Hitler's First Victims

by Timothy W. Ryback

  Wäckerle then took the reporter on a tour of his facility. They visited a guardhouse where one of several machine guns stood ready for use. They viewed the high perimeter wall that was patrolled by armed storm troopers. When the camp had first opened, local residents had stood near the gate to gawk at arriving detainees. Those days were over. That very morning, Wäckerle had issued a stern warning that curiosity seekers loitering near the entrance or attempting to peer into the camp would themselves be detained. Anyone attempting to scale the wall would be shot.

  Wäckerle led the reporter into the “inner camp” with its double-rank of barbed-wire fencing strung with “high-voltage wiring” powerful enough to kill a man. The detainees stood about in listless groups with drab dungarees pulled over their civilian clothing, their heads shaved, while armed SS guards loomed with a menacing presence. Wäckerle explained that the 530 detainees consisted mostly of communist leaders, but that there were also medical doctors, lawyers, writers, and university students, as well as two members of the Bavarian state parliament. Each time Wäckerle and the reporter approached, SS guards and detainees alike snapped to attention.

  “My guards consist of 120 storm troop men only, supervised by noncommissioned officers of the green police,” Wäckerle explained. “They won’t need to be increased even if the prisoners number 5,000.” He noted that his men worked in rotations of twenty-four-hour shifts, thirty at a time. The prisoners’ workday commenced at 6 with reveille and ended at 5:30 p.m., with a half-hour break for breakfast and two hours at midday. Dinner was served in the evening, with lights-out at 9:15.

  Wäckerle led the reporter into several barracks. The quarters were clean and orderly but spare in the extreme. The fifty men assigned to each barrack lived like rabbits in a warren. They slept in wooden bunks stacked in tiers of three, from floor to ceiling, separated from each other by four-inch boards. Their bedding consisted of a bulky straw sack with a blanket. A bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling provided the only illumination. The top-tier bunks had to be scaled with ladders. Each time the two men entered a barrack, the detainees jumped to attention; once, a man started playing a mandolin as if on cue.

  Wäckerle also showed the reporter the SS quarters, equally spartan except that there were two instead of three tiers of beds, lending the space a somewhat lighter atmosphere.

  Wäckerle explained that the detainees had access to books and newspapers, and received parcels from their families with foodstuffs. However, they were not allowed to see their wives, children, or friends, except in an extreme emergency. Nevertheless, shopkeepers were occasionally permitted to leave the camp to attend to business matters. Wäckerle said that seventy “well-conducted fathers” had been released in time for the Easter weekend so they could spend the holidays with their families. They now needed only to report to the police twice each week. Wäckerle said that many of the men, after years of unemployment, were happy finally to have something to do. In one barrack, Dr. Delwin Katz, a Jewish physician from Nuremberg, was conducting examinations of inmates. In the kitchen, a burly man stood over giant cauldrons of sauerkraut with a thousand sausages. Wäckerle explained that he was a former communist who had gunned down a socialist deputy during the short-lived Soviet Republic. The only thing the men really missed, Wäckerle said, was “their Bavarian beer.”

  The reporter was permitted to interview a dozen detainees. When he asked one man what he thought of the food, the answer was crisp. It was “beautifully cooked” but the portions were too spare and there was not enough bread. Another, when asked if he had any complaints, was circumspect. He said he found no fault with the camp itself, but had no idea why he was being detained. He had never been involved in politics and had no connection with the Communist Party. He had once belonged to a socialist fraternity but nothing more.

  “You all say you did nothing,” Wäckerle snapped back. Wäckerle said if the man was indeed innocent, he would be released as soon as there was time to review his case in detail. The reporter noted the pervasive unease caused by the undefined and indefinite nature of “protective custody,” as well as “the herding together of intellectuals and men of a low order.” He discovered trained professionals and young students sharing close quarters with common criminals and social outcasts, many of whom looked “long-starved and crippled,” all with shaved heads, all sullen, some brutish, some menacing, some depraved. “Many of the prisoners looked as if the community would not suffer from their seclusion,” he wrote, “but there must be numbers who were made the victims of some private grudge in the wave of denunciations that followed the Nazi revolution.”

