KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Irmgard Litten herself had more to go on than hearsay when it came to the early camps. Like many other relatives of prisoners, she received regular letters from her son—the intervals varied, ranging from a week to a month—and like many other inmates, Hans Litten smuggled references about his condition into his correspondence. Writing from Sonnenburg in spring 1933, the lawyer Litten mentioned a fictitious “client” of his who was “on such bad terms with the other residents that they constantly attack him when he comes home at night.” He also advised another “client” to make his will because he was dying. Later on, Hans Litten used a special cipher to dupe the censors. In his first coded letter, he asked for opium to kill himself.233

  Many relatives could see for themselves how their loved ones were being treated. In sharp contrast to the later SS camps, the authorities in 1933 often allowed visits, just as in prisons. Some camps permitted bimonthly meetings for a few minutes under strict observation. Others allowed weekly visits lasting several hours, during which prisoners were left largely unsupervised.234 What the visitors saw often confirmed their worst fears, with the marks of abuse and torture clearly visible. When Irmgard Litten met her son in Spandau in spring 1933, shortly after his transfer from Sonnenburg, he was difficult to recognize, with a swollen face and a deformed, strangely crooked head. His whole appearance, his mother noted, was ghostly.235

  Normally, visits were authorized by the camp officials. But on occasion, relatives talked their way into early camps, almost unthinkable in the later SS system. When Gertrud Hübner learned that her husband was held at the SA camp on General-Pape-Strasse in Berlin, she immediately went to the camp and persisted until the guards admitted her. “My husband made a very run-down and tormented impression,” she remembered. “I took my husband into my arms and he started to cry.”236

  On their return from early camps, relatives often shared their impressions with friends and family, starting off a whirlwind of whispers. Some women displayed their husbands’ bloodied shirts and trousers, which they had received in exchange for fresh clothing; in May 1933, Erich Mühsam’s wife, Kreszentia, even confronted the Prussian civil servant in charge of protective custody, Dr. Mittelbach, brandishing the blood-soaked underwear she had been sent from Sonnenburg.237 News of deaths also spread fast. Following mass turnouts at burials of prominent political prisoners, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior ordered local authorities in November 1933 to forbid any more funerals “with a dissenting tone.”238

  As popular knowledge of abuses spread, the authorities came under pressure to release individual inmates. Some initiatives came from religious groups.239 But mostly, it was relatives who lobbied on behalf of prisoners. Within a few months, Irmgard Litten, who was well connected, had contacted the Reich defense minister Blomberg, Reich minister of justice Gürtner, Reich bishop Müller, and Hermann Göring’s adjutant.240 Much to the annoyance of camp and police officers, such campaigns for imprisoned men sometimes caused senior state officials to step in.241 In Hans Litten’s case, his treatment occasionally improved following interventions from above.242 Yet Litten remained inside the camps, as did other prominent prisoners. Even Friedrich Ebert was not released, despite support from Reich president Hindenburg himself, who had been petitioned by Ebert’s mother to spare her son from being abused “as a humiliated laboring prisoner.”243

  Friedrich Ebert was unfortunate. Most other prisoners of the early camps were soon set free again—not because of outside intervention, but because the authorities felt that a brief period of shock and awe was normally enough to force opponents into compliance. As a result, there was a rapid turnover in 1933, with the places of released prisoners quickly filled with new ones. The duration of detention was unpredictable. Prisoners who expected to regain their freedom after a few days were mostly disappointed, but it was rare for them to remain inside for a year or more. Longer spells were served in the bigger, more permanent camps, but even in a large camp like Oranienburg, around two-thirds of all prisoners stayed for less than three months.244 The result was a constant stream of former prisoners back into German society, and it was these men and women who would become the most important sources of private knowledge about the early camps.

