KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  But life in the Emsland camps did not quiet down for long after the dramatic demise of the SS. Following a more benign interlude of police rule, Göring handed guard duties over to SA units in December 1933. Soon there were more excesses and murders, as many SA men acted just like their SS predecessors.161 The victims included some new “bigwigs.” Among them was Hans Litten, who was taken from Brandenburg to Esterwegen in January 1934; after weeks of torment and draining work, he fainted and fell off a truck that ran over his leg. Around the same time, Carl von Ossietzky arrived, almost a year after his and Litten’s arrest in Berlin. He, too, was singled out for more abuses during the work on the moor, and quickly lost hope of ever leaving the camp alive.162

  Unable to bring the Emsland camps under control, Göring prepared to abandon them. In April 1934, he presided over the closure of Börgermoor and Neusustrum, two camps he had seen as permanent places for extralegal detention only a few months earlier. Now only the two Esterwegen camps were left, holding no more than 1,162 prisoners on April 25, 1934.163 In faraway Bavaria, Heinrich Himmler must have rubbed his hands with glee at the failure of Göring’s project. While the Emsland complex was breaking apart, his own large camp was still going strong.164

  Himmler’s Model Camp

  “I became police president of Munich and took over the police headquarters, Heydrich got the political section,” SS leader Heinrich Himmler reminisced some ten years later about March 9, 1933, the day that set him on track to become the undisputed master of the Third Reich terror machine, with his faithful lieutenant Reinhard Heydrich by his side. “This is how we started,” Himmler added wistfully.165 His party career had begun before 1933, of course. Born in Munich in 1900, he was one of those angry young men from the war youth generation—too young to serve at the front—who joined radical right-wing groups after the German defeat and revolution of 1918, making up for missing the First World War by fighting a proxy battle against the Weimar Republic. A foot soldier in the nascent Nazi movement, Himmler’s big break came in 1929 when he took over the SS. Initially, it was a small bodyguard unit, no more than a peripheral part of the powerful SA under Himmler’s mentor, Ernst Röhm. But the sly and ambitious Himmler quickly turned the SS into a paramilitary force in its own right. Himmler, who unlike most Nazi activists came from the educated middle class, positioned the SS as the self-professed racial and soldierly elite of the Nazi movement, allowing him to indulge his frustrated military fantasies. By the time of the Nazi capture of power in 1933, Himmler’s SS had grown from a few hundred men to over fifty thousand, and it became ever more powerful as its leader rose through the Nazi state. On April 1, 1933, Himmler had already taken charge of the Bavarian political police and auxiliary police, and set out to build a powerful apparatus of repression in his home state.166

  Dachau stood at the heart of Himmler’s vision. On March 13, 1933, a commission inspected the old munitions factory and approved its use as a camp for protective custody. Preparations began the following day, and on March 20, 1933, Himmler proclaimed the creation of the “first concentration camp” to the press. The self-assurance with which the political novice presented his radical vision was remarkable. The remit of Dachau was not restricted to Communist functionaries, he said, but extended to all left-wing opponents who “threaten the security of the state.” The police had to be uncompromising, Himmler added, and restrain these functionaries for as long as necessary. And Himmler was thinking big: Dachau would hold some five thousand protective custody prisoners, more than the average prisoner population of all large Bavarian state prisons in 1932.167

  Himmler’s camp soon became the center for lawless detention in Bavaria. Prisoners arrived in Dachau from across the state, once protective custody was centralized in the hands of the Bavarian political police, and in just a few months, prisoner numbers rose from 151 (March 31) to 2,036 (June 30).168 By then, the camp’s appearance had changed, too. The prisoners had moved from the provisional compound into a larger one, which they had helped to build on the old factory grounds. The new Dachau camp compound, enclosed by barbed wire and guard towers, contained ten one-story barracks made of brick and concrete, which had once housed workshops of the munitions factory. Every barrack was subdivided into five rooms with bunk beds, each designed for fifty-four prisoners (attached to each room was a small washroom with sinks). Also inside the prisoner compound was the infirmary, the laundry, and the roll call square. Right outside was the large SS shooting range—a daily reminder of the guards’ dominance—and several more buildings for prisoners, including a canteen and a new bunker. Beyond these huts stood some administrative buildings, workshops, and the guards’ quarters. The whole area was surrounded by yet more barbed wire and a long wall with guard towers. To walk around the entire camp complex, one prisoner estimated, would have taken two hours.169

