KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (22 page)

The chief camp doctor, who headed the medical office (Department V), stood under dual subordination, too. In addition to the commandant, he answered to the chief medical officer in the IKL, Dr. Karl Genzken, a former navy doctor and old Nazi activist, who in turn
reported to the SS Medical Authority (which posted the doctors to the camps) and the SS Reich physician. Camp doctors were in charge of all medical matters, supervising the provision for both SS troops and prisoners, for whom basic infirmaries existed.
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These doctors loomed large in the lives of inmates, in contrast to the bureaucrats from the administration office (Department IV), who operated
largely hidden from view. In many ways, though, the administration office proved no less important. Not only were the officials overseeing the camp budget, they were in charge of food, clothing, and lodging (for prisoners and the SS), as well as maintenance in the camp, working closely with the SS Administration Office under Oswald Pohl.
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The most powerful figure in the Commandant Staff, with
the exception of the commandant, was the camp compound leader, who headed the protective custody camp (Department III). A more visible presence than the commandant, for whom he deputized, he was a key figure for inmates and SS men alike. Rudolf Höss called him the “real ruler over the entire life of prisoners.” This was reflected in the location of his office, in the gatehouse directly overlooking
the prisoner compound. The camp compound leader directed the largest department in the Commandant Staff. His personnel included one or more deputies at the top, a report leader (responsible for prisoner discipline and roll calls), a work service leader (supervising SS commando leaders in charge of prisoner labor details), and the block leaders (in charge of prisoner barracks). Dedicated SS men
quickly moved up the ranks, sometimes all the way to the top.
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Rudolf Höss was among the brightest stars of the Camp SS. In the Dachau Commandant Staff, he was soon fast-tracked from block leader to report leader, and after a visit in 1936, Heinrich Himmler himself promoted him to Untersturmführer; just three years after joining the SS, Höss was now an officer. He moved to Sachsenhausen in
summer 1938, first as adjutant, then as camp compound leader. These two posts were the main gateways for striving SS men to become commandants, and sure enough, when his superiors searched for a dynamic officer to head one of their new KL in 1940, Höss was their choice. He packed his bags and traveled east to a place “way back in Poland,” as he wrote, as commandant of a camp called Auschwitz.
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Camp SS Professionals

