KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Most important, the Camp SS saw the death of Rottenführer Kallweit as a signal for more violence. Even in distant Dachau, guards threatened prisoners with brutal retaliation.9 In Buchenwald itself, SS men went on a rampage. Collective punishment was common after escapes, but it reached new heights on Friday, May 13, 1938. Screaming guards beat the remaining prisoners from the sewage plant detail back to the compound, where a mob of SS men whipped and punched them until some maimed victims collapsed. The guards murdered at least two Buchenwald prisoners that day. All others, Commandant Koch demanded, would face much greater hardship in the future.10 He was true to his word, as one assault followed another. During one such attack, some three weeks after Bargatzky’s execution, SS men smashed several windows in prisoner barracks, tore up dozens of bed covers, ripped apart hundreds of straw mattresses, and left three inmates dead.11

  SS leaders supported this hard line. In a paean to the killed guard in the Völkischer Beobachter, Theodor Eicke threatened that “enemies of the state” would face “iron hard” discipline.12 Himmler said much the same during his visit to Buchenwald on May 14, 1938, and two days later, he repeated his demand for tough action in a letter to Reich minister of justice Gürtner. Earlier that spring, Himmler claimed, he had responded to a complaint by Gürtner about excessive SS shootings by ordering his men to use their weapons more sparingly, with “devastating” results. This attempt to blame Gürtner for the killing in Buchenwald was absurd—Rottenführer Kallweit had walked too closely to the two prisoners, in breach of SS protocol—but this did not stop Himmler from announcing that guards would now reach more readily for their rifles, preempting future judicial criticism.13

  Himmler’s swagger reflected his rising status in the late 1930s. To be sure, his SS was not yet all-powerful. The presence of a judge during the execution of Emil Bargatzky in Buchenwald was a reminder that a court had pronounced the death sentence, not the SS. Moreover, the execution remained an exception in the prewar KL. Still, it was a sign for the growing confidence of SS leaders and for their desire to usurp legal powers like the judicial monopoly over the death penalty. In practice, the SS already did so: Camp SS men murdered far more prisoners during the late 1930s than ever before. In Buchenwald, the SS conducted a major killing spree in the weeks after the death of Rottenführer Kallweit; in June and July 1938, 168 prisoners lost their lives, compared to seven prisoners during March and April.14 In other camps, too, the SS stepped up its violence in the final years before the Second World War, which also saw a great expansion of KL sites and of slave labor. The relentless rise of the concentration camp complex seemed unstoppable.

  SOCIAL OUTSIDERS

  Heinrich Himmler had big plans for his camps. In a secret speech in November 1937, he told SS leaders that he expected the three KL for men—Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald—to hold twenty thousand prisoners in all, and even more in the case of war.15 This was an ambitious aim, at a time when his camps held fewer than eight thousand prisoners. But Himmler’s target was quickly reached and exceeded in 1938–39, during a frantic period that saw the foundation of the three camps in Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrück. Thanks to large-scale police raids, prisoner numbers climbed fast, and by the end of June 1938, there were already twenty-four thousand or more inmates in the camps, a threefold increase in just six months.16 Even that was not enough for police and SS leaders, who soon envisaged a further rise to thirty thousand inmates and more.17

  As the size of the prisoner population changed, so did its composition, moving ever further away from the preponderance of left-wing German prisoners that characterized the camps early on. Camp SS officials struggled to keep up with all the new prisoner groups. In Sachsenhausen, for example, five separate prisoner categories (early 1937) became twelve (late 1939).18 Among the new prisoners were thousands of foreigners, after Nazi leaders began to flex their muscles on the international stage. In March 1938, the Third Reich invaded and annexed Austria, and the new rulers quickly arrested tens of thousands of alleged opponents. On the evening of April 1, 1938, the new criminal police office in Vienna dispatched a first transport of Austrian prisoners—among them many members of the old political elite, including the mayor of Vienna—to Dachau; the men suffered extreme abuse on the train, which continued after their arrival the next day. “For a long time, we Austrians were the main attraction in the camp,” the nationalist politician Fritz Bock recalled. In all, 7,861 Austrian men were taken to Dachau during 1938 (almost eighty percent of them Jews).19

