Hitler's First Victims

by Timothy W. Ryback

  Hartinger demanded to see the men’s quarters. He was led by a young SS man, Hans Steinbrenner, into the “inner camp,” a barbed-wire compound with a dozen or so one-story barracks, little more than a human cage within a sprawling industrial wasteland. Steinbrenner led Hartinger to Barrack II, where Hartinger entered on his own.

  We do not know specifically with whom Hartinger spoke or the details that were relayed to him, but a number of detainees were witness to the events leading up to the shooting. Willi Gesell had been with Benario, Goldmann, and Arthur Kahn on the transport of thirty men who had arrived the day before the shootings. Gesell remembered long afterward that Wäckerle had called Benario, Goldmann, and Kahn to step forward on arrival in the camp, then ordered Steinbrenner and several other guards to set upon them. “They started beating the Jews wildly and kicking them,” Gesell recalled. When the brown-uniformed swarm cleared, Gesell saw Benario, Goldmann, and Kahn writhing in the dirt, “bleeding from their nose and mouth and other parts of their bodies.” Steinbrenner ordered them to their feet and marched them to Barrack II, all the time lashing them with his pizzle. The three men were barely settled in the barrack when Steinbrenner came back. He ordered them, along with Erwin Kahn, to a work detail with about thirty other detainees. The four Jews were put to work emptying enormous trash bins outside the barracks. “While they were doing this, they were beaten horrifically by Steinbrenner, who was charged with overseeing the work,” another detainee, Horst Scharnagel, would later recall. When Steinbrenner saw Scharnagel looking on, he pressed him into service as well, whipping and beating the five men as they struggled with the containers. The men returned to the barrack that evening bloodied and exhausted.

  Around three o’clock in the morning, Steinbrenner appeared in the barrack with three other SS guards, all of them evidently drunk. Steinbrenner fired his pistol into the ceiling, then assembled all the men outside for roll call. Names were called. The men were dismissed. Four hours later, Steinbrenner was back yet again. This time, he summoned Benario, Goldmann, and Arthur Kahn, then added Willi Gesell. He ordered them to fill a container with trash and haul it to a nearby gravel pit that was being used as the camp garbage dump. “It was only with the greatest effort that we were able to lift the container and drag it a few meters,” Gesell remembered. “We were constantly being beaten along the way.” Steinbrenner worked the men for four hours, then returned them to their quarters.

  At two o’clock that afternoon, Steinbrenner summoned Benario, Goldmann, and the two Kahns yet again. He marched them outside the wire enclosure to work on clear-cutting the SS shooting range beyond the camp perimeter. The men returned at four o’clock. Exactly what happened next is unclear. One detainee, Heinrich Ultsch, recalled resting outside with Benario, Goldmann, and Arthur Kahn. “On the critical day during the afternoon—it was gradually getting dark—we were lying on the grass between Barracks II and III,” Ultsch recalled. “We were talking about money and Kahn said that he had smuggled a dollar bill into the camp and was afraid.” Ultsch offered to hide the bill for him. Arthur Kahn, who had been preparing to attend medical school in Scotland, went into the barrack to get the money. At that moment, Steinbrenner appeared and called for Kahn, Goldmann, and Benario. “The last two, who were right there, answered immediately, and in the meantime we started calling for [Arthur] Kahn, who had gone into the barracks. He came out just at the moment when another answered that his name was Kahn and that he came from Munich. When Steinbrenner heard this, he said, ‘You come along too.’ ” He handed the four of them spades and picks, marched them to the footbridge over the Würm Mill Creek, and turned them over to Erspenmüller.

  Willi Gesell remembered the incident differently. He recalled that the detainees were standing in line for the daily distribution of letters and packages when Steinbrenner suddenly appeared.

  “Everybody stop!” he is said to have barked. “Where is Kahn?”

  “Here!”

  “Another Kahn!”

  “Here!”

  “And Goldmann?”

  An older man stepped forward.

  “No, not you, the Jew there.”

  Ernst Goldmann stepped forward.

