The crackdown on ‘community aliens’ in fact had begun immediately in 1933, when several hundred ‘professional criminals’ had been arrested by the police in the first of a number of concerted actions, concentrating among others on organized criminal gangs in Berlin.165 In September 1933, as many as 100,000 vagrants and mendicants were arrested in a ‘Reich beggars’ week’ staged to coincide with the launch of the first Winter Aid programme, in which voluntary contributions were collected for the destitute and the unemployed - a neat illustration of the interdependence of welfare and coercion in the new Reich.166 Offenders such as these did not on the whole end up in the camps, but on 13 November 1933, criminals, along with sex offenders, had been made subject in Prussia to preventive police custody in concentration camps, and there were nearly 500 of them incarcerated there by 1935. After the centralization of the police and its takeover by the SS, this policy became far more widespread and systematic. In March 1937, Himmler ordered the arrest of 2,000 so-called professional or habitual criminals, that is, offenders with several convictions to their name, however petty the offences might be; unlike the ‘security confined’, whose fate had to be determined by the courts, these were put straight into concentration camps without any legal process at all. A decree issued on 14 December 1937 allowed for the arrest and confinement in concentration camps of everyone whom the regime and its various agencies, now working in closer co-operation with the police than before, defined as asocial. Shortly afterwards, the Reich and Prussian Ministries of the Interior extended the definition of asocial to include anyone whose attitude did not fit in with that of the racial community, including gypsies, prostitutes, pimps, tramps, vagrants, beggars and hooligans. Even traffic offenders could be included under some circumstances, as were the long-term unemployed, whose names were obtained by the police from labour exchanges. By this time, the reasoning went, there was no need to be unemployed, so they must be congenitally work-shy and therefore in need of correction. 167
In April 1938 the Gestapo launched a nationwide series of raids. The raids also covered doss-houses of the sort where Hitler had once found shelter in his days of poverty and unemployment in Vienna before the First World War. By June 1938 there were some 2,000 such people in Buchenwald concentration camp alone. At this point, on 13 June, the Criminal Police, acting under orders from Heydrich, launched another series of raids, targeting beggars, tramps and itinerants. The police also arrested unemployed men with permanent places of residence. In many areas they went well beyond Heydrich’s instructions and took all the unemployed into custody. Heydrich had ordered 200 arrests in every police district, but the Frankfurt police arrested 400 and their Hamburg colleagues 700. The total number of arrests across the country was well in excess of 10,000.168 The economic considerations that played such an important role in these actions could be read in the documents justifying preventive detention for these men. The papers on one 54-year-old man arrested in Duisburg in June 1938 as part of this wider action against people classified as asocials noted for example:
According to information from the welfare office here, C. is to be classified as a work-shy person. He does not care for his wife and his 2 children, so that these have to be supported from the public purse. He has never taken up the work duty assigned to him. He has given himself over to drink. He has used up all his benefit payments. He has received several warnings from the welfare office and is described as a classic example of an asocial, irresponsible and work-shy person.169
Taken to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, the man lasted little more than eighteen months before dying, so the camp records claimed, from general physical weakness.170
People classified as asocial now swelled the depleted concentration camp population across Germany, causing massive overcrowding. More than 6,000 were admitted to Sachsenhausen in the summer of 1938, for example; the effects of this on a camp where the total number of inmates had not been more than 2,500 at the beginning of the year were startling. In Buchenwald, 4,600 out of the 8,000 inmates in August 1938 were classified as work-shy. The influx of new prisoners prompted the opening of two new camps, at Flossenburg and Mauthausen, for criminals and ‘asocials’, run by the SS but linked to a subsidiary organization founded on 29 April 1938, the German Earth- and Stoneworks Company. Under the aegis of this new enterprise, the prisoners were forced to work in quarries blasting and digging out granite for the grandiose building schemes of Hitler and his architect Albert Speer.171 The asocials were the underclass of camp life, just as they had been the underclass of society outside. They were treated badly by the guards, and almost by definition they were unable to organize self-help measures of the sort that kept the political prisoners going. The other prisoners looked down on them, and they played little part in camp life. Death and sickness rates among them were particularly high. An amnesty on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday on 20 April 1939 led only a few of them to be released. The rest were there indefinitely. Although their numbers declined, they still formed a major part of the camp population on the eve of the war. In Buchenwald, for instance, 8,892 of the 12,921 preventive detainees counted on 31 December 1938 were classified as asocial; a year later the comparable figure was 8,212 out of 12,221. The raids had fundamentally changed the nature of the camp population.172
II