  Wäckerle and the reporter discussed the shootings of the previous week only once that afternoon. It was while they were observing the perimeter wall, just before they entered the wire compound. Wäckerle explained that martial law had been imposed on the camp; that he had ordered his guards to shoot anyone trying to escape. He said that the four men had been led outside the compound to “fell trees.” When they bolted, they were shot. “They ignored a challenge and got about 100 yards into the woods before the bullets brought them down,” Wäckerle said. “Three were killed.” The reporter probed no further. He did not seem particularly attentive to the incident, but three days later, when his article appeared in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, the promise of atrocity billowed spectacularly in a boldfaced headline:

  NAZIS SHOOT DOWN FLEEING PRISONERS

  Three Reds Are Slain Trying to Escape From

  Dachau Internment Camp.

  A series of subtitles highlighted the imposition of martial law, the use of electrified fencing, and the fact that the Times had scored a journalistic coup as the first newspaper to be granted complete and seemingly unrestricted access to the Dachau Concentration Camp. The article retraced the reporter’s tour of the facility step by step, from his arrival at the front gate, to his meeting with Wäckerle at the commandant’s headquarters, to the visit to the guardhouse and viewing of the perimeter wall, to the the inspection of several barracks inside the electrified-wire compound. The article made only passing reference to the Dachau shootings and abided by Wäckerle’s perfunctory explanation of the three deaths. The first insider account of the Dachau Concentration Camp gave the facility and its commandant a generally positive review. “Life at Dachau seems halfway between that of a severely disciplined regiment and that of a hard labor prison,” the correspondent concluded. Wäckerle came across as a poster boy of the new Germany, a handsome but somewhat demure young man overseeing a complex mix of 530 detainees and 120 SS guards whom he was managing with a balance of sparring wit and martial discipline, without a wisp of atrocity.

  THE SHRILL HEADLINE SUGGESTS that the Times editors gleaned as much drama and menace as they could from the 1,300-word wireless dispatch, leaving one to wonder how the headline might have read had the reporter realized that the four detainees had been “Jews” rather than “Reds.” Or had he seized the sizzling lead Wäckerle handed him—that only three of the four men were dead—and traced the further fate of the surviving victim of the shooting, from the camp infirmary where Erwin Kahn was given triage, to the Dachau hospital where he was bandaged, to the Nussbaumstrasse surgical clinic where attending staff recorded his account of the shooting in his medical record, or ultimately to the Munich apartment of Eva Kahn to whom her husband had related the entire incident on the afternoon before his death? As it was, Wäckerle alone was left to provide an account of the first Dachau killings in America’s leading newspaper of record. The day after the Times article appeared, on page twenty-two of the Sunday edition, Wäckerle received further validation for his version of the incident.

  On Monday, April 24, Karl Wintersberger formally closed the Munich II investigation into the shooting deaths of the four Dachau detainees. In a three-page report to the attorney general’s office, “Killing of Escaping Prisoners from the Collection Camp Dachau,” the veteran prosecutor dismissed Hartinger’s suspicions and officially confirmed Wäckerle’
s account of the incident. “Suddenly Arthur Kahn started running from his work and fled into the woods immediately adjacent to the open woods,” Wintersberger said. “The three other prisoners immediately started running in different directions; two of them, Goldmann and Benario, gave the impression that they intended to flee, at which point the two guards, after repeatedly shouting ‘Halt!,’ repeatedly shot with their sidearms from a distance of approximately ten meters. Erspenmüller, who was in the vicinity and became aware of the incident, also fired several shots. Goldmann and Benario dropped dead not far from where they were working. Also Arthur Kahn was hit and fell between them dead.” Wintersberger included the unflattering observation that the four men “were clearly somewhat lethargic and had to be warned repeatedly.” He summarized the results of Dr. Flamm’s forensic examination, but noted incorrectly that Kahn had not been able to provide an account of the shooting. “Due to his condition, it was not possible to conduct a legal deposition of Erwin Kahn before his death,” Wintersberger wrote.

  It was now official. Benario, Goldmann, and the two Kahns had been shot in a failed escape from the Dachau Concentration Camp. This was legal truth. The case was closed. In those same days, the detainee Ferdinand Wünsch, a trained gardener, was ordered to bury the victims’ bloodstained clothing in the camp vegetable plot.