  Popular Reactions

  Martin Grünwiedl had just been released from Dachau in early 1934, after more than ten months inside, when two of his Communist comrades, who operated undercover in Munich, asked him to write a report about the camp. Despite the risks, the thirty-two-year-old decorator produced a remarkable thirty-page account of SS crimes called “Dachau Prisoners Speak Out,” incorporating testimonies from several former inmates. Following painstaking preparations, Grünwiedl and four helpers then copied the pamphlet. Equipped with tents, food, carbon paper, and a copying machine, they cycled to a remote islet in the idyllic Isar River, dressed as vacationers. After several anxious days, the men returned to Munich to complete their work. When all was done, Grünwiedl handed around four hundred copies to underground KPD officials. Some 250 more copies were put into mailboxes or sent to sympathizers and public figures, with instructions to pass on the pamphlet “so that it is read as widely as possible!”245

  The resisters clearly faced huge obstacles: months of dangerous work involving more than a dozen individuals, several of whom were later arrested (among them Grünwiedl, who found himself back in Dachau), had yielded no more than a few hundred copies. But the production of the pamphlet also demonstrates the determination of left-wing opponents to spread the word about the regime and its camps. Grünwiedl and his friends were not alone. There was still a sizable resistance movement in 1933–34, turning out hundreds of thousands of underground newspapers and flyers.246 Some publications were hidden inside harmless books, like a Communist pamphlet on the torture of Hans Litten and others in Sonnenburg, distributed inside the cover of a medical textbook about kidney and bladder disease.247 Several prisoner reports circulated widely in Germany, among them an account by Gerhart Seger, written in Czechoslovakia after he managed to escape from Oranienburg in early December 1933.248

  When it came to news about the camps, word of mouth was even more important than the written word. Upon release, prisoners often had to vow to stay silent, otherwise, guards threatened, they would be taken back to the camp or beaten to death.249 But such threats could not stop former inmates from talking to family and friends, who in turn talked to others, in a countrywide game of pass the message.250 There was so much talk that some observers concluded that everyone “knew or had heard about someone who had been to a concentration camp once.”251

  Even former inmates unable to speak about their experiences—because of fear or trauma—bore witness to the camps.252 Their broken teeth, battered bodies, and terrified silences were often more revealing than words; it could take months for visible injuries to heal, and some victims never recovered.253 Doctors and nurses joined the growing circle of German professionals—including lawyers, civil servants, state attorneys, and morgue attendants—who knew about SA and SS crimes. In early October 1933, for example, a Wuppertal hospital attendant made the following case notes about twenty-five-year-old Erich Minz, who had been admitted from Kemna with a fractured skull and obvious signs of abuse: “Patient is completely unconscious. The whole body, especially the back and buttocks, are covered with welts and bruises, some blue-red, others blue-yellow-green. The nose and lips are swollen, blue-red.”254 Talk of torture soon spread outside hospital wards, especially when former prisoners died of their injuries.255

  At the beginning of the Third Reich, then, Germany was awash with rumors about the early camps. Not only were most Germans aware of their existence, they knew that the camps stood for brutal repression. Camps were held up as the ultimate sanction in private and public disputes, and found their way into popular jokes, too:

  “Sergeant,” anxiously said a warden in the concentration camp, “look at the prisoner in that bed. His spine is broken, his eyes are put out, and I think the damp has made him deaf. What shall w
e do with him?”

  “Set him free! He is prepared to receive our Führer’s doctrine.”256

  Information about the abuses was not spread evenly across the nation, however. There were differences among German regions—with far more early camps in urban than in rural areas—and between social groups. The best-informed Germans often came from the organized working class. After all, the vast majority of prisoners were Communist and Socialist activists, and their supporters—to say nothing of their wives, children, friends, and colleagues—were desperate to learn about their fate. Moreover, left-wing workers were most likely to receive underground pamphlets and to hear from released prisoners, who tended to share their experiences within their traditional milieus. Finally, with so many early camps established in the middle of working-class areas, supporters of the Left often had direct insight into the daily violence.