  The most momentous change in Dachau did not affect its appearance, however, but its staff, as Dachau turned into an SS camp. The first guards had come from the regular state police, but Himmler regarded this as a short-term measure only. Sometime in late March 1933, a small SS detachment was sent to Dachau, officially deployed as auxiliary police, and on April 2, 1933, Himmler ordered Dachau to be placed under the SS. After several days of training by the state police, the SS troop, which had grown to 138 men, stepped up. On April 11, 1933, a select band of SS men took over the prisoner compound. Meanwhile, SS sentries stationed around the barbed wire, some of them barely able to point their weapons in the right direction, continued to be supervised and drilled by a small police force. The police finally departed at the end of May 1933, when the entire Dachau operation fell to the SS.170 The basic structure of Bavarian lawless terror was now in place: the political police carried out arrests and sent protective custody prisoners to the camp in Dachau, where they were guarded by the SS. Crucially, both SS and police came under the leadership of one man, Heinrich Himmler, who had created the template for the later Germany-wide camp system.

  Himmler knew that his SS men would rule Dachau differently from the state police. The first SS detachment had been met on the premises by the Munich SS district leader, Baron von Malsen-Ponickau. In a chilling speech, he pictured the prisoners as beasts who had planned to massacre the Nazis; now the SS would hit back. Private Hans Steinbrenner, who was among the assembled men, recalled that the baron ended his address with an open incitement to murder: “If one [prisoner] tries to escape, you shoot and I hope you don’t miss. The more of these types die, the better.”171 These words were still ringing in the ears of the SS men when they took over the prisoner compound on April 11, 1933. They were led by the new commandant, the thirty-three-year-old SS Hauptsturmführer Hilmar Wäckerle, who proved no less belligerent than the bloodthirsty baron. Wäckerle was yet another Nazi activist of the first hour—an ex-combatant of the First World War and of Weimar’s virtual civil war—and he played up his brutal persona inside the camp, where he was rarely seen without his bullwhip and his huge dog.172

  The SS inaugurated its reign over Dachau with an explosion of violence. On their first day in charge, the SS men battered newcomers, saving their worst for Jews, and at night drunkenly attacked their victims inside the barracks.173 By the following day, April 12, 1933, they had whipped themselves up into a murderous frenzy. Sometime in the late afternoon, Hans Steinbrenner called out the names of four prisoners. Among them was Erwin Kahn, in Dachau since its inception, who had assured his parents just a week earlier that he had no complaints about his treatment: “I hope!! to be free soon,” he wrote in what would be his last letter. The other three men, Rudolf Benario, Ernst Goldmann, and Arthur Kahn, were all in their early twenties and new to the camp, having arrived the previous day. All four men had already suffered terribly at the hands of the SS—a little earlier on April 12, Steinbrenner had whipped them until they were covered in blood—and they feared more torture as he led them out of the compound with a few other SS men, supposedly for punitive labor. After they reached the nearby woods, one of
the guards asked the prisoners innocently if the tools they had shouldered were heavy. When Erwin Kahn said that it was not too bad, the guard answered: “We’ll soon wipe that dirty smile off your face.” The SS men then raised their rifles and fired from behind at the prisoners. After their screams fell silent, three of them lay dead, sprawled facedown. Erwin Kahn survived with a gaping head wound, and an SS man was just about to finish him off when one of the remaining state police officers arrived on the scene. He ensured that the badly wounded prisoner was rushed to a Munich hospital. Erwin Kahn was fully conscious when his wife saw him there three days later and he told her what had happened. A few hours later he was dead, too, probably strangled during the night by the guards who had stood watch outside his hospital room.174

