Hitler's First Victims

by Timothy W. Ryback

  The shooting of four men in a failed escape from the Dachau Concentration Camp must have struck Hartinger’s Roman Catholic sensibilities as particularly unfortunate, coming as it did just two days before Good Friday and amid an appeal by the archbishop of Munich and Freising for an Easter amnesty. “In the name of, and on behalf of, the Bavarian bishops, I have the honor, Your Excellency, to extend the following request,” the stately and imperious Cardinal Faulhaber had written Bavaria’s Reich governor on April 3, “that the investigation procedure for those in protective custody be expedited as quickly as possible in order to relieve the detainees and their families from emotional torment.” Faulhaber expressed the desire that the detainees could be home in time for the Easter weekend, reminding the governor that there was no occasion more sacred to Christians than the Eastertide. “If because of time constraints the investigations cannot be completed by Good Friday,” Faulhaber proposed, “then perhaps out of pure Christian and humanitarian grounds, an Easter amnesty can be granted from Good Friday until the end of Easter.” The cardinal reminded the governor that in December 1914 Pope Benedict XV had invoked a Christmas armistice that stilled weapons on both sides of the front. What worked in a time of war must certainly work in peacetime, was the suggestion. Indeed, the previous month Chancellor Hitler himself had stated that his “greatest ambition” was to “bring back to the nation the millions who had been misled, rather than to destroy them.” What better way to instill a sense of national loyalty than through a gesture of Christian clemency on the holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ? In this deeply Catholic corner of the country, when the archbishop of Munich and Freising, the oldest and most powerful of the state’s bishoprics, spoke, the vast majority of Bavaria’s four million Catholics listened, and on this occasion so did its political leadership.

  A week later, the state interior minister, Gauleiter Adolf Wagner, responded on the Reich governor’s behalf.*2 “Most Honorable Herr Cardinal, I have the honor of responding to your letter to the governor of April 3, 1933,” he wrote, “to inform Your Eminence that we are in the process of reviewing the cases of everyone currently in detention, and that by Easter more than a thousand individuals will be released from protective custody.” Wagner conveyed additional good news. The state government would permit Easter Mass to be celebrated among those practicing Roman Catholics who remained in detention as long as it did not constitute “a burden to the state budget.” Wagner recommended that “the responsible religious authorities should be directly in contact with the administration of the individual detention camps, whom I will provide corresponding instructions as to how to deal with this matter.”

  But now, amid heartening news of the Easter amnesty, came news of the deaths at Dachau. The call to Hartinger that Thursday morning was conducted in conformity with Paragraph 159 of the Strafprozessordnung, or Criminal Procedure Code, which required police officers “to report immediately to the prosecutor or local magistrate” any case in which “a person has died from causes other than natural ones.” Paragraph 160, in turn, obligated Hartinger to take immediate action: “As soon as the prosecutor is informed of a suspected criminal act, either through a report or by other means, he is to investigate the matter until he has determined whether an indictment is to be issued.” In compliance with his Paragraph 160 responsibilities, Hartinger called Dr. Moritz Flamm, the Munich II medical examiner, who was responsible for conducting postmortem examinations and autopsies in criminal investigations.

  Hartinger liked Dr. Flamm. Both men had previously worked in Munich I, Hartinger as an assistant prosecutor and Flamm as a part-time assistant medical examiner. Like Hartinger, he was a man of keen intelligence who had earned perfect grades in school. And like Hartinger, Flamm was a man of sterling professionalism. Flamm autopsies were models of precision and efficiency—not a moment wasted, not a detail overlooked. Often thirty pages in length, they could withstand the most rigorous scrutiny in a court of law. Flamm was particularly proficient in bullet wounds. He had completed his medical training at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in July 1914, just in time to join the 2nd Bavarian Infantry Regiment. He was dispatched to the front in August 1916 with the 3rd Medical Company, where he served meritoriously, earning an Iron Cross, the Bavarian Military Order, and the Friedrich August Cross. “Particularly noteworthy is his absolute reliability and his medical professionalism that make him, without question, suited for any type of service,” the company surgeon had commented after the war. “At the front [Flamm] became virtually indispensable as the situation with medical supplies deteriorated,” he wrote, “all the while demonstrating a seemingly inexhaustible dedication to his work.” The surgeon observed that Flamm was notably “modest” and “by nature rather sensitive,” but possessed of intelligence, sound judgment, and humor even “in the most desperate situations.” The surgeon said he had come to know in Flamm a physician “for whom one can only wish full and well-deserved recognition and in good conscience can provide unqualified praise.” Flamm’s handwriting, precise and refined, with playful, elegant flourishes, reflects his calm and easy competence.