  Class was not all-decisive, of course. There were middle-class professionals who knew all about the camps. Also, some reports by left-wing prisoners reached beyond the organized working class, sometimes circuitously. When the Dresden professor Victor Klemperer heard about the abuse of Erich Mühsam, for example, it was from a friend who had met up with exiled German Communists in Denmark.257 On the whole, however, the middle classes—who largely supported the Nazis by 1933—knew less about the reality of Nazi terror.258 They were also more inclined to dismiss rumors about abuses as lies spread by enemies of the new state.259 Still, Nazi followers were largely aware of the early camps’ dark side. So how did they react?

  Nazi supporters from all classes and backgrounds hailed the regime’s crackdown on the Left. “You have to have order,” one factory foreman told his son in spring 1933, regarding the arrests of left-wingers.260 Many followers also welcomed harsh measures in the early camps; the Left’s danger justified brutal means, they believed, and “terrorists” deserved all the violence that came their way. Some even screamed abuse as prisoners were paraded through the streets. In Berlin, spectators egged on the brownshirts, shouting things like: “Finally you’ve got the dogs, beat them to death, or send them to Moscow.” But support for attacks on left-wing organizations did not always translate into support for violent attacks on left-wing activists.261 Looking back at the prewar years, Heinrich Himmler later admitted that the establishment of the camps had been greatly condemned by “circles outside the party.”262 Himmler may have embellished for effect, but still, some Nazi sympathizers were clearly uncomfortable about reports of abuses. There were various reasons for their unease. Having been drawn to the Nazi movement for its promise to restore public order following the Weimar street fighting, some supporters worried about the growing lawlessness of the early camps.263 Others were more concerned with Germany’s image abroad, as news about atrocities quickly spread across the border, where the early camps became a byword for the inhumanity of Hitler’s new Germany.264

  The View from Abroad

  “If they could, they would take us to a concentration camp,” the satirist Kurt Tucholsky wrote from the safety of Switzerland about Nazi supporters, in a despairing letter on April 20, 1933, the day Germany celebrated Hitler’s birthday. “The reports [about the camps] are horrible, by the way,” Tucholsky added.265 German émigrés like Tucholsky learned about the Nazi camps from contacts inside the country and from the exile press. In France, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere, German-language publications sprang up. Following the arrest of its editor Carl von Ossietzky, for example, the influential Weltbühne was relaunched from Prague, featuring the first of many articles on the camps in September 1933. Exile papers and magazines focused on the most notorious camps, like Dachau, Börgermoor, Oranienburg, and Sonnenburg, which was also featured in a poem by Bertolt Brecht, another famous exile. Meanwhile, German left-wing parties in exile sponsored editions of eyewitness reports, like the Communist Brown Book (Braunbuch) on Nazi terror. Printed in August 1933 in Paris and widely translated afterward, this bestselling book of anti-Nazi propaganda called the camps’ creation the “worst act of despotism by the Hitler government” and included more than thirty pages on crimes inside.266

  Some of these exile publications were smuggled into the Third Reich. In exceptional cases, they even found their way into early camps, boosting prisoner morale. But on the whole, their circulation was too small to make much of an impact in Germany.267 More important was public opinion abroad, with some reports quickly picked up by foreign papers and politicians. On October 13, 1933, barely a week after a German-language paper in the Saarland (under League of Nations mandate until 1935) had printed an article by a former Börgermoor prisoner, the Manchester Guardian ran the same story, reporting that Friedrich Ebert had been “struck with rifle butts until his face was covered with blood” and Ernst Heilmann had been “so badly beaten that he was prostrate for several days.”268 The most vocal former prisoner was Gerhart Seger, who lectured, published, and lobbied in Europe and North America in a campaign to draw attention to the Nazi camps.269

