KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (13 page)

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.”
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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.
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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
.
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Several historians have suggested that most Germans welcomed such reports because they supported the camps and the regime’s broader aims.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 reported the following day.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Farther east, a local woman confided to a Lichtenburg
prisoner that the townspeople of Prettin “know everything that goes on inside!”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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As popular knowledge of abuses spread, the authorities came under pressure to release individual inmates. Some initiatives came from religious groups.
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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.
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Much to the annoyance of camp and police officers, such campaigns for imprisoned men sometimes caused senior state officials to step in.
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In Hans
Litten’s case, his treatment occasionally improved following interventions from above.
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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.”
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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.
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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!”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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Even former inmates unable to speak about their experiences—because of fear or trauma—bore witness to the
camps.
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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.
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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.”
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Talk of torture soon spread outside hospital wards, especially when former prisoners died of their injuries.
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