The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  The ‘security confined’ had a particularly hard time. They were sentenced to nine hours’ hard labour a day and subjected to strict military discipline. Since they were permanently in prison, these conditions weighed ever more heavily on them as they grew older. By 1939 more than a quarter of them were in their fifties or above. Cases of self-mutilation and attempted suicide increased rapidly. ‘I won’t do another 3 years here,’ wrote one inmate to her sister in 1937: ‘. . . I have stolen, but I will rather do myself in, my dear sister, than be buried alive for that in here.’143 New laws and greater police powers drove the number of inmates of all kinds in state prisons on an average day up by 50 per cent in 1933, until it reached a peak of 122,000 at the end of February 1937, compared to a mere 69,000 ten years earlier.144 Nazi policy towards crime was not directed by any rational attempt to reduce ordinary offences of theft and violence, although it was common to hear older Germans in the postwar years claiming that whatever Hitler’s faults, he had at least made the streets safe for the honest citizen. In fact, amnesties were declared for minor, non-political, criminal offences in August 1934 and April 1936, quashing no fewer than 720,000 prosecutions that would have led to short prison sentences or fines. This was not the kind of offender whom the Nazis were interested in pursuing. So-called habitual criminals, however, were not included in such amnesties, a further indication of the arbitrariness of Nazi penal practice.145

  Meanwhile large numbers of new offences were created by a series of new laws and decrees, some of them with retroactive effect. They were designed not least to serve the ideological and propaganda interests of the regime. Thus, for instance, in 1938, Hitler ordered a new law making highway robbery on a motorway retroactively punishable by death after two men had been found guilty of this offence in 1938 and sentenced to a term of imprisonment. They were duly sent to the guillotine.146 Offences of all kinds were given a political or ideological slant, so that even pilfering or picking pockets became evidence of hereditary degeneracy, and vaguely defined activities such as ‘grumbling’ or ‘idling’ became grounds for indefinite imprisonment. Punishments increasingly no longer fitted the crime, but were designed to assert the supposed collective interest of the ‘racial community’ in the face of deviance from the norms set by the Nazis. Whole categories of people were increasingly defined by police, prosecutors and courts as inherently criminal and caught up in their thousands in the process of arbitrary arrest and confinement without trial.

  Deviant and marginal, but hitherto socially more or less tolerated, professions like prostitution also began to be defined as ‘asocial’ and subject to the same sanctions. Vague and wide-ranging laws and decrees gave the police almost limitless powers of arrest and detention, virtually at will, while the courts did not lag far behind in applying the policies of repression and control, for all the regime’s continual attacks on them for their supposed leniency. All this was cheered on, with only small and often quite technical reservations, by considerable numbers of criminologists, penal specialists, lawyers, judges, and professional experts of one kind and another - men like the criminologist Professor Edmund Mezger, a member of the committee charged with preparing a new Criminal Code, who declared in a textbook published in 1933 that the aim of penal policy was ‘the elimination from the racial community of elements which damage the people and the race’.147 As Mezger’s phrase indicated, crime, deviance, and political opposition were all aspects of the same phenomenon for the Nazis, the problem, as they put it, of ‘community aliens’ (Gemeinschaftsfremde), people who for whatever reason were not ‘racial comrades’ (Volksgenossen) and therefore one way or another had to be removed from society by force. A leading police expert of the period, Paul Werner, summed this up in 1939 when he declared that only those who completely integrated themselves into the ‘racial community’ could be given the full rights of a member; anyone who was just merely ‘indifferent’ towards it was acting ‘from a criminal or asocial mentality’ and was thus a ‘criminal enemy of the state’, to be ‘combatted and brought down’ by the police.148

