Another legacy of early Nazi terror was the rapid blurring between state and party. With Nazi activists pouring into the police force at all levels, it was impossible, as early as spring 1933, to draw a clear line between police repression and paramilitary violence. On January 30, 1933, for example, Hermann Göring had become acting head of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior (from April 1933 he also served as minister president), which brought the Prussian police force under his control. Not only did Göring instigate the subsequent police assault on Nazi opponents, on February 22 he opened the door for SA and SS men to “relieve the regular police” in its fight against the Left. Nazi thugs were delighted. As auxiliary policemen, they could now settle scores with their political enemies without worrying about interference from the police; they had become the police.28
As for established police officers, most were broadly sympathetic to the political aims of Nazism and needed no persuading of the dangers of Communism. The German police embraced the regime with little hesitation; no large-scale purge was necessary to turn it into a repressive machine for the Third Reich.29 In mid-March 1933, on the occasion of his appointment as acting Munich police chief, SS leader Heinrich Himmler, another senior Nazi official who seized a post in law enforcement, used a newspaper article to praise the excellent collaboration between police and party. Many enemies had already been arrested, he added, after SA and SS men had led the police to the “hideouts of Marxist organizations.”30
Mass Detention
Vast numbers of opponents were rounded up during the Nazi capture of power. In all, up to two hundred thousand political prisoners were detained at one time or another in 1933.31 Almost all were German nationals, with Communists in the great majority, especially during the early months of Nazi rule. Some of the prisoners—like KPD leader Ernst Thälmann, caught together with close aides in hiding on March 3, 1933—were known across Germany, but most were minor functionaries and ordinary activists; even members of Communist-affiliated sports clubs and choirs were treated like terrorists. Those who now found themselves in Nazi hands were overwhelmingly young working-class men—the demographic that formed the backbone of the Communist movement.32
Compared to the captured men, the number of female prisoners was vanishingly small. Again, most were Communists, often prominent party activists or wives of senior functionaries detained as hostages to blackmail their husbands.33 One of the imprisoned women was the twenty-four-year-old Centa Beimler, a Communist supporter since her teens, who was surprised in hiding by the Munich police in the early hours of April 21, 1933, ten days after the arrest of her husband, Hans. Just one day earlier, she had told him in a secret message that she wished she could take his place. Now they were both prisoners.34
Nazi detention in 1933 was unpredictable and confusing. Thousands of police prisoners were handed over as law breakers to the regular legal system, which played a major part in repression in the Third Reich. German judges and prosecutors, like most other civil servants, largely backed the regime. They wielded old and new laws against Nazi opponents, rapidly filling the judicial state prisons.35 But most arrested opponents did not end up in court, at least not in 1933, because they were not detained for illegal acts, but for who they were—suspected enemies of the new order.
In their reliance on mass arrests beyond the law, Nazi rulers followed other revolutionaries: they wanted to destroy their enemies before they might strike back. This called for radical action, abandoning legal principles and paperwork. Years later, SS leader Heinrich Himmler boasted that the Nazis had destroyed the “Jewish-Communist asocial organization” in 1933 by pulling people off the streets “completely illegally.”36 In fact, most suspects had formally been taken into the euphemistically named protective custody (Schutzhaft), a form of indefinite detention loosely resting on the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State. This decree, passed by Hitler’s cabinet on February 28, 1933, in response to the Reichstag fire, had suspended basic civil liberties. It became, in the words of the émigré German political scientist Ernst Fraenkel, something like the “constitutional charter of the Third Reich,” justifying all manner of abuses of power—including the denial of personal freedom without judicial oversight or appeal. True, the use of extralegal detention was not entirely new in modern Germany and the decree borrowed from earlier Weimar emergency legislation. But it went much further: the Nazi practice of lawless detention was unprecedented both in its severity and scope.37
During the first wave of terror in March and April 1933, an estimated forty to fifty thousand opponents were temporarily taken into protective custody, mostly by the police, SA, and SS. The next wave in summer caught further victims, and despite frequent releases, there were officially almost twenty-seven thousand protective custody prisoners on July 31, 1933, falling only slowly to around twenty-two thousand by the end of October.38 The Nazi press occasionally claimed that this form of detention was well organized. In reality, there was a bewildering array of local rules and practices, with protective custody amounting to little more than kidnapping with a bureaucratic veneer.39
Many Nazi activists dispensed even with this formal façade and grabbed opponents without any official authorization. Senior civil servants, municipal officials, Nazi leaders, local party bruisers, and many more claimed the right to lock up anyone they deemed an opponent of the new order. The escalating terror from below and the accompanying chaos were summed up by an exasperated SA Gruppenführer in early July 1933: “Everyone is arresting everybody, bypassing the prescribed official procedure, everyone threatens everybody with protective custody, everybody threatens everybody with Dachau.”40 The result was a free-for-all, as more and more state and party officials exploited the opportunities for virtually unrestrained terror.
