KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (17 page)

The capture of Oranienburg—the
oldest and most prominent SA camp—symbolized the new SS hegemony. On July 4, 1934, a few days after a police unit had disarmed most of the Oranienburg SA, Eicke made his grand entrance. SS troops under his command, some of them drawn from Dachau, surrounded the camp; according to one witness, Eicke had brought two tanks for backup. But there was no resistance from the scared SA men. Eicke curtly
announced the SS takeover, telling the assembled SA guards to look for another job. SA rule over Oranienburg ended with a whimper. The new masters, meanwhile, celebrated in SS style by killing their most prominent prisoner, Erich Mühsam. At first, they tried to drive him to suicide. Mühsam resisted, but quietly distributed his belongings among fellow prisoners, knowing that his killers could strike
at any time. On the night of July 9–10, 1934, the frail Mühsam was led away. He was strangled with a clothesline, apparently, his body dumped in the camp latrine in a feeble attempt to make his death look like a suicide. Erich Mühsam’s funeral was held in Berlin on July 16, attended only by a few brave friends and admirers. His wife, Kreszentia, who had tried so long to save him, was not among
them; she was escaping abroad, where she would publish a searing account of her husband’s torment.
31

Himmler and Eicke quickly streamlined their new camps. They had no interest in maintaining Oranienburg and Hohnstein, and closed both.
32
By contrast, Eicke led the conversion of Sachsenburg and Esterwegen into SS camps, along the lines of Dachau.
33
The new Esterwegen regulations of August 1, 1934,
for example, were based directly on Dachau.
34
Eicke also looked for officials who would bring the SS spirit to his new camps. Back in Dachau, he had been impressed by Standartenführer Hans Loritz, a belligerent fanatic in Eicke’s own image, and he now helped to make him the new commandant of Esterwegen. Loritz did not disappoint. A former prisoner remembered his first address in July 1934: “Today
I have taken over the camp. In regards to discipline, I am a swine.”
35

Theodor Eicke initially directed his fiefdom of camps from Dachau and during flying visits to the other SS sites.
36
Then, on December 10, 1934, Himmler gave him a permanent office to go with his title. The choice of location revealed the importance Himmler attached to the camps, for Eicke moved right into the heart of the
police headquarters in Berlin. As a part of the state bureaucracy, Eicke’s new Inspectorate of Concentration Camps (IKL) was housed in five rooms on the ground floor of the Gestapa, on 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Despite their proximity, however, Himmler made sure to keep Eicke’s IKL separate from Heydrich’s Gestapa.
37
The two men, who had an uneasy relationship, were forced to work closely together.
Heydrich enforced the virtual police monopoly over protective custody, sending suspects to the KL and ordering their release; the organization and administration of the KL, meanwhile, was left to Eicke.
38

Eicke’s standing was bolstered further after his guards were removed from their subordination under the general SS (in the same way the Gestapo was removed from the oversight of the regular
police). In a significant move, Himmler elevated the camp guards on December 14, 1934, to the status of a separate force within the SS, and as their leader, Eicke garnered yet another title: inspector of SS Guard Troops. To be sure, Eicke was not fully autonomous from the expanding SS administration, especially in regard to financial and staffing matters, and he also still came under the formal authority
of the chief of the new SS Main Office (until summer 1939). In practice, though, Eicke often bypassed the chain of command by appealing directly to Himmler.
39

By the end of 1934, in the space of just a few months, Himmler and Eicke had created the rudiments of a nationwide system of SS concentration camps. There was now a small network of five KL—run along similar lines and staffed by SS Guard
Troops—under the umbrella of the new Inspectorate in Berlin.
40
But the future of this SS system remained uncertain, as the KL had not yet been confirmed as permanent fixtures. In fact, it had seemed likely in 1934 that they would soon wither away.