  INSTRUMENTS OF TERROR

  I

  The systematization of the Nazi mechanism of repression and control under the aegis of Heinrich Himmler’s SS had a marked effect on the concentration camps.149 At least seventy camps had been hastily erected in the course of the seizure of power in the early months of 1933, alongside an unknown but probably even larger number of torture cellars and small prisons in the stormtroopers’ various branch headquarters. Around 45,000 prisoners were held in them at this time, beaten, tortured and ritually humiliated by their guards. Several hundred died as a result of their maltreatment. The vast majority were Communists, Social Democrats and trade unionists. However, most of these early concentration camps and unofficial torture centres were closed down in the second half of 1933 and the first two or three months of 1934. One of the most notorious, the illegal concentration camp set up in the Vulkan shipyard in Stettin, was closed in February 1934 on the orders of the State Prosecutor. A number of the SA and SS officers who had taken the lead in the torture of prisoners there were put on trial and given lengthy sentences. Well before this time, however, a series of official and unofficial amnesties had led to the release of large numbers of chastened and browbeaten inmates. A third of the camp population was released on 31 July 1933 alone. By May 1934 there were only a quarter as many prisoners as there had been a year before, and the regime was beginning to regularize and systematize the conditions of internment of those who remained. 150

  Some time before, in June 1933, the Bavarian State Prosecutor had charged camp commandant Wäckerle of Dachau, together with the camp physician and the camp administrator, with being accessories to the murder of prisoners.151 Himmler, who had taken a hand in drawing up the camp regulations enforced, though not very consistently, by Wäckerle, was obliged on 26 June 1933 to sack him and appoint a new commandant. This was Theodor Eicke, an ex-policeman with a distinctly chequered past. Born in 1892, Eicke had been an army paymaster and security guard who had risen through the ranks of the SS to become a battalion leader, in command of over 1,000 men, by the end of 1931. The following year, however, he had been forced to flee to Italy after being convicted of preparing bomb outrages. After running a refugee camp on behalf of the Fascist government, Eicke had returned to Germany in February 1933 to take part in the Nazi seizure of power. But he soon quarelled violently with Josef Bürckel, the Regional Leader of the Palatinate, who committed him to a mental hospital; the alarmed Himmler had him psychiatrically examined and found sane.152 One of his subordinates in Dachau, Rudolf Höss, described him as ‘an inflexible Nazi of the old type’ who regarded the mainly Communist prisoners in the early concentration camps as ‘sworn enemies of the state, who were to be treated with great severity and destroyed if they showed resistance’.153

  In June 1933 Himmler remembered that Eicke had organized a camp in Italy with some success, and appointed him to run Dachau. The new commandant reported later that he had found corruption amongst the guards, poor equipment and low morale in the camp administration. There were ‘no cartridges or rifles, let alone machine guns. Of the entire staff only three men could handle a machine gun. My men were billeted in draughty factories. Everywhere there was poverty and misery’ - everywhere, that is, among the guards; he did not mention any possible poverty and misery among the prisoners. Eicke sacked half the complement of 120 staff and appointed replacements. He issued a comprehensive set of regulations in October 1933, which, unlike the previous ones, also laid down a code of conduct for the guards. These imposed the appearance of order and uniformity where previously there had been arbitrary brutality and violence. They were draconian in the extreme. Prisoners who discussed politics with the aim of ‘incitement’, or spread ‘atrocity propaganda’, were to be hanged; sabotage, assaulting a guard, or any kind of mutiny or insubordination was punishable by the firing squad. Lesser infringements met with a variety of lesser punishments. These included solitary confin
ement on a diet of bread and water for a period of time varying with the offence; corporal punishment (twenty-five strokes of the cane); punishment drill; tying to a post or a tree for a period of hours; hard labour; or the withholding of mail. Additional punishment of this kind also carried with it a prolongation of the inmate’s sentence.154