  The first murders in Dachau were premeditated, designed to demonstrate the new SS rulers’ power over the prisoners, now that the police reign was over.175 But how did the SS select their first victims from among the four hundred or so Dachau prisoners?176 Strikingly, none of the four doomed prisoners were prominent political opponents. Two had been lowly local left-wing activists, the other two had pretty much stayed out of politics altogether. “In my whole life I never joined a party,” Erwin Kahn wrote in his last letter, puzzled by his detention in Dachau. What set Kahn and the other three apart from most other Dachau prisoners was their Jewish descent. All four had been identified by the SS as Jews, and as such they were regarded as the most dangerous enemies of all. As Hans Steinbrenner told one of the other Dachau inmates shortly after the murders: “We’ll leave you guys alone, but we’ll bump off all the Jews.”177

  Once the Dachau SS men started to kill, they found it hard to stop. After a lull of a few weeks—waiting to see if they would get away with murder—they executed several more prisoners. Hatred of the Communists was clearly an important factor, with some KPD functionaries among the dead (and Hans Beimler only just escaping a similar fate). But extreme anti-Semitism overshadowed everything; at least eight of the twelve prisoners murdered in six weeks from April 12 to May 26, 1933, were of Jewish descent, making Dachau by far the most lethal early camp for Jews in Germany. Most exposed were Communist activists, who embodied the SS hate figure of the “Jewish Bolshevist”; only one Jewish KPD supporter dragged to Dachau in 1933 survived.178

  Throughout the initial period of SS rule, the Dachau commandant Wäckerle acted as if he were omnipotent. This also affected the special camp regulations he introduced in May 1933. These rules placed the camp under “martial law,” exercised by the commandant, and threatened any prisoner with the “death penalty” if he dared to incite others to “deny obedience” to the SS.179 Although capital punishment was still the monopoly of the regular judicial system, the Nazi veteran Wäckerle believed that Dachau was beyond the law.

  Dachau Under Pressure

  Early on April 13, 1933, attorney Josef Hartinger from the Munich state prosecutor’s office set off for an urgent trip to Dachau, where he was met by Commandant Wäckerle. Having learned about the violent deaths of Rudolf Benario, Ernst Goldmann, and Arthur Kahn the previous day, Hartinger followed standard procedure and inspected the scene. The attorney soon came to question the official SS version that the prisoners had been killed as they escaped and that a fourth prisoner, the seriously wounded Erwin Kahn, had been caught in the line of fire. The suspicion of foul play deepened after Erwin Kahn died mysteriously in the hospital and his widow reported his posthumous account to Hartinger. But the case went nowhere. It was hard to contradict the stonewalling SS men, and Hartinger’s own superior initially showed little appetite for a fight with the Dachau SS, mindful perhaps of the demonstrative support it had received from Police Commissioner Himmler: on the very day Hartinger visited Dachau, Himmler announced at a press conference that the four prisoners—whom he described as Communists—had been shot as they tried to flee, coining what would become a standard phrase for concealing KL murders (a few years later, in a secret speech to SS leaders, Himmler made clear that he knew very well that “shot while trying to escape” was a euphemism for execution).180

  Attorney Hartinger was soon back in Dachau in May 1933, as one suspect prisoner death followed another. The autopsies of victims like Louis Schloss, who had evidently been battered to death, left him and his colleagues in no doubt that they were looking at a spate of murders. They became even more alarmed after reading the homicidal camp regulations introduced by Wäckerle, who blithely told them that the rules had been approved by Himmler. Wäckerle and his men felt invincible, obstructing and taunting Hartinger and his judicial colleagues whenever they showed up inside the camp; some guards barely bothered anymore to camouflage their murders.

