KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  The construction of Camp SS men as political soldiers was made up of several components. To start with, there was the “superb esprit-de-corps,” as Eicke called it, based on “cordial comradeship.” The ideal of military camaraderie—derived above all from the myth of German fraternity in the First World War trenches, with its glorified images of solidarity and sacrifice—had become a powerful political tool in postwar Germany, not least for the mobilization of Nazi activists.153 The flip side of comradeship was the closing of ranks against others, and Eicke exhorted his men to show no pity to prisoners. The empathy of Camp SS men toward one another, he insisted, had to be matched by their hostility toward inmates. “In service there is only merciless severity and hardness,” Eicke reminded his subordinates, “outside service hours there is heart-warming comradeship.”154 The SS men had to show their teeth to prisoners, he demanded, leaving no room for empathy. “Tolerance means weakness,” he said, and for Eicke there was nothing worse than compassion for enemies.155 Weaklings were not cut out for the Camp SS and would be better off in a monastery. “Keep our ranks pure,” he told his men: “Tolerate no softies or weak characters amongst yourselves.”156 Behind all this stood a reverence of masculine virtues like military bearing, toughness, physical strength, and cold-bloodedness. Only real men would make the grade in the Camp SS.157

  But how should SS recruits be molded into political soldiers? Heinrich Himmler tried to show the way. Once he had secured the future of the KL system in 1935, he remained hands-on during its consolidation and expansion. Himmler passed on orders, appointed senior staff, conferred with Eicke, visited new sites, and inspected existing ones. Some of his visits were closely stage-managed, so that the camps came closer to their official image, in order to impress Himmler as well as other dignitaries.158 Occasionally, however, Himmler appeared unannounced, to the alarm of the local SS. For all his talk of comradeship, Himmler was not popular among his men, who disliked his reserve and feared his fastidiousness; one long-serving Camp SS man later described the SS leader as “a mean-minded pedant” and “petty tyrant.”159

  By contrast, Theodor Eicke enjoyed a good working relationship with his boss, based on their shared vision for the camps, on Eicke’s undying gratitude to Himmler, and on Himmler’s respect for the man he regarded as the perfect manager of the SS camp system. The decision to give the disgraced Eicke another chance had paid off handsomely for Himmler. He trusted Eicke, and when it came to the creation of the Camp SS, he gave him plenty of leeway, admiring and perhaps even envying the rapport Eicke built with his men.160

  Eicke quickly put his stamp on the concentration camps. He transformed the Camp Inspectorate from a small backroom operation to an influential agency. His IKL staff increased from five (January 1935) to forty-nine (December 1937), spread across several departments; there was the main (or political) office, as well as separate offices for personnel, administrative, and medical matters.161 The IKL became the nerve center of the SS camp system. From here, key decisions by Eicke and his officers were transmitted to the individual camps. From 1937, the IKL also printed a monthly newsletter, a set of musings and instructions by Eicke on organizational matters (from staff IDs to weapon maintenance), SS deportment, and prisoner treatment.162 Demonstrating his independence from the Gestapo, Eicke soon moved the IKL office out of Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse into larger premises, first, in June 1936, to Friedrichstrasse in central Berlin, and then in August 1938 to a brand-new office block in Oranienburg, right next to Sachsenhausen (some prisoners were forced to work on the construction). Because of its shape, the long three-story structure later became known as the T-Building. Eicke himself occupied the most lavish office, overlooking the large landscaped square outside, and in the evenings retired to wine and dine in his luxurious new villa nearby. Commensurate with their growing status, the men from Camp SS headquarters now resided in some style.163

  But Eicke never saw himself as an aloof manager. Like other Nazi activists, he worried that too much paperwork might turn him into a pencil pusher; he and his followers had to stay true to themselves as men of vigor and action.164 Eicke led by example and kept up a hectic schedule of meetings and inspections. “For twenty days each month I am traveling and exhausting myself,” he wrote to Himmler in August 1936, eager as ever to impress. “I live only to fulfill my duty to my troops that I have come to be fond of.”165 In addition, Eicke held regular conferences with his commandants. On one memorable occasion in late 1936, they all met in a picturesque hotel at the foot of the Zugspitze, Germany’s tallest mountain; a snapshot shows Eicke and his officers milling around in the snow, wearing their long black SS coats and caps bearing the skull and bones.166