Theodor Eicke never tired of conjuring up the SS Death’s Head “spirit”—the mortar, as he called it, which bonded his men.
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But Eicke’s rhetoric could not smooth over the cracks in the Camp SS. For all his bluster about breaking down barriers, for example, there were many formal and informal hierarchies separating leaders, NCOs, and ordinary men, both in the camp and off-duty;
officers often lived in spacious and well-appointed houses in newly built SS settlements, while their men slept in large and shabby huts which sometimes faced the prisoner barracks, separated only by the barbed wire.
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Instead of a unified community of SS comrades there were rival groups, an inevitable consequence of drafting so many ruthless and hard-nosed men.
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Conflicts also erupted over
the daily duties, with plenty of men failing to live up to Eicke’s ideals. Camp SS leaders frequently reprimanded their men for slovenly dress and poor posture, for chatting with inmates, for stealing from SS stores, and for reading, or worse still, for falling asleep on duty.
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A few errant guards even ended up as prisoners themselves, after Himmler introduced a new sanction for disgraced SS
men in summer 1938: on his personal orders, they would be placed into protective custody in Sachsenhausen. By September 1939, seventy-three ex–SS men—including former guards—were held here in the so-called Education Platoon, under comparatively lenient conditions. Their former SS comrades regularly set them upon fellow prisoners, who greatly feared these “bone men,” a nickname derived from the crossbones
on their prisoner uniforms, a daily memento of how they had fallen.
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Despite Eicke’s exaggerations, the SS Death’s Head spirit was not entirely imaginary. Like a true corporate leader, Eicke did impress a distinct organizational identity onto the Camp SS—with its own traditions, values, and vocabulary—and the hard core among his men fully embraced it. “We in the KL were a completely isolated
clique,” one of them recalled proudly after the war. They signed up for Eicke’s ideal of the political soldier and pursued long-term careers as concentration camp professionals. There may not have been more than a few hundred of them in the prewar years, mostly inside the Commandant Staff, but it was these men who ultimately dominated the KL.
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Life as a political soldier was a full-time commitment.
The core members of the Camp SS spent much of their free time together on the grounds. They met up in SS canteens and celebrated festive occasions together. In Dachau, SS men mingled at their own private swimming pool, bowling alley, and tennis courts; there was even a nature reserve with wild animals. Senior officials socialized outside the camp grounds, too. Most of them were married with
two or more children—another signifier of masculine SS identity—and their families often lived together in the nearby SS settlements. In this way, the private and professional lives of dedicated Camp SS men merged into one.
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At the center of their lives stood violence. This was the real mortar binding together the Camp SS professionals, as their shared practice of abuse created close bonds
of community and complicity.
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So strong was the violent energy at the core of the SS, it spread beyond the camps, leading to scuffles and brawls between guards and locals; the worst incident occurred in April 1938 in Dachau, when an SS man used his ceremonial dagger to stab two workers to death, apparently after an argument about his uniform and golden Nazi Party badge.
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Violence was the
essence of the Camp SS spirit, and it was soaked up by the SS professionals. In addition to official prisoner punishments, they practiced many other forms of violence, starting with slaps. For prisoners the first slap in the face was a humiliating reminder of their servitude—slaps were commonly used by German men to discipline minors and inferiors—but it was preferable to many other abuses.
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Punches and kicks, for example, caused real bodily harm, as did another violent SS ritual, the nighttime raid, when screaming guards would descend on sleeping prisoners, followed by carnage and torture.
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By contrast, murder was still unusual in the mid-1930s. On average, between four and five prisoners died monthly in 1937 in each of the big SS camps for men (Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald),
which held a daily average of around 2,300 prisoners each.
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In all, perhaps three hundred prisoners perished in the KL between 1934 and 1937, most of them driven to suicide by SS men or killed outright.
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Violence came easy to the hard core of the Camp SS, justified (as in early camps) as the only way to hold down dangerous inmates. True, the fiction of the savage prisoner was more difficult
to maintain, now that the Third Reich was fully entrenched. But Camp SS leaders worked hard to fan the flames of hatred. New recruits received ideological instruction, which continued throughout their service. In lectures, leaflets, and directives, SS leaders painted prisoners as dangerous enemies, never to be trusted, never to be left alone, never to be spared. These slogans often stuck, partly
because the KL were staffed by self-selected National Socialist believers, partly because prisoners began to resemble the stereotypical image of convicts, with shaved heads and striped uniforms (see below). SS revulsion against prisoners became so intense, Rudolf Höss wrote, it was “unimaginable for outsiders.”
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Not every slap or kick was prompted by burning hatred, however. SS men found many
practical reasons for assaults, to punish infractions or to maintain discipline. And sometimes, they simply assaulted prisoners out of sheer boredom, to liven up their dull days.
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Whatever the motive, however, all attacks grew out of a deep disdain for the victims.

To make his men even harder, as Theodor Eicke put it, they were ordered to attend official prisoner floggings. The first time,
Rudolf Höss recalled, he was shocked by the screams, but he got used to it, just like his comrades, some of whom appeared to enjoy the suffering of their “enemies.”
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Professional Camp SS men were more than passive observers, of course. A few of them received specialist training in torture methods.
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But most men learned on the job, copying the behavior of more experienced colleagues and superiors.
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They could deaden any remaining scruples with alcohol, which fueled violent excesses; some men got so drunk they hurt themselves as they stumbled around the camp.
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Violence not only united Camp SS hard-liners, it propelled their careers. In a community based on the veneration of the political soldier, brutality brought valuable social capital. Ambitious SS men knew that a reputation for ruthlessness
would impress superiors and boost their prospects. This was one reason why block leaders attacked prisoners and volunteered to carry out floggings. Senior officials, meanwhile, did not want to be outdone by their men. “I could not ask block leaders to do more than I was willing to do myself,” the former Sachsenhausen report leader testified after the war. “That is why I personally punched
and kicked.” To maintain their status, Camp SS men had to reaffirm their brutality, over and over again. Unlike prisoners, who were desperate to lie low—a common motto was “don’t be conspicuous”—committed SS men were eager to stand out, impressing their SS audience with theatrical displays of cruelty; the ensuing competition ratcheted up the spiral of terror.
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In sum, the SS perpetrators did
not simply commit violence for its own sake.
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Rather, their actions were driven by an explosive mix of ideological and situational factors.