But what to do with all the prisoners? Despite all their talk during the Weimar years about crushing their enemies, Nazi leaders had given precious little thought to the practicalities. Once Nazi terror was unleashed in spring 1933, officials across Germany frantically searched for places to hold the victims of lawless arrests. Over the coming months, many hundreds of new sites were set up, which collectively can be called early camps.41
The landscape of early Nazi camps created in spring and summer 1933 could not have been more varied. The sites were run by different local, regional, and state authorities, and came in all shapes and sizes. A handful would operate for years, but most closed after just a few weeks or months. Conditions varied enormously, too, ranging from harmless to life-threatening; some prisoners suffered no cruelty, while others were continually violated. Several of the new sites were called concentration camps, but this term was still applied loosely, and many other names circulated, too—among them detention home, work service camp, and transit camp—reflecting the improvised nature of early Nazi terror.42 Despite their profound differences, though, the early camps shared a common purpose: to break the opposition.
Many early camps were established inside existing workhouses and state prisons; in spring 1933, whole wings were cleared for protective custody prisoners.43 The authorities saw this as a pragmatic solution to a pressing problem. Tens of thousands of prisoners could be locked away quickly, cheaply, and securely, as most of the infrastructure, from buildings to guards, was already in place.44 Workhouses were especially easy to convert, since they often stood half-empty anyway, having lost much of their purpose during the Weimar years. The large workhouse in Moringen near Göttingen, for example, had held fewer than a hundred beggars and paupers in 1932, and its director welcomed the arrival of protective custody prisoners, hoping that it would breathe new life into his outdated institution; he was not to be disappointed.45 The situation was more complicated in state prisons, which were already crowded with regular remand prisoners and convicts. Still, to demonstrate their support for the new regime, the legal authorities agreed to temporarily open up large prisons and small county jails for extralegal detention. The cells in the new wings were soon packed. By e
arly April 1933, Bavarian prisons alone held over 4,500 inmates in protective custody, almost eclipsing the number of regular state prisoners held there.46
Protective custody prisoners were subject to strict order inside prisons and workhouses, as well as low-level harassment and a monotonous daily schedule. Worst of all was the uncertainty about their future and the fate of their loved ones. By September 1933, Centa Beimler had already spent more than four months in the cold, gloomy cells of Stadelheim prison in Munich—one of the few state prisons with a wing for both men and women in protective custody—and there was no end in sight. What was more, she had not heard from her husband, Hans, since his spectacular escape from Dachau; a letter he sent from the USSR, full of love and concern for her, would only reach her years later. Meanwhile, the police had arrested her mother and her sister for their Communist sympathies, and the welfare services had taken her young son to a borstal. Centa Beimler was not the only Stadelheim prisoner tormented by fears for her family. One of her Communist comrades, Magdalena Knödler, whose children were left all alone after the arrest of her husband, hanged herself in despair.47
Despite the many hardships, most protective custody prisoners found life inside prisons and workhouses bearable. They were generally held apart from the rest of the inmate population, sometimes inside big community rooms. Single cells, meanwhile, were simple but not Spartan, typically comprising a bed, a table, a chair, a shelf, a washbowl, and a bucket as toilet.48 Food and accommodation were mostly adequate, despite the overcrowding, and prisoners were not normally expected to work, passing their time by talking, reading, exercising, knitting, and playing games like chess. During his time in Berlin’s Spandau prison in summer 1933, Ludwig Bendix, a senior German-Jewish lawyer and moderate left-wing legal commentator, even managed to draft a treatise on criminal law that was published a few months later in a respected German criminological journal.49