SS Camps Under Threat

Once the Third Reich was established, an internal tug-of-war began over its direction: Exactly what kind of dictatorship would
it become? Today, the answer seems obvious. But Nazi Germany did not follow a preordained path to extreme terror. Initially, some influential figures in state and party envisaged a rather different future. They wanted an authoritarian regime, bound by laws enforced by the traditional state apparatus. True, they had accepted, or applauded, the unrestrained repression in 1933 as a means for stabilizing
the regime. But they saw the Röhm purge as the last act of the Nazi revolution, clearing the way for a dictatorship based on authoritarian law. Now there would be no more need for arbitrary violence and for extralegal camps, which only damaged the image of the regime at home and abroad.
41

State officials had made tentative moves to curb the camps as early as spring and summer 1933, while some
newspapers assured their readers that these sites would not become a regular feature of the new Germany.
42
Such efforts gathered momentum toward the end of the year, pushed ahead by an unlikely champion: Prussian minister president Hermann Göring. Once the initial wave of Nazi terror had subsided, Göring, always a proponent of a strong state, styled himself as a respectable statesman upholding
law and order.
43
Following the “completed stabilization of the National Socialist regime,” he announced in the Nazi press in early December 1933, there would be mass releases from the Prussian camps. In all, up to five thousand inmates were freed during this so-called Christmas amnesty, almost half of all the Prussian protective custody prisoners.
44
Most of them were foot soldiers or sympathizers
of the Left; others had been held for grumbling about the regime.
45
But the authorities also freed some prominent figures, among them Friedrich Ebert, who kept his head down after his release, running a gas station in Berlin.
46

The early camps’ decline accelerated during 1934. Hermann Göring continued his campaign, both in public and in private, not least with Hitler. He was backed by the Reich
minister of the interior, Wilhelm Frick, another Nazi faithful, who sharply criticized the excessive use of protective custody and indicated that the camps would fade away.
47
As the regime consolidated, more prisoners were released (among them Wolfgang Langhoff in late March) and fewer were dragged inside; in Prussia, just 2,267 prisoners were held in protective custody on August 1, 1934, down
from 14,906 one year earlier.
48
The early camps were disappearing fast. More than a dozen shut down in Prussia and elsewhere in the first few months of 1934, including Brandenburg, Sonnenburg, and Bredow.
49

Further camps closed later that year, following a direct intervention by Hitler. In early August 1934, shortly before a plebiscite endorsed him as Führer and Reich chancellor, Hitler made
a play for the public gallery, announcing a major amnesty for political and other offenders. Crucially, Hitler extended his grand gesture to the camps. He ordered a speedy examination of all protective custody cases, demanding the release of prisoners held for minor transgressions and those thought to pose no more threat.
50
Despite some resistance from the SS and Gestapo—who refused to free high-profile
figures like Carl von Ossietzky and Hans Litten—most of the remaining protective custody prisoners were let go. In Prussia, there were just 437 inmates left after Hitler’s amnesty; Esterwegen—the last outpost of the Emsland concentration camp complex, originally built for five thousand prisoners—was down to an estimated 150 men by October 1934.
51
The camps’ rapid decline was public knowledge.
In late August 1934, Göring authorized a press release about the closure of Oranienburg, adding that protective custody would be “greatly curtailed” in the future, with lawbreakers “immediately transferred to the courts” instead.
52

The judicial apparatus—with its hundreds of prisons—stood ready to take over the mantle of the camps. The German legal system had undergone a major transformation
since early 1933. Although it was still largely run by national conservatives, such as the long-serving Reich minister of justice Franz Gürtner, it became a loyal servant of the Nazi regime. Critical officials were dismissed, fundamental legal principles abandoned, new courts set up and stricter laws applied. German jurists overwhelmingly backed this development. The upshot was a huge increase in
the number of state prisoners, from a daily average of around 63,000 in 1932 to more than 107,000 in summer 1935, including at least 23,000 political prisoners. Gürtner and other jurists were sending a clear message to Nazi leaders: enemies of the regime would be punished hard by the law, making measures such as protective custody superfluous. With such a determined legal system, who needed concentration
camps?
53