  In 1933, hundreds of articles about the camps appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. Many of these articles did not originate with German exiles, but came from foreign reporters in Germany; in 1933/34, The New York Times alone printed dozens of detailed stories by U.S. journalists. Other foreign papers did the same. As early as April 7, 1933, the Chicago Daily Tribune featured an article about a Württemberg camp, with its correspondent describing the “shocking” appearance of the prisoners. Foreign journalists sometimes drew on secret contacts with the German resistance. In this way, a reporter of a Dutch newspaper obtained a sensational letter by Oranienburg prisoners about their torture.270

  Foreign press reports highlighted the suffering of prominent prisoners, often as part of international campaigns backed by leading public figures. In November 1933, for instance, the British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald made an official inquiry about the fate of Hans Litten. Such pressure benefited some prisoners—despite the Nazi fury about outside meddling—though not Litten. In reply to MacDonald’s intervention, the Prussian Gestapa refused to answer any questions about him, while the German foreign office concluded that “provocative” foreign campaigns had to be refuted as part of a wider German PR offensive to improve the camps’ image abroad.271

  The Nazi regime, which closely monitored foreign opinion, was acutely sensitive about critical reports. As articles about abuses inside early camps mounted up, paranoid Nazi leaders suspected an international conspiracy by Jews and Bolsheviks, and drew comparisons to the Allied “atrocity propaganda” of World War I. As a popular Nazi tract explained at the time, the camps were used to defame Nazi Germany in the same way alleged crimes during the invasion of Belgium had been used to slander the German Empire in 1914. “Like in the war!” Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels fumed in his diary.272

  Why were Nazi officials so thin-skinned? They were obviously concerned about critical reports filtering back to the Third Reich (where foreign papers remained on sale), adding more grist to the fast-spinning rumor mill.273 Even more pressing was their concern about Germany’s standing abroad. In 1933, its position was still weak, and Hitler had to tread carefully on the international stage to make other leaders believe his guise as a man of peace—a difficult enough feat even without the stream of reports about atrocities in Nazi camps.274

  In order to silence criticism abroad, German state officials held press conferences for foreign correspondents and staged visits to selected camps, which were meticulously prepared in advance.275 This was a high-risk strategy, though, as Nazi officials realized themselves.276 Several visitors were not tricked and some crude propaganda backfired. When Dr. Ludwig Levy, a former Oranienburg prisoner, used a reader’s letter from Germany to refute a detailed eyewitness account in the London Times of September 19, 1933—which had named him as an SA torture victim—and praised the “thoroughly good and even respectful” treatment he had received, the author of the original article replied in a letter of his own, offering yet more detail about the abuses
:

  Dr. Levy lived in the same room as myself at Oranienburg … I saw Dr. Levy with his left eye black and swollen and blood running from it. About a fortnight later his right eye was in the same condition. On both occasions he was fresh from an interview with the camp “leaders.” I also saw him kicked and knocked about by the guards, like the rest of us, many times.

  I do not blame Dr. Levy for making the statement which you have published, as I am well aware of the kind of pressure to which he, still living in Potsdam [outside Berlin], must be exposed.277

  The Nazi PR campaign also scored some successes, however, especially when it played upon fears of Communism. Some foreign news editors published positive stories, or became wary about running negative ones.278 Several diplomats were duped, too, among them the British vice-consul in Dresden. In an enthusiastic report on his October 1933 visit to Hohnstein in Saxony—one of the worst early camps, with at least eight prisoner deaths—the vice-consul praised it as “a model from all points of view,” with “exemplary” SA guards and prisoners who made a “distinctly satisfied impression.”279

  Nazi propaganda tried to persuade a skeptical foreign audience that the camps were orderly and benevolent institutions, which turned terrorists into worthy citizens.280 This message was summed up in an extraordinary radio report recorded on September 30, 1933, inside Oranienburg, for broadcast on Germany’s international station. During the lengthy report, which aimed to refute “lies and atrocity stories” abroad, a reporter strolled through the grounds, the dining hall, and the sleeping quarters, accompanied by Commandant Schäfer, who extolled his decent treatment of left-wing criminals and the exemplary discipline created by his SA men. The broadcast even featured interviews with prisoners, including the following exchange: