KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (9 page)

Similar scenes took place in other early camps run by Nazi paramilitaries. And
it was not just prominent radicals who suffered: senior members of the moderate SPD were exposed, too. On August 8, 1933, for example, the Berlin police took several political celebrities to Oranienburg, among them the longtime SPD parliamentary leader in the Prussian parliament Ernst Heilmann, one of the most powerful politicians of the Weimar era, and Friedrich Ebert, an SPD Reichstag deputy, a
newspaper editor, and the son of the deceased first Reich president of the Weimar Republic, a hated figure on the German right. The SA guards were primed for a special “welcome,” having been alerted in advance to the transport, as they often were in case of prominent opponents. On arrival, the newcomers had to pose for propaganda pictures. Then they stood to attention in front of all other prisoners
on the roll call square, where a senior SA officer berated them: “Here they are, these seducers! These swindlers of the people! These crooks! These dirty dogs!” he shouted, before pointing out the “red swine” Heilmann, the “bloodthirsty schemer” Ebert, and the others. The guards forced their victims to undress in public and change into rags, and then shaved their heads. Later on, Ebert and Heilmann
were apparently tortured in the notorious room 16. More abuse followed over the coming weeks. Like other “bigwigs,” Heilmann and Ebert had to perform particularly strenuous, useless, and disgusting work. And whenever Nazi dignitaries visited Oranienburg, the two men were put on show, like dangerous animals in the zoo.
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The guards’ violent hatred of prominent political prisoners was further
inflamed by radical anti-Semitism. The fact that some victims—among them Heilmann, Mühsam, and Litten—had Jewish roots was taken as confirmation of incendiary stereotypes linking Jews to political deviance, summed up in the mortal threat of “Jewish Bolshevism.”
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At the core of the Nazi worldview stood extreme anti-Semitism, which branded Jews as the most dangerous of enemies. Jews were blamed
for all the misfortunes that were said to have befallen modern Germany, from the “stab in the back” to the corrupt Weimar regime. So obstinate was the belief that all Jews were political foes, and vice versa, that Sonnenburg SA guards convinced themselves that Carl von Ossietzky must be Jewish, too (he was not), redoubling their assaults on the “Jewish swine.”
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German Jews constituted a small
minority among the prisoner population of the early camps, perhaps some five percent.
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However, this still meant that Jews were far more likely to be dragged to camps than the average citizen, an early sign of things to come.
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In all, up to ten thousand German Jews were forced into early camps during the course of 1933.
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Most were detained as left-wing activists (although contrary to Nazi
propaganda, Jews were far from dominant among the German Communists).
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But some eager officials also arrested Jews primarily for being Jewish, among them numerous lawyers. In Saxony, the Ministry of the Interior had to remind its policemen that “affiliation to the Jewish race
alone
is not a reason to impose protective custody.”
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In Berlin, meanwhile, local SA leaders cautioned their men in
May 1933 that “not everyone running around with dark hair is a Jew.”
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Kidnapping and arrest were part of an anti-Semitic wave that swept through Germany in spring and summer. While the new leaders were busy implementing a raft of discriminatory measures, trying to make good on their promise to exclude Jews from German life, local thugs launched their own attacks on Jewish businesses and individuals.
Some victims were forced into early camps—often after denunciations by neighbors or business rivals—where they were held for “crimes” such as alleged profiteering or sexual relations with so-called Aryans.
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Whether prominent or not, almost all Jewish prisoners faced abuse from Nazi paramilitaries, who subscribed to a wild blend of anti-Semitic fantasies. Not only were Jews seen as deadly political
enemies, they were branded as racial threats, capitalist exploiters, and lazy intellectuals.
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When new prisoners arrived at a camp, guards would often order Jews to make themselves known: “Are there also any Jews?,” a young Dachau SS man screamed at newcomers on April 25, 1933, the day Hans Beimler arrived in the camp. With external markings for identifying prisoner groups yet to be introduced,
such verbal orders for Jews to step forward became routine. Some prisoners concealed their origins, but this was risky. In Dachau, the Communist prisoner Karl Lehrburger was murdered by Private Steinbrenner in May 1933, shortly after his true identity was revealed by a visiting policeman who happened to know him.
