The prewar camps foreshadowed the later all-out assault against the Jews in many ways. Not only were KL prisoners the first Jews under Nazi control to be marked with the yellow Star of David, but the prewar camps functioned as a “motor of radicalization” for anti-Semitic policy more generally, as the historian Jürgen Matthäus put it, driving forward the isolation, forced labor, and murder of Jews in the Third Reich.238 The transmission of these measures from the KL across German society was aided by senior SS personnel, starting at the top with Heinrich Himmler, who not only steered the camps, but also helped to propel anti-Jewish policy.
Coordinating Anti-Jewish Abuse
Before 1938, few Jews were taken to the KL. Despite the detention of Jewish “race defilers” prior to the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, there were still no more than a few dozen Jewish prisoners in each camp during the mid-1930s; even a large KL like Sachsenhausen only held around fifty Jewish men by early 1937.239 Despite the small size of the Jewish prisoner population, it always loomed large in the minds of Camp SS men, who eagerly anticipated their arrival, just like some guards in the early camps had done.240
Radical anti-Semitism was part of the Camp SS code, a wild mix of traditional prejudice, racial mania, perverse fantasies, and political paranoia. Many SS men had been steeped in anti-Semitism long before they entered the camps, and once inside, their hatred was fanned daily, in word and deed. So deeply ingrained was this mind-set that even an SS guard formally questioned about his part in the murder of a Jewish prisoner (the attorney Friedrich Weissler in Sachsenhausen) saw no cause to conceal his feelings. “[Scharführer Christian] Guthardt acknowledged that he is a fanatical Jew-hater,” a Berlin state prosecutor noted after an interrogation in 1937, “and declared that for him, a Jew was less than a head of cattle.”241
Almost every day in the mid-1930s, SS guards made Jews run the gauntlet. They showered their victims in invective and made them debase themselves with humiliating tasks, like singing the Buchenwald “Jew Song,” which ended as follows:
But now at last the Germans know our nature
And barbed wire hides us safely out of sight.
Traducers of the people, we are fearful
To face the truth that felled us overnight.
And now, with mournful crooked Jewish noses,
We find that hate and discord were in vain.
An end to thievery, to food aplenty.
Too late, we say, again and yet again.242
At the center of SS abuse stood, once more, forced labor. The guards, who derided Jews as lazy cheats, were determined to teach them a lesson about labor they would never forget.243 Just like in the early camps, Jews had to perform particularly heavy and revolting jobs. The infamous latrine squads—widely mocked by the SS as “4711 commandos” (after a German eau de cologne)—almost always included Jews. The same was true for the most exhausting labor details. As they were breaking boulders with heavy hammers, Sachsenburg prisoners had to shout things like “I am an old Jewish swine” or “I am a race defiler and should peg out.”244
Such work was often accompanied by blows and kicks, as SS guards stayed especially close to the Jewish commandos. In Sachsenhausen, for example, Jews who cleaned the guardhouse regularly suffered “broken ribs, knocked-out teeth, and other physical injuries,” two survivors wrote after the war.245 The guards also tortured Jews with senseless work, even more so than others. In Esterwegen, SS men repeatedly forced Jewish prisoners to pile up a large mound of sand. Once they had finished, they had to pull an iron cart to the top, climb inside, shout “Comrades, a new age is dawning, we’re setting off for Palestine!” and ride down; the cart would inevitably crash, causing serious injuries.246 In view of such excesses, it is not surprising that Jews were far more likely to die than the average inmate during the mid-1930s.247
Even so, most Jewish prisoners survived the concentration camps during this period. The SS did not reserve its worst violence exclusively for Jews, at times hitting other prisoner groups just as hard. And Jewish prisoners still received some of the privileges open to others, like permission to buy additional goods with small sums sent by relatives; a few Jews also gained access to Kapo positions, giving them added influence.248 In Moringen, Jewish women were even allowed to celebrate Chanukah in late 1936—lighting the menorah, exchanging small gifts, and singing hymns—after they were granted two days off work by the senior guard.249 This would have been unthinkable in camps for men, where conditions were far worse and would soon deteriorate further.
