KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (12 page)

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.

When Theodor Eicke took up his post in Dachau a few weeks later, now reinstated as SS Oberführer, he knew that, at the age of forty-one, this might well
be his final chance to make something of his botched life. Unlike many other commandants of early camps, Eicke did not see his appointment as a diversion or nuisance, but as an opportunity to build a career. He grabbed it with his customary zeal. The concentration camps, he wrote to Himmler a few years later in one of his self-aggrandizing letters, became his life’s work.
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During his first
days in Dachau, Eicke observed the SS routines, walking around and making notes, as he drew up plans for restructuring the camp. He worked around the clock and even slept in his office. “Now Eicke is in his element,” one SS man later commented. Eicke soon changed the face of Dachau and became its real founding father. He oversaw a major overhaul of SS staff, creating a regimented troop loyal to him.
Most of Wäckerle’s closest aides departed, among them the notorious Hans Steinbrenner. Eicke also got rid of the querulous leader of SS sentries and replaced him with Sturmführer Michael Lippert, who would come to play a particularly malignant part. Finally, Eicke drew up new rules of engagement, to make SS violence appear less arbitrary, and introduced a more coherent administrative structure
for the SS staff.
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Himmler was delighted by Eicke’s progress. On August 4, 1933, he visited Dachau with SA leader Ernst Röhm, still his nominal superior. Following their inspection of the camp, they were guests of honor during the unveiling of a monument (built by prisoners) dedicated to the Nazi “martyr” Horst Wessel, a young SA firebrand killed in a dispute with local Communists in Berlin
in 1930, and celebrated by Nazi propaganda as a symbol for the deadly struggle against Bolshevism. During a festive get-together in the large SS mess hall that evening, Himmler and Röhm applauded the discipline of the guards and singled out Commandant Eicke for special praise. In Röhm’s case, this would prove a grimly ironic moment, in light of what Eicke would do to him less than a year later.
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Behind Dachau’s front as a model camp, the torment continued. Eicke did not want to go any easier on the inmates than his predecessor. He just wanted a slicker operation. And so the abuse carried on, with “bigwigs” and Jews still suffering the worst treatment and hardest labor, like pulling a huge rolling barrel to flatten the paths inside the camp.
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Eicke’s approach was summed up in his camp
regulations of October 1, 1933, which greatly expanded the list of punishable prisoner offenses, compared with Wäckerle’s earlier rules, and pronounced even more savage penalties. They also continued to threaten prisoners with death. Eicke warned all “political agitators and subversive intellectuals” that SS men will “reach for your throats and silence you according to your own methods.” Prisoners
suspected of sabotage, mutiny, or agitation would be executed on the basis of “revolutionary law”: “Anyone who attacks a guard or an SS man physically, refuses obedience or, at his work place, refuses to work … [or] bawls, shouts, agitates or makes speeches on the march or at work
will be shot dead on the spot as a mutineer
or subsequently hanged.”
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Armed with this license, Dachau SS guards
continued to murder individual prisoners. By the end of 1933, at least ten more inmates had died on Eicke’s watch (three of the dead were Jews).
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And although the murders were better camouflaged than before, they provoked further investigations and political wrangling. Himmler soon found himself in another tight corner and had to be bailed out in December 1933 by Ernst Röhm. Using his considerable
political muscle, Röhm stalled a judicial inquiry into three suspicious prisoner deaths by arguing that the “political nature” of the matter made it “presently unsuitable” for legal intervention. Once again, justice was denied.
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Dachau was something of an outlier in 1933, standing at the extreme end of a wide spectrum of early camps. From the beginning, SS leader Heinrich Himmler oversaw a
particularly radical approach to lawless detention; more prisoners were killed in Dachau than in any other early camp. By comparison, some other large state camps were considerably less brutal. Inside Osthofen in Hesse, for example, not one of the 2,500 or more prisoners died.
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Nor did all other official camp regulations resemble the radical Dachau ones. The police rules for state camps in Saxony,
passed in summer 1933, explicitly banned physical punishment.
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But even in Dachau, the epicenter of early terror, death remained the exception; out of 4,821 men dragged through the camp in 1933, no more than twenty-five lost their lives.
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The other inmates suffered daily drills and humiliations, and were always at risk of hideous assaults. And yet, they survived, and even snatched some moments
beyond violence; after lunch, for example, prisoners would normally rest and play chess, smoke, read, and sometimes play an instrument. Dachau—like the other early camps—was not yet consumed by deadly force.
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The Roots of the Nazi Camps

On August 11, 1932, the Nazi daily
Völkischer Beobachter
had carried a prophetic story on its front page. More than five months before Hitler was appointed
chancellor, the paper predicted that a future Nazi government would pass an emergency decree to arrest left-wing functionaries and put “suspects and intellectual instigators in concentration camps.” This was not the first time the Nazis had anticipated the use of camps against their enemies. In an article as far back as 1921, when he was no more than an unusually venomous agitator in Munich, Hitler
had promised to “stop the Jews from undermining our nation, if necessary by keeping their bacilli safely in concentration camps.”
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Clearly, the idea of setting up camps had crossed the minds of Nazi leaders long before they came anywhere near power. But there was no direct line from their early threats to the later camps. The scattered references of the Weimar years owed much to the political
rhetoric of the time; at most, they were vague statements of intent. The improvisation after the capture of power makes abundantly clear that there was no blueprint in Nazi files. When Hitler took charge of Germany in 1933, the Nazi concentration camp still had to be invented.
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This is not to say that the early camps came from nowhere, as has sometimes been suggested.
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On the whole, Nazi
officials took their inspiration less from foreign precedents than from existing national disciplinary discourses and practices, with the most important influences—especially on larger and more permanent state camps, like Dachau and those in the Emsland—coming from the German prison system and from the army.

