KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Take the camp in the town of Oranienburg, just north of Berlin, which became notorious for its violence. A local SA unit set up the camp on March 21, 1933, on the grounds of a former brewery, to lock up forty of its prisoners. Just a few days later, however, the camp was formally placed under the district state administration. Soon, police and municipal authorities sent alleged opponents of the new order to the expanding camp, still staffed by the SA. By August 1933, Oranienburg was among the largest early camps in Prussia, holding over nine hundred prisoners.68

  Conditions in early camps run by Nazi paramilitaries were almost uniformly dreadful. Much of the blame lay with the SA and SS guards, but there were also practical problems. Unlike prisons and workhouses, hardly any of the sites had been designed for holding captives. Even basic facilities—toilets, washrooms, heating, kitchens—were lacking, and inmates were forced into bare and cold quarters, such as former storage or engine rooms, some with leaking roofs and windows. In Oranienburg, prisoners initially had to lie on the straw-covered concrete floor of long and narrow cellars previously used for storing beer bottles. Even in the summer months it was dark and damp here, and the inmates “froze like young puppies,” recalled the former SPD Reichstag deputy Gerhart Seger, who arrived in Oranienburg in June 1933. Later the prisoners slept on tiny, three-tiered wooden bunks which reminded Seger of “rabbit hutches.” The food was no better than the quarters. Just as in many other SA camps, the rations in Oranienburg were small and disgusting, so much so that some prisoners preferred to go hungry.69 But the defining feature was the guards’ brutality, which was no less extreme than in Kola-Fu: at least seven Oranienburg prisoners perished between May and September 1933.70

  SA and SS Guards

  If torture was the essence of National Socialism, as the Austrian philosopher and concentration camp survivor Jean Améry suggested, then the early SA and SS camps stood at the center of the emerging Third Reich.71 To be sure, not all guards were torturers, not in 1933 and not after. Early on, individual SA and SS men still had to find their roles, and some shied away from hands-on violence against defenseless prisoners. In one exceptional case, an SS guard even protested against the beating of an elderly man—only to be shouted down by his comrades; for them, prisoner abuse was fast becoming second nature.72

  The violence began on arrival. The breaking of newcomers—stripping them of their dignity and asserting the dominance of the authorities—was a common ritual in “total institutions” everywhere, but it was taken to extremes in early SA and SS camps.73 From the start, the guards used violence to communicate a simple message: the prisoners were worthless and at their mercy.74 Screaming men surrounded bewildered newcomers and showered them in abuse. “Get out, you swine!” a Dachau guard shouted in early July 1933 as a truck discharged a group of prisoners. “I’ll make you run! For Christ’s sake, I will shoot a hole into your noodle.”75 Verbal abuse went hand in hand with physical assaults, as SA and SS men kicked, beat, and whipped their victims.76 Often, this was followed by punishing exercises and a brief speech from the officer in charge, laced with more threats. Many prisoners had to undergo a bodily search, and occasionally they were photographed and fingerprinted—reinforcing the message that they were dangerous criminals and would be treated as such.77 All these practices established the template for the prisoner “welcome,” an elaborate routine of humiliation and violence that would soon become a permanent feature of the SS concentration camp system.78

  Every prisoner—young and old, male and female—was fair game for SA and SS guards.79 They beat inmates with hands and fists, and an array of weapons like truncheons, whips, and sticks. Skin was slashed, jaws smashed, organs ruptured, bones broken. Mock executions were widespread, too, as were other degrading practices. The torturers shaved their victims’ body hair, ordered them to beat each other, force-fed them castor oil (a torment copied from Italian Fascists), and made them eat excrement and drink urine.80 Sexual abuse was frequent in these early camps, at least compared to the later SS camp system. Men were hit on the naked genitals, and some were forced to masturbate each other; in Dachau, one prisoner died in summer 1933 after the SS inserted a hose into his rectum and opened the high-pressure water tap.81 Female prisoners were targeted, too. Male guards carried out several assaults, beating their victims on the naked thighs, buttocks, and breasts; there were also rapes.82

  Why this eruption of violence? The authorities did not normally select particularly brutal men to staff SA and SS camps; personnel policy was far too unsystematic in 1933.83 Most commandants were appointed simply because they headed the local paramilitary unit stationed at the camp.84 The recruitment of guards was even more haphazard. SS Private Steinbrenner, the man who tortured Hans Beimler, later testified that he had been on his way to a routine assignment as an auxiliary policeman in Munich when, one evening in late March 1933, he happened to walk past an officer from his unit. To Steinbrenner’s surprise his superior ordered him to board a bus parked on the street and join other SS men inside; the twenty-seven-year-old apparently had no idea that the bus would head for Dachau and that he had just been seconded as a guard.85 Like Steinbrenner, most early SA and SS guards were not volunteers.86 Many must have welcomed their new posts nonetheless, above all those coming from the vast army of the German unemployed—officially numbering around six million in early 1933—who now received pay and free board. Indeed, the Nazi authorities deliberately used appointments to the early camps to reward out-of-work activists (Oranienburg alone employed three hundred brownshirts in June 1933).87 At the same time, many new guards saw their poorly paid positions as temporary, and almost all moved on after a few weeks or months, as did the commandants. Few men envisaged long careers in the camps.88

  The casual recruitment policy notwithstanding, many SA and SS guards were primed for violence by virtue of being Nazi paramilitaries. There was no need for the authorities to select especially brutal guards, in other words, because SA and SS men were presumed to be brutal anyway. Most of them were young men in their twenties and early thirties, from working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds. They belonged to the so-called “superfluous generation”—too young for action in the Great War and hit hardest by the economic upheaval of the Weimar years—which often sought salvation in the radical politics of interwar Germany.89 These SA and SS men were veterans of Weimar political extremism and many had the scars and criminal records to prove it.90 In their eyes, the assault on left-wing prisoners in 1933 was the culmination of a civil war that had raged since 1918 against the SPD (as the main defender of Weimar) and the KPD (as the main agent of Bolshevism). “The SA was ready to fight to win the revolution,” the Oranienburg commandant, SA Sturmbannführer Werner Schäfer later wrote about the first day in the camp, “just as it had slowly and stubbornly fought to win the [beer] halls, the streets, the villages and towns.”91 Terror inside the early camps, in short, grew directly out of the violent Weimar political culture.