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Anti-Semitic abuse in early SA and SS camps took many forms. Like other torturers,
Nazi guards oversaw acts of ritual humiliation and desecration. Beatings were accompanied by vile insults. “We’ll castrate you so you can’t molest Aryan girls anymore,” two Jewish men were told as they were tormented in the cellar of a Berlin SA pub in August 1933.
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In Dachau, Steinbrenner later recalled, there was “much hilarity” among his SS comrades after they shaved a cross on the head of
a Jewish prisoner. In Sonnenburg, SA men defaced Erich Mühsam’s beard to make him resemble the Nazi cartoons they knew so well.
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Jewish inmates were also often forced into particularly arduous and revolting jobs. What was reserved as a cruel and unusual punishment for individual non-Jews—mostly prominent political prisoners—became normal for Jews, who found themselves at the bottom of the prisoner
hierarchy. Ernst Heilmann, for example, was immediately made “director of the crapper” by the Oranienburg SA, placing him in charge of a group of Jews who had to clean the four toilets—sometimes with their bare hands—used by almost a thousand prisoners. Heilmann took over this post from Max Abraham, a rabbi from Rathenow near Berlin, who was now called “deputy director” by the sneering SA men.
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In Oranienburg—and a few other large camps, like Dachau—anti-Semitic terror even led to the creation of separate labor details and barracks (so-called Jew Companies). However, such spatial separation was still unusual in the early camps. Jews mostly worked and slept with other inmates, especially in smaller camps, though even a comparatively large camp like Osthofen near Worms (Hesse), which held
well over a hundred Jewish inmates, had no “Jew Company.” Osthofen was different from camps like Oranienburg in other ways, too. The local commandant, SS Sturmbannführer Karl D’Angelo, who would later transfer to Dachau, was more restrained than his opposite number in Oranienburg and did not promote violent excesses among the guards.
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This highlights, once again, the disparities between early
camps, even those staffed by Nazi paramilitaries. As yet, there was no agreement on how Jewish prisoners should be treated. Occasionally, this even led to open conflicts between Nazi officials, as happened in Sonnenburg. Rumors about the torture of Hans Litten and Erich Mühsam had reached Berlin within days. Concerned about the reputation of Sonnenburg, attorney Dr. Mittelbach from Berlin police
headquarters carried out an inspection on April 10, 1933. A glance at the prisoners—Mühsam’s dentures were smashed and Litten’s face grotesquely swollen—quickly confirmed that they had been harmed “in a very serious way,” as the civil servant informed his superiors. Mittelbach called together the SA guards and lectured them that abuses were strictly forbidden. When it became clear that his warning
was being ignored, he returned to Sonnenburg by car on April 25 to pick up Litten, coming back one month later for Mühsam. He took both prisoners to state prison wings in Berlin, where their treatment improved immeasurably. “Dr. Mittelbach has saved my life,” the beaming Litten told his mother in Spandau prison.
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Mittelbach could intervene in Sonnenburg because the camp—though staffed by SA
men—came under his authority. It was the first major camp of the Prussian political police and Mittelbach, who had helped to set it up, was soon appointed to an even more influential post: coordinating protective custody across Prussia from inside the secret state police office (Gestapa), established as a new agency under the Prussian Ministry of the Interior in late April 1933. The official task
of the secret state police (Gestapo) officers in the Berlin headquarters and its regional branches was to pursue “all subversive political activities in the whole of Prussia.” Mittelbach himself did not last long in his new post, perhaps because of his help for Litten. Still, the central state authorities, in Prussia and other German states, were starting to assert greater control over the chaotic
network of early camps.
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COORDINATION

In early March 1933, at the dawn of the Third Reich, government officials in Thuringia hastily erected a camp for Communist prisoners on the grounds of a former airfield in Nohra near Weimar; within a few days, more than two hundred men were held inside. Just ten weeks later, however, the new camp was abandoned again. Sometimes described as the first German
concentration camp to open, Nohra was also one of the first to close down.