In the second half of the 1930s, the SS increasingly coordinated its anti-Jewish abuse across the KL. Whereas earlier assaults had originated with local Camp SS men, SS leaders now tried to guide terror from above. From August 1936, all releases of Jews from protective custody required the personal approval of Heinrich Himmler, who had discussed the question of releases with Hitler himself.250 An even more important initiative came in February 1937, when Himmler designated Dachau as the central camp for all male Jewish prisoners.251 Nazi policy had been moving in this direction for some time. From 1936, the Camp SS had separated Jewish prisoners more systematically from others, forming additional Jewish blocks and labor details in the KL. Now segregation was taken to the next stage.252
Dachau seemed the obvious choice as the central camp for Jews. It already held the largest number of Jewish prisoners and had pioneered their separation into a special “Jew company” as long ago as spring 1933. Following Himmler’s decision, some eighty-five men arrived from other camps in early spring 1937, bringing the total number of Jewish prisoners in Dachau to around 150, rising further to an estimated three hundred by the end of the year (around twelve percent of the Dachau prisoner population).253 The prisoners faced a familiar catalogue of SS abuses and occasional murder—like in summer 1937, when an SS block leader forced a prisoner accused of “race defilement” inside a running cement mixer.254
The segregation in Dachau made it easier for SS leaders to impose collective punishment against all male Jewish prisoners. On November 22, 1937, for example, Heinrich Himmler announced a general ban on releasing Jews from Dachau, which apparently remained in place for well over six months.255 Another collective punishment was the isolation of Jewish prisoners in their barrack. This seclusion was enforced at least three times in Dachau in 1937, the first time in March, just as Jews from other camps arrived. It was imposed centrally by the Camp Inspectorate in Berlin, and although Eicke took credit as its inventor, the orders probably emanated from Himmler himself.256
SS leaders pronounced such collective punishment as a penalty for “atrocity lies” about the camps, which they blamed, in their fanatical belief in a Jewish world conspiracy, on the collusion between prisoners and Jews abroad. Many regular Camp SS men agreed. “At the time,” Rudolf Höss recalled, “I thought it was right to punish Jews we held in our hands for the spread of horror stories by their racial brethren.” By using the Jews as hostages—an idea that had preoccupied Nazi leaders for some time and became more virulent in the late 1930s—the Camp SS hoped to put an end to foreign criticism.257 The Dachau SS also forced the prisoners to send protest letters about “lying reports” in foreign papers. Hans Litten, who had arrived in Dachau from Buchenwald on October 16, 1937, informed his mother on November 27, 1937, that he and the other Jewish prisoners were punished with isolation and that she should try to “influence the emigrant Jews … to abstain in the future from such idiotic lies about the concentration camps, since the Jews in Dachau as racial comrades will be held responsible for them.” Such crude SS blackmail did not fool anyone, of course, and was quickly exposed by the press abroad.258
During those periods when the Dachau Jews were isolated, their seclusion was nearly total. For several weeks at a time, they were cut off from all other prisoners. Except for a brief spell of “sport,” they spent day and night in their barrack, with doors locked and windows painted over, allowing only dim light inside; the air was stale and humid, especially during the hot
summer months. Prisoners spent most of their time lying on their sacks of straw, lethargic and tense, as well as hungry, since they could not supplement their rations with food from the canteen.259 Worst of all, perhaps, was the mail embargo, which hit the prisoners as hard as their relatives outside. In late August 1937, after she had waited in vain for more than a month for a letter from her husband in Dachau, Gertrud Glogowski, herself imprisoned in Moringen, sent a desperate plea to the camp authorities: “So far, his letters have held me up. Now, because there is no news at all, I am completely done for.”260