  * * *

  * The article appeared with an anonymous byline as a wireless dispatch to the New York Times, datelined Munich, April 22, 1933. The newspaper’s chief correspondent, Frederick Birchall, who would receive the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting that year, was covering Hitler’s birthday celebrations in Berlin.

  7

  The Utility of Atrocity

  WHEN HILMAR WÄCKERLE BOASTED to the New York Times reporter that 120 SS men could guard as many as five thousand detainees—there were five hundred at the time—he knew he was lying. For all his jaunty, fair-haired confidence, Wäckerle was in fact a beleaguered man. From his private quarters on the second floor of the commandant headquarters, he looked across a ruined industrial landscape overgrown with thickets of brush and weeds, and dense stands of trees. Wäckerle knew that the Dachau Concentration Camp, despite its official title, was little more than a makeshift barbed-wire outpost in an isolated moorland and lacked proper security.*1 The camp’s alarm and communication system consisted of three telephones connected by field wire, two hand sirens—one for the guards and one at the commandant’s headquarters—and an electrical system that dated from 1916.

  An internal security assessment underscored the myriad perils. “The following possibilities for enemy assault should be particularly noted,” the report noted. “The woods between the Amperwerk facility and the SS quarters; the woods northwest of the ‘inner camp’; and those to the southeast of the foreign barracks.” The barracks and nearby villas were to serve as the main defense line, though caution was urged to “cover the flanks and rear” as well. The detainees posed the most immediate risk. “The first measure [in case of assault] is to prevent any connection between the attackers and the prisoners,” the plan noted. “The prisoners must be locked in the barracks and machine-guns and rifles employed to enforce security.” Hand grenades were stockpiled. “In the case of serious threat, they can be dispatched by the security officers.”

  Police lieutenant Schuler recalled Wäckerle’s concern. “I noted that at the time Wäckerle, who did not seem particularly confident, was constantly afraid of an attack by communists,” Schuler said. “He repeatedly asked me for advice as to what was to be done in such circumstances, since I had an armed police training unit while his SS guards still did not know how to use guns.”

  The “concentration” of hundreds of communists heightened the threat of armed assault by the underground “military political apparatus” of the Communist Party. Dachau itself was iconic for German communists. In April 1919, when the Bolsheviks seized power in Munich and established the short-lived Soviet Republic of Bavaria, a unit of the Bavarian Red Army under the command of the activist-playwright Ernst Toller scored a stinging victory there. Toller had deployed his men along the Würm Canal near the train station to counter an advance by regular army units. “As the battle commences, all of the workers of the Dachauer munitions plant—male and female—begin attacking the White Soldiers,” the playwright commander recounted in a brisk present-tense narrative highlighting the particular valor of the women workers who swarmed the enemy. “They disarm the troops, round them up, and drive them out of the town with blows and kicks.” The government troops retreated, leaving 150 prisoners, four pieces of artillery, and an untallied number of machine guns. The next day, Good Friday, the Bolsheviks proclaimed victory on posters in Munich—“Red Army Victory! Dachau has been conquered!” The Soviet republic was subsequently crushed, but the memory of the Bolshevik victory endured. Following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the Bavarian communist leader Hans Beimler rallied twenty thousand followers in Munich’s Circus Krone with the defiant battle cry, “We will meet again in Dachau!”

  Along with the security threats, Wäckerle found on his arrival an atmosphere of accommodation, almost cameraderie, between the detainees and their keepers. For the previous three weeks, the facility had been under the command of the Bavarian state police, following an urgent request by the state government for “two police officers” and “forty to sixty police guards” to oversee a “collecting camp for political prisoners” outside Dachau. “A very energetic police captain is to be identified as their leader,” the instruction stipulated. “He will also serve in the capacity of camp commandant until further notice.” The order had been issued on March 20, 1933, with twenty-four hours’ notice, and with the request that the police be at the facility by six o’clock the following evening “so that they can be assigned to their guard and patrol duties while there is still daylight.” That same day, Himmler ordered the transfer of forty “protective custody” detainees from Landsberg Prison to Dachau, and held a press conference to announce the opening of Bavaria’s first “concentration camp.”