  Eicke’s system was intended to rule out personal and individual punishments and to protect officers and guards from prosecution by the local law officers by setting up a bureaucratic apparatus to provide written justification for the punishments inflicted. Formal regulation could thus claim to have replaced arbitrary violence. Beatings for example were to be carried out by several SS men, in front of the prisoners, and all punishments had to be recorded in writing. Strict rules were laid down governing the behaviour of the SS guards. They had to conduct themselves in a military fashion. They were not to engage in private conversations with the prisoners. They had to observe minutely detailed procedures for conducting the daily roll-call of the inmates, the supervision of prisoners in the camp workshop, the issuing of commands, and the implementation of punishments. Prisoners were issued with regular uniforms and prescribed exact duties in keeping their living quarters tidy. Arrangements were made for basic sanitary and medical provisions, notably absent in some of the camps in the early months of 1933. Work details outside the camp, consisting mainly of hard, unremitting physical labour, were also introduced. Eicke established a systematic and hierarchical division of labour among the staff, and issued guards with special insignia to be worn on their collars: the death’s head, after which the concentration camp division of the SS, given a separate identity after the end of 1934, was soon to be known. This symbolized Eicke’s doctrine of extreme severity towards the prisoners. As Rudolf Höss later recalled:

  It was Eicke’s intention that his SS-men, by means of continuous instruction and suitable orders concerning the dangerous criminality of the inmates, should be made basically ill-disposed towards the prisoners. They were to ‘treat them rough’, and to root out once and for all any sympathy they might feel for them. By such means, he succeeded in engendering in simple-natured men a hatred and antipathy for the prisoners which an outsider will find hard to imagine.155

  Höss himself, after signing up with the SS in September 1933, had been asked by Himmler, whom he knew from their contact through the ‘blood-and-soil’ Artamen League, to join the ‘Death’s Head Formation’ of SS concentration camp guards at Dachau. Here his habitual discipline and industriousness won him rapid promotion. He received his officer’s commission in 1936 and was put in charge of the stores and of prisoners’ property.

  A former inmate of a state prison himself, Höss later wrote that most concentration camp inmates found the uncertainty of the duration of their sentence the hardest psychological burden to bear. While an offender sentenced to a term in prison knew when he was going to get out, release for the concentration camp inmate was determined by the whim of a quarterly review board, and could be delayed by the malice of any of the SS guards. In the world of the camps created by Eicke, the rules gave untrammelled power to the guards. The detailed and elaborate rules gave the guards multifarious possibilities of inflicting serious violence on inmates for real or alleged infringements at every level. The rules were designed not least to provide legally defensible excuses for the terror they vented upon the inmates. Höss himself protested that he could not bear to watch the brutal punishments, the beatings and the whippings, inflicted on the inmates. He wrote disparagingly of the ‘malicious, evil-minded, basically bad, brutal, inferior, common creatures’ amongst the guards, who compensated for their sense of inferiority by venting their anger on the prisoners. The atmosphere of hatred was total. Here, Höss, like many other SS guards, believed, were two hostile worlds fighting it out, Communists and Social Democrats on the one side, the SS on the other. Eicke’s rules made it certain the latter would win.156 Not surprisingly, Eicke’s reorganization of Dachau won the approval of Himmler, who appointed him inspector of the concentration camps throughout the Reich on 4 July 1934. On 11 July, Eicke was given the top rank of SS Group Leader alongside Heydrich, the head of the Security Service.157 Eicke’s systematization of the concentration camp regime became the basis for all camps right across Germany. In view of the continued interventions of State Prosecutors in cases of murder committed by camp guards, Eicke confidentially ordered that the rules invoking capital punishment for serious infringements of discipline were not to be applied; they were to remain principally as a means of ‘intimidation’ for the prisoners. The number of arbitrary killings began to decline sharply, though the main reason for this was the continued fall in the overall number of inmates. After some 24 deaths in Dachau in 1933, the number fell to 14 in 1934 (not counting those shot as part of the Röhm purge), 13 in 1935 and 10 in 1936.158

