KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps
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This highlights, once again, the disparities between early camps, even those staffed by Nazi paramilitaries. As yet, there was no agreement on how Jewish prisoners should be treated. Occasionally, this even led to open conflicts between Nazi officials, as happened in Sonnenburg. Rumors about the torture of Hans Litten and Erich Mühsam had reached Berlin within days. Concerned about the reputation of Sonnenburg, attorney Dr. Mittelbach from Berlin police headquarters carried out an inspection on April 10, 1933. A glance at the prisoners—Mühsam’s dentures were smashed and Litten’s face grotesquely swollen—quickly confirmed that they had been harmed “in a very serious way,” as the civil servant informed his superiors. Mittelbach called together the SA guards and lectured them that abuses were strictly forbidden. When it became clear that his warning was being ignored, he returned to Sonnenburg by car on April 25 to pick up Litten, coming back one month later for Mühsam. He took both prisoners to state prison wings in Berlin, where their treatment improved immeasurably. “Dr. Mittelbach has saved my life,” the beaming Litten told his mother in Spandau prison.119
Mittelbach could intervene in Sonnenburg because the camp—though staffed by SA men—came under his authority. It was the first major camp of the Prussian political police and Mittelbach, who had helped to set it up, was soon appointed to an even more influential post: coordinating protective custody across Prussia from inside the secret state police office (Gestapa), established as a new agency under the Prussian Ministry of the Interior in late April 1933. The official task of the secret state police (Gestapo) officers in the Berlin headquarters and its regional branches was to pursue “all subversive political activities in the whole of Prussia.” Mittelbach himself did not last long in his new post, perhaps because of his help for Litten. Still, the central state authorities, in Prussia and other German states, were starting to assert greater control over the chaotic network of early camps.120
COORDINATION
In early March 1933, at the dawn of the Third Reich, government officials in Thuringia hastily erected a camp for Communist prisoners on the grounds of a former airfield in Nohra near Weimar; within a few days, more than two hundred men were held inside. Just ten weeks later, however, the new camp was abandoned again. Sometimes described as the first German concentration camp to open, Nohra was also one of the first to close down.121 Many others followed, and by late summer 1933 most early camps had shut their gates.122 These camps had never been intended as anything more than temporary and their closure reflected a wider shift in Nazi terror. Once the regime had secured its position, its leaders tried to rein in the storm troopers, whose excesses were beginning to cause concern even among staunch Nazi supporters. On July 6, 1933, Hitler unequivocally told senior Reich officials that the Nazi revolution was over.123 The resulting decline in rank-and-file violence meant fewer prisoners and fewer camps.
Among the remaining early camps were several larger state camps. Attempts to coordinate political terror had already begun in spring 1933 and gathered pace from mid-1933.124 Just two months after local activists had set up Osthofen in March, for example, the Hesse police commissioner designated it as an official state camp.125 Senior state officials elsewhere also established large camps.126 The most significant initiatives came in the two biggest German states, Prussia and Bavaria, where officials formulated ambitious visions for the future of extra-legal police detention. To implement their rival plans, both states operated model camps, in the Emsland and in Dachau respectively. Not only were these the largest sites in the second half of 1933—holding some 3,000 (Emsland) and 2,400 (Dachau) prisoners a day in September—they were the closest the early camps came to prototypes for later SS concentration camps.127
“Protective Custody” in Prussia
During the Nazi capture of power, far more political opponents were locked up in Prussia than in any other German state. At the end of July 1933, well over half of all protective custody prisoners were detained there.128 Many of them were so dangerous, a top Prussian civil servant claimed in summer 1933, that they could not be released for a long time. Over the coming years, he estimated, around ten thousand protective custody prisoners would be held in Prussia on a daily basis. Lawless detention in camps was here to stay.129
The conviction that the camps were more than an emergency measure, that they would last beyond the capture of power and become a permanent feature of the Third Reich, galvanized early efforts to create a more ordered system of detention beyond the law.130 In Prussia, the coordination of the camp system was spearheaded by the Ministry of the Interior. Hermann Göring himself had signed off on its new model by autumn 1933: in the future, there would be four large state concentration camps, in place of the plethora of early camps.131
The first Prussian state camp was the infamous one in Sonnenburg, where Carl von Ossietzky was among the approximately one thousand prisoners in late November 1933.132 About the same number of men was detained in a second state camp in Brandenburg on the Havel River, set up in August inside another run-down former penitentiary. The inmates here included Erich Mühsam and Hans Litten, whose brief refuge in Berlin prisons had come to an abrupt end.133 Even more men—some 1,675 in late September—were detained in a third camp, Lichtenburg in Prettin on the Elbe, which had opened back in June, again on the grounds of a derelict penitentiary.134 But the pride of Göring’s officials was the largest site, a major complex of camps established from summer 1933 around Papenburg in the Emsland, in northwestern Germany near the Dutch border.135