  The confrontation between the Dachau SS and the law came to a head in early June 1933. On June 1, the Munich state prosecutor’s office launched preliminary proceedings against several Dachau SS men; Commandant Wäckerle was named as an accessory. On the same day, Hartinger’s superior, the Munich chief public prosecutor, held a lunchtime meeting with Heinrich Himmler, who had to promise his full cooperation with the judicial investigation. Himmler’s defeat seemed complete when he was forced, at a hastily arranged conference on June 2 with the Bavarian Reich governor von Epp and several ministers, to cut loose his tarnished commandant. At the time, this seemed like a humiliating setback for Himmler. In the long run, however, he probably regarded it as a blessing in disguise. The judicial investigation petered out after his police officials asked for the case files and then “lost” them. As for Wäckerle’s sacking, Himmler may have been quite happy to sacrifice him, having clashed over the commandant’s brazen provocation of the legal authorities. Himmler needed a shrewder man to lead his camp and he found the perfect candidate in, of all places, a mental asylum. The patient’s name was Theodor Eicke.181

  On June 26, 1933, Theodor Eicke officially took command in Dachau, and over the coming years this bluff and burly man, who often had a Virginia cigar dangling from his lips, dominated the SS concentration camps. In a quirk of fate, the judicial effort to stop the murders in Dachau had paved the way for the entrance of the man who would mastermind the transformation of Dachau and other early camps into permanent sites of terror. While Himmler set the general direction for the later SS camp system, Eicke became its powerful motor. He was a roughneck, a bully, and a fanatical Nazi. Always spoiling for a fight, this overbearing and vindictive man suspected foes everywhere. Feared by his rivals for his obstinacy and temper, he felt that his destiny would finally be fulfilled under Nazi rule, after years of personal struggle and frustration. But he could hardly have got off to a worse start in the Third Reich.

  As a young man in 1909, aged seventeen, Eicke had left his modest family home in Alsace (then part of Germany) without completing school, determined to make a career for himself. He volunteered for the army and quickly took to military life. However, he did not cover himself in glory during almost ten years as a paymaster, and when the German army downscaled after the war, he was discharged without reaching officer rank. Married with a young child and few prospects, Eicke never really adjusted to civilian life. He failed miserably to make the grade as a police officer, a perceived injustice that rankled to the end of his days, and finally found steady but dull employment with the chemical giant IG Farben in Ludwigshafen, working mainly in its security branch. Eicke’s humdrum life was shaken up in the late 1920s, when he found the Nazi movement and with it a new calling. In July 1930 he joined the SS, with membership number 2921, and soon gave all his spare time to the cause. Eicke proved himself as an able organizer and leader. He became a powerful regional commander and soon caught Himmler’s eye. Eicke’s reputation as a desperado grew further when the police discovered dozens of homemade bombs in his flat. Sentenced in summer 1932 to two years’ penitentiary, Eicke absconded to Lake Garda in Fascist Italy, entrusted by Himmler with the command over a local terrorist training camp for Austrian Nazis; once, he had the honor of showing the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini around.

 
After Eicke returned to Hitler’s Germany in mid-February 1933, hoping to harvest the fruits of his sacrifices for the cause, he was bitterly disappointed. As he jostled for position, his longstanding feud with the Gauleiter of the Palatinate Josef Bürckel, who branded Eicke as “syphilitic and completely mad,” escalated and ended in Eicke’s ignominious incarceration, first in prison and then from late March 1933 in a Würzburg mental asylum. In addition, Eicke was stripped of his SS rank. Although the consulting doctor Werner Heyde—later a pivotal figure in the murderous “euthanasia” program—quickly concluded that his prominent patient was not clinically ill, Himmler let Eicke stew, ignoring his desperate pleas. By early summer, the Reichsführer SS finally decided that it was time to bring him back into the fold. On June 2, 1933—the very day that he agreed to dismiss Commandant Wäckerle—Himmler informed the Würzburg asylum that Eicke could be released and might soon find himself in an important position. His selection of Eicke as the new Dachau commandant was a characteristic move for Himmler, who often bought himself the loyalty of failed SS men by giving them a chance for redemption. Sure enough, Eicke repaid his master with blind devotion for the rest of his life.