KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  These are no longer the political inmates of 1933, of whom only a small percentage is still in the camp while the rest have long since been released, but for the most part a selection of asocial elements, recidivist political muddle-heads, vagabonds, work-shy persons, and drunkards … émigrés and Jewish parasites on the nation, offenders against morality of every kind, and a group of professional criminals on whom preventive police custody has been imposed.

  Said prisoners were now learning strict military discipline, rigorous cleanliness, and hard labor, “which many of them have shunned all their lives.” Lest anyone worried about SS abuse, the article reassured readers that prisoners were healthy and well fed. Indeed, some of the inmates “from totally wrecked social circumstances” had never had it any better. This was just as well, since it was clear that many of them would never be allowed to taste freedom again—locked up for good to protect the national community.119 Other Nazi propaganda underscored this last point, stressing that the permanent detention of social outsiders was driving down crime.120

  Such claims found a receptive audience inside Germany. Weimar society had been fixated on crime, especially during its final years, with an ever-louder chorus clamoring for harsher measures against deviants.121 The Third Reich could build on this noxious legacy, with even some political prisoners supporting the indefinite detention of selected social outsiders.122 Nazi media reports about the KL exploited existing prejudices, with staged photos of prisoners in menacing poses and covered in tattoos. “On our walk through the camp,” the 1936 magazine feature about Dachau declared, “we often encounter the typical face of the born criminal,” playing on popular beliefs in physiognomic theories.123 Such stories had some impact in the Third Reich, perpetuating the image of the camps as places full of dangerous deviants and strengthening the common conviction that Hitler had made the streets safe again, a myth that long outlived the Nazi regime inside Germany.124

  Nevertheless, the camps were not foremost in the minds of ordinary Germans in the second half of the 1930s; the strong emotions of 1933—curiosity, acclaim, anger, fear—had given way to greater indifference; even among former supporters of the Left, the novelty of the KL had long worn off. In addition, the detainees now largely came from the margins of society, and were often arrested away from the public eye. Even the mass raids against so-called asocials and criminals, despite their propaganda potential, went largely unreported in the German press.125

  This was part of a wider trend, as the KL gradually faded from view. Many factors were in the mix. To start with, hundreds of semipublic early camps had been replaced by a handful of secluded sites. At the same time, eyewitness accounts by victims—the main source of popular knowledge about the camps in 1933—largely vanished. There were fewer prisoners, and those who returned were often too scared to say much at all.126 The ones who did speak, meanwhile, could barely make themselves heard, now that the organized resistance was in tatters. Most important, perhaps, the audience for critical reports was smaller than ever, as the Nazi dictatorship grew in popularity. The German population did not forget the KL, of course, nor did it forget earlier stories of terror inside; in the public mind, the camps remained associated with violence and abuse—to the irritation of some local notables, like those in Dachau, who realized that the bad reputation of the camp was driving away tourists from their town.127 Still, for the great majority of Germans—content with the regime or at least resigned to it—fears about the KL were now at most dim and abstract.128

  As for the Nazi dictatorship itself, it was content to let the KL blend into the background, with only occasional reminders of their existence for deterrence. Beyond that, the regime showed no desire to push the KL back into the media limelight. There was no more need for rescuing their reputation, now that rumors about abuses were less virulent.129 What is more, the Nazi authorities were still unsure about the popularity of the KL, despite their alleged contribution to the Nazi fight against crime. Barely a week after the big Dachau photo spread had appeared in 1936, the authorities even issued a secret order to cut down on press reports about incidents inside camps; such reports, Reich press chief Otto Dietrich announced confidentially, “are apt to trigger damaging effects at home and abroad.”130

