 1943, the Nazis arrested him in France for not wearing the yellow star and sent him to Auschwitz Monowitz.
His captors recognized him, and despite his battered body, they could see he had been a disciplined athlete. The guards asked him to give a private demonstration, laughing as he showed them his best moves. He was allowed to train for several days and given extra rations to rebuild his strength. He then fought an SS guard in a three-round bout and won, and he defeated another opponent afterward, an inmate named Paul Steinberg.
The guards watched with admiration, enjoying the spectacle of a world champion performing amid the horror they were inflicting. Other boxers met similar fates. Tadeusz Pietrzykowski, a Polish bantamweight runner-up, fought between forty and sixty bouts in the main camp at Auschwitz between 1941 and 1943. He defeated several German heavyweights, including his own kapo, making him the camp’s most famous champion.
He was applauded by the same Nazis who tortured him during the day. At Mauthausen, a Spanish Republican named Segundo Esparza, known as Paulino, fought every Sunday at the request of the SS camp commandant. He became known as the brave and undefeated boxer of Mauthausen, defeating even powerful SS soldiers who dared challenge him. For Paulino, fighting was his only hope of staying alive, though it did not spare him from the daily mistreatment endured by all prisoners.
Music was another form of entertainment the Nazis forcibly extracted from their victims. Hitler loved classical music, and his officers often pretended to share his taste. In 1942, the director of the Neuengamme concentration camp requested a piano, an expensive instrument that contrasted sharply with the camp’s otherwise limited spending. But the SS were content with simpler instruments too.
Harmonics and accordions were common in the camps, played by both prisoners and guards. Polish inmates who still had strength in their arms played the accordion, and SS officers would gather to listen. Unable to recruit professional musicians, the Germans improvised orchestras from prisoners, who performed for free in exchange for extra food rations. In Auschwitz, the first prisoner orchestra began playing in January 1941, and concerts were held every Sunday on the esplanade behind block 24, a brothel where Nazi soldiers indulged their sexual appetites with prisoners forced into prostitution.
The musicians’ melodies of Beethoven, Schubert, Bach, and Wagner drowned out the moans of the women being assaulted inside. Buchenwald established the second prisoner orchestra, where musicians, especially female prisoners, received extra rations and even brandy in exchange for their services. They played South American melodies alongside the classical repertoire requested by their executioners. The orchestras became so successful that industrial camps within the Auschwitz complex began forming their own.
Coco Schumann, a young German pioneer of swing music, was imprisoned at Theresienstadt and then deported to Auschwitz. He survived because he was popular with the soldiers, who asked his orchestra to play his classic song “The Dove” to reassure prisoners as they walked toward the gas chambers. The German swing hit became the pre-death melody heard by hundreds of Jews. In the Buchenwald women’s camp, a Jewish prisoner named Alma Rosé conducted an orchestra organized under the direction of chief supervisor Maria Mandl, performing two concerts a week.
The group began by playing instruments seized from murdered Jews. Rosé was so highly acclaimed that she once shushed two guards who were talking during a concert, a gesture that could have cost her her life. But she was too important to the soldiers’ leisure, so they spared her. The SS also enjoyed board games.
Commandants and local directors submitted requests for chess, checkers, card games, and strategy games, which were all the rage in Nazi families. Games of every kind were delivered to the barracks, with Skat, an old German card game from Thuringia, proving the most popular. Tarot also gained popularity, as the Nazis, despite their outward Catholicism, were drawn to esoteric practices such as astrology, alchemy, and theosophy. Prisoners were sometimes invited to test their skills at chess and checkers.
Ukrainian prisoners recruited by the Waffen-SS were particularly skilled and often defeated SS officers, who regarded them with suspicion, secretly believing the Ukrainians were more intelligent than themselves. When a member of a supposedly inferior race won, it ran directly against Nazi propaganda, and matches sometimes ended in savage beatings when the outcome went against the executioner. Soccer was also a means of survival. Many SS soldiers exercised to compensate for the long hours they spent standing in watchtowers, and they viewed sport as a way to mobilize men through collective effort.
Throughout the war, SS teams played in championships against nearby organizations such as the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht. From 1942 onward, the Nazi war machine relied increasingly on slave labor, and Himmler believed it was not a bad idea to give prisoners a little rest on Sundays so they could produce more. Many prisoners attended the matches, and some even played. Footballers were imprisoned alongside the boxers, including Saturnino Navazo, a Spanish Republican arrested in France and transferred to Mauthausen.
When the Nazis discovered who he was, they kept him slightly better fed in exchange for training them in football. His talent earned him a transfer to the kitchen, where he lived somewhat better and even saved the life of a Jewish boy from Frankfurt, adopting him as his son toward the end of the war. The matches often took place in extremely precarious conditions. They were not always played eleven against eleven, and sometimes the players used balls made of rags.
