Hitler's First Victims

by Timothy W. Ryback

  * * *

  *1 The Reich Court in Leipzig convicted Marinus van der Lubbe of treason in December 1933, but acquitted the other four defendants. Van der Lubbe was beheaded in January 1934. Mainstream historiography assumes that Van der Lubbe acted alone, and dismisses both the theory of a communist conspiracy as well as Nazi complicity; however, the issue remains a point of continued speculation. In 1946, Hans Gisevius, a former member of the Gestapo, provided details of alleged Nazi involvement, as did a 2001 book based on previously unexplored Gestapo archives in Moscow: Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel, Der Reichstagsbrand (Berlin: Quintessenz Verlag, 2001).

  *2 The SS Unit 10 was headquartered in Stuttgart and under the command of SS lieutenant Johann-Erasmus Baron von Malsen-Ponickau, who had received the first SS guards in Dachau in his capacity as head of the Munich “assistant police.”

  Epilogue

  The Hartinger Conviction

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1945, an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army was rifling through the office of Adolf Wagner when he came across a cache of files locked in a desk drawer. Wagner’s office had been left untouched since June 1942 when the state interior minister had suffered a stroke to which he had succumbed two years later. The files contained hundreds of pages of original documents, all dated from May and June 1933, and included the murder indictment and arrest warrant for Hilmar Wäckerle and several of his subordinates. The files were transferred to Nuremberg, a city that for more than a decade had provided the backdrop for the swastika-swathed pageants of the Third Reich, and now served as the setting for the International Military Tribunal, where the prosecution team was preparing for the upcoming trial. The neighboring town of Fürth, virtually untouched by the bombings that had devastated Nuremberg, provided quarters for many of the jurists.

  When President Harry S. Truman first approached Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson about serving as chief prosecutor, Jackson had envisioned Adolf Hitler in the dock as defendant, possibly along with Benito Mussolini, and several key Hitler lieutenants, such as Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Martin Bormann. In the final weeks of the war, Jackson saw his list of suspects eviscerated. On April 30, Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, followed a day later by Goebbels. Himmler popped a cyanide tablet in his mouth almost immediately after being detained by British intelligence officers. Bormann had vanished, leaving only Göring among the senior Nazis to stand trial and compelling Jackson to recalibrate his prosecution strategy. According to a calculation made by Warren Farr, the second tier of Nazi leaders included 1,000 potential criminal suspects, followed by surviving Gauleiters and their staffs, numbering an estimated 4,000, with another 21,000 local officials, and 2,000 more “group leaders,” 60,000 “cell leaders,” and another 300,000 “block leaders,” for a total of 463,048 potential criminal suspects. This was excluding 400,000 lesser members of the Nazi Party leadership among the four million officially registered party members.

  The undertaking was as dubious as it was daunting, a fact that was evident to all, including the defendants. “You can’t indict a government and its organizations as criminal,” Hans Frank observed from his prison cell. “The concept of the Reich government is a hundred years old. The general staff is hundreds of years old.” Frank admitted that the case of the SS was different, since “it was started with the party and by the party.” “But it’s quite impossible to indict or convict an organization as criminal if it has in its membership millions of innocent people.”

  But that is exactly what Jackson had decided to do. He indicted twenty-four prominent Nazis—of whom twenty-one made it into the dock—each responsible for a particular sector of the government, then demonstrated the criminal nature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and its affiliated entities as a way of netting the broadest swath of defendants. Jackson divided assignments among the Russian, French, British, and American jurists, and charged Farr with the task of “criminalizing” the SS. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1945, the prosecution teams combed through more than 100,000 documents taken from offices, archives, sealed vaults, salt mines, and ash heaps. Farr immediately recognized the value of the Dachau murder indictments.

  The bundling of the four cases permitted Farr to demonstrate a systematic, chain-of-command process with explicit homicidal intent on the part of the SS within weeks of the Nazi seizure of power. “The significance is that you have, one after the other, murders committed within a short space of time,” Farr explained to the tribunal that December. “And, in each instance, an official report by the camp commander or the guard as to the cause of death which was completely disproved by the facts.” Farr read from the indictment file for the murder of Alfred Strauss (Document 641-PS), then turned to the indictment for the murder of Leonhard Hausmann (Document 642-PS), only to be interrupted by the tribunal president.

