Hitler's First Victims

by Timothy W. Ryback

  They entered the wire enclosure and proceeded past the double rank of ten barracks, to the back of the camp where the Arrest Bunker stood orphaned near the concrete perimeter wall. It was actually a half-barrack, a truncated, one-story structure, half the size of the others, and it housed the seven arrest cells, along with the SS changing rooms, a storage area for the bedding, and the camp infirmary. It was a convenient corner for atrocity. Detainees were lashed in the storage room, where the bedding could be used to muffle their screams. “If I wasn’t wrapping a blanket around the head,” Steinbrenner recalled, “then I was whipping, and another was holding the head.” A doctor was always nearby to give an injection if a detainee fell unconscious during the lashing. The word “Wache,” or guardpost, was scrawled in chalk over the entrance.

  The door was locked. While they waited for camp manager Vogel to bring the keys, Steinbrenner asked Beimler if he still “imagined” himself as a delegate to the Reichstag in Berlin. “Imagination,” Beimler replied, “is a bourgeois concept that has no place in communism.” Steinbrenner stared at Beimler, baffled, and decided to turn his attention to Hunglinger. “And you, traitor! You swine, you scoundrel, now we know that you spied on us and were in the pay of the police,” he said. “And how you misled and deceived our SA men in the Führer school.” As he reviewed Hunglinger’s transgressions, he talked himself into a rage, cuffing Hunglinger across the face repeatedly. Unlike Beimler, who had remained belligerently defiant, Hunglinger, who had spent the previous five days in storm trooper hands at the Ettstrasse police station, accepted the blows with blunted lethargy.

  When Vogel returned, he pulled a clattering set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door. The arrest cells were little more than a row of converted toilet and shower stalls along the right side of a narrow hallway. The toilets had been ripped out and the windows blocked. The open sewage pipes breathed acrid moist air into the gloom. The cells were tight, narrow spaces equipped with a simple wooden bunk and a table with a plate, a knife, and a pitcher of water. A large sack filled with straw served as bedding. Hunglinger was placed in Cell 1 and Beimler down the hall in Cell 3. Josef Götz, who was still serving time for his dinner-table remark about the shooting of Benario, Goldmann, and the Kahns two weeks earlier, was between them in Cell 2.

  The men had barely settled into their quarters when Steinbrenner appeared with two SS men. “Now we’ve got you, you traitor, you rebel,” he barked as he flung open Beimler’s door. “People are paying for your rabble-rousing.” Then he commanded, “Get up!” As Beimler rose, Steinbrenner started whipping him, then shoved him into the corner of the cell. “Now will you admit that you betrayed the workers?” Beimler’s response came low and glowering: “If I were to admit now to having betrayed the workers, out of fear of you hitting me,” he told Steinbrenner, “then I would deserve to be beaten to death here and now.” Steinbrenner slammed the door shut and moved to Hunglinger, who was beaten and pummeled and left lying on his bunk, moaning.

  Vogel followed Steinbrenner a short while later, opening each door in turn and inquiring about his charges. Vogel possessed a sense of nuance and irony absent in the brutish Steinbrenner, preferring to administer torment in small, subtle doses. “Do you have any requests,” he asked Beimler, “any wishes, any complaints?”

  “None of the three,” Beimler replied curtly.

  Vogel handed Beimler a six-foot-long leather cord with a noose on the end and ordered him to stand on the bed and tie it to the shower fixture near the ceiling. “Yes, yes, just get onto the bed and hang the noose from the faucet,” Vogel explained. When Beimler completed the task, Vogel instructed him in Arrest Bunker protocol. “In future, when someone enters the cell, you must strike a military pose and say: ‘Detainee Beimler at your service.’ ” Vogel then explained that Steinbrenner’s beatings would be a regular part of the Arrest Bunker routine. He spoke in a calm, reassuring tone, addressing Beimler with the more respectful “Sie” rather than “du,” assuring him that Steinbrenner’s excesses were not gratuitous, that these were brutalities with a purpose. The beatings would be painful, Vogel assured Beimler, then added, pointing to the noose, “And in case you begin to have any doubts, then you always have this option.”

