When Theodor Eicke took up his post in Dachau a few weeks later, now reinstated as SS Oberführer, he knew that, at the age of forty-one, this might well be his final chance to make something of his botched life. Unlike many other commandants of early camps, Eicke did not see his appointment as a diversion or nuisance, but as an opportunity to build a career. He grabbed it with his customary zeal. The concentration camps, he wrote to Himmler a few years later in one of his self-aggrandizing letters, became his life’s work.182
During his first days in Dachau, Eicke observed the SS routines, walking around and making notes, as he drew up plans for restructuring the camp. He worked around the clock and even slept in his office. “Now Eicke is in his element,” one SS man later commented. Eicke soon changed the face of Dachau and became its real founding father. He oversaw a major overhaul of SS staff, creating a regimented troop loyal to him. Most of Wäckerle’s closest aides departed, among them the notorious Hans Steinbrenner. Eicke also got rid of the querulous leader of SS sentries and replaced him with Sturmführer Michael Lippert, who would come to play a particularly malignant part. Finally, Eicke drew up new rules of engagement, to make SS violence appear less arbitrary, and introduced a more coherent administrative structure for the SS staff.183
Himmler was delighted by Eicke’s progress. On August 4, 1933, he visited Dachau with SA leader Ernst Röhm, still his nominal superior. Following their inspection of the camp, they were guests of honor during the unveiling of a monument (built by prisoners) dedicated to the Nazi “martyr” Horst Wessel, a young SA firebrand killed in a dispute with local Communists in Berlin in 1930, and celebrated by Nazi propaganda as a symbol for the deadly struggle against Bolshevism. During a festive get-together in the large SS mess hall that evening, Himmler and Röhm applauded the discipline of the guards and singled out Commandant Eicke for special praise. In Röhm’s case, this would prove a grimly ironic moment, in light of what Eicke would do to him less than a year later.184
Behind Dachau’s front as a model camp, the torment continued. Eicke did not want to go any easier on the inmates than his predecessor. He just wanted a slicker operation. And so the abuse carried on, with “bigwigs” and Jews still suffering the worst treatment and hardest labor, like pulling a huge rolling barrel to flatten the paths inside the camp.185 Eicke’s approach was summed up in his camp regulations of October 1, 1933, which greatly expanded the list of punishable prisoner offenses, compared with Wäckerle’s earlier rules, and pronounced even more savage penalties. They also continued to threaten prisoners with death. Eicke warned all “political agitators and subversive intellectuals” that SS men will “reach for your throats and silence you according to your own methods.” Prisoners suspected of sabotage, mutiny, or agitation would be executed on the basis of “revolutionary law”: “Anyone who attacks a guard or an SS man physically, refuses obedience or, at his work place, refuses to work … [or] bawls, shouts, agitates or makes speeches on the march or at work will be shot dead on the spot as a mutineer or subsequently hanged.”186
Armed with this license, Dachau SS guards continued to murder individual prisoners. By the end of 1933, at least ten more inmates had died on Eicke’s watch (three of the dead were Jews).187 And although the murders were better camouflaged than before, they provoked further investigations and political wrangling. Himmler soon found himself in another tight corner and had to be bailed out in December 1933 by Ernst Röhm. Using his considerable political muscle, Röhm stalled a judicial inquiry into three suspicious prisoner deaths by arguing that the “political nature” of the matter made it “presently unsuitable” for legal intervention. Once again, justice was denied.188
Dachau was something of an outlier in 1933, standing at the extreme end of a wide spectrum of early camps. From the beginning, SS leader Heinrich Himmler oversaw a particularly radical approach to lawless detention; more prisoners were killed in Dachau than in any other early camp. By comparison, some other large state camps were considerably less brutal. Inside Osthofen in Hesse, for example, not one of the 2,500 or more prisoners died.189 Nor did all other official camp regulations resemble the radical Dachau ones. The police rules for state camps in Saxony, passed in summer 1933, explicitly banned physical punishment.190
But even in Dachau, the epicenter of early terror, death remained the exception; out of 4,821 men dragged through the camp in 1933, no more than twenty-five lost their lives.191 The other inmates suffered daily drills and humiliations, and were always at risk of hideous assaults. And yet, they survived, and even snatched some moments beyond violence; after lunch, for example, prisoners would normally rest and play chess, smoke, read, and sometimes play an instrument. Dachau—like the other early camps—was not yet consumed by deadly force.192
