KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (10 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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As in other early camps, SS violence reached a terrifying crescendo whenever well-known politicians and Jews arrived.
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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 maimed 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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