Most important, prisoners like Ludwig Bendix and Centa Beimler were mostly safe from assaults. Physical violence had long been banned from German prisons and workhouses, and the old guards were drilled to uphold this rule. This accounts for the “mild” and “peaceful” atmosphere in Spandau, as Bendix put it a few years later, where guards had even showed some sympathy to him.50 In some other prisons and workhouses, inmates were in greater peril, following an influx of SA and SS guards. But while these men committed some assaults, as did police officers during interrogations, they were largely held in check by the regular staff.51 Also, the legal authorities insisted that protective custody prisoners in their care would generally be treated like inmates on remand, barring the police and Nazi paramilitaries from exerting any major influence.52
The Nazi use of the term “protective custody” was supremely cynical. As one daring inmate of a small jail complained to the Prussian authorities in late March 1933, he was “touched” by all the “concern for my person,” but did not need any “protection” because “no decent people are threatening me.”53 Still, protective custody in prisons and workhouses did save some detainees from excesses in more brutal early camps, at least for a while.54 This prompted Nazi extremists to complain that their enemies were being handled with kid gloves—rehashing an old right-wing myth about prisons as sanatoria—and to demand their immediate transfer to so-called concentration camps, where much tougher treatment would be guaranteed.55
SA and SS Camps
On September 4, 1933, the life of Fritz Solmitz, a Social Democratic journalist and local councillor from Lübeck, took a terrible turn. At the time, Solmitz was one of around five hundred men in protective custody in Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel, the largest German prison complex, with space for thousands of inmates. Since late March 1933, Fuhlsbüttel included a wing for police prisoners like Solmitz. It was initially controlled by restrained older prison officials, but the period of relative calm did not last. In early August 1933 the Hamburg Gauleiter (NSDAP district leader) Karl Kaufmann expressed his outrage at the lenient treatment of the prisoners and vowed to shake things up. Just one month later, he oversaw the opening of Hamburg’s first central concentration camp, in another part of Fuhlsbüttel. The new camp, soon known as Kola-Fu (Konzentrationslager Fuhlsbüttel), was essentially the personal fiefdom of Kaufmann, who appointed a close confidant and Nazi veteran as commandant. Kaufmann and his men watched as Solmitz and the other protective custody prisoners were marched out of their old quarters on the early morning of September 4 and lined up in the yard. After a menacing speech by one of the officials—who announced that the inmates would be taught that no one could disrupt Adolf Hitler’s Germany—came the first round of systematic violence, with the new guards, some thirty SS men, kicking and punching the prisoners.56
The Fuhlsbüttel guards singled out Fritz Solmitz, who was Jewish, for special abuse from the start. After nine days, on September 13, 1933, they moved him from a large community cell into the cellar for solitary confinement, reserved for torturing supposedly recalcitrant prisoners. Solmitz was immediately surrounded by nine men who pounded him with whips, continuing even after he collapsed semiconscious on the floor. When the guards finally let up, they were covered in the blood that poured from their victim’s head. After Solmitz regained his senses, he recorded his torment on small pieces of cigarette paper hidden inside his watch. He wrote another note on the evening of September 18, just after a group of SS men had left his cell, threatening him with more torture the next day: “A very long SS man steps on my toes and yells: For me you’ll bend over. ‘Oi, say yes, you pig.’ Another: ‘Why don’t you hang yourself? Then you won’t get whipped!’ The seriousness of the threat is not to be doubted. God, what shall I do?” A few hours later, Solmitz was dead, most likely murdered by his torturers. He was one of at least ten prisoners who lost their lives in Kola-Fu in 1933, all the others being Communist activists.57
