KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (15 page)

Several accounts were published by senior camp officials themselves,
including a full-length book in February 1934 by the Oranienburg commandant Werner Schäfer. As the only such account by a camp commandant, it caused something of a stir. The book sold tens of thousands of copies, was serialized in several regional newspapers, and was read by Nazi leaders. Even Adolf Hitler received a volume, courtesy of Commandant Schäfer. Another two thousand copies were
dispatched to German embassies abroad, on the initiative of Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda.
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In his book, the verbose Schäfer stuck closely to the official narrative of the camps. He claimed that his men had triumphed over many obstacles—such as poor infrastructure and hostile prisoners—to create a model institution, based on care, order, and labor. Carried away on his flight of fancy, Schäfer
described his SA guards as dedicated “pedagogues” and “psychologists,” who gave their all to turn former enemies into “useful members of the German national community.” To prove his point, Schäfer included several letters purportedly sent to him by former prisoners, including one who praised the “very valuable” experience and another who personally thanked Schäfer “for the good treatment and
everything else.”
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The cynical use of prisoners was a key feature of the Nazi public relations strategy. Testimonies by supposedly satisfied prisoners became a staple of German press reporting.
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This campaign peaked on November 12, 1933, when the Nazi state held a rigged plebiscite and national election. Prisoners in the early camps were “allowed” to participate, with largely predictable
results; according to the Munich press, almost all Dachau prisoners voted in support of the Third Reich.
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This farcical result was no proof of the regime’s popularity among prisoners, of course, but of the brutal effectiveness of SS terror in Dachau. A week before the election, a senior Bavarian state official had warned the inmates that naysayers would be treated as traitors. On the day of
the vote, SS guards reminded them to support the regime if they ever wanted to be free again. This the prisoners did, for they were well aware that the SS had devised a system for identifying individual voters.
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Prisoner fears of retribution for disobedience were well founded; in the Brandenburg camp, a Communist who cast his vote against the state was tortured to death.
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The official rationale
for the media blitz across Germany—emblazoning the image of the “good camp”—was the rebuttal of foreign “atrocity stories.” The self-important Commandant Schäfer, for one, announced that Oranienburg was the most “defamed” camp in the world and pointedly called his rejoinder the “Anti-Brown Book.”
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But Nazi outrage at foreign criticism was often disingenuous, little more than an excuse for tackling
a far more pressing problem—the whispers inside Germany. Early on, the authorities occasionally admitted that their real concern was domestic public opinion. As the glowing article about Oranienburg put it on March 28, 1933, all the “talk of merciless flogging” was just “old wives’ tales.” In the previous week, Heinrich Himmler had made a similar point as he announced the establishment of Dachau,
denying all rumors about abuses of protective custody prisoners.
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Such reassurances were directed at Nazi supporters, aiming to “dissolve the anxieties of the middle-class followers who feel that illegal acts destroy the foundation of their existence,” as the former Dachau prisoner Bruno Bettelheim later put it.
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It is hard to judge the popular response to the official narrative of the “good
camp.” Nazi sympathizers—who were more insulated from knowledge of abuses—may well have been reassured and probably wanted to believe the regime’s version. At the same time, many other observers saw through the smoke screen. Victor Klemperer was not alone in greeting the November 1933 reports about prisoners voting overwhelmingly for the Nazis with incredulity.
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More generally, rumors about
violence and torture persisted, chipping away at the official picture.

At times, it was Nazi officials themselves who contradicted the carefully crafted official message. In his sensationalist book, Commandant Schäfer repeatedly let slip his benevolent mask, admitting that prisoners had been beaten.
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Other publications revealed that for prominent prisoners, the much-vaunted productive labor
amounted to degrading work like cleaning latrines.
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And in Dachau, local papers kept readers informed about deaths inside, with articles about “suicides” and prisoners “shot trying to escape” exposing the fiction of the camp as a benevolent educational establishment. But such revealing reports were the exception in 1933—a time when Nazi propaganda was not yet fully streamlined—and disappeared
altogether in later years.
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On balance, the regime had little to gain by deviations from the official line. Instead of playing up the violence inside the camps, the authorities tried to silence the chorus of whispers.