Cruel as the Dachau isolation was, it had some unintended benefits for the victims. Since Jewish prisoners were excluded from roll calls and forced labor, they temporarily escaped some of the worst SS excesses. To pass the days in the barrack, they made music, discussed politics, and organized talks. In the midst of it all was Hans Litten, who was temporarily reenergized, almost cheerful, sharing his knowledge of art and history, and reciting literature and poems. But this would be Litten’s last stand. Once the SS lifted the last isolation in late December 1937, normal life resumed, and Litten was pressed into the grueling snow-clearing commando. After almost five years in Nazi hands, he was haggard, listless, and frail, and he walked with a cane like an old man, belying his youth. The end came in early 1938. Following the death of the Jewish Kapo in his Dachau block—tortured by SS men suspecting a conspiracy—Litten was interrogated by Standartenführer Hermann Baranowski and afterwards lost all hope. Shortly after midnight on February 5, his body was found hanging in the latrine. He was only thirty-four years old, one of forty men who lost their lives in Dachau between January and May 1938; at least half of them had been detained as Jews, like Hans Litten.261
Dark Months
The year 1938 was a fateful one for Jews in the Third Reich.262 In the months leading up to the November pogrom, the authorities launched a frontal assault on the remaining Jews, incited by Hitler and other Nazi leaders. Legal discrimination and state-sponsored robbery of Jewish businesses and property intensified, as did attacks on Jews and their belongings. Meanwhile, the Anschluss of Austria, accompanied by looting, violence, and humiliation on a grand scale, gave further momentum to anti-Semitic policy.263 And as Nazi terror against Jews escalated, the KL began to play a more prominent role in their persecution.
Austrian Jews were hit first, during a wave of arrests in spring of 1938, following the German invasion. Initially, the police focused on political opponents and prominent men, many of Jewish descent; the first transport of 150 Austrian detainees, arriving in Dachau on April 2, 1938, included sixty-three Jews.264 The new Nazi rulers quickly extended their reach beyond prominent Jews, encouraged by the Gestapo raids across Germany against the “work-shy” in April 1938. While these raids had not specifically targeted Jews, the authorities in May 1938 launched a major action in annexed Austria specifically against Jews described as “asocial,” “criminal,” or otherwise “disagreeable.” Armed with these open-ended orders, SS and police carried out random raids, swooping on parks, public squares, and restaurants, and arrested Jews simply for being Jewish. In late May 1938, the up-and-coming SD officer Adolf Eichmann, recently posted to Vienna, expected that some five thousand Jews, mostly from Vienna, would be dispatched to Dachau over the coming weeks. Although this target proved too ambitious in the end, the authorities did direct three special trains to Dachau, arriving between May 31 and June 25 with 1,521 Jewish men on board.265
The suffering of these Austrian Jews began well before they reached Dachau. Unusually, the trains from Vienna were guarded by SS men from Dachau, not by police officials, and the men with the Death’s Head on their uniforms battered their victims during the grueling journey. Several Jewish prisoners were dead by the time the transports arrived at a new track inside the Dachau complex, where the trains were greeted by a baying SS mob, who kicked and punched the survivors with rifle butts until they panicked and ran toward the camp, protecting their heads. The new arrivals were chased along the way by the frenzied guards, who were cheered by off-duty colleagues watching from their quarters; left behind on the road were the hats, scarves, clothes, and shoes of the Jewish men. So excessive was the violence—SS officers estimated that on one transport, around seventy percent of the prisoners had been assaulted, some suffering deep stab wounds—that representatives from the state attorney’s office came to the camp to investigate, though to no avail.266
The Austrian Jews arrested in spring 1938 were still streaming into Dachau when police leaders moved to the next round of mass arrests, this time across the whole of the Third Reich. The initiative apparently came from Hitler himself, who demanded the detention of “asocial and criminal Jews” in late May 1938, perhaps inspired by the raids in Vienna.267 Heydrich quickly added a special provision to his orders for the forthcoming mass action against “asocials,” instructing regional criminal police officials to take male Jews “who have served a prison sentence of no less than one month” into preventive police custody as well. Although the arrest orders against Jews and asocials went out in the same directive in June 1938, the motives behind them were clearly different. In the case of Jews, the authorities were not interested in forced labor; rather, they wanted to pressure more Jews into giving up their property and leaving the country. This was why subsequent police orders stressed that it did not matter if the arrested Jews were fit for work. All that mattered was that they were labeled as criminals—one of the most enduring anti-Semitic stereotypes—and therefore unwanted in Germany.268