Beyond these four main sites, the Prussian state authorities approved a handful of regional camps, among them Moringen, which became the central Prussian camp for women in protective custody; by mid-November, almost 150 women were held here.136 As for all the other remaining early camps, Hermann Göring announced in October 1933 that they were “not recognized by me as state concentration camps” and would “shortly, in any case by the end of this year, be dissolved.”137 Several early camps really were closed down around this time and their prisoners taken to the Emsland.138
The new Prussian model envisaged a system of large state camps coordinated from Berlin. Instead of different authorities meddling in protective custody, police offices would apply to the Gestapa, which would oversee the detention and release of all prisoners in state concentration camps.139 The individual camps were headed by civil servants from the police service, who reported to the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. In turn, these camp directors were in charge of the commanders of local SS guards. The SS monopoly over guard duties in Prussia had been secured by SS Gruppenführer Kurt Daluege, the head of the police department in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. Other senior officials—duped by SS efforts to project a more disciplined public image than the unruly SA—evidently endorsed the move. The decision to put the SS in charge led to the replacement of SA guards in camps like Sonnenburg, and by late August all the main Prussian state concentration camps were staffed by SS units.140
But the Prussian model was never fully realized. Its administrative structure proved unworkable. Far from ensuring central control, it was a guarantee for turmoil, as many local SS guards were loath to submit to directors from the civil service.141 Similar conflicts were played out at a higher level between officials from the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and SA and SS chieftains. In autumn 1933, for example, the ministry had to shelve its plan to close Oranienburg, following furious protests by SA leaders who defended the camp as a bulwark against enemies of the state (more important, perhaps, was their desire to secure the future employment of the local SA guards). In the end, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior grudgingly accepted Oranienburg as a regional state camp run by the SA.142
This climb-down was typical of the inability of Göring’s officials to bring lawless detention in Prussia fully under their control. Not only did some Nazi paramilitaries continue to arrest prisoners on their own accord; a few defiant SA and SS leaders even struck out on their own to set up new camps.143 In autumn 1933,
for instance, the police president of Stettin, SS Oberführer Fritz-Karl Engel, established a camp in an abandoned wharf building in the Bredow district, which operated until March 11, 1934.144 When it finally closed down, an exasperated Göring ordered that any other police camps that “bear the character of concentration camps” had to be “dissolved at once.”145 A few days later, during a conference with Hitler, Göring went even further and suggested that an official commission should comb the country for secret SA camps.146
The Prussian experiment ended in disarray. No sooner had a comprehensive model for a state camp system been developed, than it came apart. Its unraveling was hastened by the lack of leadership from the top of the Prussian state. Hermann Göring himself began to doubt the purpose of his large camps and pushed for mass releases instead (see below). Further down the hierarchy, Prussian state officials pulled in different directions. In late November 1933, the Ministry of the Interior effectively lost control over the camps, which passed instead to the newly independent Prussian Gestapo, now run as a special agency subordinated directly to Göring. But the Gestapo failed to develop a systematic vision and over the coming months, Prussian policy drifted.147 The general confusion and conflicts that characterized the Prussian state system was reflected in its flagship camps in the Emsland, during a long year of terror.148
Inside the Emsland Camps
Wolfgang Langhoff woke with a jolt one early morning in July 1933, roused from a deep sleep by shrill whistles and screams. He had no idea where he was. Langhoff looked up in a daze and found himself surrounded by beds full of equally bewildered men. In a flash, it all came back to him and he choked with fear: they were prisoners of the Börgermoor camp in the Emsland. Langhoff had arrived on a large transport the previous night. He was already a veteran of the early camps, having been arrested on February 28, 1933, in Düsseldorf, where he was well known as a stage actor, often playing the youthful hero, and as an agitator for the Communist cause. It had been dark when Langhoff passed through the Börgermoor gate, and after the march from the faraway railway station, brutally driven on by SS men, he had collapsed on a straw mattress inside a large building. Now, with the dull morning light creeping through the windows, he had a closer look around. The cheap wooden barrack was some 130 feet long and 30 feet wide, reminding him of a stable. Most of it was crammed full of bunk beds, holding a hundred prisoners in all, with a few narrow lockers for their belongings. Beyond, there was a smaller area with tables and benches for prisoners to eat, and a separate washroom at the far end.