  Prisoners from Czechoslovakia were next, after Hitler bullied French and British leaders into accepting the German annexation of the Sudetenland at the Munich conference. In October and November 1938, well over 1,500 prisoners from the Sudetenland arrived in Dachau, including many ethnic Germans.20 The isolated Czechoslovakian government also succumbed to German pressure to extradite Peter Forster, who was in their hands after his escape from Buchenwald. Unlike his accomplice Emil Bargatzky, Forster had evaded the German police and managed to cross the border in late May 1938. Forster, a committed left-wing opponent of the Nazi regime, pleaded for asylum and defended the killing of the SS guard. “We acted in self-defense,” he was quoted as saying, “because every prisoner in that camp lived in danger of being killed.” Despite an international campaign to save him, Forster was handed over to Nazi Germany in late 1938. His fate was the same as Bargatzky’s. Sentenced to death on December 21, he was hanged later that day in Buchenwald, the only other prisoner officially executed in a KL before the war.21 After the German invasion of the remaining Czech territory in March 1939, which was designated as the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the German police dragged further victims to the KL, among them numerous German émigrés and Czech Jews. However, in view of the international condemnation of Nazi aggression, the police moved rather cautiously and did not repeat the mass deportations that had followed the incorporation of Austria one year earlier.22

  The arrival of prisoners from abroad foreshadowed the dramatic later changes in the concentration camps. Before the war, however, the number of foreigners generally remained small. In the late 1930s, the regime still saw the KL primarily as weapons against its own people, including Austrian nationals subsumed into the Third Reich (and largely classified as German by the SS). Above all, the authorities were homing in on social outsiders, who were fast becoming the main target.

  Early Attacks on “Criminals” and “Asocials”

  The pursuit of social deviants was a major part of the Nazi policy of exclusion, aimed at removing all those who did not (or could not) fit into the mythical national community. The motives of the officials in the welfare services, the courts, and the police were as diverse as the men and women they targeted, and often reflected demands which predated the Nazi rise to power. Some officials had utopian visions of rooting out all social ills; some placed their trust in the teachings of racial hygiene; some hoped to stimulate the economy by terrorizing the jobless. The ensuing offensive against Germans on the margins of society led to benefit cuts and surveillance, as well as to detention, not just in traditional state institutions like prisons and workhouses, but in the concentration camps, too.23

  The fate of social outsiders in the KL was widely ignored after the Second World War, when these prisoners joined the ranks of other forgotten victims. If writers mentioned their persecution at all, it was in a derogatory manner, describing it as a tactical maneuver by the Nazi authorities to gain popular support or to besmirch the reputation of political prisoners.24 Only in recent decades have historians recognized the assault on social outsiders as a key Nazi policy in its own right.25 Many historians now argue that the police and SS turned to a policy of “racial general prevention” from 1936, attacking social outsiders in a bid to “cleanse” the “body of the nation” of alleged deviants and degenerates.26 Important as this new research has been in revealing the ideological drive behind the mass detention of social outsiders in the late 1930s, it neglects previous Nazi a
ttacks on the same groups. While the early camps in 1933–34 were primarily about political opponents, the authorities had also used them to detain and punish social outsiders.27

  As soon as Heinrich Himmler became Munich police president in March 1933, he declared the “eradication of the criminal class” as a priority.28 Over the coming months, he developed his vision of policing as social cleansing, with the early camps as places of detention, retribution, and correction.29 Himmler’s approach altered his model camp Dachau already from summer 1933, when the police dragged the first alleged criminals and vagrants inside.30 Their numbers soon increased, after the police arrested tens of thousands of beggars and homeless in nationwide raids in September 1933. Although the authorities quickly released most detainees, some ended up for longer in camps and workhouses.31 Just a year after the SS had set up Dachau, the composition of its prisoner population had changed markedly. Political prisoners still accounted for the great majority of all Bavarian inmates in protective custody, but their proportion had fallen to around eighty percent by April 1934, with social outsiders making up the rest; among them were 142 “work-shy” men, 96 “national pests,” and 82 men accused of “asocial behavior.”32