By the eve of the war numbers in the concentration camps had grown again, from 7,500 to 21,000, and they now had a much more varied population than in the early years of the regime, when the inmates had overwhelmingly been sent there for political offences.173 The camp population was concentrated in a small number of relatively large camps - Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Ravensbrück (the women’s camp, which had replaced Lichtenburg in May 1939), Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen. Already, the search by the SS for building materials had led to the opening of a sub-camp (Aussenlager) of Sachsenhausen, in the Hamburg suburb of Neuengamme, where bricks for Hitler’s planned transformation of the Elbe port were to be manufactured. More were to follow in due course. Labour was becoming an increasingly important function of the camps.174 Yet labour was expendable, and conditions in the new camps were harsher even than they had been in their predecessors in the mid-1930s. From the winter of 1935-6 some camp authorities began to require the different categories of inmates to carry appropriate designations on their uniforms, and in the winter of 1937-8 this was standardized across the system. From now on, every prisoner had to wear an inverted triangle on the left breast of his or her striped camp uniform: black for an asocial, green for a professional criminal, blue for a returning Jewish emigrant (a rather small category), red for political, violet for a Jehovah’s Witness, pink for a homosexual. Jewish prisoners were assigned to one or other of these categories (usually, they were classed as political) but had to wear a yellow triangle underneath their category badge, sewn in the right way up so that the corners were showing, making the whole ensemble into a star of David. These categories were of course often very rough, inaccurately applied or even quite arbitrary, but this did not matter to the camp authorities. By granting limited privileges to political prisoners, they were able to arouse the resentment of the others; by putting criminals in charge of other prisoners, they could stir up divisions between the different types of inmate even further.175
The brutality of camp life in the later 1930s is well conveyed in the memoirs of some of those who managed to survive the experience. One such was Walter Poller, born in 1900, a Social Democratic newspaper editor under the Weimar Republic. Poller became active in the Social Democratic resistance after his dismissal in 1933. He was arrested at the beginning of November 1934 for high treason after the Gestapo had identified him as the author of oppositional leaflets, the third time he had been arrested since early 1933. At the end of his four years in prison he was immediately rearrested and taken to Buchenwald. His experience there testified to the extreme brutality that had now become the norm in the camps. As soon as they arrived, Poller and his fellow prisoners were subjected to a v
iolent and completely unprovoked beating by the SS guards, who drove them into the camp, hitting them with rifle butts and rubber truncheons as they ran. Arriving, dirty, bruised and bloody, in the main barracks for political prisoners, they were read a version of the camp rules by an SS officer, who told them:
Here you are, and you’re not in a sanatorium! You’ll have got that already. Anyone who hasn’t grasped that will soon be made to. You can rely on that . . . You’re not prison inmates here, serving a sentence imposed by the courts, you’re just ‘prisoners’ pure and simple, and if you don’t know what that means, you’ll soon find out. You’re dishonourable and defenceless! You’re without rights! Your fate is a slave’s fate! Amen.176
Poller soon found that although the political prisoners received superior quality camp uniforms and were housed separately from the others, the heavy work to which he was assigned on daily marches outside the camp was too much for him. The Social Democratic and Communist camp inmates, who were well organized and had an elaborate system of informal mutual aid, managed to get him assigned to a job as clerk to the camp doctor. In this position, Poller was able not only to survive until his eventual release in May 1940, but also to observe the daily routine of camp life. It involved a necessary degree of self-government by the prisoners, with senior inmates made responsible for each barracks and Kapos in charge of mustering and presenting the inmates at roll-call and on other occasions - a task which many of them carried out with a brutality that rivalled that of the guards. But all the prisoners, whatever their position, were completely at the mercy of the SS, who did not hesitate to exploit their position of absolute power over life and death whenever they pleased.177
Every day, Poller reported, the inmates were roused at four or five in the morning, according to the season, and had to wash, get dressed and make their beds, military-style, eat and get out onto the parade-ground for roll-call in double-quick time. Any infringement, such as a poorly made-up bed or a late arrival for roll-call, would call forth a rain of curses and blows from the Kapos or the guards, or placement on a punishment detail, where conditions of work were especially harsh. Roll-call provided another opportunity for beatings and assaults. On one occasion in 1937, Poller saw how two political prisoners were roughly hauled out of the ranks, taken out through the camp gates and shot, for reasons that nobody ever discovered. SS men had no problem in using the painstakingly detailed regulations to convict prisoners they did not like of infringements - including such vague offences as laziness at work - and ordering them to be whipped, a procedure that had to be officially recorded on a two-page yellow form. Prisoners were frequently forced to watch as the offender was tied hand and foot to a bench, face down, and beaten by an SS guard with a cane. Not one beating, Poller reported, ever followed the rules laid down on the form. Prisoners sentenced according to regulations to five, ten or twenty-five strokes were required to count them out aloud, and if they forgot, the beating would start all over again. The prescribed cane was frequently replaced by a dog-whip, a leather strap or even a steel rod. Often the beatings continued until the offender lost consciousness. Frequently the camp authorities tried to drown out the screams of the prisoners undergoing a beating by ordering the camp band, consisting of prisoners with proven musical abilities, to play a march or a song while it lasted.178