  Eicke’s authority over his men was absolute, and although it ultimately derived from Himmler, it was fed by the force of his personality. Eicke was a charismatic leader, and many of his men felt bound to him by their belief in his heroic character, his exceptional abilities, and his vision.167 His followers revered him as Röhm’s killer and projected all kinds of other epic deeds onto him, picturing Eicke as a titanic warrior.168 And although Eicke reveled in the trappings of his office, he made a show of breaking barriers of rank and status, asking his men to address superiors with the informal “Du” and telling them, “I am ready to listen at any time to the youngest comrade and will stand up for any comrade if he proves an open and honest character.” In an ostentatious celebration of SS comradeship, Eicke even met with regular guards, carousing, drinking, and smoking late into the night—quite unthinkable behavior for the uptight Himmler.169

  Many of his men, in turn, worshiped Eicke. They bought into his ideal of the Camp SS as a surrogate family—“My men are dearer to me than my wife and family,” he once wrote—with Eicke as the omnipotent father figure; his underlings even called him “Papa Eicke” (as Eicke proudly relayed to Himmler).170 One of these fawning SS men was Johannes Hassebroek, a twenty-five-year-old hand-picked by Eicke in 1936 as platoon leader, after passing an elite SS leadership academy (Junkerschule). Hassebroek’s devotion to Eicke remained undimmed even decades after the war. “Eicke was more than a commander,” the misty-eyed sixty-five-year-old reminisced in 1975. “He was a true friend and we were his friends in the way that only real men can be.”171

  The Janus Face of Punishment

  When Heinrich Himmler fantasized about his political soldiers, there was one virtue he prized above all others—decency. Among all the commandments he issued, and there were many, this was paramount. However brutal the fight against the enemy, his men had to remember that they were fighting for the greater German good, not for personal gain or pleasure. Speaking to SS leaders in 1938, Himmler insisted that sadism toward prisoners was just as wrong as compassion: “to be hard, without being cruel” was the guiding principle.172

  Himmler’s call for propriety was echoed in Camp SS orders. As early as October 1933, Theodor Eicke, only a few months into his reign as Dachau commandant, instructed guards that any “maltreatment or chicanery” of prisoners was strictly forbidden. Other SS commandants followed suit.173 Later on, SS guards were even required to sign a written declaration that they would not “lay a hand” on any opponent of the state.174 Disobedient Camp SS men were threatened with sanctions. In March 1937, Theodor Eicke warned in a newsletter that Himmler might expel guards for “the least maltreatment (box on the ear)” of inmates.175 Just a few months later, another newsletter carried this stunning announcement: “SS Oberscharführer Zeidler in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp has, because of sadistic tastes, beaten a prisoner in a most vile manner. He was reduced to the rank of SS man, permanently expelled from the SS and handed over to the criminal judge. This case is being made known as a warning example.”176 What was going on here? Were Himmler and Eicke serious about clamping down on SS assaults in the KL?

  What really concerned SS leaders was not prisoner abuse as such, but what one of Himmler’s aides, in a telling aside, called “unnecessary torture” that breached decorum or caused disord
er.177 To stop such acts, SS leaders introduced two key measures. First, they issued an approved catalogue of punishments for all KL, largely modeled on practices tried and tested in Eicke’s old stomping ground at Dachau.178 Second, they regulated the execution of these official punishments; only the commandant could impose them. If guards spotted an infraction, they were supposed to follow the rule book. Rather than assaulting the guilty prisoner themselves, they would send a written report up the chain of command.179 Even the commandants were not fully autonomous. When it came to flogging, the most brutal sanction, they had to send a written application in triplicate to the IKL.180