  Amid the scramble, Company 2 of the Bavarian state police, under the command of Captain Schlemmer, arrived, and the first forty detainees were delivered on Wednesday. Schlemmer was appalled by what he found. The barracks were unheated. Food was served in a field kitchen. Unwilling to subject the detainees to such conditions, Schlemmer quartered the prisoners in a building next to his own headquarters. The detainees undertook joint foraging expeditions with the police in the abandoned buildings, and helped Reichswehr soldiers erect the barbed-wire fencing around the barracks. “The prisoners were treated decently,” one state policeman, Johann Kugler, recalled. “They received the same food as we did, they used the same toilet and shower facilities, and played soccer with us.” Detainee Martin Grünwiedl confirmed the cordial relations. “We worked with the soldiers like comrades and got along well,” he recalled. “We broke off our conversations whenever an SS man approached.”

  Schlemmer called Adolf Wagner. Claus Bastian, the first detainee registered in Dachau, overheard Schlemmer’s conversation. “He said he thought the imprisonment of the detainees was unlawful,” Bastian recalled Schlemmer chastising Wagner. “On top of that, he accused the Gauleiter of misusing the state police for tasks for which there was no legal basis or official statement. There was not even a formal police order for such extensive use of so-called ‘protective custody.’ If such political measures were already being taken, then the most basic courtesy dictated that at least the financial means for provisions, etc., needed to be made available. It was impossible to make such demands on the state police.”

  Schlemmer and his officers were equally firm with the SS guards who had been assigned to the camp as “assistant police.” They had been greeted on arrival by SS Standartenführer (Colonel) Johann-Erasmus Baron von Malsen-Ponickau, appointed by Himmler as their Munich-based head. “We have not come here to treat the swine in there humanely,” the Nazi aristocrat instructed the men on arrival. “We no longer v
iew them as human beings like us, rather as people of a second class.” Malsen-Ponickau had helped Epp crush Bavaria’s Soviet mini-state in 1919 and retained a hard-bitten memory of Bolsheviks. “If these swine had come to power, they would have cut off all our heads,” he said. “Whoever cannot stand the sight of blood does not belong here and should step forward. The more of these swine that we knock off, the fewer we have to feed.” A state police officer who overheard Malsen-Ponickau’s remarks dismissed the fascist bluster. “Yes, that was horrible to hear, but as long as we are on guard here nothing will happen,” the police officer told a detainee. “But if we leave, you are going to be in trouble.”

  For the first three weeks, the state police kept the SS at heel. “We always emphasized the fact that the guards were to strictly refrain from assaulting prisoners,” one officer remembered, “and if anyone was found to behave in such an inadmissible manner, expulsion from the SS would occur. These threats had a certain weight because it would not only damage their honor, but would have also carried significant repercussions for their future.” When SS lieutenant Robert Erspenmüller announced his intention “to knock off a few Jews,” he was warned against touching “a single hair” of anyone in the camp. Erwin Kahn appreciated the police presence. “I was walking next to Kahn, who had a particularly prominent Jewish nose,” fellow detainee Wilhelm Brink recalled. “Nearby there was a group of SS, including Steinbrenner and another SS man known as the boxer.” These two SS men suddenly set upon Kahn. “Only the intervention of the green police prevented Kahn from being mistreated,” Brink said.

  On April 2, Himmler exercised his capacity as police chief and Reichsführer SS to transfer responsibility for the detainees from the state police to the SS. “The transfer is to take place as agreed between the head of the political assistant police and the commander of the state police,” Himmler dictated, then scrawled a bold, runicstyle “H. Himmler” beneath the instruction. Himmler’s transfer order was an administrative fast shuffle that removed the detainees from police protection and placed them directly in SS hands, while the facility itself remained under police auspices. The formal transfer was set for eleven o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, April 11. “For security and training purposes, a police unit consisting of two officers and around sixteen state policemen will remain until the entire security and guard service is taken over by the assistant police,” the minutes of an April 7 meeting record. Captain Max Winkler was placed in charge of the camp and Lieutenant Schuler in charge of training the SS guards.