  The detention of social outsiders in Dachau did not escape the attention of the Bavarian Reich governor von Epp. During his general drive to reduce prisoner numbers, Epp protested in March 1934 that the arrest of alleged criminals and asocials violated the “meaning and purpose of protective custody.”33 Himmler was undeterred. In the rude reply he drafted (see chapter 2), he dismissed any criticism and spelled out his wider convictions: “The observation that imposition of protective custody for alcoholism, firewood theft, embezzlement of moneys belonging to organizations, immoral lifestyle, work shirking, etc., do not quite correspond to the letter of the valid regulations, is entirely accurate. They do, however, correspond to National Socialist sentiment.” In Himmler’s mind, Nazi “sentiment” trumped everything, including the law. Because the courts did not deal swiftly and firmly with asocials and criminals, he argued, the police had to take the suspects to Dachau. The results, he added, were impressive: the arrests played “the most essential part in the decline of criminality in Bavaria.” Himmler saw no reason to change course.34

  Heinrich Himmler may have faced some internal critics, but he was not alone in his aggressive pursuit of social outsiders.35 All over Germany, state and party officials placed social outsiders into protective custody during 1933–34, with the initiative often coming from below. In Hamburg, the police temporarily arrested hundreds of beggars, pimps, and homeless in 1933, as well as several thousand female prostitutes. Elsewhere, too, Nazi officials moved against so-called asocials, especially after the “beggar raid” in September; on October 4, 1933, the Völkischer Beobachter reported on the “first concentration camp for beggars” in Meseritz (Posen).36

  As for the fight against crime, Prussia pursued an even more radical policy than Bavaria in 1933, inspired by a nationwide offensive against persistent criminals. German jurists had pushed for years for indefinite sentences against dangerous re-offenders and their wish finally came true in the Third Reich. Under the Habitual Criminals Law of November 24, 1933, judges could punish defendants with custodial sentences followed by open-ended security confinement (Sicherungsverwahrung) in a prison or penitentiary; by 1939, judges had passed almost ten thousand such sentences, chiefly against minor property offenders.37 However, senior Prussian police officers saw the new law as deficient, since it only targeted those found guilty of new crimes. To wipe out the criminal underclass, they argued, it was also necessary to detain “professional criminals” who could not be brought to court due to insufficient evidence. Hermann Göring shared this view and had introduced preventive police custody (polizeiliche Vorbeugungshaft) by decree on November 13, 1933. From now on, the Prussian criminal police could hold so-called professional criminals in state concentration camps without trial or sentence. The main targets were ex-convicts with long criminal records for property offenses; but even someone who had never been tried before could be detained if the police alleged “criminal intent.”38

  At the time, the Prussian criminal police did not envisage mass arrests. Senior police officials believed that a small hard core of offenders was responsible for the great majority of property crime, and that their selective detention would suffice to deter the others. The Prussian Ministry of the Interior initially set an upper limit of 165 prisoners, soon raised to 525; at first, the arrested men were gathered in Lichtenburg, where they soon made up the majority of inmates.39 Despite the relatively small number of arrests, the Prussian initiative amounted to a radical new approach to preventive policing and set the stage for the future.

  The extralegal detention of social outsiders grew during the mid-1930s. In Prussia, the police arrested more men as professional criminals, focusing on “usual suspects” like burglars and thieves with many previous convictions. In 1935, the police authorities concentrated them in Esterwegen, prompting Inspector Eicke to describe that KL as the most difficult to rule; by October 1935, it held 476 so-called professional criminals, forming the largest prisoner group.40 Meanwhile, several other German states adopted the radical Prussian policy and placed criminals into preventive police custody in concentration camps, too.41