  Flamm also demonstrated a fierce independence and willingness to act on his conscience when circumstances demanded. In the spring of 1919, amid a failed Bolshevik coup that saw thousands taken into protective custody—with and without cause—he exercised his authority as chief physician of a military hospital to order the release of two patients who were being detained on suspicion of collaborating with communists. Flamm was accused of Bolshevik sympathies, but was taken into “personal protection” by his superior, who vouched for him “administratively, professionally, and politically” and insisted that he was a man free of “any personal, moral, or political blemish.” After two years with Flamm in Munich II, Hartinger had come to share the same high regard. In addition, Flamm had a driver’s license and his own motorcar.

  DACHAU WAS an easy twenty-minute drive north of Munich, first to the town of Allach, where BMW had an assembly plant, then into the Dachau moorlands along tree-lined country lanes and across open fields. The town, whose name derived from dah, for “mud,” and au, for “meadow”—the “muddy meadow”—was in fact a charming weave of cobblestone streets and cross-timber façades situated on a prominent rise that overlooked the surrounding moorlands. The local residents, a sturdy rural Bavarian stock reputed to be particularly geschert—rough-cut and provincial—took their history in stride, managing over the centuries to till their fields and peddle their wares in the service of monarchs, communists, constitutionalists, and now National Socialists.

  In the eighteenth century, the Wittelsbachs, who had ruled Bavaria for more than eight hundred years, built their summer residence there, a cheerful rococo palace with a splay of windows along its southern façade that still glint splendidly in the afternoon sunlight. In the late nineteenth century, landscape artists discovered the Dachau moors, whose soft hues complemented the impressionist style that was all the rage of the era. In the 1890s, Dachau was awarded two stars by the Michelin Guide. Munich received only one. By the end of the century, more than a thousand artists were said to be living and working around Dachau.

  During the Great War, the Royal Powder and Munitions Factory was constructed just east of town in a swampy woodland fed by the Würm Mill Creek, isolated enough to protect the local population from an industrial accident but accessible to the Dachau train station along the main rail line between Munich and Stuttgart and beyond to the fighting fronts. For the next several years, the factory produced millions of projectiles that were adapted to the changing fashions of the front. In addition to standard bullets for pistols, rifles, and machine guns, specialized munitions for slicing barbed wire, shooting down observation balloons, and piercing armor were developed. After the war, in April 1919, the Bolsheviks won a military victory here during the rule of the ill-fated Soviet Republic of Bavaria, when Bavaria broke briefly from the Reich, only to return to the longer-lived but equally tumultuous a
nd ultimately equally ill-fated Weimar Republic.

  The Treaty of Versailles idled munitions production, stranding thousands of workers. For the next decade, the facility stood as a haunting reminder not just of military defeat and political humiliation but also of the ruinous impact on the local economy. “Since 1920, the numerous work sites have stood empty,” the Dachauer Zeitung reported, “the many buildings and work halls, constructed at such expense, stand dead and abandoned.” A local author, Eugen Mondt, who circulated within distinguished literary circles—he was a friend of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and attended a reading by Franz Kafka*3—lived adjacent to the abandoned facility. As Mondt watched the vacant building fall into decay, an eerie and seemingly Kafkaesque ruin emerged in his mind. “The facility seemed uncanny to me,” he wrote. “It was like a city of the dead.”