  “Benario!”

  “Here!”

  “You four, come with me!”

  According to Gesell, Steinbrenner handed the men spades, marched them to the footbridge over the Würm Mill Creek, and turned them over to Erspenmüller, who led them into the woods. A few minutes later, just after five o’clock, a series of gunshots pierced the late afternoon stillness, accompanied by screams. There were no witnesses to the actual shooting.

  Hartinger sensed the fear and tension in the barrack. “I have a clear recollection that a terrified young man pressed hard through the crowd,” Hartinger recalled. “He was sobbing and told me that he was afraid he was going to be murdered.” Hartinger tried to calm him. He told him not to worry, everything would be fine. Then he departed.

  On the drive back to their offices in Munich, Hartinger told Flamm he suspected that the men had been intentionally shot on explicit orders of the commandant. “My reasons were based not only on the physical circumstances but in particular on my assessment of the personalities I encountered in the camp, and especially on my evaluation of the nature of the camp commandant Wäckerle, who made a devastating impression on me,” Hartinger later wrote. “I also had to include in my deliberations the fact that all those who had been shot were Jews.”

  * * *

  *1 The word Bazi can be translated as “swindler” or “scoundrel,” and derives from the Bavarian dialect, as does the word Nazi, a shortening of the word Nationalsozialist, but also an old nickname for Ignatius, a popular Bavarian name commonly associated with a country bumpkin, and applied disparagingly to Hitler followers. A Nazi never called another Nazi a “Nazi.” They referred to each other as National Socialists or “party comrades.”

  *2 The Gauleiter, or district leader, was the Nazi Party official responsible for local affairs. These Nazi Party districts corresponded to the thirty-three voting districts for the Reichstag elections. In 1941, the number of Gauleiter and corresponding districts was increased to forty-three.

  *3 On the evening of March 22, 1922, Mondt was among the fifty or so guests who attended a reading in Munich by Kafka, who presented his short story “In the Penal Colony,” a chilling tale about a nightmare facility where men are held in indeterminate detention for unknown reasons and ultimately destroyed in murderous machinery. “The words left the audience stunned,” Mondt wrote. Kafka himself thought the evening a failure and never again read in public outside his native Prague.

  *4 The three-man team was known as a Gerichtskommission, or judicial commission, and operated in cooperation with an investigation team from the state police, known as a Mordkommission, or homicide commission, which was responsible for collecting evidence, taking depositions, making sketches of the crime scene, and so on. The prosecutor prepared criminal indictments that were then presented to a judge who could issue arrest warrants that would be executed by the police.

  2

  Late Afternoon News

  WHILE HARTINGER AND FLAMM were investigating the shootings in the Würm Mill Creek Woods, a hundred miles to the north in the town of Fürth, an easy ten-minute tram ride from Nuremberg, Leo and Maria Benario were preparing a package of provisions to send their son, Rudolf. He had been transferred two days earlier, suddenly and unexpectedly, from a makeshift detention facility in Fürth to the recently erected Dachau Concentration Camp.

  For the past several weeks, the Benarios had been shuttling fresh changes of clothing and other necessities to their son, especially medication for the chronic bronchitis from which he had been suffering. He had been taken into protective custody by a group of storm troopers in the early morning hours of March 10 during a roundup of a dozen local political activists who included his friend Ernst Goldmann. Since the town jail was too small to accommodate all the prisoners, the men were detained in the l
ocal sports hall.

  The problem with protective custody, of course, was the uncertainty. Schutzhaft was a security measure dating back to the mid-nineteenth century in which a person could be detained without cause.* It was a double-edged legal instrument, as the name suggested, used either to protect an individual from intimidation or threat by an angry mob, or to secure the public at large from a potential threat. Since there were no indictments or arrest warrants, there were no charges to challenge, no recourse for appeal. Judges were irrelevant, lawyers useless. The Benarios’ son had fallen into a legal gray zone beyond the reach of normal judicial process.