As there was no running water yet, Langhoff and the others were ordered outside to wash. The dense fog, typical of the region, made it hard to see at first, but when it lifted Langhoff realized that he was standing in a small town of barracks. His was one of ten identical yellow prisoner huts, five neat rows of low wooden buildings on either side of a path bisecting the rectangular camp. In addition, there were five administrative barracks, including kitchen, infirmary, and bunker. The compound, which somewhat resembled German First World War POW camps, was enclosed by two parallel double fences of barbed wire, with a narrow corridor inside for patrols. On the other side, near the gate and the watchtower (fitted with searchlights and machine guns), stood yet more barracks, though they looked more comfortable; here the SS guards did paperwork, slept, and got drunk. Beyond these barracks, there was nothing, except for a white pole with a swastika flag, a few dead trees, and a row of telegraph poles lining the flat landscape to the faraway horizon. “Endless moorland, as far as one can see,” Langhoff wrote two years later. “Brown and black, broken up and ditches running through.” It was hard to imagine a bleaker place than Börgermoor, deep inside the sparsely populated Emsland.149
Börgermoor was one of four almost identical state camps—there was another one in Neusustrum and two in Esterwegen—opened by the Prussian Ministry of the Interior between June and October 1933 across a wide stretch of largely uncultivated land in the northern Emsland. The decision to set up this complex was made as early as spring 1933, and ministerial officials soon saw it as the centerpiece of the emerging Prussian state system.150 The special nature of these camps was obvious at first sight. In contrast to other spaces turned into early Nazi camps, the Emsland camps were not found. Instead of adapting existing buildings, the authorities had planned and purpose-built new ones, forcing prisoners to construct their own camp in the barrack style that would become a standard for the later SS camp system.151 Not only did the new complex look unlike other Prussian camps, it dwarfed them in size. In autumn 1933, the Emsland camps together held up to four thousand men—half of all prisoners in Prussian state concentration camps.152
Forced labor also set the Emsland camps apart. It was not incidental, as in most early camps, but integral. The cultivation of the Emsland moor, which had only advanced fitfully in previous years, promised both economic and ideological gain. Land reclamation would raise German agricultural self-sufficiency and chimed with the Nazi doctrines of “blood and soil” and “living space.” Also, it would not upset small businesses worried about cheap competition from prisoner labor. Most important of all, such work was a perfect fit for the propaganda picture of early camps as places of “reeducation” through hard manual labor.
