KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (6 page)

Within a few months of Hitler’s appointment, the Nazi movement had been swept to almost total control, riding a wave of terror which engulfed, above all, the different parts of the organized working class. The Nazis smashed their movements, ransacked their offices, and humiliated, locked up, and tortured their activists. In recent years, some historians have downplayed the significance
of this prewar Nazi terror. Caricaturing the Third Reich as a “feel-good dictatorship,” they suggest that the regime’s popularity made a major onslaught against its political enemies largely superfluous.
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But popular support for the regime, important as it was, only ever went so far, and terror was indispensable for silencing the millions who had so far proved resistant to the lure of Nazism.
So-called racial and social outsiders were targeted, too, but early repression was directed, first and foremost, at political opponents, and here above all at those standing on the left. It was the primacy of political terror that set the Nazis on the road to absolute rule.

Terror Against the Left

The promise of national rebirth, creating a new Germany out of the ashes of the Weimar Republic,
lay at the heart of the popular appeal of Nazism in the early 1930s. But the Nazi dream of a golden future was always also a dream of destruction. Long before they came to power, Nazi leaders had envisaged a ruthless policy of exclusion; by removing all that was alien and dangerous, they would create a homogenous national community ready for battle in the coming racial war.
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This dream of national
unity through terror grew out of the lessons Nazi leaders had drawn from the German trauma of 1918. The importance for Nazi ideology of defeat in the First World War cannot be overstated. Unwilling to face the reality of Germany’s humiliating defeat on the battlefield, Nazi leaders, like many other German nationalists, convinced themselves that the country had been brought to its knees by defeatism
and deviance on the home front, culminating in the supposed “stab in the back” of the German army by the revolution. The solution, Hitler believed, was the radical repression of all internal enemies.
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In a private speech in 1926, a time when the Nazi movement was still consigned to the extreme fringes of German politics, he promised to annihilate the Left. There could be no peace and quiet until
“the last Marxist is converted or exterminated.”
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Extreme political violence had blighted Weimar from the start, and when the Nazi movement grew in strength in the early 1930s, bloody confrontations began to scar the country on an almost daily basis, nowhere more so than in the capital, Berlin. The paramilitary armies of the Nazis—with their huge storm division (SA) and the much smaller protection
squad (SS)—were on the offensive, disrupting rival political meetings, assaulting opponents, and smashing their taverns.
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Crucially, the Nazi movement gained political capital from these clashes with Communists and Social Democrats, reinforcing its image among nationalist supporters as the most dedicated opponent of the much-hated Left.
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Following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January
30, 1933, many Nazi activists were itching to settle accounts with their enemies. But their leaders were still treading cautiously during the first few weeks, mindful about going too far too soon. Then, on the evening of February 27, a devastating fire ravaged the Reichstag in Berlin. As Nazi chiefs started to gather at the scene, they immediately pointed the finger at the Communists (the real
culprit was a Dutch loner, perhaps aided by a covert team of SA arsonists). Adolf Hitler himself arrived in his limousine at around 10:00 p.m., wearing a dark suit and a raincoat. After he had stared for some time at the blazing building, he flew into one of his hysterical rages. Blinded by deep-seated paranoia of the Left (and apparently ignorant about the possible involvement of some of his own
men), he denounced the fire as the signal for a long-expected Communist revolt and ordered an immediate crackdown. According to one witness, he screamed: “There will be no mercy now. Anyone who stands in our way will be cut down.”
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In Prussia, the ensuing arrests were centrally coordinated by the political police, using older lists of alleged left-wing extremists that had been revised in recent
weeks, in line with Nazi ideology.
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The Berlin police immediately swung into action, the German capital still bathed in darkness. Among the victims detained over the following hours were leading Communist politicians and other prominent suspects. One of them was Erich Mühsam, a writer, anarchist, and bohemian, who had become a bête noire for the German Right because of his involvement in the
Munich uprising of 1919, for which he had been jailed for several years. Mühsam was still asleep when a police car arrived at 5:00 a.m. on February 28 at his flat on the outskirts of Berlin. Earlier that same night, in other parts of Berlin, the police had arrested Carl von Ossietzky, the famous pacifist publicist, and Hans Litten, a brilliant young left-wing attorney who had tangled Hitler in knots
during a court appearance in 1931. Within hours, the police prison at Alexanderplatz held much of the liberal and left elite of Berlin. The arrest sheets read like a Who’s Who of writers, artists, lawyers, and politicians despised by the Nazis. “Everyone knows everyone else,” one of them later recalled, “and every time someone new is dragged in by the police, there are greetings all around.” Some
were soon set free again. Others—including Litten, Mühsam, and Ossietzky—faced a terrible fate.
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Police raids across Germany continued for days after the Reichstag fire. “Mass arrests everywhere,” the daily Nazi newspaper
Völkischer Beobachter
announced on its front page on March 2, 1933, adding: “The fist hits hard!” By the time Germany went to the polls three days later, up to five thousand
men and women had been arrested.
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Dramatic as these events were, however, it soon became clear that they had just been the opening salvo in the Nazi war on political opponents.

The full capture of power began after the March 5, 1933 elections. In a few short months, Germany became an all-out dictatorship. The Nazis took control of all German states, every other political party disappeared, the
elected Reichstag effectively dissolved itself, and society was coordinated. Many Germans eagerly supported these changes. But terror was indispensable for the swift establishment of the regime, stunning the opposition into silence and submission. The police stepped up its raids and although the spotlight remained on Communists, it widened to other sections of the organized working class, especially
after the destruction of trade unions in May and the SPD in June 1933. In the last week of June alone, more than three thousand Social Democrats were arrested, among them many senior functionaries. Some conservative and nationalist leaders found themselves in custody, too.