To support their case, legal officials could point to their harsh prisons. In 1933, senior legal figures promised more deterrence and retribution—turning the prison into a “house of horror,” as one put it—and introduced harder sanctions and diminished rations.
54
The showcase for the new prison regime was a network of camps in the Emsland. In a move that summed up their ambition to constrain
lawless detention, the German legal officials had taken over the early camps Neusustrum and Börgermoor in April 1934; inside, the places of protective custody prisoners were taken by regular penitentiary inmates. By 1935, the Reich Ministry of Justice ran six camps in the Emsland, holding well over five thousand prisoners. Rules, conditions, and treatment were brutal, with thirteen confirmed
prisoner deaths in 1935 alone. The high levels of violence were due, in large measure, to the employment of former SA camp guards as prison warders. They were led by another veteran of the early camps, none other than SA Sturmbannführer Werner Schäfer, who had been poached by the legal authorities in April 1934 from his post as commandant of Oranienburg. Appointed as a civil servant, Schäfer served
in the Emsland prison camps until 1942, by which time several hundred inmates had died inside.
55

While legal officials generally turned a blind eye to abuses in their own prisons, they began to take more concerted action against atrocities in SA and SS camps. True, there was some collusion; murders committed during the Röhm purge, for example, were out of bounds.
56
Still, now that the early camps
seemed to be fading, state prosecutors launched several criminal investigations, touching at least ten camps in the mid-1930s. The biggest case was brought against former SA guards from Hohnstein, following the camps’ closure. Flaunting their Nazi credentials, the legal authorities were willing to overlook crimes committed in revenge for Communist “wrongs” or for “political reasons.” But the
judges drew a line when it came to arbitrary atrocities. In their view, there was no place in the Third Reich for the sadistic excesses that had blighted Hohnstein, and on May 15, 1935, the regional court of Dresden sent twenty-three SA men to prison, with sentences ranging from ten months to six years for the former commandant.
57

SS men found themselves in the dock, too. In spring 1934, the
regional court of Stettin convicted seven SS men from the recently closed Bredow camp for grievous bodily harm and other offenses, with the former commandant sentenced to thirteen years in a penitentiary. The case was widely reported in the German press, as part of Göring’s effort to present himself as a guarantor of order. Not to be outdone, Hitler used a speech in the Reichstag on July 13, 1934,
after his action against Röhm, to announce that three SS guards (of the Stettin camp) had been shot during the purge because of their “vile abuse of protective custody prisoners.”
58
Even the KL now under Eicke came under scrutiny, resulting in the arrest and conviction of senior officers from Esterwegen and Lichtenburg.
59

The SS was put on the back foot.
60
Its reputation was already poor—“I know
there are some people in Germany who feel sick at the sight of this black uniform,” Himmler conceded—and the legal investigations only dragged it further down, at the very time when the future of the KL system was in doubt.
61
Eicke railed against “poisonous” attacks that “serve the sole purpose of systematically undermining and shaking the state leadership’s confidence” in the camps.
62
Meanwhile,
the legal authorities continued to chip away at the KL. In summer 1935, Reich minister of justice Gürtner, whom Eicke regarded as a personal enemy, suggested that all camp inmates should be granted legal representation, a proposal supported by many German lawyers and the leaders of the Protestant Church.
63

By 1935, then, the SS concentration camp system—only just established—found itself under
serious pressure. Greatly depleted, the KL faced a crisis of legitimacy; to many observers, their days seemed numbered. But Heinrich Himmler had different ideas. In December 1934, he warned Göring against “abolishing an institution that at present is the most effective means against all enemies of the state.”
64
Himmler would fight tooth and nail for the survival of the KL, to secure and extend
his own power, but also, as he saw it, to save the Third Reich.
65

Himmler’s Vision

The mass releases from Nazi camps in 1934 were “one of the worst political mistakes the National Socialist state could have made,” Heinrich Himmler seethed in a confidential speech a few years later. It had been sheer “madness” to allow vicious opponents to resume their destructive work. After all, the fight to
secure the Nazi regime was far from won. According to Himmler, the German nation was still in mortal danger from shadowy enemies who threatened everything from the foundations of state and society to the moral fiber and racial health of the people. The nation had to fight to the death against the “forces of organized subhumanity,” a catch-all term he would use over and over again, meaning Communists,
Socialists, Freemasons, priests, asocials, criminals, and above all Jews, who “should not be viewed as humans of our species.”
66