  No one was quite certain who selected the moldering ruin as the site for a detention center. Some thought it was the new thirty-two-year-old chief of police, Heinrich Himmler, whose first job had been with an agricultural fertilizer business in the nearby town of Oberschleissheim. Some thought it might have been Dachau’s own town fathers. In January 1933, a few weeks before Hitler came to power, the Amper-Bote (Amper Messenger) published an ambitious plan to retool the abandoned industrial facility into a public work camp for the unemployed. The offices could be reequipped, the cooking and sanitation facilities renovated, the barracks refurbished. The camp residents would be put to work cultivating the fields, shoring up the banks of the Amper River, and rebuilding local roads. “Naturally, it would be necessary to develop this organization carefully and in the greatest detail,” the article said, “so that in every respect the best orderliness, security and pleasant working conditions would be provided for those wishing to work here.” The only issue that remained to be clarified was whether residency in the facility was to be “forced” or “voluntary.” The proposal was taken under consideration by the Munich authorities.

  On Thursday, March 13, Interior Minister Wagner dispatched a team to Dachau to assess the site’s potential for concentrating in one place the thousands of political prisoners glutting Bavaria’s jails, prisons, and makeshift detention centers. The following Sunday, a column of trucks loaded with Nazi “volunteers” rolled into the abandoned facility and hoisted a swastika banner. “On the water tower of the former gunpowder factory, visible from far away, the black-white-and-red flag flutters in the wind,” the Dachauer Zeitung reported, “a sign that new life has moved into the once desolate compound of the big Dachau gunpowder factory.” On Monday, March 20, Police Chief Heinrich Himmler announced the opening of the Dachau Concentration Camp. Two days later, a bus delivered the first detainees.

  HARTINGER AND FLAMM ARRIVED at the camp, along with a note taker, shortly before ten o’clock that morning.*4 The facility was enclosed by the ten-foot-high perimeter wall that once protected the industrial park from sabotage; the stone escutcheons of Wittelsbach heraldry still graced the entrance gate. The detention center had been officially designated the Konzentrationslager Dachau, but it was in fact situated in the district of Prittlbach, a town so obscure and isolated that the Nazis had borrowed the name from the neighboring rail-linked town of Dachau. It was Hartinger’s first visit to this remote corner of his jurisdiction since Himmler had announced the camp’s opening three weeks earlier.

  Hartinger was troubled from the outset. There was not a single green uniform of a state police officer in sight. Instead, the entrance was guarded by a clutch of armed men in brown storm trooper uniforms with black kepis indicating their elevated status into the elite SS. Hartinger knew that the Reich governor had issued a special ordinance on March 10 permitting storm troopers to help manage the surge of protective-custody detentions—“These are to be armed by the police with pistols”—but it made provision for these guards to serve under state police supervision.

  Hartinger demanded entrance. A call was made. The iron gate swung open. Flamm steered his motorcar through the narrow entrance. As they drove past boarded-up buildings and work details of detainees in gray dungarees, their heads shaven, guarded by rifle-toting storm troopers, Hartinger’s disquiet deepened. He knew something about detention facilities. His position after university had been as a prison assessor with the attorney general’s office in his hometown of Amberg. At a glance, Hartinger knew this place violated virtually every regulation for a state facility.

  At the camp commandant’s headquarters, a two-story building, the judicial commission was received not by a state police officer but by an SS captain, SS Hauptsturmführer Hilmar Wäckerle. He was dressed in a crisp black SS uniform with flawlessly polished kneehigh riding boots and a peaked black kepi, a veritable poster boy of Aryan superiority. With one hand, Wäckerle held a leashed and muzzled attack dog. In the other, he gripped a pizzle. He exuded cruelty and arrogance. Wäckerle was evidently a man who understood the trappings of brute force but possessed little appreciation for the less overt, more subtle sources of power. He did not understand that the middle-aged, slightly balding civil servant with thickrimmed eyeglasses, a man of modest appearance and stature—in the office, Hartinger was known as the “short, dark guy”—carried with him the full legal authority of the Bavarian state.