The Roots of the Nazi Camps
On August 11, 1932, the Nazi daily Völkischer Beobachter had carried a prophetic story on its front page. More than five months before Hitler was appointed chancellor, the paper predicted that a future Nazi government would pass an emergency decree to arrest left-wing functionaries and put “suspects and intellectual instigators in concentration camps.” This was not the first time the Nazis had anticipated the use of camps against their enemies. In an article as far back as 1921, when he was no more than an unusually venomous agitator in Munich, Hitler had promised to “stop the Jews from undermining our nation, if necessary by keeping their bacilli safely in concentration camps.”193 Clearly, the idea of setting up camps had crossed the minds of Nazi leaders long before they came anywhere near power. But there was no direct line from their early threats to the later camps. The scattered references of the Weimar years owed much to the political rhetoric of the time; at most, they were vague statements of intent. The improvisation after the capture of power makes abundantly clear that there was no blueprint in Nazi files. When Hitler took charge of Germany in 1933, the Nazi concentration camp still had to be invented.194
This is not to say that the early camps came from nowhere, as has sometimes been suggested.195 On the whole, Nazi officials took their inspiration less from foreign precedents than from existing national disciplinary discourses and practices, with the most important influences—especially on larger and more permanent state camps, like Dachau and those in the Emsland—coming from the German prison system and from the army.
SS officers like Theodor Eicke often stressed the uniqueness of their camps, denying any resemblance to regular prisons and penitentiaries.196 But back in 1933, Nazi officials borrowed liberally from the traditional prison service. Indeed, many officials—including Eicke—could draw on personal experiences of the Weimar prison, which had mostly been strict and highly regimented (contrary to later Nazi caricatures). Having been locked up for political extremism during the Weimar years, these men now applied the lessons they had learned to the early camps.
The masters of the early camps copied from the prisons’ rigid schedules and rules, lifting some passages directly from existing regulations. Traditional disciplinary punishments from the prison service, like aggravated detention (depriving prisoners for several weeks of their bed, fresh air, and regular food), found their way straight into the early camps.197 Even flogging, introduced as an official disciplinary punishment under Eicke in Dachau, had its roots in German prisons: until it was abandoned after the First World War as inhumane and counterproductive, men in Prussian penitentiaries could be officially punished with thirty or even sixty lashes.198
Another element appropriated from the prison service was the so-called progressive stages system, which had been practiced in all large German penal institutions from the mid-1920s. Prisoners were divided into three groups, with sanctions for supposedly ill-disciplined or incorrigible inmates, and corresponding benefits for more docile ones.199 In 1933, a similar stages system—with significantly harsher sanctions—was introduced in several early camps, at least on paper. When Hans Beimler arrived in Dachau, for example, the SS immediately put him into stage three, officially reserved for pri
soners “whose previous life justifies a particularly severe supervision.”200
Yet another influence on early camps was forced labor, which stood at the heart of the modern prison, thanks to its easy compatibility with very different conceptions of detention. Traditionalists had long seen hard manual work as a punishment. Prison reformers, meanwhile, regarded it as an instrument of rehabilitation; repetitive labor in their cells would inoculate inmates with a strict work ethic, and toil outside (in farming or land cultivation) would tie deviants to the countryside and help cleanse “degenerate” cities.201 Similar beliefs had underpinned other institutions of social welfare and discipline in Weimar Germany, like workhouses and the camps of the Voluntary Labor Service, which left their own marks on the early Nazi camps.202 Drawing on these precedents, forced labor figured fairly prominently in early camps, not least because it could be presented as a means of both repression and redemption. Reporting the opening of the new Prussian state camp in Brandenburg in August 1933, a local newspaper announced that work would force prisoners to “reflect at leisure upon their earlier actions and assertions” and help them “to reform.” What readers were not told, of course, was that in Erich Mühsam’s case such work meant wiping the floors while SS men kicked and beat him, dragged him by his hair, and forced him to lick the dirty water.203