Camp SS men who failed the test of violence were marginalized and mocked. Just as Eicke had demanded, they were shamed as weak and effeminate. This created significant group pressure on individual men to “toughen up.” Rudolf Höss, for one, was terrified
of ridicule. “I wanted to become notorious for being hard,” he wrote, “so that I would not be considered soft.” Those written off as failures were sidelined into office jobs, punished, or dismissed—“for the Death’s Head strikes its wearer,” Eicke wrote in his inimitable style, “if ever he deviates from our prescribed course.” Eicke’s drive to remove “soft” men claimed several prominent casualties,
none more so than the commandant of the largest SS concentration camp.
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The Dachau School

When Heinrich Himmler cast around for a permanent new Dachau commandant to replace Theodor Eicke, he turned to one of his oldest followers. Born in 1890, Heinrich Deubel had returned from Allied captivity in the First World War as a decorated lieutenant and settled into a steady job as a customs official.
His real passion, however, was for far-right politics. He joined the fledgling SS in 1926 as member number 186, rising fast through its ranks. By 1934, Oberführer Deubel was commanding a regiment of Austrian SS men, stationed on the same grounds as the Dachau camp. As an army veteran and passionate SS officer, with a violent temper to boot, Deubel seemed as good a choice as any to succeed Eicke
and took over as Dachau commandant in December 1934.
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His appointment was rather typical of the haphazard personnel policy in the early phase of the KL, when so-called old Nazi fighters, some of whom had fallen on hard times, were rewarded with posts for their early dedication to the movement, often on the spur of the moment.
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But impeccable Nazi credentials were no guarantee of a successful
Camp SS career. Like several other Nazi veterans, Heinrich Deubel failed the expectations of his superiors. It quickly became clear that in terms of terror, he was anything but Eicke’s double. Dachau remained a brutal SS camp, to be sure, with thirteen known prisoner deaths in 1935. But these were still better days for most inmates. They faced less severe punishment, worked less hard, and mingled
more freely. Supported by his camp compound leader Karl D’Angelo (who had shown himself as a more moderate officer in the early camp Osthofen), Deubel championed new methods of prisoner reform, including lessons in math and foreign languages in a so-called camp school. He even suggested sending a Communist on a Nazi-sponsored cruise to win him over for the national community.

Significant as the
Deubel era was, as early evidence that the KL did not move inexorably from bad to worse, it was short-lived. Eicke soon attacked Deubel for compromising the flagship KL, and inside Dachau, too, hard-line guards complained about the “disgusting humane treatment” of inmates. In late March 1936, Eicke had enough and removed Deubel. As with other failed officers, the principle of SS comradeship dictated
that he would get another chance. But after Deubel spent a few unhappy months as commandant of the Columbia House, Eicke kicked him out as “completely unsuitable.” Soon after, Deubel found himself back in his old job in the customs office.
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His place in Dachau was taken by the forty-year-old Oberführer Hans Loritz, who would become a pivotal figure in the Camp SS. His background was remarkably
similar to Deubel’s. Here was another First World War veteran and former POW, whose humdrum life as a civil servant in the Weimar years had become secondary to his SS career (he had joined in 1930). In one crucial respect, however, Loritz was different. He had volunteered for the KL, professing a deep admiration for Eicke, and had already proven himself as uncompromising during his tenure as commandant
of Esterwegen.
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