Hitler's First Victims

by Timothy W. Ryback

  As always in Bavaria, the final word was reserved for the archbishop of Munich and Freising. “We owe the former Bavarian State Government our indelible, everlasting gratitude for protecting our homeland from the threats of communism and Bolshevism over the past decade,” Cardinal Faulhaber wrote to Heinrich Held in those same days. “We equally owe our thanks to them for their efforts regarding our religion and customs, as well as the recovery of the socioeconomic situation of our people.” Two days later, Faulhaber dispatched a “pastoral instruction” to his clergy reminding them of their obligations to respect the authority of the state, but underscoring the need to “to call a mistake a mistake, to call an injustice an injustice,” and to reject those “cultural-political ideologies” that violate “the convictions of our conscience.” He said violent transgressions should not be glossed “with a simple yes and an Amen.”

  FROM HIS SECOND-FLOOR OFFICE at Prielmayrstrasse 5, just across Karlsplatz from the Palace of Justice, Hartinger observed the political tumult of March and early April with dismay. He was a born-and-bred Bavarian and a card-carrying member of Heinrich Held’s Bavarian People’s Party, with an aversion to the National Socialist movement that dated back to his days as a student at Maximilian University. “Right after the putsch of November 11, 1923, I participated publicly against Hitler’s followers in mass demonstrations in the Ludwigstrasse area in Munich,” Hartinger recalled. In one confrontation on Odeonsplatz, Hartinger found himself surrounded by belligerents. “They called me a ‘little Jew,’ and twice I was nearly beaten to the ground,” he said. He continued his opposition to the National Socialists with equal resolve as a junior prosecutor with Munich I, where he prosecuted infractions as Wintersberger had done a decade earlier.

  On March 9, Hartinger had watched from his office window as throngs of storm troopers streamed down Prielmayrstrasse from the train station toward the Palais Montgelas and unfurled the giant swastika banner from the old town gate across the square. That same evening, elegant Theatinerstrasse, where Hartinger lived “nicely but inexpensively” in a fourth-floor apartment, was mobbed with storm troopers on their way to hear Epp’s victory speech at Odeonsplatz. But for all Munich’s street-level drama, the rising brown tide of National Socialism sweeping the country that spring caused barely a ripple in the offices and corridors at Prielmayrstrasse 5. By early April, there was but a single swastika lapel pin to be seen in Munich II. It belonged to Anton Heigl, an ambitious young deputy prosecutor who had been a fervent Social Democrat with a notable disdain for the National Socialist movement, especially the brutish storm troopers, but following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor that January quickly changed political color, his sights set on promotion. The Heigl conversion chastened Hartinger and his two senior Munich II colleagues, Hans Hechtel and Josef Wintrich. “Whenever the three of us were having a conversation, as generally happens in any office, and Heigl would approach,” Hartinger recalled, “we immediately changed our conversation if it was dealing with anything political, which in those days, of course, was usually the case.”

  Hartinger did not think that the new government was as bad as it could have been. Hitler had clearly kept the worst of his cronies at bay. The fanatical Julius Streicher remained in Nuremberg as editor of Der Stürmer. Even the choice of Epp as Reich governor was clearly a compromise. He was the only Reich governor in the country who was not also serving as a Gauleiter. More reassuring still, Epp, though certainly hard-bitten, ruthless, and antidemocratic, was more interested in public order than political ideology.

  Hartinger was particularly heartened by the choice of Ludwig Siebert as Bavaria’s prime minister and finance minister. Siebert, following his career as a judge, had already spent successful years as mayor of Lindau and Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Hartinger trusted in Siebert’s sound judgment. Most important, Siebert was a latecomer to the National Socialist movement. Like Epp, he had previously been a member of the Bavarian People’s Party. Siebert had joined Hitler’s party just two years earlier as the National Socialists began making strides in elections. He was more a political opportunist than a Nazi ideologue, and again, like Epp, a devout Roman Catholic.