Just as the masters of the early camps tried to differentiate themselves from prison officials, they drew a line between themselves and regular soldiers. But there was no mistaking the influence of military traditions, which were widely copied and perverted inside camps. Again, SA and SS officials could often fall back on their own experience. Many commandants were First World War veterans (some had even spent time in POW camps), and so were some of the guards.204 Those who had been too young to enlist had often soaked up the army spirit in extremist paramilitary formations like the SA, which was consciously modeled on the army, with its flags, uniforms, and rituals, and had provided its members with comprehensive military training.205
“When a new arrival first enters the concentration camp,” a former Dachau prisoner recalled, he finds “a kind of military camp.”206 There were many echoes of army life in the early camps, starting with the guards’ demeanor. The Dachau SS, for example, greatly prized military bearing among its men, who learned to march in formation in exaggerated goose step, proudly wearing uniforms with army-inspired insignia.207 Army veterans among the prisoners were also familiar with daily marches (accompanied by military music) and roll calls (with barked commands like “Caps off” and “Eyes right”).208 “As an old soldier I knew that the wisest thing was to say Yes and Amen to everything,” an ex-prisoner reported about his time in Esterwegen.209 During their encounters with guards, prisoners had to offer a salute and “adopt a military stance,” Theodor Eicke ordered (similar rules existed inside German prisons). Eicke also insisted that the start of the inmates’ work day was marked by an SS trumpeter with the bugle call to arms.210 The militarization of some early camps even extended to everyday language. In Dachau, each barrack constituted a “prisoner company,” made up of five “platoons” (i.e., five rooms) supervised by an SS “company leader.”211
Violent abuses in early camps were also inspired by military routines, starting with the ubiquitous “welcome,” an exaggerated version of initiation rituals common in the armed forces.212 Then there were all the drills. Exhausting training had been the norm for army recruits in the German Empire, sometimes accompanied by slaps and punches from commanding officers.213 The amplified counterpart in the early camps was prisoner “sport,” a succession of torturous exercises such as slow knee bends and unending push-ups, as well as crawling, hopping, and running. In the army, such drills aimed at fusing recruits into a cohesive unit. In the camps, they were meant to break the prisoners.214 Mindless discipline continued inside prisoners’ living quarters, with the pedantic rules giving guards a ready excuse for more abuse. Once more, many of the routines mirrored military practices, including the daily “bed building,” where prisoners had to make their beds perfectly straight, with sharp edges like boxes; prisoners often had to use strings and spirit levels to evade punishment. Again, army veterans were at an advantage. “I had been a soldier,” a prisoner in a Berlin camp later wrote. “I know this drill.” Some better-off inmates, meanwhile, used food and money to pay skilled colleagues to help them.215
The novices behind the early Nazi camps borrowed established disciplinary methods—from the prison, the army, and other institutions—as a matter of convenience and opportunism. This had an unintended, though not unwelcome, side effect. By drawing on familiar customs and ideas, the early camps (and protective custody) did not appear like a complete break with German traditions. To some members of the public, this made the camps seem less exceptional than they really were. As Jane Caplan has said, the inflection with existing practices helped to disguise “the ruthless character of Nazi repression, and eased its official and popular acceptance.”216
OPEN TERROR
Contrary to the pervasive myth of ignorance about the KL, which dominated German memory for decades after the war, the camps had lodged themselves early and deeply into the minds of the population—so much so that some ordinary Germans already started dreaming about them in 1933. As one local newspaper concluded in May of that year, everyone was talking about protective custody.217 The regime did not hide the early camps’ existence. On the contrary, the press—soon coordinated by the new rulers—carried countless articles, some initiated by the authorities, others by journalists themselves. The Nazi media emphasized that the main targets were political opponents of the new order, primarily Communist “terrorists,” followed by SPD “fat cats” and other “dangerous characters.” A newsreel, shown in German cinemas in 1933, described prisoners of a camp in Halle as “the main rabble-rousers among the red murderers and incendiaries.” The detention of well-known political figures was given particular prominence: a photograph of the arrival in Oranienburg of Friedrich Ebert and Ernst Heilmann, described in the press as “one-time greats,” even featured on the front page of the Völkischer Beobachter.218