  “I don’t think you need to read the details.”

  “I will offer it without reading it.”

  The murders of Louis Schloss (Document 644-PS) and Sebastian Nefzger (Document 645-PS) were dismissed with equal curtness, but Farr went on to make his point. “These four murders committed within the short space of two weeks in the spring of 1933, each by different SS guards, are but a few examples of SS activities in the camps at that very early date,” he explained. “Indeed, that sort of thing was officially encouraged.”

  Farr returned the next morning to continue his prosecution, underscoring the homicidal nature of the camp command structure, citing from the camp regulations, again quoting from Himmler, and observing that seven of the defendants sitting in the dock had been senior members of the SS. Then he got to his point. “As an organization founded on the principle that persons of ‘German blood’ were a ‘master race’ it exemplified a basic Nazi doctrine,” he said. “It served as one of the means through which the conspirators acquired control of the German government. The operations of the SD and SS Totenkopf Verbände [Death’s Head Units] in concentration camps were means used by the conspirators to secure their regime and terrorize their opponents.… In the Nazi program of Jewish extermination, all branches of the SS were involved from the very beginning.” Farr again emphasized that service in the SS was voluntary and that terror was integral to its mission. “It was, we submit, at all times the exclusive function and purpose of the SS to carry out the common objectives of the defendant conspirators,” he concluded. “Its activities in carrying out those functions involved the commission of the crimes defined in Article 6 of the Charter. By reason of its aims and the means used for the accomplishment thereof, the SS should be declared a criminal organization in accordance with Article 9 of the Charter.”*1

  With Farr’s phase of the prosecution complete, the Munich prosecutor’s files were returned to the Bavarian state ministry of justice. “The enclosed files were found in the desk of former Gauleiter Adolf Wagner,” an accompanying memorandum explained. “These appear to be indictments signed in 1933 that were never delivered. The documents clearly show that the German judges at the time pursued the murderers in the SS circles; but that their efforts failed in the face of the overwhelming power of the political leadership. These cases can at least serve as valuable vindication for judges today, and perhaps even permit the prosecution to be taken up again.”

  The files lingered in the state ministry of justice for nearly a year, eventually finding their way to the attention of Munich’s chief of police, Franz Xavier Pitzer, who then forwarded them, on December 31, 1946, to the Munich II prosecutors’ offices, where they came into the hands of Hartinger’s former Munich II colleague Anton Heigl. In early 1934, Heigl had been dismissd from the Munich II office by the National Socialists when his earlier socialist affiliations were discovered, but Heigl had now turned this to his advantage with the American occupation forces, who were impressed with his excellent command of English and his status as a “victim” of the Nazi regime. He was returned to Munich II as deputy prosecutor. He recognized the Hartinger
files immediately and decided to inform his former colleague.

  At the time, Hartinger was serving as a district judge in his hometown of Amberg, east of Nuremberg. In March 1934, he had been transferred from Munich II, which removed the Dachau Concentration Camp from his judicial authority. Wintersberger was also transferred a few months later, effectively terminating the investigations. During the war, Hartinger served for a time in the east and then on the western front, where he was taken prisoner by the Americans in the autumn of 1944 and spent the next two years in a prisoner-of-war camp. Eventually he returned to civil service. Now, in early 1947, he received a letter from Heigl informing him that his Dachau indictments had suddenly reappeared. Hartinger received the courtesy with mixed feelings. Heigl made no pretense of the fact that he regularly reported on Hartinger to the Nazis, as if it had been part of the normal course of things. “A sign of a sick world,” Hartinger later lamented. “Yes, the world was ill, and unfortunately especially the German people.”*2

  Hartinger traveled to Munich, where Heigl offered to let him have a look at the papers he had found. “I took them with me back to Amberg and had multiple copies made of all the files,” Hartinger recalled. He had lost the files once; he was not going to lose them again. He had the files notarized on May, 17, 1947, then returned the originals to Heigl, who reactivated the criminal investigation, though most of the suspects included in the Hartinger indictments were now dead.