  The Benarios had taken some comfort in the provisional and proximate nature of Rudolf’s detention and the assumption that he had ceased political activity in the past year to focus on completing his doctoral dissertation in political economy at the Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen. Indeed, just that November, when the Bavarian political police had approached the university rector about communist activities on campus, he had cleared Benario of any suspicion. “Among the individual students to be noted is a former student of political economics named Benario, who according to information given to me by the political police was determined to have been actively involved with communist activities,” the rector wrote in a memorandum dated December 12, 1932. The rector had seen Benario at the university just that autumn—most likely for Rudolf’s dissertation defense—and was firm in his conviction that Benario “had no affiliation” with the communist movement.

  Rudolf had been involved with political activists in Fürth but had distanced himself from those elements, announcing his engagement and preparing for a settled life that suited his family station and his officially recognized status as Doctor rerum politicarum, or doctor of political economy. But his transfer to the Dachau Concentration Camp dashed any hope of immediate release. The imminent amnesty that was to see as many as a thousand detainees freed in time for the Easter holidays would hardly apply to a family with a name derived from Ben Ari, Hebrew for “Son of Ari.”

  Leo and Maria Benario now braced themselves for an extended detention that could well last through the spring. The weather reports for the upcoming weekend looked promising, but they knew Bavarian seasons to be temperamental, especially in the Dachau moorland. One of Maria’s older brothers, Dr. Siegmund Bing, had frequented artistic circles in Dachau in his youth, and was familiar with the beauty as well as the rigors of the region.

  Spring rains could be chilling and relentless. Late winter squalls could pelt the fields and moors with ice and snow. They packed Rudolf’s winter coat as well as his insulated boots and decided to include his house slippers, along with three shirts, four changes of underwear, ten pair of socks, and twelve handkerchieves. Maria added a supply of Dicodid, Adalin, and Chinosol for Rudolf’s bronchitis, as well as a fever thermometer so he could monitor his temperature.

  TWO YEARS EARLIER, in the summer of 1931, when the Benarios moved from their elegant Erlenstegstrasse villa in a fashionable quarter of Nuremberg to the modest third-floor apartment on Moststrasse in Fürth, it seemed an ideal retreat for a beleaguered Jewish family. The quaint town, with its patchwork of cobblestone streets and timber-beam façades, had been providing solace and safe haven to Jews since 1528, when the margrave George the Pious, a German noble, accommodated two Jewish merchants for six years in exchange for a “protection tithe.” By the seventeenth century, Fürth boasted a Talmud school, a synagogue, a Jewish cemetery, and the first Jewish hospital on German soil. Three centuries on, a Jewish family could worship in one of Fürth’s six synagogues, and educate their children in the Israeli Elementary School and the Israeli High School. By then there were two Jewish cemeteries. In this north Bavarian province of Franconia, Fürth was known as “the Franconian Jerusalem.”

  The Benarios’ move to Fürth had accompanied a dramatic turn in the fortunes of one of Nuremberg’s leading industrial families. Maria was the daughter of Ignaz Bing, one of the two Bing brothers who in the late nineteenth century founded Bing Metal Works, a manufacturing firm that started out stamping tin plates but quickly emerged as one of Bavaria’s leading manufacturing enterprises in kitchen utensils and metal toys. The legendary Bing Eisenbahn, a pioneer in the toy train market, overshadowed the Märklin brand in Germany, established the “00” gauge for toy trains in England, and for a time went head-to-head with Lionel trains for the vast American market. Ignaz Bing paid his employees generously and treated them well. In an era of frequent strikes and labor unrest, he boasted that he had never experienced a single strike among his three thousand workers. He enjoyed an equally amicable relationship with the city of Nuremberg, where he emerged as the city’s leading philanthropist, funding shelters for the poor and hospitals and helping maintain local museums. He was made a privy counselor and, in 1891, awarded Nuremberg’s silver medallion for service to the city. He was visited by the king of Bavaria. During World War I, Bing Metal Works stamped helmets, canteens, and other supplies for the soldiers at the front. By 1923, the factory, retooled for peace, occupied an entire city block, employing more than sixteen thousand workers, and laid proud claim to being “the largest toy manufacturer in the world.”

  Leo Benario married into the Bing family dynasty in 1907 but retained his position in Frankfurt as financial editor with the highly regarded newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung, the predecessor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In 1913, Leo helped the French Nobel Peace Prize laureate Baron d’Estournelles de Constant establish the German chapter of the International Conciliation Committee, a prominent prewar peace initiative. “This branch seems destined to have a great influence upon the leaders of Europe,” an American publication, the Advocate of Peace, observed that summer, citing Leo as one of Germany’s most influential peace advocates.

  In 1918, when his father-in-law passed away, Leo moved his family from Frankfurt to Nuremberg, where he assumed the life of an academic. He taught courses in banking and investment at the Nuremberg Professional School of Business and Social Sciences. In 1924 he founded the Institute for Newspaper Research, and two years later published a history of the seventeenth-century newspaper business in northern Bavaria. A family photograph from those years shows Leo to be an elegant gentleman in his late fifties with a distinctly professorial bearing, sporting a three-piece tweed suit. Maria stands beside him, a woman of dark features and unassuming comportment, though some might say she looks like a worrier. Another photograph shows Rudolf casually seated in a wooden lounge chair in a tree-shaded garden. He is a well-groomed young man with pale skin and delicate features. A pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses lend him a distinctively academic demeanor.

  There is a keen intelligence in the gaze that Rudolf directs to the camera, but it is tipped with a hard-edged defiance that could be perceived as arrogance. He was by all accounts a difficult but bookish child possessed of a frail constitution. He was frequently ill. In 1927, when Rudolf enrolled at Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen, it was already a bastion of political conservatism and radical nationalism.

  The central square was dominated by an imposing statue of a muscle-bound German soldier with a naked torso, his wrists shackled to a cliff—a symbol of the restraints imposed by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles—his chiseled visage with its jutting chin and fierce eyes glaring west toward France, and atop his head a trench helmet of the type manufactured by Bing Metal Works during the war. Hitler addressed the students and faculty on several occasions. “When someone claims that all human beings are equal,” the Nazi leader told a standing-room-only crowd of students and faculty in Erlangen’s largest venue on February 26, 1928, “he is rejecting the entire future of our people.” The “source of power in any person,” Hitler insisted, lay in the “quality of his blood.” He denounced pacifism, communism, and democracy in equal measure, and received a thunderous ovation.

  When Rudolf arrived on campus in the spring of 1927 and found himself excluded from the myriad proof-of-blood student clubs, he cofou
nded with another student the Club of Republican Students—a nod to the democratic values of the Weimar Republic—and opened membership to “all those students belonging to the republican parties, whether the German Democratic Party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the German Centrist Party, or pacifist organizations, or those sharing similar values.” The club organized public debates and provided information on university policies as well as networking opportunities with like-minded student clubs at other universities, including the Club of Independent Academics in Berlin and the Cartel of Republican Students for Germany and Austria. His leadership of a student club accorded him a seat on the student council, where he confronted the growing influence of the right-wing students, and on one occasion protested to the rector himself.

  In November 1929, the National Socialists won a majority in student elections, securing fourteen of the council’s twenty-five seats. On January 15, 1930, the newly elected body convened its first session of the year, where the National Socialist delegates voiced objection to Benario’s presence. “Student Benario represents through his actions a destructive influence on the unity of the Erlangen student body,” their spokesman claimed. They demanded he leave the assembly. When Benario stood his ground, the fourteen National Socialists rose and marched “in unity” from the room, dissolving the quorum and forcing the chairman to adjourn the session. The student council reconvened the next day without Benario. When one council member objected to Benario’s exclusion, the matter was put to a vote. The delegates closed ranks. “Student Winterberg, speaking for the faction of the Youth Movement and Students at Work, declared that they fully endorsed the National Socialist faction’s position after further inquiries about Student Benario,” the Erlanger Nachrichten reported. Benario was declared a disruptive influence and banished from the council.