Several historians have suggested that most Germans welcomed such reports because they supported the camps and the regime’s broader aims.219 There is some truth in this. Given the pervasive hatred of the Left among Nazi followers and national conservatives alike, the authorities knew that their crackdown was likely to be greeted with applause in these quarters.220 But propaganda about the early camps was not just about consensus building. Those who rejected Nazism heard a very different message: “There is still room in the concentration camp,” one regional paper declared darkly in August 1933, summing up the camps’ deterrent function.221 More generally, one should tread carefully when judging the mood in the Third Reich, because of the evident difficulty of measuring popular opinion in a totalitarian dictatorship, and because official propaganda messages were contradicted by rumors.222 When we examine reactions to the early camps, we have to address a rather more complex set of questions: who knew what, when, and reacted how, to which aspect of the camps?
Witnesses and Whispers
The Nazi authorities were never in full control of the camps’ image. Although the regime dominated the public sphere, its authorized version of the early camps, as disseminated in the media, was often undercut. In 1933, there were still many ways of learning the truth, and a large number of ordinary Germans gained a surprisingly accurate picture of what was really going on.223
Many Germans witnessed Nazi terror firsthand. Their first glimpse often came during processions of prominent prisoners through towns toward nearby camps. Along streets and squares lined with spectators, the prisoners, some of them wearing demeaning placards, were cursed, shoved, and spat at by jeering crowds of SA and SS men. When Erich Mühsam, Carl von Ossietzky, and Hans Litten marched with other prisoners through Sonnenburg to the camp on April 6, 1933, they were “frequently helped along” by the rubber truncheons of the guards, a local paper repor
ted the following day.224
Such humiliating parades were not the only time locals came face-to-face with prisoners. Some inmates, for example, were deployed for public works outside the barbed wire, and their dress and demeanor spoke volumes about the treatment. Often, their work was designed as a demeaning spectacle, like in Oranienburg, where Commandant Schäfer once sent a group of left-wing politicians—among them the former SPD deputies Ernst Heilmann, Friedrich Ebert, and Gerhart Seger—into town to scratch old election posters from the walls.225
Germans who lived in the immediate vicinity of early camps also witnessed abuses inside. With so many early camps in the middle of towns and cities, it was impossible for the authorities to shut out all observers. In residential areas, neighbors occasionally saw the prisoners or, more often, heard them; tourists at Nuremberg castle could listen as prisoners were tortured in the cellars below. Sometimes witnesses tried to intervene. In Stettin, locals complained to the police about screams and shots fired at night inside the Bredow camp.226 Further news spread through encounters with the camp staff. Although guards were supposed to stay silent, some boasted loudly in local pubs about beating prisoners or even murdering them.227
Before long, many places across Germany were abuzz with news about crimes in local camps. In Wuppertal in western Germany, rumors about prisoner abuses in Kemna camp circulated widely, as leading Nazi officials conceded.228 Farther east, a local woman confided to a Lichtenburg prisoner that the townspeople of Prettin “know everything that goes on inside!”229 In the far north of the country, legal officials warned that cases of “serious ill-treatment” in Bredow were “known among the general public of Stettin and Pomerania.”230 And around Munich in the south, there was talk about abuses, too, with sayings like “Shut up, or you’ll end up in Dachau!” and “Please, dear Lord, make me dumb, so that I won’t to Dachau come” circulating widely by summer 1933.231 But the capital of whisperers must have been Berlin, with its vast number of early camps. In spring 1933, recalled Hans Litten’s mother, Irmgard, it was impossible to step into a café or an underground train without hearing all about the abuses.232
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