Fighting “Atrocity Rumors”

On June 2, 1933, a Dachau newspaper printed an ominous directive by the Supreme SA Command. Under the headline “Warning!” it informed the local population
that two people were recently arrested as they peered into the camp: “They claimed to have looked over the wall out of curiosity about what the camp looked like from inside. To enable them to satisfy their thirst for knowledge and to provide them with an opportunity to do so, they were kept in the concentration camp for one night.” Any other “curious individuals,” the directive added, would
be given an even “more prolonged opportunity to study the camp.” Not for the first time, the residents of Dachau were being warned to stay well away from the camp in their midst.
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Despite such threats, officials in early camps like Dachau found it impossible to shut out spectators. Some local authorities responded by taking prisoners to more secluded locations. This is what happened in Bremen
in September 1933, where the Missler camp—located inside a residential area—was closed down and most prisoners moved to a new camp on a tug boat beached on the embankment of an isolated stretch of river outside the city.
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The Nazi state also continued to threaten whisperers. Since spring 1933, press and radio reports carried warnings that so-called atrocity rumors would be punished.
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New
special courts passed exemplary sentences, using the March 21, 1933, Decree Against Malicious Attacks that criminalized “untrue or grossly exaggerated” statements which could cause “serious damage” to the regime.
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Among the defendants were locals living near camps, such as a joiner who fell into a nighttime conversation with two men on a Berlin street and told them about abuses in Oranienburg,
only to be denounced and sentenced to a year in prison. “Such rumors,” the judges found, “have to be rigorously combated in order to deter others from similar deeds.”
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Even some Germans far away from camps were convicted. In August 1933, for example, the Munich special court sentenced several workers to three months’ imprisonment for discussing the death of the KPD deputy Fritz Dressel in Dachau—a
case widely known in Bavaria, even before Hans Beimler mentioned it in his book—as they sat in a stonemasons’ hut in the hamlet of Wotzdorf, some 125 miles east of the camp.
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The heavy-handed response by the authorities drew more sarcasm about the regime and its camps, including the following joke about Dachau:

Two men meet [on the street]. “Nice to see you’re free again. How was it in the
concentration camp?”

“Great! Breakfast in bed, a choice of coffee or chocolate. Then some sport. For lunch we got soup, meat, and dessert. And we played games in the afternoon before getting coffee and cakes. Then a little snooze and we watched movies after dinner.”

The man was astonished: “That’s great! I recently spoke to Meyer, who was also locked up there. He told me a different story.”