  Dietrich’s reference to foreign opinion was telling. While the regime had become more adept at managing public knowledge about the camps inside Germany, foreign opinion inevitably proved much harder to manipulate. Not that the Nazis didn’t try. To improve the image of the KL abroad, the Camp SS continued to use both pressure and deception.131 Among those who were fooled were members of the British Legion, who came away from their 1935 tour of Dachau convinced that every SS man “was out to help any prisoner to make the best of himself and of the situation,” as they put it in a memorandum to the more skeptical British Foreign Office.132 Similar apologetic accounts sometimes found their way into the press abroad.133 But they were far outweighed, at least in the mid-1930s, by reports about terror, abuse, and murder in the KL, which continued to appear in German émigré papers and the foreign media.134

  Foreign criticism of the KL still coalesced around the fate of individual political prisoners. In Britain, for example, the ongoing public appeals for Hans Litten led the German ambassador to conclude that his discharge would significantly improve the image of the Third Reich. However, the Nazi regime rebuffed all demands for Litten’s release; at a speech at the Nuremberg Rally in September 1935, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels himself denounced Litten as one of the main Jewish enemies behind a global Communist conspiracy.135 In another, even more high-profile case, however, Nazi leaders partially gave in to foreign pressure.

  The pacifist writer Carl von Ossietzky was easily the most famous concentration camp prisoner in the mid-1930s, at least outside the German borders, where a campaign to award him the Nobel Peace Prize was gathering strength. Ossietzky’s health had deteriorated dramatically since his arrest in February 1933. He was still in Esterwegen, gravely ill with pulmonary tuberculosis and barely able to speak; a visiting Red Cross official regarded his condition as “desperate.” Theodor Eicke, who knew that Ossietzky could die at any moment, still advised Himmler to ignore the clamor for his release, concerned that Ossietzky’s iconic stature and insights into SS crimes would make him the “chief witness against Nazi Germany.” Heydrich took a similar view, but Hermann Göring overruled them both, evidently worried that the affair would overshadow the forthcoming Olympics. In late May 1936, Ossietzky was moved out of Esterwegen and spent the rest of his life under strict police guard in Berlin hospitals. It was here that he learned that he had won the Nobel Prize. Despite intense Nazi pressure, he accepted the award in a last show of defiance, but the German authorities prevented him from leaving the country to accept the honor. Ossietzky never recovered from the KL and died on May 4, 1938, aged forty-eight.136

  Although the campaign for Ossietzky momentarily lifted the Nazi camps into the international news, general media interest abroad was on the wane, partly because details were harder to obtain, and partly because of what one historian has called “compassion fatigue,” following several years of reports about Nazi atrocities.137 One cause célèbre that briefly punctured the growing silence in the late 1930s was the detention of the Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller.138 A right-wing nationalist and one-time sympathizer of the Nazis, Niemöller had become increasingly critical of the regime’s pressure on the Protestant Church and emerged as a leader of the breakaway Confessing Church. Niemöller was arrested in 1937; his trial before a Berlin special court in March 1938 ended in a shambles, after the judges found him not guilty of malicious attacks on the state and set him free. Hitler was furious, accusing the legal system of yet another blunder, and ordered Himmler to take the pastor to Sachsenhausen. The police arrested Niemöller inside the court building and took him away, causing worldwide condemnation. Nazi leaders had anticipated this furor, but regarded it as a price worth paying. In contrast to their earlier attempts to pacify
foreign critics with their cynical show of compassion for Ossietzky, they ignored all calls for Niemöller’s freedom, even when it became widely known that his health was failing; he would spend the next seven years in Sachsenhausen and Dachau.139

  The obstinacy of the Third Reich reflected its growing strength in the late 1930s. As Nazi leaders became more aggressive and steered the country toward an open confrontation with the West, foreign opinion seemed to matter less and less. The drive to war was transforming Germany’s international standing, and also left a mark on the Camp SS.