  The ferocity of the guards’ assault on prisoners also owed much to the peculiar mind-set of Nazi paramilitaries in 1933, which combined euphoria and paranoia into an explosive mix. The guards were celebrating the triumph of Nazism. Intoxicated with their sudden powers, they were anything but magnanimous in victory: they decorated the camps with captured flags of left-wing groups and branded their supremacy onto their enemies’ bodies.92 “Think about what they would have done to you,” SA men in Colditz camp were told before they were let loose on inmates in spring 1933.93 Often, the hatred of prisoners was not abstract but personal. Because of the localized nature of early Nazi terror, jailers and jailed often knew each other well. They had grown up in the same streets and shared a long history of violence and vendettas. Now the time had come for a final reckoning. The worst thing that could happen to an inmate, a former Dachau prisoner wrote in 1934, was to be recognized by a guard from his hometown.94

  But behind the wild triumphalism of SA and SS guards lurked anxiety. Nazi propaganda had stressed the Communist mena
ce for so long that its crushing defeat seemed to have come too easily. Fear of an imminent counterstrike was widespread in spring and summer 1933, and went well beyond Nazi fanatics; even some deluded KPD prisoners themselves were confident that a workers’ uprising was just around the corner.95 Some Nazi officials feared that the early camps would be attacked by armed gangs, like state prisons had been during the German revolution of 1918–19. Guards were warned to be vigilant at all times about threats from the outside.96

  The obsession with the Communist specter spurred nervous guards to further attacks, especially during so-called interrogations. There were special torture chambers in many early camps run by Nazi paramilitaries, where guards tried to force prisoners to reveal names, plots, and hidden weapons. In Oranienburg, for example, SA torturers sat in room 16, beating prisoners until their bodies were covered in blood and bruises.97 Deaths in custody were still rare, however, even in SA and SS camps. Contrary to the picture of early Nazi camps as places of mass extermination, advanced by scholars like Hannah Arendt, the vast majority of prisoners survived.98 Still, many hundreds lost their lives in 1933, murdered by the guards or driven to suicide. Most vulnerable of all were Jews and prominent political prisoners.99

  Targeting “Bigwigs” and Jews

  On April 6, 1933, a special train left Berlin’s Schlesischer Bahnhof for Sonnenburg in the east of Prussia, where SA men had just established a new camp on the grounds of a dilapidated penitentiary, abandoned by the judicial authorities two years earlier after an outbreak of dysentery. On board the train were more than fifty well-known political prisoners (“bigwigs”), including Erich Mühsam, Carl von Ossietzky, and Hans Litten. After their arrest in Berlin in the early hours of February 28, 1933, the three men had spent several weeks in state prisons, describing conditions there as “uncomfortable” but “tolerable.”100 These had been the good days, compared to what was about to follow.

  The prisoners were abused and beaten on the special train, and even more so inside Sonnenburg. The SA guards focused much of their attention on Mühsam, Ossietzky, and Litten. Not only were they left-wing intellectuals—a “type” despised as lazy and dangerous by the paramilitaries, who symbolically destroyed Mühsam’s glasses—they were famous; even the local newspaper had announced their arrival. The anarchist Erich Mühsam was wrongly held responsible by the Nazis for the notorious execution of hostages in a Munich school during the 1919 uprising (like Hans Beimler). The publicist Ossietzky had previously demanded the disbanding of the Berlin SA Storm 33 (known as the “Murder Storm”), to which many of the camp guards belonged, while the attorney Litten had fought some of its members in court. Now the tables were turned, and at the end of a long day of terror, during which Litten was nearly strangled to death, the three men spent a first terrifying night together in a Sonnenburg cell.101

  The torture continued during the following days. The two frail older men, Ossietzky and Mühsam, had to dig a grave in the prison yard. Then they had to line up to be shot, only for the SA men to burst into laughter and drop their rifles. Ossietzky and Mühsam also performed humiliating exercises and exhausting menial tasks, at running pace and abused by SA men. Carl von Ossietzky finally collapsed and was taken to the infirmary, pallid, gaunt, and shaking. Erich Mühsam, his clothes covered in blood, broke down on April 12 with “serious heart attacks,” as he noted in a diary. Hans Litten, meanwhile, was tortured in a “life-threatening way,” as he secretly told his loved ones, and tried to take his own life by cutting his wrists.102 After just a few days inside Sonnenburg, the SA guards had pushed all three of their trophy prisoners close to death.

  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.103

  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.”104 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.”105

  German Jews constituted a small minority among the prisoner population of the early camps, perhaps some five percent.106 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.107 In all, up to ten thousand German Jews were forced into early camps during the course of 1933.108 Most were detained as left-wing activists (although contrary to Nazi propaganda, Jews were far from dominant among the German Communists).109 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.”110 In Berlin, meanwhile, local SA leaders cautioned their men in May 1933 that “not everyone running around with dark hair is a Jew.”111 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.112

  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.113 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.1
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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 1933.115 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.116 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.117

  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.118