  Wäckerle’s office administrator, Josef Mutzbauer, had fallen victim to the very machinery he had helped put in motion. In the spring of 1934, in a moment of lapsed judgment, he mentioned to his SS driver that he was weary of the “swindle” being perpetrated in Dachau. The driver dutifully reported the remark. Mutzbauer was arrested and placed in the Arrest Bunker. The next day he was found hanged in his cell. There was no investigation. Dr. Werner Nürnbergk continued to serve as a camp doctor until March 1934, when he was replaced by Dr. Hans Meixner, but Nürnbergk retains the grim distinction of being the first SS doctor to serve in a Nazi concentration camp.

  Following Wäckerle’s dismissal as camp commandant, when he was dispatched by Himmler to Stuttgart, Wäckerle married a local beauty, Elfriede Rupp, nine years younger and the daughter of a local veterinarian. Wäckerle was eventually transferred to the nearby town of Ellwangen, where he was involved in helping establish the first armed SS units, the precursor of the Waffen SS, before being transferred to Hamburg. During the war, he served as a colonel in the Waffen SS Viking Division, participating in the invasions of Poland, the Netherlands, and the Soviet Union. He was as fearless and ruthless as he had been in the First World War, committing acts of atrocity and heroism with equal conviction. In the Netherlands, he led an advance unit in the capture of a key railway station, earning an Iron Cross First and Second Class for bravery, and sustaining a bullet wound along the way. A photograph taken a day after the battle shows him bandaged and brimming with pride, his blood-spattered uniform draped over his shoulder. He died two years later during the first weeks of the invasion of the Soviet Union, shot in the head by a Russian soldier when he opened the hatch of a crippled Russian tank. “With the passing of SS colonel Wäckerle we have lost a man whose entire life since his earliest youth was dedicated to the fatherland,” an obituary in an SS newspaper read. The tribute made no reference to Wäckerle’s distinction as the first commandant of the Dachau Concentration Camp.

  In May 1945, American soldiers captured Hans Steinbrenner on the Austrian border with Bavaria. Steinbrenner had spent the previous twelve years in the service of the SS. He would say in a postwar interrogation that he had been transferred from Dachau after Wäckerle’s departure and served with an honor guard at the Wittelsbach Palace, at the ministry of the interior, and at the shrine to the “martyrs” of the Beer Hall Putsch, on Odeonsplatz. Steinbrenner returned to Dachau in mid-1934 to train SS recruits, and went on to service at the Lichtenburg and Buchenwald concentration camps. “From September 1939 until the collapse of Germany,” he told the investigators, “I served with several divisions of the Waffen SS in campaigns in Holland, Belgium, France, and in Russia on several fronts.” After his capture by the Americans, Steinbrenner escaped briefly and sought refuge with his wife. She turned him over to the police and filed for divorce. Steinbrenner was subjected to severe interrogation by the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) and Military Intelligence Service (MIS) that left him disabled. “The behavior of the Allied soldiers, of the CIC and MIS officials after the war, which included atrocities I experienced to my own person,” Steinbrenner said, “showed that the soldiers of the democratic states in the world, the soldiers who fought in the name of Jesus Christ, would not have behaved any differently than our own soldiers. Their acts did nothing to awake any remorse in my soul, but created only a sense of undying hatred.” Steinbrenner was eventually handed over to German authorities.

  Once in German hands, Steinbrenner was willing to talk. He admitted that Benario, Goldmann, and the two Kahns had been murdered, and spoke of the fear of prosecution that haunted the SS guards following these first killings. “I need to note that back then if the Mordkommission from Munich, which on such occasions conducted inspections of the crime scene and other investigations, had been more thorough and decisive from the outset,” Steinbrenner said, “the commission would have had to have determined that these Jews had been murdered, not shot trying to escape. This would have had the consequence of preventing further and similar transgressions.” Steinbrenner was initially charged in the shooting of the four men, but the charges were dropped due to conflicting witness testimony. Steinbrenner confessed to the Lehrburger murder, but was vague about his role in other excesses, including the death of Willy Aron. “In any event, I never lashed a detainee so long that blood ran from his buttocks down to his ankles,” he insisted. He also exposed himself to be the “unknown perpetrator” in the death of Louis Schloss.