The death of Fritz Solmitz highlights, in the harshest light, the contrast between different kinds of early camps, in particular those dominated by civil servants and those dominated by Nazi paramilitaries. There were hundreds of early camps controlled by SA or SS men. Some were set up to ease overcrowding in state prisons, following calls by legal officials for police prisoners to be moved elsewhere.58 This suited Nazi hard-liners, as it gave them greater control over prisoners. Adolf Wagner, the new state commissar in charge of the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior—and a close confidant of Hitler—declared as early as March 13, 1933, that, when state prisons ran out of space, arrested enemies should instead be exposed to the elements in “abandoned ruins.”59 In fact, this was exactly what some brownshirts were already doing.
During spring and summer 1933, early camps run by SA and SS men sprang up in the most unlikely locations. Nazi activists occupied whatever space they could, including run-down or vacant hotels, castles, sports grounds, and youth hostels.60 Even restaurants were converted, like the Schützenhaus in the town of Annaberg in Saxony; its landlord was the local SA Sturmbannführer, who ran the new camp while his wife prepared the prisoners’ food.61 Most common was the use of so-called SA pubs, which often held just a handful of prisoners. For years, the life of local brownshirts had revolved around these pubs, which served as informal headquarters to meet, drink, and plan the next attacks. In the Weimar Republic, violence against Nazi enemies had spilled from these pubs onto the streets. In spring 1933, terror flowed the other way, moving from the streets inside the pubs.62
“The number of Nazi torture dens is countless,” the Communist Theodor Balk wrote about Germany in the spring of 1933. “No village or city quarter is without such private martyring dens.”63 Although this was something of an overstatement, camps run by the brownshirts really did cover Germany. Designed as weapons against the labor movement, most of these early camps were established in cities and industrial regions.64
The focal point was “Red Berlin.” During 1933, SA and SS troops ran more than 170 early camps in Berlin, clustered in districts known for their opposition to Nazism. In the working-class areas of Wed
ding and Kreuzberg, for example, where the two parties of the Left had still gained an absolute majority in the tainted March election, no fewer than thirty-four early camps were set up in spring 1933 alone (by contrast, there was just one such camp in leafy Zehlendorf). Because of the density of the new terror network, it often took Nazi thugs just minutes to drag their victims into one of these camps, largely in SA pubs, private apartments, or so-called SA homes, which had offered shelter for unemployed and homeless brownshirts in the final years of the Weimar Republic.65
Some prisoners went through several early camps in quick succession. The prominent left-wing lawyer James Broh, for example, was apprehended by a group of local SA men in his home in Berlin-Wilmersdorf on March 11, 1933, and forced into a private-apartment-turned-torture-camp. The next day, he was moved to an SA pub, and a few days later to the house of the local SA leader. After an endless week of extreme abuse, Broh felt that “I would not be able to bear more torture.” His ordeal ended only after his transfer to Spandau prison.66
Many early camps run by Nazi paramilitaries emerged locally, with little or no direction from above. But it would be misleading to describe them all as “wild camps,” as some historians have done. Many of these camps had ties to the state authorities from the start—hardly surprising, given the overlap between police and party officials. Indeed, some SA and SS camps had been initiated by the police authorities, and it was not uncommon for police officials to encourage prisoner abuses and use “confessions” extracted under torture. But even if no such ties existed at first, they soon developed. No SA camp remained isolated from the regional police for any length of time.67
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