  Parallel to the pursuit of criminals, the detention of so-called asocials also continued in the mid-1930s. As before, Nazi officials mainly targeted the destitute. In Bavaria, for example, the political police arrested more than three hundred “beggars and vagabonds” in summer 1936 and sent them to Dachau, in a cynical attempt to smarten up the streets before the Olympics.42 In addition, the authorities trained their sights on “indecent” individuals. Dozens of female prostitutes were dragged to Moringen, among them Minna K., arrested by the Bremen police in late 1935 as a streetwalker. The forty-five-year-old had been held many times before and was accused of drunken attempts to “capture men” in seedy bars, undermining police efforts “to keep the town’s streets and establishments clean in a moral respect,” thereby endangering public order and the Nazi state.43

  By the mid-1930s, then, the KL had become well-established weapons against social outsiders. To be sure, their primary focus was still on political opponents, broadly defined. But social outsiders now made up a significant part of the prisoner population, in Dachau and elsewhere. When a delegation of the British Legion visited Dachau on July 21, 1935, the SS hosts (who included Theodor Eicke himself) told them that of the 1,543 prisoners inside, 246 were “professional criminals,” 198 “work-shy,” 26 “hardened criminals,” and 38 “moral perverts”—in other words, some thirty-three percent of inmates were detained as social deviants.44 Such figures would rise even further across the KL in 1937–38, as the police centralized and escalated the earlier measures against social outsiders.45

  The Green Triangle

  With the appointment of Heinrich Himmler as chief of German police in summer 1936, the path was clear for the creation of a nationwide criminal police. Over the following years, Himmler oversaw the formation of a large and modern force, centrally coordinated in Berlin.46 Himmler quickly used his new powers to mastermind a strike against ex-convicts. On February 23, 1937, he ordered the Prussian State Criminal Police Office (the later Reich Office, or RKPA) to conduct the first nationwide raid against “professional and habitual criminals,” who would be arrested “abruptly” and taken to concentration camps. Using lists compiled earlier by regional police officials, the Criminal Police Office selected the suspects and instructed forces around the country to strike on March 9, 1937. The raids went ahead as planned and over the coming days, some two thousand prisoners—the target set by Himmler—arrived in the KL, which had been primed by Eicke. Almost all the prisoners were men, among them Emil Bargatzky, who was picked up by the police in Essen and sent to Lichtenburg with five hundred other so-called criminals.47

  The raids in spring 1937 resulted primarily from Himmler’s determination to wipe out
the criminal subculture. Earlier preventive police measures had not been as successful as anticipated and Himmler worried that the persistence of serious crime would damage the reputation of the Nazi regime, which had promised to clean up Germany. The time had come, he believed, to extend preventive arrests beyond the few hundred most obvious suspects.48 Naturally, Himmler was quick to declare his initiative a great success, claiming in a speech to SS leaders a few months later that the crime rate had “dropped quite significantly” as a result. He predicted even greater benefits for the future, since some of the detained criminals could be released after several years, once the SS had broken their will and taught them order.49 Himmler still believed in the transformative power of the camps, no doubt influenced by the conclusion of German criminologists that certain offenders could be reformed through discipline and labor.50

  Himmler had some additional motives for the spring 1937 raids, beyond his obsession with crime.51 Economic factors, in particular, began to influence police and SS policy. By the late 1930s, mass unemployment, which had helped propel the Nazis to power, was becoming a distant memory. Following the rapid recovery from the depression, Germany was beginning to face serious labor shortages, accompanied by growing concerns about workers’ discipline.52 At a meeting of senior government officials on February 11, 1937, chaired by Göring, Himmler floated the idea of forcing some five hundred thousand “work-shy” individuals into “labor camps.”53 His proposal, which he had probably discussed with KL chief Eicke, was too radical even for the Nazi state, so when Himmler met senior civil servants from the Reich Ministry of Justice two days later, he only mentioned plans for the selective detention of the “work-shy.” Hard work in a camp for up to fourteen hours a day, he announced (according to the minutes), would “show them, and others, that it is better to seek work in freedom than running the risk of being taken to such a camp.”54 Just ten days later, Himmler authorized the March 1937 raids, ordering the police to detain criminals “not in work.”55 No doubt, Himmler intended these arrests as a warning shot to the so-called work-shy.56