  As Vogel walked down the hall back to the SS changing room, Hunglinger called to him, rapping on the inside of his cell door. Vogel unlocked the cell. Hunglinger explained that he needed to relieve himself. Vogel led him out. When Hunglinger returned, he asked Vogel for a favor. “Please just give me a revolver,” he said. “I want to shoot myself. I can’t bear the beatings any longer.”

  “We don’t have any revolvers; besides, you’re not worth the bullet,” Vogel sniped. “You should have thought about the fact that you have a family earlier, and you should not have betrayed us.” Vogel paused, then added, “Still, I want to be charitable with you.” He handed Hunglinger a length of leather strip with a noose similar to the one he had just given Beimler.

  That night, Steinbrenner returned, this time with five SS men. Vogel unlocked Hunglinger’s door. Two men held the police major down and the other four set upon him. Hunglinger screamed. They whipped him until his cries faded to an exhausted moan, and then pummeled him until he issued little more than a half-conscious gurgling of pain. Vogel locked the door to Hunglinger’s cell, then accompanied Steinbrenner’s team down the hall to Götz’s cell, where they repeated the same procedure.

  By the time they came to Beimler, they were soaked with perspiration from the exertion. Their kepis were thrown back over their necks; their hair hung in their faces and was dripping with sweat. “Come on, lie down!” Steinbrenner screamed as the door flew open. “Come on, come on.” The men swarmed Beimler, flogging him with their pizzles, two from the right and two from the left, while the other two offered a chorus of taunts: “Red Front! Heil Moscow! Hurray for the world revolution!” Beimler crumpled in pain, turning on his side, then rolling onto his stomach as they continued to whip him wildly, each delivering forty or fifty lashes. When they had finished, they grabbed each arm, opened Beimler’s hands, whipped his palms ten times, then turned his hands over and lashed the backs until they swelled. “When they finally left the cell and I thought that there would be some peace and quiet, I soon realized that I had been wrong again,” Beimler later recalled. “In the meantime they fetched a number of Jews from the camp and were beating them, one after the other, in an empty cell next to mine.” By ten o’clock it was over. Peace descended on the barrack for the night. The doors were closed and locked and the lights turned out.

  Steinbrenner and his whipping team returned the next morning at eleven o’clock and went straight to Cell 1, where they administered another round of beatings to Hunglinger. They again lashed and pummeled the fifty-three-year-old into near unconsciousness, at which point Steinbrenner pronounced with a knowing satisfaction, “That will do it.” Later that morning, when they returned and opened the cell, Hunglinger was hanging from the leather cord. A suicide note lay on the table.

  Hartinger arrived that afternoon and found Hunglinger’s corpse still hanging by the cord. He seized the suicide note as evidence in a potential prosecution. He knew men could be held accountable as “accessories to unnatural death” under Paragraph 23 of the criminal code. He decided to show the note to Hunglinger’s brother, who worked at the state court in the Palace of Justice. Hunglinger confirmed his dead sibling’s handwriting and accompanied Hartinger to the morgue to view the body. “Only after Hunglinger’s brother agreed,” Hartinger said, “did I release the corpse for burial.”

  9

  The Gumbel Report

  IN 1922, Emil Gumbel published his landmark study Four Years of Political Murder, attempting to explain the unprecedented upsurge in violence and atrocity that had swept Germany in the immediate postwar years. Gumbel was distressed and baffled that a nation that for centuries had prided itself on its discipline and orderliness, that was called the land of “poets and thinkers”—Dichter und Denker—and
had produced Bach and Beethoven and Brahms, not to mention Einstein (with whom Gumbel spent the war years in Berlin), possessed within itself the capacity for such bestiality and sadism. He was particularly troubled by the myriad brutalities that swept the Munich I and Munich II jurisdictions in the spring of 1919, when extremists from right and left battled for political power.