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Many others followed, and by late summer 1933 most early camps had shut their gates.
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These camps had never been intended as anything more than temporary and their closure reflected a wider shift in Nazi terror. Once the regime had secured its position, its leaders tried to rein in the storm troopers, whose excesses
were beginning to cause concern even among staunch Nazi supporters. On July 6, 1933, Hitler unequivocally told senior Reich officials that the Nazi revolution was over.
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The resulting decline in rank-and-file violence meant fewer prisoners and fewer camps.

Among the remaining early camps were several larger state camps. Attempts to coordinate political terror had already begun in spring 1933
and gathered pace from mid-1933.
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Just two months after local activists had set up Osthofen in March, for example, the Hesse police commissioner designated it as an official state camp.
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Senior state officials elsewhere also established large camps.
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The most significant initiatives came in the two biggest German states, Prussia and Bavaria, where officials formulated ambitious visions for
the future of extra-legal police detention. To implement their rival plans, both states operated model camps, in the Emsland and in Dachau respectively. Not only were these the largest sites in the second half of 1933—holding some 3,000 (Emsland) and 2,400 (Dachau) prisoners a day in September—they were the closest the early camps came to prototypes for later SS concentration camps.
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“Protective
Custody” in Prussia

During the Nazi capture of power, far more political opponents were locked up in Prussia than in any other German state. At the end of July 1933, well over half of all protective custody prisoners were detained there.
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Many of them were so dangerous, a top Prussian civil servant claimed in summer 1933, that they could not be released for a long time. Over the coming years,
he estimated, around ten thousand protective custody prisoners would be held in Prussia on a daily basis. Lawless detention in camps was here to stay.
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The conviction that the camps were more than an emergency measure, that they would last beyond the capture of power and become a permanent feature of the Third Reich, galvanized early efforts to create a more ordered system of detention beyond
the law.
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In Prussia, the coordination of the camp system was spearheaded by the Ministry of the Interior. Hermann Göring himself had signed off on its new model by autumn 1933: in the future, there would be four large state concentration camps, in place of the plethora of early camps.
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The first Prussian state camp was the infamous one in Sonnenburg, where Carl von Ossietzky was among the
approximately one thousand prisoners in late November 1933.
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About the same number of men was detained in a second state camp in Brandenburg on the Havel River, set up in August inside another run-down former penitentiary. The inmates here included Erich Mühsam and Hans Litten, whose brief refuge in Berlin prisons had come to an abrupt end.
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Even more men—some 1,675 in late September—were
detained in a third camp, Lichtenburg in Prettin on the Elbe, which had opened back in June, again on the grounds of a derelict penitentiary.
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But the pride of Göring’s officials was the largest site, a major complex of camps established from summer 1933 around Papenburg in the Emsland, in northwestern Germany near the Dutch border.
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Beyond these four main sites, the Prussian state authorities approved a handful of regional camps, among them Moringen, which became the central Prussian camp for women in protective custody; by mid-November,
almost 150 women were held here.
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As for all the other remaining early camps, Hermann Göring announced in October 1933 that they were “not recognized by me as state concentration camps” and would “shortly, in any case by the end of this year, be dissolved.”
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Several early camps really were closed down around this time and their prisoners taken to the Emsland.
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The new Prussian model envisaged
a system of large state camps coordinated from Berlin. Instead of different authorities meddling in protective custody, police offices would apply to the Gestapa, which would oversee the detention and release of all prisoners in state concentration camps.
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The individual camps were headed by civil servants from the police service, who reported to the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. In turn,
these camp directors were in charge of the commanders of local SS guards. The SS monopoly over guard duties in Prussia had been secured by SS Gruppenführer Kurt Daluege, the head of the police department in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. Other senior officials—duped by SS efforts to project a more disciplined public image than the unruly SA—evidently endorsed the move. The decision to put
the SS in charge led to the replacement of SA guards in camps like Sonnenburg, and by late August all the main Prussian state concentration camps were staffed by SS units.
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