  Flogging prisoners was a favorite punishment of the Camp SS, and indeed of Himmler himself. The use of sticks and whips had already been widespread in early camps, as SA and SS men preferred to use torture instruments instead of their bare hands; this way, they could inflict greater damage, at little risk of injuring themselves. Such assaults carried symbolic weight, too, with a long history of masters whipping their slaves.181 In addition to wild beatings, some early camps had practiced formal flogging. In Dachau, SS men under Commandant Wäckerle staged regular “welcome” beatings of new prisoners, who were pulled over a table and whipped, often until they fainted. Wäckerle also introduced corporal punishment for alleged infractions. “Guilty” prisoners received five to twenty-five blows with a bullwhip or a long willow rod.182 This torture continued under the new Commandant Eicke, who included the “twenty-five blows” in his official Dachau punishment regulations of October 1933. Later, as camp inspector, he rolled out the same rules to the other KL.183

  Most ritual floggings took place behind closed doors. But the Camp SS also staged regular performances of cruelty on the roll call squares, to shame its victims and intimidate others (in Buchenwald, well over 240 prisoners were publicly whipped during the second half of 1938 alone). On such occasions, all inmates were forced to stand to attention and watch as the victims, strapped to a special wooden buck, were whipped on the behind, with blood running down their legs; some overeager SS men hit so hard the canes broke.184 This, then, was Himmler’s ideal of “decent” punishment.

  An equally gruesome practice was the so-called tying to a post.185 It was another official form of SS torture—drawing on practices dating back to the Inquisition and beyond—that had been pioneered in Dachau before spreading to other KL.186 Prisoners, their hands tied behind their backs, were hung from a pole by their wrists. Sometimes they were left to touch the ground with the toes; or they were suspended without any support, often for several hours. To intensify the torment, SS men pulled on prisoners’ legs or punched them so that they swayed from side to side. The pain from torn ligaments and dislocated or broken bones was so excruciating that prisoners were soon bathed in sweat and struggled for breath, although some fought hard to keep their composure, to demonstrate to the SS and other prisoners that they would not be broken. Their bodies were marked for many days. An inmate who had been tortured for three hours in Sachsenhausen in summer 1939 testified not long afterward that “for around ten days, I did not know if I still had a pair of arms attached to the shoulders, my comrades had to do everything for me … because I could not touch anything, because I had no sense of feeling in the arms.” Some victims did not survive; others were so traumatized they tried to kill themselves.187

  Hanging and flogging were only two of the approved SS torture methods. In addition, Eicke’s catalogue of official punishment included penal labor, pack drill (or “sport”), cuts to rations, detention in the dreaded bunker, and transfer to a special penal company (or penal block).188 Most of these sanctions remained in force until the end of the Third Reich, one of the many pernicious legacies of the prewar camps.

  By the late 1930s, the SS had built up an elaborate bureaucracy of torture: before a prisoner was officially punished, reports were written and forms were signed. SS leaders saw several advantages in this formal system. To begin with, it imposed some oversight. The leadership principle applied to the camps just as it did to other parts of the Nazi state, and some central control was deemed necessary to prevent chaos.189 Also, the new system had the desired effect of terrorizing prisoners. Since every behavior could be construed as an infraction of the rules, every prisoner was at risk of punishment—and prisoners knew what this meant. As for the victims, the pain of torture was preceded by another torment. They had to wait for days or weeks, following their initial “infraction,” to find out how they would be punished.190 Finally, torture-by-the-book protected the Camp SS. Its leaders were still concerned about the reactions of other Nazi agencies and used the official catalogue of punishments to erect a façade of orderliness around the KL. As Eicke told his men, he had plenty of sympathy for those who hit “cheeky detainees,” but he could not openly condone it “or we would run the risk of being described, by the Ministry of the Interior of the German Reich, as incapable of dealing with prisoners.”191

  But the official KL regulations did not put an end to other excesses. Nor were they meant to. SS guards saw violence as their birthright. They continued to torment prisoners and found ways to aggravate regular punishment, for example by flogging prisoners more than officially allowed.192 This happened with the support of local Camp SS officers, who knew that wild assaults added yet another layer of fear for prisoners. Indeed, most commandants led from the front: at the same time as they signed official torture orders, they abused inmates without recourse to the written rules.193 It was this duality of regulated and spontaneous violence that created the unusual potency of SS terror in the camps.