  But two appointments troubled Hartinger deeply: Wagner as interior minister and Himmler as chief of police. Both men were cruel, arrogant, and ruthless, indifferent to laws or regulations. Hartinger was particularly troubled by Himmler’s overlapping competencies. As chief of the Bavarian state police, Himmler controlled the state security forces. As Reichsführer of the SS, he controlled the Nazi Party’s elite security forces. “It was naïve to think that anybody in his right mind who knew Himmler and the SS—even at the most superficial level—could ever trust him,” Hartinger believed. Worse still, Himmler had installed his twenty-eight-year-old assistant, Reinhard Heydrich, as the new head of Department VI, the state police’s security service. Heydrich suddenly had access to the secret police files for the entire Bavarian state, a dangerous intrusion by a private security force into the state structure. It was a model that Hitler ultimately expanded to a national level with perilous consequences, as Warren Farr was to observe twelve years later in Nuremberg: “Thus, through Himmler’s dual capacity as Reichsführer SS, and as police chief, and through Heydrich’s dual capacity as head of the Nazi intelligence unit and the state political police, a unified personal command of the SS and political police forces was achieved.*3 The working partnership between the Gestapo, the criminal police, and the Nazi Party intelligence unit under the direction of the Reichsführer SS resulted in the end in repressive and unrestrained police activity.”

  But in April 1933, Hartinger still retained his faith in the resilience of judicial structures. They had survived the collapse of the empire and endured the political and economic travails of twelve years of the Weimar Republic. Certainly they would outlast the Hitler government. Somewhat reassuring for Hartinger was the appointment of Dr. Hans Frank as Bavaria’s new minister of justice. Although clearly a member of the National Socialists, as a trained attorney Frank appeared to have an abiding commitment to the rule of law. “Tell me what the position of a judge is in a state structure and I will tell you its value,” Frank was to tell the Nuremberg tribunal. “We are talking about one of the highest cultural achievements of Europe.” In his most famous case as a defense attorney, the 1930 trial of three officers accused of conspiring in a pro-Nazi military coup, Frank brought Hitler to the witness stand and extracted a public commitment to respect legal processes. “I shall strive to come to power by legal means,” Hitler swore in court, “and after the assumption of power I shall rule by legal means, so help me God.” Frank saw this “oath of legality” (Legalitätseid) as a landmark moment in his client’s political life.

  Following his appointment as state minister of justice, Frank demonstrated similar respect for the Bavarian judiciary. “I assumed responsibility for a generally clean judicial administration in the traditional sense of the word,” he recalled, “changing nothing in the ministry bureaucracy that was staffed with thoroughly qualified, first-rate experts.” While offices and ministries across the country were restaffed with National Socialists, an estimated 200,000 across the country, Frank brought with him a single trusted colleague, Josef Bühler, and eventually hired two or three additional jurists, all of them with perfect scores in their law school examinations, none of them members of the Nazi Party.

  Hartinger took comfort in knowing that men like Frank and Siebert, and even Epp, all Roman Catholic, all conservative, all loyal to Bavaria in blood or at least in spirit, were responsible for the state of Bavaria. “I considered all of them, even Frank, at least at that time and in that context, men of just and fair reason,” Hartinger would later note. “From what we understood of Frank at the time, he too despised these murders in the concentration camp.”

  * * *

  *1 The attack on the Reichstag appears to have been a renegade act by the twenty-four-year-old Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe, but it remains unclear to this day
whether he acted alone or was involved with a larger communist plot or possibly a National Socialist conspiracy. The alleged communist plan for massive disruptions presented in the cabinet meeting was a Nazi forgery.

  *2 Goebbels was making wordplay with Held’s name, which means “hero” in German. Goebbels had written, “dass Herr Held kein Held sein wird.”

  *3 Hartinger made a similar observation but identified three overlapping capacities. “Himmler had authority over the SS as well as the political police in the Wittelsbach Palace in Briennerstrasse,” he noted. “And not just these, but also, since he was police commander in Munich, all of the police in Munich as well, and thus had to be obeyed whenever he gave personal orders relating to police measures in the concentration camp.”

  6

  Rumors from the

  Würm Mill Woods

  HITLER HAD BEEN in power only a few weeks when rumors of Nazi atrocity began to proliferate. In the Baltic port city of Königsberg, a Jewish merchant named Max Neumann was said to have been set upon by local storm troopers and pummeled to the verge of death. Pepper was rubbed in his open wounds to heighten his agony. Not trusting the local doctors, his family drove him to a Berlin hospital where he was treated but died of blood poisoning three days later. There was the story of a young Jewish man in Berlin named Kindermann who was allegedly kidnapped, taken to a private residence in the north of the city, and beaten to death. His family only learned of the incident when they received a letter instructing them to retrieve his body from the local mortuary. Another young Jewish man named Krel was tortured to death and his corpse was hurled from a fourth-floor window to feign suicide. One Jewish survivor described an apartment at Friedrichstrasse 132 in central Berlin that had been converted into a makeshift torture chamber for use by local storm troopers. Its walls were spattered with blood. Even Nazi residents complained about the “daily and nightly screams and cries.” The survivor, who wished to remain anonymous, recalled being flogged into delirium. “I could count only until the tenth stroke,” he said. “After that, I no longer knew whether it was my own or someone else’s body that was being beaten into pulp with india-rubber whips.”

  The German Foreign Office was rumored to have received more than 150 complaints from foreign consulates about incidents of “maltreatment and savage torture.” The Polish embassy in Berlin had an “imposing list of affidavits” attesting to more than a hundred instances of Jews assaulted in their homes and businesses, robbed at gunpoint, or taken to “torture chambers where men ‘in the uniforms of storm troopers’ have beaten them with leaden balls.” “The Reich minister of the Foreign Office reported that the French and American ambassadors had submitted complaints about SA excesses,” the Reich Chancellery cabinet meeting minutes recorded on March 7. “The Reich chancellor asked whether the names of the SA men had been determined.” He was of the “firm conviction that it was not SA men but instead probably communists wearing SA uniforms.”

  There were suspicions of atrocity stirring in Dachau within seconds of the shootings of the four young Jews. “The cracking sound hit us while we were sitting on planks between the barracks eating our soup,” one detainee, Albert Andersch, remembered. “It silenced our conversation but we continued eating our soup to the end.” Except, of course, the Jewish detainees sitting with them who stopped eating altogether. Josef Götz, a communist delegate to the Bavarian state parliament, incarcerated at Dachau, commented during his dinner, “That is fascism in its purest form.” When Wäckerle learned of the comment, he ordered Götz to his office and threatened solitary confinement. “If something happens to me,” Götz told a fellow detainee afterward, “you will know what it was about.”

  State police lieutenant Emil Schuler was in his quarters when he heard gunfire in the adjacent woods. He rushed toward the trees, only to be stopped by an SS guard at the Würm Mill Creek footbridge. The guard said he had instructions not to let anyone pass. Schuler pushed by him and rushed to the scene of the shooting, where Erspenmüller stood with his pistol drawn.

  “I saw three men in front of me lying facedown on the ground, one of whom was screaming horribly and begging to be put out of his misery,” Schuler remembered. Erspenmüller raised his gun to deliver the coup de grâce. Schuler screamed for him to desist. It would have been an act of “pure murder,” he said. Erspenmüller halted. Schuler then ran to summon a police physican, a Dr. Meier, who happened to be at the camp, but as he reached the bridge, he heard renewed shooting. Schuler ordered the SS guard to find Dr. Meier, then rushed back to the clearing. Erspensmüller stood over the now motionless body of the supplicant, his pistol still smoking. When Schuler inquired about the fourth man, Erspenmüller led him into the woods and showed him a man lying facedown on the ground. He too was dead. They returned to the clearing to find that one of the detainees was still alive. Erspenmüller drew his pistol yet again. In that instant, Dr. Meier appeared. He ordered the wounded man carried back to the camp, where he was bandaged and, as we know, rushed by ambulance to a local hospital. Steinbrenner, who recalled that the man was delirious with pain and kept asking for his shoes, later heard that the detainee had related the entire incident of the shooting to the hospital staff.