The other man nods gravely and says: “Yes, well, that’s why they’ve picked him up again.”
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In their eagerness to silence critics, the Nazi authorities targeted relatives of former prisoners, who often knew particularly damaging details. Among the victims was Fritz Dressel’s widow, who was apparently taken to Stadelheim.
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Centa Beimler, meanwhile, was imprisoned for several years, following
her arrest in spring 1933, in a bid to stop her escaped husband from making further revelations about Dachau. But the detention of relatives for revenge or deterrence, later known as
Sippenhaft
, only gave further ammunition to foreign critics. The decision of the Dessau political police in early 1934 to force Elisabeth Seger and her baby daughter Renate into Rosslau camp, following the escape
of her husband Gerhart from Oranienburg, became a public relations disaster. At a press conference in London on March 18, 1934, Gerhart Seger denounced the reprisals of the Nazi regime. Because of his book, which was circulating inside Germany, the Nazi authorities “have now taken my wife and child from me.” There was a public outcry in Britain, which even reached Hitler’s ears, and after sustained
pressure from the British press and politicians, the German authorities released both mother and daughter, who were reunited abroad with Gerhart Seger.
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Undeterred, some Nazi fanatics resorted to murder to suppress rumors. In the new Dachau camp regulations of October 1, 1933, Commandant Eicke had threatened prisoners who collected or passed on “atrocity propaganda about the concentration camp”
with execution. Less than three weeks later his guards uncovered an alleged prisoner plot to smuggle evidence of SS crimes abroad, and Eicke made good on his threat. Backed by Heinrich Himmler—who claimed that the guilty prisoners had tried to send material for an “atrocity propaganda film” to Czechoslovakia—the Dachau commandant swore revenge. SS suspicions centered on five prisoners, three
Jews and two non-Jews, who were thrown into the bunker. They were all doomed. The first to die were Wilhelm Franz (the Kapo overseeing prisoner correspondence) and Dr. Delvin Katz (an orderly in the infirmary), who were tortured and strangled by SS men the night of October 18–19, 1933. The next day, Eicke announced their deaths to all assembled prisoners and declared a temporary ban (sanctioned by
Himmler) on letters and releases. According to an eyewitness, Eicke had a chilling message for the prisoners, which summed up the Nazi double-speak about the early camps: “We still have enough German oaks to string up everyone who defies us,” Eicke warned, adding: “There are no atrocities and no Cheka cellars in Dachau.”
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Such threats were still on the minds of prisoners when they were released
from early camps. The camps left many deep and lasting wounds on prisoner bodies. In addition to the visible scars, there was the enduring trauma of fear, humiliation, and shame. Many men found it hard to live with memories that undermined their masculine identity, as when they had pleaded, cried, or soiled themselves in the face of overwhelming terror.
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In light of these experiences, and the
regime’s crackdown on “atrocity propaganda,” it took great courage for former prisoners like Martin Grünwiedl to write about the camps and continue their fight against the dictatorship. Not surprisingly, many more left-wing activists retreated from resistance. As early as summer 1933, the underground Communist leadership warned die-hard supporters that many released comrades were “renegades” who
had broken with the party out of fear.
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This fear gripped other opponents of the regime, too. Once the reality of Nazi terror was known, they anxiously withdrew into the private sphere.
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In this way, the whispers about abuses and atrocities in the early camps paved the way for total Nazi rule, fatally weakening the resistance.
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Of course, deterrence was just one of many functions of the
early camps. From the start, Nazi camps were multipurpose weapons. This left an important legacy for the future, as did the innovations in camps like Dachau, with its specific architecture, administrative routine, and daily rituals. Clearly, some of the essentials of the SS concentration camps had emerged early on. All the same, the later SS system was still a long way off. After one year of Nazi
rule, individual German states still pursued rival visions and there was no coordinated national network of camps. Instead, the early camps differed in terms of how they looked, who ran them, and how prisoners fared. In early 1934, their future remained undecided. In fact, it was not even clear if the camps would have any future at all in the Third Reich.
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2

The SS Camp System

Murder was the making of Theodor Eicke. More precisely, it was a single shot he fired at around 6:00 p.m. on July 1, 1934, that ignited his career. As he hurried to his murderous assignment that early Sunday evening, striding across a new cell block of the Stadelheim prison complex in Munich, Eicke may already have dreamed about the rewards he would reap. Although he
was no experienced killer—as Dachau commandant, he had left most of the dirty work to his men—he betrayed no sign of nerves as he climbed up to the second floor and walked along two corridors lined with armed policemen. He finally stopped outside cell number 474 and ordered the door to be unlocked. Eicke stepped inside, accompanied by his right-hand man Michael Lippert, and came face to face with
his former benefactor, now the Nazis’ most prized political prisoner—SA leader Ernst Röhm.

Eicke and Lippert had arrived in Stadelheim about an hour earlier from Dachau, heading straight for the governor of the prison. They demanded immediate access to Röhm, who had been arrested for treason the previous morning, together with other senior SA men. After the governor stalled, Eicke announced angrily
that he was acting on orders from Hitler. The Führer, barked Eicke, had personally instructed him to give the SA leader an ultimatum to commit suicide; if Röhm failed to comply, Eicke would shoot him. After the governor had made some frantic phone calls to corroborate Eicke’s story, the two SS officers were allowed to proceed to cell 474. Here, Eicke handed Röhm a copy of the
Völkischer Beobachter
, with details of the execution of six SA leaders in Stadelheim the previous day, and tersely issued Hitler’s ultimatum. Röhm apparently tried to protest, but his cell was quickly locked again, a gun loaded with one bullet left on a small table. Outside, Eicke checked his watch and after a tense ten minutes, the time span specified by Hitler, he ordered a prison official to retrieve the unused
weapon. Eicke and Lippert then raised their own guns and pointed through the open door at Röhm, who had taken his shirt off. After steadying themselves for several seconds, both men pulled the trigger. Röhm stumbled backward. He was bleeding heavily, but he was still alive. The sight of the moaning Röhm may have spooked Eicke, for he ordered Lippert to finish the job. The younger man duly stepped
up and fired a third bullet from close range at Röhm’s heart. According to one eyewitness, the last words of the dying SA leader were: “Führer, my Führer.”
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