The action began in mid-June 1938, as planned. Simultaneous with the arrest of so-called asocials, the police rounded up Jews in their homes and in public places like bars, cafés, and cinemas. Petty offenders, many of whom had fallen foul of Nazi anti-Semitic laws, were dragged away like dangerous criminals; in Berlin, these arrests were accompanied by open violence and destruction on the streets. Members of the wider Jewish community were left deeply shaken and more terrified than ever of the KL—with good reason.269
There were far more Jews than ever in the concentration camps. The June 1938 raids forced almost 2,300 Jewish men inside, bringing the total number of Jewish inmates to around 4,600 (late June 1938), an estimated tenfold increase since March. Jews now made up almost twenty percent of the prisoner population across the concentration camp system. Faced with this sharp rise, the Nazi authorities abandoned the near-exclusive use of Dachau, already overcrowded, as the collection camp for Jews. Instead, the largest group of “criminal” Jews arrested during the June raids, some 1,265 Jewish men, was sent to Buchenwald, a camp that only a few weeks earlier had held only seventeen Jewish prisoners. In the blink of an eye, Buchenwald turned into the most lethal KL for Jews.270
The general conditions in Buchenwald in summer 1938 were appalling, but they were worst for the Jewish victims of the June mass arrests. As there were not enough barracks, the SS forced hundreds of new arrivals, among them many Jews from Berlin, into a sheep pen; for months, prisoners slept on brushwood spread across the bare ground. And although all the recently arrested “asocials” were assaulted by the SS, the guards singled out Jews for the most vicious abuse. Many Camp SS men were fired up about their first encounters with large numbers of Jewish “enemies”; some screamed things like: “At last we have you here, you Jew pigs. You shall all die a miserable death here.” Often, SS men would abandon assaults on other prisoner groups to concentrate their energies on Jews. As always, labor was the greatest torture. “The Jews shall learn how to work,” the Buchenwald SS leaders announced, and pressed them into the worst jobs, such as hauling limestone in the quarry, at running pace, for ten or more hours a day; even the sick and old had to carry boulders until they collapsed under the weight.271
Jewish prisoners in Buchenwald were soon decimated. Between June and August 1938, at least ninety-two men lost their lives, making Jews far more vulnerable than other inmate groups. There were so many deaths that Camp Inspector Eicke, as early as June 21, 1938, proposed the construct
ion of a crematorium in Buchenwald, to spare his SS men the frequent transfer of corpses to the municipal facilities in Weimar.272 The Buchenwald death toll would have been higher still had the police not released hundreds of Jewish prisoners within weeks of their arrest, often conditional on their emigration. Those who returned from Buchenwald were broken and fearful, an underground report explained: “In general, the men start to cry as soon as you ask them anything.”273
Not every KL was like Buchenwald, however. Despite all the Nazi efforts to coordinate anti-Jewish terror, major differences remained. While Buchenwald was unusually lethal in summer 1938, Dachau proved much less so, with Jewish men around seven to ten times less likely to die.274 Even Buchenwald did not sustain its ferocity. In September 1938 the inmate population grew further, after the transfer of around 2,400 Jews from Dachau made it the undisputed SS center for Jewish prisoners.275 On October 4, 1938, Buchenwald held 3,124 Jewish men (some thirty percent of its total inmate population), putting even more pressure on resources in the packed camp.276 Yet the number of deaths among Jewish prisoners fell sharply, from forty-eight in July to eight in October, after some of the most abysmal lodgings, like the sheep pen, were finally abandoned.277 This would prove no more than a brief lull in anti-Jewish terror, however, soon to be shattered.
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