SS officers like Theodor Eicke often stressed the uniqueness of their camps, denying
any resemblance to regular prisons and penitentiaries.
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But back in 1933, Nazi officials borrowed liberally from the traditional prison service. Indeed, many officials—including Eicke—could draw on personal experiences of the Weimar prison, which had mostly been strict and highly regimented (contrary to later Nazi caricatures). Having been locked up for political extremism during the Weimar
years, these men now applied the lessons they had learned to the early camps.

The masters of the early camps copied from the prisons’ rigid schedules and rules, lifting some passages directly from existing regulations. Traditional disciplinary punishments from the prison service, like aggravated detention (depriving prisoners for several weeks of their bed, fresh air, and regular food), found
their way straight into the early camps.
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Even flogging, introduced as an official disciplinary punishment under Eicke in Dachau, had its roots in German prisons: until it was abandoned after the First World War as inhumane and counterproductive, men in Prussian penitentiaries could be officially punished with thirty or even sixty lashes.
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Another element appropriated from the prison service
was the so-called progressive stages system, which had been practiced in all large German penal institutions from the mid-1920s. Prisoners were divided into three groups, with sanctions for supposedly ill-disciplined or incorrigible inmates, and corresponding benefits for more docile ones.
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In 1933, a similar stages system—with significantly harsher sanctions—was introduced in several early
camps, at least on paper. When Hans Beimler arrived in Dachau, for example, the SS immediately put him into stage three, officially reserved for prisoners “whose previous life justifies a particularly severe supervision.”
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Yet another influence on early camps was forced labor, which stood at the heart of the modern prison, thanks to its easy compatibility with very different conceptions of
detention. Traditionalists had long seen hard manual work as a punishment. Prison reformers, meanwhile, regarded it as an instrument of rehabilitation; repetitive labor in their cells would inoculate inmates with a strict work ethic, and toil outside (in farming or land cultivation) would tie deviants to the countryside and help cleanse “degenerate” cities.
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Similar beliefs had underpinned other
institutions of social welfare and discipline in Weimar Germany, like workhouses and the camps of the Voluntary Labor Service, which left their own marks on the early Nazi camps.
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Drawing on these precedents, forced labor figured fairly prominently in early camps, not least because it could be presented as a means of both repression and redemption. Reporting the opening of the new Prussian state
camp in Brandenburg in August 1933, a local newspaper announced that work would force prisoners to “reflect at leisure upon their earlier actions and assertions” and help them “to reform.” What readers were not told, of course, was that in Erich Mühsam’s case such work meant wiping the floors while SS men kicked and beat him, dragged him by his hair, and forced him to lick the dirty water.
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Just as the masters of the early camps tried to differentiate themselves from prison officials, they drew a line between themselves and regular soldiers. But there was no mistaking the influence of military traditions, which were widely copied and perverted inside camps. Again, SA and SS officials could often fall back on their own experience. Many commandants were First World War veterans (some
had even spent time in POW camps), and so were some of the guards.
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Those who had been too young to enlist had often soaked up the army spirit in extremist paramilitary formations like the SA, which was consciously modeled on the army, with its flags, uniforms, and rituals, and had provided its members with comprehensive military training.
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“When a new arrival first enters the concentration
camp,” a former Dachau prisoner recalled, he finds “a kind of military camp.”
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There were many echoes of army life in the early camps, starting with the guards’ demeanor. The Dachau SS, for example, greatly prized military bearing among its men, who learned to march in formation in exaggerated goose step, proudly wearing uniforms with army-inspired insignia.
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Army veterans among the prisoners
were also familiar with daily marches (accompanied by military music) and roll calls (with barked commands like “Caps off” and “Eyes right”).
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“As an old soldier I knew that the wisest thing was to say Yes and Amen to everything,” an ex-prisoner reported about his time in Esterwegen.
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During their encounters with guards, prisoners had to offer a salute and “adopt a military stance,” Theodor
Eicke ordered (similar rules existed inside German prisons). Eicke also insisted that the start of the inmates’ work day was marked by an SS trumpeter with the bugle call to arms.
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The militarization of some early camps even extended to everyday language. In Dachau, each barrack constituted a “prisoner company,” made up of five “platoons” (i.e., five rooms) supervised by an SS “company leader.”
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Violent abuses in early camps were also inspired by military routines, starting with the ubiquitous “welcome,” an exaggerated version of initiation rituals common in the armed forces.
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Then there were all the drills. Exhausting training had been the norm for army recruits in the German Empire, sometimes accompanied by slaps and punches from commanding officers.
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The amplified counterpart in
the early camps was prisoner “sport,” a succession of torturous exercises such as slow knee bends and unending push-ups, as well as crawling, hopping, and running. In the army, such drills aimed at fusing recruits into a cohesive unit. In the camps, they were meant to break the prisoners.
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Mindless discipline continued inside prisoners’ living quarters, with the pedantic rules giving guards
a ready excuse for more abuse. Once more, many of the routines mirrored military practices, including the daily “bed building,” where prisoners had to make their beds perfectly straight, with sharp edges like boxes; prisoners often had to use strings and spirit levels to evade punishment. Again, army veterans were at an advantage. “I had been a soldier,” a prisoner in a Berlin camp later wrote. “I
know this drill.” Some better-off inmates, meanwhile, used food and money to pay skilled colleagues to help them.
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