  Just as Himmler was taking over and centralizing police forces across Germany, so too he took the concentration camps into the control of the SS in 1934 and 1935, aided by the growth in the power and influence of the SS after the Röhm purge. By this time there were only 3,000 inmates left, a sign that the dictatorship had established itself on a more or less stable basis. Along with the process of systematization went a parallel process of centralization. Oranienburg and Fuhlsbüttel camps were wound up in 1935, Esterwegen in 1936, and Sachsenburg in 1937. By August 1937 there were only four concentration camps in Germany: Dachau, Sachsenhausen (where Höss was transferred the following year), Buchenwald and Lichtenburg, the last-named a camp for women. This reflected to a degree the regime’s growing sense of security and its successful crushing of left-wing opposition. Social Democrats and Communists thought to have learned their lesson were released in the course of 1933-6. Those kept in custody were either too prominent to be released, like the former Communist leader Ernst Thälmann, or were regarded as a hard core who would continue resisting the Third Reich if released. The relatively small numbers were also an indication that the regime had succeeded in bending the state judicial and penal systems to its will, so that the official state prisons, after the closing of the small camps and torture centres set up by the SA in 1933, now played the major role in the incarceration of the real and supposed political enemies of the Third Reich. In the summer of 1937, for instance, the overall number of political prisoners in the camps paled into insignificance in comparison with the 14,000 officially designated political offenders who were held in state prisons. After the initial period of violence and repression in 1933, it was the state rather than the SA and SS that played the major part in dealing with those who offended against the Third Reich’s political norms.159 Here too there was a decline in number as political offenders were released into the community. The effective smashing of the Communist resistance in the mid-1930s was reflected in a decline of high treason convictions from 5,255 in 1937 to 1,126 in 1939, and a corresponding fall in the number of state prison inmates classified as political offenders from 23,000 in June 1935 to 11,265 in December 1938.160 But this was still more than the concentration camps held, and the police, the courts and the prison system continued to play a more important role in political repression under the Third Reich than the SS and the concentration camps did, at least until the outbreak of war.

  Map 2.Concentration Camps in August 1939

  By February 1936, Hitler had approved a reorientation of the whole system, in which Himmler’s SS and Gestapo were charged not only with preventing any resurgence of resistance from former Communists and Social Democrats, but also - now that the workers’ resistance had been effectively crushed - with purging the German race of undesirable elements. These consisted above all of habitual criminals, asocials and more generally deviants from the idea and practice of the normal healthy member of the German racial community. Jews, so far, did not form a separate category: the aim was to purge the German race, as Hitler and Himmler understood it, of undesirable and degenerate elements. Thus the composition of the camp population now began to change, and the numbers o
f inmates began to increase again. By July 1937, for instance, 330 of Dachau’s 1,146 inmates were professional criminals, 230 had been sentenced, under welfare regulations, to labour service, and 93 had been arrested as part of a Bavarian police action against vagrants and beggars. Fifty-seven per cent of the prisoners by this time were thus not classified as political at all, in sharp contrast to the situation in 1933-4.161 A dramatic change in the nature and function of the camps was in progress. From being part of a concerted effort, involving also the People’s Court and the Special Courts, to clamp down on political opposition and, above all, resistance from members of the Communist Party, the concentration camps had become instead an instrument of racial and social engineering. The concentration camps were now dumping-grounds for the racially degenerate.162 And the change of function, coupled with Himmler’s success in securing immunity from prosecution for the camp guards and officials for anything they did behind the perimeter fence, soon led to a sharp increase in inmate deaths once more after the relative hiatus of the mid-1930s.163 In 1937, there were 69 deaths in Dachau, seven times more than in the previous year, out of a camp population that had remained more or less unchanged at around 2,200. In 1938 the number of deaths in the camp jumped again, to 370, out of a greatly increased camp population of just over 8,000. In Buchenwald, where conditions were a good deal worse, there were 48 deaths among the 2,200 inmates in 1937, 771 amongst 7,420 inmates in 1938, and no fewer than 1,235 deaths amongst the 8,390 inmates in 1939, these last two figures reflecting not least the effects of a raging typhus epidemic in the camp in the winter of 1938-9.164