  SS Military Ambitions

  Himmler liked to see the Camp SS as soldiers. By presenting his men as warriors fighting “the scum of Germany,” he hoped to boost their profile and elevate them above mere prison guards.140 But Himmler’s use of military imagery was more than rhetoric. From early on, he envisaged his guards as paramilitaries, who patrolled not only the make-believe battlefields inside camps, but who would also serve beyond the barbed wire during national emergencies, as the Dachau SS had done during the Röhm putsch in 1934. Hardened by the confrontation with “enemies” in concentration camps, he argued, his special forces could be trusted to fight terrorists outside.141

  The transformation of the SS Guard Troops into a paramilitary force began early, already in the mid-1930s.142 Sentry service around the KL was just one of their duties. As we have seen, the men spent considerably more time on military drills. Initially, Guard Troop commanders struggled with poor equipment; in Dachau, they did not even have enough reserve munitions. This changed after Hitler agreed to fund the Death’s Head SS from the Reich budget. More weapons for combat now poured into the Guard Troops, which set up additional machine gun formations. In Dachau, the dilapidated old barracks were replaced by a vast training camp, symbolizing the military intentions of the SS. In Sachsenhausen, too, a big new complex was built (by prisoners) near the camp, as a base for SS excursions. In Sachsenburg, meanwhile, prisoners constructed a new and modern shooting range, complete with movable targets. Most significantly, the SS continued to recruit far more Guard Troops than it needed for running the camps; SS personnel rose from an estimated 1,700 in January 1935 to 4,300 three years later, keeping the staff–inmate ratio well below 1:2. Although the force was still small, there was no mistaking the ambitions of its leaders.143

  The creeping militarization of the Camp SS was part of a bigger plan by Himmler: the creation of independent SS formations for deployment at the front. The German army, ever since its conflict with SA leader Ernst Röhm, was paranoid about the military aspirations of Nazi leaders, and in Himmler’s case, the generals were right to worry. Despite his hollow denials, Himmler was not content with establishing the SS and police as a force inside Germany. He was gunning for the army’s monopoly of military might. Speaking to senior SS commanders in 1938, he claimed that it was their solemn duty to stand tall on the battlefield: “Were we not to bring blood sacrifices and were we not to fight at the front, we would lose the moral right to shoot at shirkers and cowards at home.” Using all his guile, his direct line to Hitler, and his talent for bureaucratic sparring, Himmler won the upper hand in the turf war with the army. Initially, his hope of creating an SS division centered mainly on the new SS Troop for Special Duty (Verfügungstruppe), formed in autumn 1934 out of different smaller armed units. But he also began to consider the use of SS Guard Troops beyond the German borders, erasing the boundary between internal and external front.144

  The military role of the SS was cemented in the late 1930s, as a European war loomed ever closer. One landmark was Hitler’s secret decree of August 17, 1938, drafted by Himmler, which confirmed that SS formations would be deployed on the battlefield. As for the Death’s Head units specifically, they would greatly expand to serve as a “standing armed SS troop” for “tackling special duties of a police nature.” This cryptic phrase still pointed to a domestic deployment of Camp SS men. However, a few months earlier, members of the Dachau Guard Troop had already engaged in a first foray onto foreign soil, marching into Austria in March 1938 under the command of the German army. Soon, another opportunity presented itself. In autumn 1938, four Death’s Head battalions took part in the occupation of the Sudetenland; they were led by Theodor Eicke, who presented his men during a first review on Czech soil to Hitler. The following May, soon after Death’s Head troops had participated in the takeover of the rest of the Czech territory, Hitler issued yet another decree, officially recognizing the military role of SS Death’s Head units: in wartime, some Camp SS men would join the front line.145

  If there was anyone more delighted about the combat status of the Camp SS than Himmler, it was his lieutenant Theodor Eicke. Having fancied himself for some time as a general (commensurate with his SS rank), Eicke was able to realize his dream through the militarization of the Camp SS. In the late 1930s, he threw himself into the expansion of the Guard Troops—even at the expense of the KL, as a resentful Rudolf Höss noted. Eicke showed “incredible generosity” when it came to the Guard Troop, Höss complained, always demanding the best equipment and the biggest quarters.146 In addition, Eicke pushed hard for new recruits. The criteria for enlistment were relaxed and Eicke even ordered SS “head hunters,” as he called them, to poach enlisted soldiers from the armed forces: “Bring them from the bars, bring them from the sports clubs, bring them from the barber. As far as I’m concerned, you can bring them from the brothels. Bring them from every place you meet them.”147