Prisoner teams were formed according to nationality or trade, with teams of carpenters, cooks, and cleaning staff. The SS enjoyed playing football among themselves and forced prisoners to attend and applaud. They also enjoyed watching starving prisoners struggle through games. Some prisoners fainted in the middle of a match and were dragged away by their arms because the football show had to continue.
One of the most infamous examples of the Nazis’ hidden obsessions was Ilse Koch, known as the Bitch of Buchenwald, a fanatical Nazi, sadist, and murderer. With her angelic appearance and curly red hair, she caused a sensation among her SS comrades. She joined the Nazi party in 1932, met Himmler in person, and married Karl Koch, one of his principal deputies, a colonel at Sachsenhausen already regarded as one of the cruelest and most brutal officers. Prisoners said he liked to punish them with a whip fitted with razor blades and enjoyed torturing people with hot irons.
The couple settled in Buchenwald, where Ilse asked her husband to build a vast estate just a few meters from the camp so she could indulge her dark appetites. Within its walls, they held group orgies in rooms lined with mirrors. By day, Ilse set hungry dogs on pregnant prisoners and laughed at the spectacle. At night, she held orgies involving as many as twelve women at once, with her husband’s subordinates taking part, compelled by their fear of her.
Her depravity knew no bounds. She waited bare-chested for new prisoners arriving at Buchenwald, making sexual remarks and placing their hands on her body, then lashing them with her whip if they dared to look at her. On April 11, 1945, a young American soldier named Abner Ganet came across a row of lockers at Buchenwald and found delicately shaped lamps painted with butterflies and birds. When he touched one, he began to vomit.
The lamps were made from tightly stretched human skin. Ilse Koch appeared behind him and asked whether he thought they were beautiful, showing no shame or regret, only pride. She owned a handbag made from the same material and collected human heads of murdered prisoners, keeping more than twelve on display in her living room, chemically shrunk to smaller than normal size. She was particularly interested in tattoos.
In her house, American soldiers found photo albums showing prisoners’ tattoos, compiled by one of her lovers, SS doctor Erich Wagner. It was said she asked her husband to kill all the prisoners Wagner had photographed so their tattooed skin could be used to make decorative objects and clothes. One prisoner claimed she had made panties from tattooed human skin. Children were not spared.
Some SS guards enjoyed beating Jewish children against walls while their imprisoned mothers watched in despair. Others were brutally beaten to death for stealing food from camp officials. But the most macabre story is that of Eva and Miriam Mozes Kor, twin sisters who became the favorite playthings of Josef Mengele, known as the Angel of Death. Sent to Auschwitz with their family in 1944, the fourteen-year-old twins fell into his hands.
Mengele believed that discovering the secret of twin reproduction could help Germans reproduce quickly and populate Eastern Europe. He treated the children well at first, greeting them with chocolates, then scanned their bodies to determine whether they were suitable for his experiments. He tied the twins by their arms, restricting their blood circulation until they passed out, injected chemicals into their eyes, and administered more than five injections into other parts of their bodies. Prisoners described how the children approached Mengele eagerly, but every time they left his experimental barracks, they emerged crying and screaming.
The Angel of Death came out with a smile from ear to ear, whistling a classical melody, having taken pleasure in his martyrdom of Jewish and Roma children. The brothel at Mauthausen was the first of its kind, established to entertain the camp’s insatiable guards. It operated in barracks one and in a building at the Gusen subcamp. Thirty-five German women of humble origins passed through it, recruited in the expectation that they would soon be liberated.
Instead, the brothel became a hell for them even as it satisfied the sexual appetites of the SS killers. Some prisoners were allowed to enter as well, but Jews and Soviet prisoners were excluded. The privilege was enjoyed by Austrians, German political prisoners, and Frenchmen, many of whom sought a moment of companionship rather than sexual relations. Communist prisoners selected to spend a night with one of the women were the most likely to refuse, urging their comrades not to exploit the sexual slavery of the women.
The SS soldiers forced some women to be with more than five Germans in a single day. The Nazis created concentration camps to remove their enemies from society and exploit them as slave labor for the war economy. But they soon realized that prisoners could also serve as objects of their darkest pleasures. The guards needed leisure, and what better way to satisfy that need than by using people they had already dehumanized.
They entertained themselves with boxing exhibitions, soccer matches, card games, musical orchestras, and brothels. They even used prisoners as raw material for the grim decoration of their homes. In the concentration camps, the Nazis demonstrated that the deepest horror inflicted on a human being can be accompanied by the pleasure, enjoyment, and leisure of those who perpetrate it.