  In the town of Perlach, twelve men had been rousted from bed at three o’clock in the morning, beaten and robbed, then packed into a truck, driven to the Hofbräuhaus in Munich, and leisurely shot in pairs between 11 a.m. and one o’clock in the afternoon. Their killers drank beer in between the rounds of execution. In a monastery near the town of Gerlach, fourteen young men were beaten, then butchered. “The soldiers, some of them drunk, trampled the prisoners,” Gumbel quoted one witness. “They clubbed the men wildly with their guns and hit with such force that one sidearm barrel was bent and a brain splattered around.” One victim had his nose kicked into his face. Others had the backs of their skulls smashed in. “Two soldiers who had slung their arms around each other,” the witness recalled, “began an Indian warrior dance next to the corpses. They shouted and howled.” Near Grosshadern, a hundred Russian prisoners of war who were awaiting return to their homeland were packed into trucks at five o’clock in the morning, driven to a gravel pit, and gunned down en masse. Twenty men were tortured and shot in Starnberg, four in Possenhofen, three in Grosshesselohe and neighboring Grünwald, three more in Grosshadern, and one each in Schleissheim, Harlaching, Schäftlarn, and Grossförn. In Tegernsee, a thirty-two-year-old woman and her six-year-old daughter were used for target practice.

  By year’s end, Gumbel had tallied nearly eight hundred murders across the state, and more than twelve hundred across the rest of the country. “How are such things possible in a country that was once so orderly,” Gumbel wondered, “that once belonged to the leading cultural nations of our era and that, according to its constitution, is a free, democratic republic?”

  Since Gumbel was a professor, the question was of course rhetorical, and he had the answers ready at hand. He held Prussia responsible for the imposition of militarism on the hodgepodge of otherwise peaceable principalities and independent city-states that had constituted the loosely configured nations of German-speaking peoples before Bismarck forged his Reich of “blood and iron” in the 1870s. He faulted the Hohenzollern monarchy in particular for its policies of intimidation during the Great War that had banned free speech and basic civil liberties. And Gumbel blamed the “psychological brutalization” of the war itself, which immersed an entire generation in unprecedented bloodshed. “The indifference with which one now regards political murders and the victims of turbulent street demonstrations in Germany can only be explained through the theory that war has hardened us to the value of a human life,” Gumbel posited. He also blamed the press, which glorified the violence and published appeals for the assassination of public figures.

  Gumbel also noted the unprecedented application of the law on “protective custody,” which permitted the temporary detainment—usually for twenty-four hours—of an individual without due process. “Without any possibility of recourse, thousands sat in protective custody,” Gumbel wrote. Hundreds of these detainees were shot allegedly attempting to escape. The term “shot while escaping” (erschossen auf der Flucht) became a public euphemism for extrajudicial execution, to which the courts appeared to turn a blind eye.

  To make his point, Gumbel cited the case of Max Mauer, a socialist political activist who had been taken into protective custody by a military patrol and was shot allegedly attempting to flee. When the case was dismissed by a lower court, Mauer’s wife appealed it to the Reich Court in Leipzig, the highest judicial venue in the country. As part of her evidence, she quoted one of the soldiers who tried to silence her protests as her husband was taken away. “Don’t make such a scene,” he said. “Your husband is not coming back.” She also presented forensic evidence indicating that Mauer had been hit with several shots in the back with, according to the medical report, “one shot to the neck at the height of the larynx, about 2 cm left of the center.” The three soldiers insisted that Mauer had attempted to flee across a field and that they had followed proper procedure. “The guard Kruppe had shouted ‘Halt’ three times,” one witness testified, “and then, since Mauer continued running, began shooting at him until he collapsed.”

  The high court acquitted the defendants, citing a nineteenth-century law according soldiers the right to shoot prisoners attempting to escape. “According to the law of March 20, 1837, when someone is shot by a soldier, it should generally be assumed that the soldier acted rightfully,” Gumbel summarized the decision. “The soldiers do not need to prove this. It is up to the survivors to provide evidence that the soldier transgressed their limits of authority and that there was no attempt at escape by the victim. This is, of course, practically impossible.” When the trial was over, the court required the wife to cover all its costs. “Although we are used to murderers not being tried justly in Germany,” Gumbel commented drily, “up until now at least some civil courts had the objectivity to give the victim’s relatives a compensation for the court costs. After the decision of the Reich Court, even this option has been practically obliterated.”