  The Janus face of Nazi terror—with its normative and prerogative side—reflected the wider beliefs of Himmler and Eicke.194 In normal circumstances, they expected their men to respect the rules of engagement and the lines of command. But in an emergency, no political soldier could wait for written permission to strike. If the enemy behind the barbed wire went on the offensive—and prisoners were always suspected of being on the brink of insubordination—then guards had to throw out the rule book. In the moral universe of the Camp SS, almost all attacks on inmates could be justified as acts of necessity. This had pragmatic advantages, too, as it would thwart judicial investigations. In a secret order, the leader of the Dachau sentries reminded his men that all prisoner abuses should officially be recorded as self-defense.195

  Only in exceptional circumstances did SS leaders discipline abusive guards. This is what happened to Paul Zeidler, mentioned in Eicke’s newsletter above. However, Zeidler was not expelled for torturing a prisoner, as Eicke suggested; if prisoner abuse had been a ground for dismissal, most SS guards would have been fired. Zeidler’s real crime, as far as his superiors were concerned, was that he had let himself be caught by the judiciary. Zeidler had been part of a gang of SS guards who murdered the prisoner Friedrich Weissler in February 1937 in the Sachsenhausen bunker: after slowly beating Weissler to a pulp, they had strangled him with his own handkerchief. During the ensuing routine investigation, the local Camp SS covered up the crime. But it did not go away. Weissler had been a leading official in the Protestant Confessing Church—he was arrested after a petition to Hitler, critical of the regime and the camps, was leaked to foreign newspapers—and his death caused alarm in German church circles and abroad. Moreover, Weissler was a former colleague of the Berlin state prosecutors; until he was dismissed in 1933 because of his Jewish heritage, he had been the presiding judge at a regional court. This prompted a more persistent investigation than usual, quickly unraveling the SS lies. Only then, after the case threatened to engulf the Sachsenhausen SS more widely, was Paul Zeidler cut loose. By sacrificing the shifty Zeidler, who was later sentenced in a secret trial to one year of imprisonment, SS leaders managed to protect other implicated Sachsenhausen officials—men like Commandant Karl Otto Koch, who would go on to become a dominant figure of the prewar KL.196

  Death’s Head Careers

  The Death’s Head SS expanded fast during the second half of the 1930s, growing from 1,987
men (January 1935) to 5,371 (January 1938).197 In each KL, these men were divided into two main groups. A select few, easily identifiable by the letter “K” on their uniforms, joined the so-called Commandant Staff and controlled most key aspects of the camps, including the prisoner compound itself.198 The rest belonged to the so-called Guard Troop sentries, with one Death’s Head battalion (later regiment) stationed at every concentration camp for men. The Guard Troops were responsible for external security. They patrolled the camp perimeter and manned the watchtowers, and shot prisoners who crossed the sentry line. They also guarded prisoners working outside, offering them the opportunity for hands-on violence.199 Although there were many points of contact between Guard Troops and Commandant Staff, the SS tried to maintain a division of duties; normally, sentries were not even permitted inside the camp compound. This separation between running a camp and guarding it—a separation already in place in early camps like Dachau—became the basic organizational feature of the KL.200

  The great majority of Camp SS men served as sentries in the Guard Troop, outnumbering Commandant Staff personnel by a ratio of around 11:1 in late 1937.201 Like other SS members at the time, these sentries had gone through a selection process, essential for maintaining the elite image of the SS. All recruits had to be healthy and at least 5 feet, 6 inches tall, with physical prowess equated with manliness and character. And they had to conform to Himmler’s crank ideas of racial purity, tracing their “Aryan” heritage back to the eighteenth century.202 Beyond these general requirements, selection for the camps had initially been haphazard. But with the coordination of the KL system in the second half of the 1930s, Theodor Eicke pursued a more systematic recruitment strategy for the Guard Troop, focusing on two aspects—youth and voluntarism.203