  While this particular scheme probably met with little success, Eicke still managed to attract many new recruits. During the course of 1938, the size of the Death’s Head SS more than doubled, reaching 10,441 men in November. By the following summer, the figure had grown further, to around twelve or thirteen thousand full-time staff.148 At the same time, the Death’s Head SS stockpiled weapons. According to Eicke, his units possessed over 800 machine guns, almost 1,500 machine pistols, and nearly 20,000 carbines by mid-1939.149 Eicke and his political soldiers were ready for a war beyond the camps.

  FORCED LABOR

  When an esteemed German encyclopedia described the SS concentration camps, a new entry within its pages in 1937, it explained that prisoners were “formed into groups and made to perform useful work.”150 It was almost inevitable that the dictionary would highlight forced labor, since labor featured in almost all official Nazi accounts of the KL; no article or speech seemed complete without it. And although these references were all about propaganda, they pointed to a larger truth—that work dominated daily KL life and the thoughts of the prisoners, as this extract from the “Sachsenhausen Song” illustrates:

  Behind barbed wire is our work,

  our backs are sore from bending,

  we’re turning hard, we’re turning tough,

  our work is never-ending.151

  The Third Reich did not invent forced labor for captives, of course. It was central to traditional conceptions of prisons and workhouses, as we have seen, promising many practical benefits. On the most basic level, labor was a useful organizing principle for keeping inmates occupied. Moreover, productive labor was said to drive down the cost of detention. As for its wider purpose, some officials regarded it as rehabilitative, preparing deviants for a life on the straight and narrow, while others championed it as an instrument to inflict the right amount of pain, for retribution or deterrence.152

  This last aspect dominates postwar accounts of the KL, exemplified by the study of Wolfgang Sofsky, who describes the primary function of forced labor as “violence, terror, and death.”153 This conclusion certainly captures a key aim of the Camp SS: the use of work to humiliate and harm prisoners. But this is not the whole story. Reducing camp labor to a demonstration of absolute power oversimplifies SS policy, which was also guided by other ideological, economic, and pragmatic considerations.

  Work and Punishment

  Although all-out forced labor became an essential element of the KL system, it was not one of its founding principles. In the early camps, labor
had played a far less dominant role. In their rush to set up temporary sites, some officials simply disregarded it. Those who did emphasize the importance of labor, meanwhile, were often frustrated by the difficulty of finding any, given the mass unemployment across the country. More generally, there was still uncertainty (especially in protective custody wings of state prisons) as to whether the inmates should be forced to work at all, given the long German tradition of treating some political prisoners as honorable offenders (one beneficiary had been Adolf Hitler, who used his time in Landsberg fortress in 1924, after his failed putsch, to write parts of his opus, Mein Kampf). In the end, it was not unusual for prisoners in 1933 to be entirely without work. Some guards in early camps forced these unemployed inmates to perform military drills. Elsewhere, however, the prisoners were left idle in their cells, barracks, and dormitories.154

  Camp inmates who were compelled to work in 1933 faced two main types of labor. First, there was work on the outside, which enhanced the visibility of Nazi terror. Prisoners were deployed in large-scale projects for the supposed benefit of the nation (like moor drainage in the Emsland) or to improve the local infrastructure, by building paths, roads, and canals, or helping to bring in the harvest; in Breslau, prisoners even had to drain a muddy pond so that locals could use it as a swimming pool. Second, many prisoners, especially at larger sites, were forced into camp construction and maintenance, putting up or repairing the different buildings, and installing the barbed wire that surrounded them. Others had to provide essential services such as cleaning rooms and corridors, preparing food or distributing it.155 In theory, this captive labor served a practical purpose, but in reality, abuse often took center stage, as guards used the occasion to torment those prisoners they despised the most. These inmates were also most likely to endure pointless labor; in Heuberg camp, for example, prominent political prisoners had to fill baskets with pebbles, only to tip them out and start all over again.156