  Hartinger had entered the facility not on the SS captain’s beneficence but through the force of Paragraph 160 of the Criminal Procedure Code. For his part, Wäckerle was obligated under Paragraph 161 to cooperate fully with “authorities and officials of the police and security services” and adhere to “all regulations in order to avoid obscuring the facts of the case.” The Dachau Concentration Camp may have been Wäckerle’s concentration camp, but it remained in Hartinger’s legal jurisdiction.

  Hartinger was led to the scene of the shooting across a small footbridge over the Würm Mill Creek and along a wooded path to a remote area that was being clear-cut for a shooting range for the camp guards. He was told that the four detainees had been equipped with picks and shovels the previous afternoon around five o’clock and had been led to the clearing to remove stubble and underbrush by SS lieutenant Robert Erspenmüller, a former police officer, who was serving as the deputy camp commandant. According to Erspenmüller, the four men had been noticeably “lax” in their comportment and needed to be prodded repeatedly. They had been at the site for only a few moments when the youngest, a twenty-one-year-old medical student from Würzburg named Arthur Kahn, allegedly sprinted for the trees. The accompanying guards, Hans Bürner and Max Schmidt, said they had shouted for Kahn to halt. Suddenly, it was said, two other detainees, Rudolf Benario and Ernst Goldmann, both twenty-four and both from the town of Fürth, near Nuremberg, also bolted. The two guards said they shouted again, then opened fire.

  Erspenmüller had been standing at a distance, overseeing the work. He too drew his pistol and began firing. According to Erspenmüller, the fourth detainee, Erwin Kahn (not related to Arthur), a thirty-two-year-old salesman from Munich who looked as if he was about to run back toward the camp, stepped into the line of fire, taking several bullets to the face. Erspenmüller said he pursued Arthur Kahn, firing as he went, eventually bringing him down a hundred meters or so into the woods. Back in the clearing, Benario and Goldmann lay facedown, both dead. Erwin Kahn was still conscious but delirious. He was carried on a stretcher by two SS men to the camp infirmary and placed on a table. “One of the stretcher-bearers was a short SS man from Grünwald who was not strong enough to lift him,” one witness later recalled, “so I had to jump in to help place the wounded man on the table.” A bullet had penetrated his cheekbone, just below the left eye, and exited the back of his skull. Bone fragments were visible, but Kahn was lucid. He asked to see a rabbi. Kahn was bandaged and dispatched to the local hospital.

  Standing in the dank moorland chill of this April morning, blood marking the places where the men had been shot, it was perhaps easy to understand the young men’s temptation to bolt. The provisional nature of the detention facility and the proximity of the trees
, not to mention the evident inexperience of the guards, could have proved to be a fatal combination. One could easily attribute these deaths to a tragic underestimation of the seriousness of the circumstances. But there was no excuse for the treatment of the young men’s bodies. The corpses had been unceremoniously dumped, like slain game, on the floor of a nearby ammunition shed. Their heads were shorn but they were still fully clothed. Basic human decency would have demanded a more respectful treatment of the slain young men. Hartinger began to sense that something was terribly wrong here.

  The corpses were stripped of their bloodied clothing, and Dr. Flamm set to work on the forensic examination. Arthur Kahn, the medical student who was said to have first attempted to escape, had taken five bullets. One had cut through his upper right torso, a second through his upper right arm, a third through his right thigh; a fourth was lodged in his right heel, and the fifth—the one that killed him—had traversed his skull from behind and exited through the frontal lobe. Dr. Rudolf Benario, a political scientist, had been shot twice. Benario appeared to be of a fragile constitution, with delicate hands and well-groomed nails. One bullet had clipped his left ring finger, and the second entered his skull from behind. Ernst Goldmann, more robust, with thick limbs and coarse hands, had been shot through his lower left arm and his right hand, and had taken three more bullets in the back of his head. Flamm counted fifteen bullet wounds in total. There were certainly more shots fired, but these had found their mark. When he finished, Dr. Flamm turned to Hartinger. There was no need for an autopsy, he said. The cause of death was clear in each case: a bullet to the back of the head. Flamm then turned to Wäckerle. “Your guards are very good shots with their pistols,” he observed pointedly.