  On March 10, 1952, following a four-day trial that involved more than six hundred depositions and testimonies, including formal statements by Wintersberger and Hartinger, Steinbrenner was acquitted in Schloss’s murder, due to lack of evidence, but was charged with the “crime of bodily harm in the performance of duty.” For the death of Willy Aron, he received a life sentence, and in the case of Karl Lehrburger, the court judged Steinbrenner as having acted under the duress of Erspenmüller’s threats and Wäckerle’s orders and therefore sentenced him to ten years.

  Steinbrenner spent the next decade in the state penitentiary in Landsberg am Lech, where Hitler and his fellow Nazis were imprisoned following the 1923 putsch. From Landsberg, Steinbrenner sent Hartinger an eight-page typewritten letter in which he spoke not only of his role as perpetrator but also as victim. “I am certainly aware that all the suffering and injustice committed in the concentration camps could not go unpunished,” Steinbrenner wrote, “but on closer examination of the situation it must also be acknowledged that the individual, without any intentionality on his part, or any criminal or perverse intent, was implicated through nothing more than his absolute belief in the future of Germany, that he was misled, harassed, and fanaticized, and without any close connection to a religious community. These guilty individuals are in fact those who were most deceived, and one should not demand from them that they bear the consequences that have been spared those senior to them.” Hartinger did not respond. Steinbrenner was released on May 31, 1963, in deteriorating health, and transferred to a convalescent facility near Berchtesgaden. He hanged himself the following year, still unrepentant.

  Karl Wicklmayr appeared to be more forthcoming. “As far as I can remember, during my time in Dachau,” he told the police in 1948, “I killed the detainees Götz, Dressel, Schloss, Nefzger, and Strauss on orders of Wäckerle, who was commandant at the time.” Wicklmayr recalled shooting Götz with his .8 pistol, and slashing Dressel’s wrist with a knife, as he did with Nefzger. “I still remember Nefzger today,” he said, “because he was a detainee with an amputated leg.” Wicklmayr un
derscored the fact that he committed the killings completely on his own. He also hanged Louis Schloss in his cell on Wäckerle’s orders. “I ambushed Schloss,” he said. “He offered no resistance and I hanged him from the wall.” Wicklmayr could not remember, however, whether he pounded a hook into the wall or whether there was something already there. “On Wäckerle’s orders, I also shot the detainee Strauss,” he said. “I was walking with Strauss in the camp and killed him with a bullet to the head. I had him walk ahead of me and fired the shot from behind to fake an escape attempt. As in each of the other cases, I reported to Wäckerle that I had carried out his orders.” Wicklmayr eventually retracted portions of his confession. He had not, in fact, killed Alfred Strauss. He also claimed he had not shot Josef Götz. Some considered him deranged. In the end, Wicklmayr was sentenced to six years in prison for “complicity in manslaughter.”

  Hartinger took satisfaction in seeing Nazi war criminals brought to justice, but he was less certain in apportioning guilt to those who had been complicit but not criminal. Hartinger himself had undergone a judicial review (Spruchkammerverfahren)*3 after the war and been acquitted of any complicity in the Nazi regime. Indeed, a former Munich II colleague, Josef Wintrich, who had become president of the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, suggested that Hartinger go public with an account of his efforts in the spring of 1933. Bavaria’s prime minister, Dr. Hanns Seidel, urged Hartinger not to do so. “Look, Hartinger, we have enough to do dealing with the present without looking into the past,” Seidel told him. “Let’s look to building the future, not losing ourselves in the past.” Hartinger followed Seidel’s advice. He remained silent on the matter for the next thirty years.