In practice, work in the Emsland camps was all about harassment, as Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler acknowledged a few years later, summing up the approach with a revealing pun: “You wait, I’ll teach you mores [manners], I’m sending you into the moor.”153 The prisoners left their compounds early, before 6:00 a.m. in summer, and normally marched for over an hour. They were often forced to sing on the way, though the SS soon banned the “Song of the Moorland Soldiers,” a protest song composed by three inmates (Wolfgang Langhoff among them). On the moor, prisoners had to dig trenches and turn over the soil, at breakneck speed to avoid SS punishment for slacking or for missing the daily quota. After his first day, Wolfgang Langhoff wrote, “My hands are full of blisters. My bones ache, every step hurts.” Each day brought more pain, he added, as hundreds of men slaved for weeks on a piece of land that could have been turned over by a couple of tractors in a few days.154
Despite their distinct features, the Emsland camps shared key elements with other early camps staffed by Nazi paramilitaries. In the Emsland, too, most prisoners were left-wing political opponents, with German Communists in the absolute majority. And these men faced extreme violence. Although the Emsland camps were headed by a senior police officer as director, the real masters were the SS camp commanders—all of them embittered First World War veterans who had joined the Nazi movement before its electoral breakthrough in 1930—and their brutal guards.155
As in other early camps, SS violence reached a terrifying crescendo whenever well-known politicians and Jews arrived.156 On September 13, 1933, one such transport of around twenty men from Oranienburg reached Börgermoor. Their arrival had been anticipated for days by SS guards, who pounced on the newcomers and soon pulled out the two most prominent prisoners, Friedrich Ebert and Ernst Heilmann. Their “welcome” in the SS camp Börgermoor was even more brutal than it had been in the SA camp Oranienburg five weeks earlier. On arrival, both men were humiliated and beaten with slats and table legs. Later, the two SPD politicians were thrown into a hole, together with three new Jewish prisoners (among them the rabbi Max Abraham), for a “meeting of the parliamentary group,” as their tormentors called it. Bleeding profusely and pleading for mercy, Heilmann was briefly buried alive, while Ebert apparently refused an SS order to kick the others and was threatened with execution. Some prisoners felt that Ebert’s defiance impressed the guards, who later seemed to go a little easier on him.
Meanwhile, the suffering of Ernst Heilmann in Börgermoor continued. Once, he had to spend an entire day smeared from head to toe in human excrement. Another time, he crawled on all fours into the prisoner barracks, led on a chain by an SS man, barked loudly, and exclaimed “I am the Jewish Parliamentary Deputy Heilmann from the SPD!” before he was maim
ed by guard dogs. Just before he had arrived in the Emsland, Heilmann had told a fellow prisoner that he could not endure another day like his first one in Oranienburg. But in Börgermoor, every day was like a new “welcome,” as guards invented ever more sadistic games to drive him to his grave. Finally, on September 29, 1933, Ernst Heilmann, his body battered and his spirit broken, tried to take his own life, stumbling like a sleepwalker over the sentry line. Several shots missed before a bullet felled him. But Heilmann’s suffering was not over yet, not for a long time. He was hit in the thigh, and after a spell in the hospital he came back to the Emsland in 1934, this time to Esterwegen camp.157
In the weeks before Heilmann’s shooting, the Emsland guards killed three men. Another three prisoners were murdered in early October 1933, among them the former police president of Hamburg-Altona, an SPD official executed on orders of the Esterwegen commander for his alleged part in the death of two storm troopers back in 1932.158 Details of the SS excesses spread among the local population and soon reached the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, which eventually stepped in. On October 17, 1933, it ordered the immediate transport of all prominent prisoners and Jews out of the Emsland camps. Local SS guards were fuming when almost eighty prisoners, including Friedrich Ebert and Max Abraham, were led away that afternoon by the police. The transport went to Lichtenburg, and despite poor conditions and occasional SS abuses there, the prisoners were greatly relieved to have escaped the Emsland. “Finally,” one of the Jewish men recalled, “the special treatment came to an end.”159
Back in the Emsland, there was no letup. At least five more prisoners died in the second half of October 1933. The outrages inside the camps (widely publicized abroad), and the growing conflicts between brawling SS guards and the local population outside, finally prompted Göring to intervene in spectacular fashion. On Sunday, November 5, 1933, a heavily armed police detachment moved to the Emsland to depose the SS. The camps were surrounded and the army was apparently put on alert in case of a violent confrontation. Following a tense overnight standoff, during which the furiously drunk guards smashed buildings, burned down a barrack, threatened to shoot prisoners, and even proposed to arm them for a joint uprising, the hungover SS men meekly handed over their weapons and dispersed without resistance. The exit of the former SS masters could not have been more inglorious.160