For more serious infringements of the rules, prisoners could be put into ‘arrest’, kept in a tiny, darkened, unheated cell for days or weeks on end, living only on bread and water. In winter, this could often be as good as a death sentence. More common was the punishment of being suspended from a pole for hours on end by the wrists, causing long-lasting muscular pain and damage, and sometimes, if it went on for long enough, loss of consciousness and death. Escape attempts aroused the particular rage of the SS guards, who realized that in view of their small numbers in comparison to those of the inmates, a determined mass escape attempt was more than likely to succeed. Those caught were savagely beaten, sometimes to death, in front of the others, or publicly hanged on the camp square as the commandant issued a warning to the whole camp that this was the fate of all who tried to get away. On one occasion at Sachsenhausen, a prisoner found trying to escape was dragged onto the camp parade-ground, severely beaten, nailed into a small wooden box and left there for a week in full view of all the inmates until he was dead.179 Faced with such threats, the vast majority of camp inmates concentrated on simply staying alive. During the day, they worked in the camp in small workshops if they had some particular handicraft skill; most of them, however, were marched out of the camp on work-details to carry out labour-intensive tasks such as digging up stones for the camp roads, quarrying chalk or gravel, or clearing away rubble. Here too, guards beat those they thought were not working hard, or quickly, enough and shot without warning anyone who strayed too far from the main group. In the late afternoon the prisoners were marched back into the camp for yet another lengthy roll-call, standing to attention sometimes for hours on end, wet, dirty and exhausted. Sometimes in winter men would collapse in the cold, dead from hypothermia. As the lights were turned out in the barracks, the camp guards warned that anyone seen walking around outside would be shot.180
The arbitrary and sometimes sadistic brutality of the guards reflected not least the brutality and sadism of their own training as SS men. By the late 1930s about 6,000 SS men were stationed in Dachau, and 3,000 in Buchenwald. The (much smaller) daily details of camp guards were drawn from these units, which consisted mostly of young men from the lower classes - farmers’ sons in Dachau, for example, with some young men from the lower middle and working classes in addition at Buchenwald. Mostly poorly educated and already used to physical hardships, they were schooled to be tough, showered with bellowed curses and verbal abuse by their officers during training, and given humiliating punishments if they failed to make the grade. One SS recruit later recalled that anyone who dropped a cartridge during weapons training was required to pick it up off the ground with his teeth. Such ideological indoctrination as they received mostly emphasized the need for hardness in the face of the enemies of the German race such as they were to encounter in the camps. On arrival at the camp, they lived in their barracks largely cut off from the outside world, with few amusements, few opportunities to meet girls or take part in local everyday life, condemned to the daily tedium of surveillance. Under such circumstances it was not surprising that they were rough towards the prisoners, showered them with obscene abuse, strengthened their own feelings of importance by condemning them to harsh punishments on the slightest pretext, relieved their boredom by subjecting them to every kind of brutal trick or avenged the physical humiliation and hardship of their own training by visiting the same upon them; it was, after all, the only kind of drill and discipline they knew themselves. Those who joined the SS after 1934 at the latest generally knew, of course, what they were letting themselves in for, so they already came with a high degree of ideological commitment; still, anyone who did not want to take part in the daily infliction of pain and terror in the camps had every opportunity to resign, and many in fact did so, especially in 1937 and 1938, as the camp regime became notably harsher. In 1937, for instance, nearly 8,000 men were released from the SS, including 146 from the Death’s Head Squads, 81 of these at their own request. Eicke ordered on 1 April 1937 that any member of these squads ‘who is incapable of obedience and looks for compromise must go’. One guard who took up his duties around Easter 1937 asked his commandant for release from the service after seeing prisoners being beaten and hearing screams coming from the cells. He wanted to be a soldier, he said, not a prison warder. He was forced to do punishment drill and even interviewed by Eicke himself to try and make him change his mind, but he stood firm, and was granted his request on 30 July 1937. Those who remained were therefore, it can safely be assumed, committed to their job and without scruples or qualms about the sufferings to which the prisoners were subjected.181
Many thousands of inmates were released from the camp
s, especially in 1933-4. ‘I know’, a senior camp official told Walter Poller as he was given his release papers, ‘that you’ve seen things here that the public perhaps doesn’t wholly understand yet. You must keep absolute silence about them. You know that, don’t you? And if you don’t do that, then you’ll soon be back here, and you know what’ll happen to you then.’182 Communication between inmates and their relatives or friends was restricted, officers and guards were banned from talking about their work to outsiders. What happened in the camps was meant to be shrouded in mystery. Attempts by the regular police and prosecution authorities to investigate murders that took place there in the early years were generally rebuffed.183 By 1936 the concentration camps had become institutions beyond the law. On the other hand, however, the regime made no secret at all of the basic fact of their existence. The opening of Dachau in 1933 was widely reported in the press, and further stories told how Communist, Reichsbanner and ‘Marxist’ functionaries who endangered state security were being sent there; how the numbers of inmates grew rapidly into the hundreds; how they were being set to work; and how lurid atrocity stories of what went on inside were incorrect. The fact that people were publicly warned in the press not to try and peer into the camp, and would be shot if they tried to climb the walls, only served to increase the general fear and apprehension that these stories must have spread.184 What happened in the camps was a nameless horror that was all the more potent because its reality could only be guessed at from the broken bodies and spirits of inmates when they were released. There could be few more frightening indications of what would happen to people who engaged in political opposition or expressed political dissent, or, by 1938-9, deviated from the norms of behaviour to which the citizen of the Third Reich was supposed to adhere.185
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