  Gumbel’s point was simple: A responsible judiciary was necessary in order to uphold the rule of law. He argued that the generation of judges responsible for the judicial system in the early years of the Weimar Republic had been born and educated in the monarchy with limited notions of freedom, but even more so—and here Gumbel revealed his leftist political inclinations—as part of the conservative middle class, with little interest or taste for broad popular democracy.*1 “Countless social bonds connect the murderer-officer with the judge who will acquit him, who will close the case, who will believe the witness who described the ‘attempt at escape’ in detail,” Gumbel asserted. “They are of the same flesh and blood. The judge understands their language, their tactics, their thoughts. Subtly his soul sways along with the murderers, covered by a mask of pretense to proper procedure. The murderer goes free.”

  Gumbel argued that judicial collusion was a “prerequisite for political murder.” To make his point, he tabulated the comparative murder rates in individual states. Between 1919 and 1921, Bavaria registered the largest number of political murders, followed by Prussia, but with a dramatic decline (more than 70 percent) in the Rhineland, which was still occupied by the Allies and where judges were accountable to the independent Rhineland Commission. Gumbel’s conclusion: You could not rely on a constitution or open elections or a free press as a gauge or guarantee for a stable and functioning democracy. “If we are to find a satisfactory answer,” he asserted, “we must instead take into consideration the implementation of regulations, the adherence to laws, the actions of the police, the spirit of the administration, and most of all, the attitude of the state.” Gumbel made a point of reminding judges and prosecutors alike that it ultimately was in their own interest to adhere to due process and legal norms. He concluded, “They must simply realize that through their actions,” by abusing the system or twisting the laws, “they are making themselves culpable.”

  JOSEF HARTINGER WAS twenty-nine years old and completing his third year as a student in the law faculty of Ludwig Maximilian University when Gumbel published his report. In many ways, Hartinger was the perfect candidate for collusion in the conservative undercurrent that Gumbel saw undermining judicial process, and with it the very foundations of democratic process. Hartinger was born in rural Bavaria in the age of monarchy and into a devout Roman Catholic family rooted in martial tradition. His mother was the daughter of a military officer. His father had served the Wittelsbach monarchy as a sous-brigadier—a junior officer—in the “Body Guard of Archers,” the personal protectors of the Bavarian kings. In August 1914, Hartinger, then twenty years old, abandoned university studies to go to war in the first fevered wave of nationalism, enlisting in the 10th Bavarian Field Art
illery Regiment. “Cannonier Josef Hartinger,” as he described himself, trained for two years before being sent to the Western Front as a junior officer, where he was thrown into some of the fiercest fighting of the war, first in the Vosges highlands along the French-German border, then in the trenches around Verdun, and eventually with the offensives in Flanders in the summer and autumn of 1917, where Hartinger earned an Iron Cross.

  That September, Hartinger was transferred to the 6th Field Artillery Regiment, and in February 1918 he was promoted to junior sergeant. His reviewing officer praised Hartinger’s “technical abilities” and his battlefield capacities. “He has full command of the maneuvers and movements of his unit,” the officer observed. “His personal comportment here is impeccable.”

  In early March, the 6th Field Artillery Regiment advanced to the front in preparation for an all-out offensive intended to force an end to the war. By then, poison gas belonged to the standard arsenal of artillery units, in particular “green cross” gas—named for the green marking on the ignition caps—a lethal tincture of 95 percent chlorine with phosgene that scorched eyes, lacerated lungs, and left victims heaving blood. Between March 11 and March 20, munitions were transported forward to the regiment: 2,500 high-explosive shells and 1,000 projectiles with poison gas for each position. Initially, the prospects for gas were poor, with rain and fog, but on the evening before the offensive was scheduled to begin, the weather cleared.

  At 4:40 a.m., on March 21, the horizon erupted in massive artillery barrage, followed by an infantry assault supported by tanks. As the British front collapsed, the 6th Field Artillery Regiment advanced, capturing men, military dispatches, and supplies, including a phonograph with a recording of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”