KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (20 page)

Only SS men with special qualities, Himmler claimed, could navigate the dangerous terrain of the KL: “no other service is more devastating and strenuous
for the troops than just that of guarding villains and criminals.”
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Some historians have taken Himmler’s aspirations at face value, falling for his idealized image of SS guards as a select force of fighters.
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The prisoners, meanwhile, often reversed the official image and described guards as a freak show of misfits and sadists.
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In Sachsenhausen, they even made up their own ditty, mocking
Himmler’s famous slogan: “There is a path to the SS. Its milestones are: stupidity, impudence, mendacity, boasting, shirking, cruelty, injustice, hypocrisy, and love of booze.”
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Although this witticism holds some truth, it offers only a partial picture of the background and actions of men serving in the KL and the IKL. Collectively, these men can be called the Camp SS, though at the time they
were known under a far more sinister name. By 1935, they were wearing a badge with a skull and bones on their uniforms: “he who joins our ranks enters into comradeship with death,” as the histrionic Theodor Eicke put it. The macabre symbol gave rise to the official name that Himmler bestowed on the Camp SS men in spring 1936—Death’s Head units.
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Constructing the Political Soldier

An elite
unit of political soldiers: this is how Himmler and Eicke liked to depict the Camp SS. In peacetime, Eicke kept telling his men, they were the only soldiers protecting the German fatherland, fighting day and night against the enemy behind the barbed wire of the concentration camps.
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The figure of the “political soldier” had first been popularized by the SA in the Weimar years.
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But it was
quickly appropriated by Heinrich Himmler and his SS leaders, who loved to style themselves as hard soldiers.
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Theodor Eicke laid full claim to the term, which became so closely associated with him that after his plane was shot down on the Eastern Front on February 26, 1943, his obituary in the
Völkischer Beobachter
carried the subheading: “Eicke, the political soldier.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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His followers revered him as Röhm’s killer and projected all kinds of other epic deeds onto him, picturing Eicke as a titanic warrior.
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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.
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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).
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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 disorder.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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This, then, was Himmler’s ideal of “decent” punishment.

An equally gruesome practice was the so-called tying to a post.
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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.
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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.
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