Important as police persecution was, terror in spring and summer 1933 rested above all in the brawny hands of Nazi paramilitaries,
chiefly the hundreds of thousands of SA brownshirts. Some of these men had already committed murderous attacks in the first weeks of Hitler’s rule, not least during the night of the Reichstag fire, when brownshirts had conducted their own search for political opponents (using SA arrest lists). But most had been held back by their superiors, who wanted to make a show of taking power legally.
Only after the March 1933 elections had given Nazi leaders a flimsy mandate, returning a small majority for the NSDAP and its national-conservative partners, did they finally release the paramilitaries. Determined to create the new Germany by force, SA and SS men now left a trail of destruction. Heavily armed, they occupied and trashed town halls, publishing houses, and party and union offices,
and hunted down political and personal enemies. The grim climax on the streets of Germany came in late June 1933, when Berlin brownshirts raided the left-wing bastion of Köpenick. During five bloody days, they murdered dozens of Nazi opponents and badly injured hundreds more; the youngest victim, a fifteen-year-old Communist, was left permanently brain damaged.
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Although much of the early terror
was driven from below, local Nazi militants acted in tune with their leaders, who openly incited violence against the opposition. Just before the March 1933 elections, Hermann Göring, one of Hitler’s top lieutenants, announced that he did not care about legal niceties, only about “destroying and exterminating” Communists. During a mass rally in mid-March, the new Württemberg state president Wilhelm
Murr, an old Nazi veteran, went even further: “We don’t say: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. No, if someone knocks out one of our eyes, we will chop off his head, and if someone knocks out one of our teeth, we will smash in his jaw.”
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The violence that followed offers an early sign of the dangerous dynamic that would come to define the Third Reich: Nazi leaders set the direction of policy,
and their followers bettered one another with ever more radical attempts to realize it.
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Another legacy of early Nazi terror was the rapid blurring between state and party. With Nazi activists pouring into the police force at all levels, it was impossible, as early as spring 1933, to draw a clear line between police repression and paramilitary violence. On January 30, 1933, for example, Hermann
Göring had become acting head of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior (from April 1933 he also served as minister president), which brought the Prussian police force under his control. Not only did Göring instigate the subsequent police assault on Nazi opponents, on February 22 he opened the door for SA and SS men to “relieve the regular police” in its fight against the Left. Nazi thugs were
delighted. As auxiliary policemen, they could now settle scores with their political enemies without worrying about interference from the police; they had become the police.
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As for established police officers, most were broadly sympathetic to the political aims of Nazism and needed no persuading of the dangers of Communism. The German police embraced the regime with little hesitation; no large-scale
purge was necessary to turn it into a repressive machine for the Third Reich.
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In mid-March 1933, on the occasion of his appointment as acting Munich police chief, SS leader Heinrich Himmler, another senior Nazi official who seized a post in law enforcement, used a newspaper article to praise the excellent collaboration between police and party. Many enemies had already been arrested, he added,
after SA and SS men had led the police to the “hideouts of Marxist organizations.”
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Mass Detention

Vast numbers of opponents were rounded up during the Nazi capture of power. In all, up to two hundred thousand political prisoners were detained at one time or another in 1933.
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Almost all were German nationals, with Communists in the great majority, especially during the early months of Nazi
rule. Some of the prisoners—like KPD leader Ernst Thälmann, caught together with close aides in hiding on March 3, 1933—were known across Germany, but most were minor functionaries and ordinary activists; even members of Communist-affiliated sports clubs and choirs were treated like terrorists. Those who now found themselves in Nazi hands were overwhelmingly young working-class men—the demographic
that formed the backbone of the Communist movement.
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Compared to the captured men, the number of female prisoners was vanishingly small. Again, most were Communists, often prominent party activists or wives of senior functionaries detained as hostages to blackmail their husbands.
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One of the imprisoned women was the twenty-four-year-old Centa Beimler, a Communist supporter since her teens,
who was surprised in hiding by the Munich police in the early hours of April 21, 1933, ten days after the arrest of her husband, Hans. Just one day earlier, she had told him in a secret message that she wished she could take his place. Now they were both prisoners.
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Nazi detention in 1933 was unpredictable and confusing. Thousands of police prisoners were handed over as law breakers to the regular
legal system, which played a major part in repression in the Third Reich. German judges and prosecutors, like most other civil servants, largely backed the regime. They wielded old and new laws against Nazi opponents, rapidly filling the judicial state prisons.
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But most arrested opponents did not end up in court, at least not in 1933, because they were not detained for illegal acts, but for
who they were—suspected enemies of the new order.

In their reliance on mass arrests beyond the law, Nazi rulers followed other revolutionaries: they wanted to destroy their enemies before they might strike back. This called for radical action, abandoning legal principles and paperwork. Years later, SS leader Heinrich Himmler boasted that the Nazis had destroyed the “Jewish-Communist asocial organization”
in 1933 by pulling people off the streets “completely illegally.”
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In fact, most suspects had formally been taken into the euphemistically named protective custody (
Schutzhaft
), a form of indefinite detention loosely resting on the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State. This decree, passed by Hitler’s cabinet on February 28, 1933, in response to the Reichstag fire,
had suspended basic civil liberties. It became, in the words of the émigré German political scientist Ernst Fraenkel, something like the “constitutional charter of the Third Reich,” justifying all manner of abuses of power—including the denial of personal freedom without judicial oversight or appeal. True, the use of extralegal detention was not entirely new in modern Germany and the decree borrowed
from earlier Weimar emergency legislation. But it went much further: the Nazi practice of lawless detention was unprecedented both in its severity and scope.
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