  The next morning, Anton Vogel, the Lagerverwalter (camp manager), assembled the detainees and informed them that the four Jews had been shot in a failed escape attempt. A detail of ten detainees was dispatched to the scene of the shooting. “I received the order from an SS guard, whom I did not know, to clear the things away, to cover over the blood, and to collect the bullet casings,” detainee Matthias Grel recalled. “I collected a handful of bullet casings, probably about fifteen in all.”

  A message was smuggled out of the camp and found its way to England. “A few days ago we were going out as usual to work,” an unnamed detainee wrote in the missive. “All of a sudden the Jewish prisoners—Goldmann a merchant, Benario a lawyer from Nuremberg, and the merchants Arthur and Erwin Kahn—were ordered to fall out of ranks. Without even a word, some storm trooper shot at them. They had not made any attempt to escape—all [sic] were killed on the spot and all had bullet wounds in their foreheads.”

  The myriad rumors of Nazi atrocity prompted journalists to investigate. The Nazis in turn orchestrated a public effort to dispel the alleged Jewish Greuelpropaganda, or horror propaganda. Near Berlin, a delegation of foreign correspondents was invited to tour a detention facility outside the town of Sonnenberg where they were permitted to speak with detainees, including Carl von Ossietzky, the renowned editor of the pacifist weekly Die Weltbühne. Louis Lochner of the Associated Press came away with the impression that many of the men “were indeed badly beaten up, but that apparently all cruel treatment has now stopped.” Edgar Mowerer of the Chicago Tribune, one of the most relentless critics of the Hitler government, who had already interviewed a Jewish victim of Nazi abuse who showed Mowerer “his back beaten to a pulp,” was hardly reassured by the facility and its camp commandant. “You know, Herr Mowerer, we were very angry at one moment,” the commandant told him. “We even thought of sending a detachment of SA lads to beat reason into you. What would you have thought about that?”

  “If there had been anything left of me, I suppose I should have staggered to a typewriter and written what I thought of it,” Mowerer replied. When the commandant asked what that meant, Mowerer replied that it was “a typical Nazi victory.”

  “And what do you imply by that?” the commandant pressed.

  “Fifteen armed men against one unarmed man,” said Mowerer.

  The New York Times does not appear to have participated in the Sonnenberg tour but did manage to arrange an exclusive tour of the Dachau Concentration Camp a week after reports of the shootings appeared in the press. On the afternoon of April 20—on Hitler’s forty-fourth birthday—Wäckerle received a Times reporter personally and amicably.* “Permission to make the visit was very hard to obtain, but once it was granted,” the reporter later observed, “everything was done by the prison comman
dant, a quiet-mannered, blond, blue-eyed young former officer named Wekerle [sic], to facilitate a thorough inspection.”

  For all the simmering brutality Hartinger had sensed in Hilmar Wäckerle, he failed to recognize, or at least appreciate, Wäckerle’s capacity to blend mendacity with charm.

  Wäckerle had shown such courtesy for the Easter holy days that Cardinal Faulhaber felt compelled to send a note of personal gratitude. “Today, I would like to thank you, Most Honorable Herr Commandant,” Faulhaber wrote, “that you supported and announced the religious services for the Catholics in such an exceedingly friendly manner.” Faulhaber urged Wäckerle to continue to provide such kind support and assured him that Father Pfanzelt would “in absolutely no way interfere in the penal processes of the state government.” He observed that this “spiritual guidance” in the camp would “serve as testimony in the chronicles of this era for the humane treatment provided to the prisoners.”

  Wäckerle now showed similar accommodation toward America’s most renowned newspaper. The Times reporter arrived at the camp entrance after the noon hour that Thursday and was given a white armband with a number, identifying him as a visitor, then led into the walled compound. It was a bleak but festive day. The fair weather that had blessed the Easter weekend had again given way to gray skies, chilling temperatures, and occasional rain showers that dampened the camp celebrations marking Hitler’s birthday. Wäckerle told the reporter that there had been a parade with music that morning as well as speeches by Nazi leaders. To celebrate the occasion, he had excused most detainees from their work assignments and given each man extra rations and ten cigarettes. He observed that smoking was generally prohibited.