KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (7 page)

During the first wave of terror in March and April 1933, an estimated forty to fifty thousand opponents were temporarily taken into protective custody, mostly by the police, SA, and SS. The next wave in summer caught further victims, and
despite frequent releases, there were officially almost twenty-seven thousand protective custody prisoners on July 31, 1933, falling only slowly to around twenty-two thousand by the end of October.
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The Nazi press occasionally claimed that this form of detention was well organized. In reality, there was a bewildering array of local rules and practices, with protective custody amounting to little
more than kidnapping with a bureaucratic veneer.
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Many Nazi activists dispensed even with this formal façade and grabbed opponents without any official authorization. Senior civil servants, municipal officials, Nazi leaders, local party bruisers, and many more claimed the right to lock up anyone they deemed an opponent of the new order. The escalating terror from below and the accompanying chaos
were summed up by an exasperated SA Gruppenführer in early July 1933: “Everyone is arresting everybody, bypassing the prescribed official procedure, everyone threatens everybody with protective custody, everybody threatens everybody with Dachau.”
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The result was a free-for-all, as more and more state and party officials exploited the opportunities for virtually unrestrained terror.

But what
to do with all the prisoners? Despite all their talk during the Weimar years about crushing their enemies, Nazi leaders had given precious little thought to the practicalities. Once Nazi terror was unleashed in spring 1933, officials across Germany frantically searched for places to hold the victims of lawless arrests. Over the coming months, many hundreds of new sites were set up, which collectively
can be called early camps.
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The landscape of early Nazi camps created in spring and summer 1933 could not have been more varied. The sites were run by different local, regional, and state authorities, and came in all shapes and sizes. A handful would operate for years, but most closed after just a few weeks or months. Conditions varied enormously, too, ranging from harmless to life-threatening;
some prisoners suffered no cruelty, while others were continually violated. Several of the new sites were called concentration camps, but this term was still applied loosely, and many other names circulated, too—among them detention home, work service camp, and transit camp—reflecting the improvised nature of early Nazi terror.
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Despite their profound differences, though, the early camps shared
a common purpose: to break the opposition.

Many early camps were established inside existing workhouses and state prisons; in spring 1933, whole wings were cleared for protective custody prisoners.
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The authorities saw this as a pragmatic solution to a pressing problem. Tens of thousands of prisoners could be locked away quickly, cheaply, and securely, as most of the infrastructure, from buildings
to guards, was already in place.
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Workhouses were especially easy to convert, since they often stood half-empty anyway, having lost much of their purpose during the Weimar years. The large workhouse in Moringen near Göttingen, for example, had held fewer than a hundred beggars and paupers in 1932, and its director welcomed the arrival of protective custody prisoners, hoping that it would breathe
new life into his outdated institution; he was not to be disappointed.
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The situation was more complicated in state prisons, which were already crowded with regular remand prisoners and convicts. Still, to demonstrate their support for the new regime, the legal authorities agreed to temporarily open up large prisons and small county jails for extralegal detention. The cells in the new wings were
soon packed. By early April 1933, Bavarian prisons alone held over 4,500 inmates in protective custody, almost eclipsing the number of regular state prisoners held there.
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Protective custody prisoners were subject to strict order inside prisons and workhouses, as well as low-level harassment and a monotonous daily schedule. Worst of all was the uncertainty about their future and the fate of
their loved ones. By September 1933, Centa Beimler had already spent more than four months in the cold, gloomy cells of Stadelheim prison in Munich—one of the few state prisons with a wing for both men and women in protective custody—and there was no end in sight. What was more, she had not heard from her husband, Hans, since his spectacular escape from Dachau; a letter he sent from the USSR, full
of love and concern for her, would only reach her years later. Meanwhile, the police had arrested her mother and her sister for their Communist sympathies, and the welfare services had taken her young son to a borstal. Centa Beimler was not the only Stadelheim prisoner tormented by fears for her family. One of her Communist comrades, Magdalena Knödler, whose children were left all alone after the
arrest of her husband, hanged herself in despair.
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Despite the many hardships, most protective custody prisoners found life inside prisons and workhouses bearable. They were generally held apart from the rest of the inmate population, sometimes inside big community rooms. Single cells, meanwhile, were simple but not Spartan, typically comprising a bed, a table, a chair, a shelf, a washbowl,
and a bucket as toilet.
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Food and accommodation were mostly adequate, despite the overcrowding, and prisoners were not normally expected to work, passing their time by talking, reading, exercising, knitting, and playing games like chess. During his time in Berlin’s Spandau prison in summer 1933, Ludwig Bendix, a senior German-Jewish lawyer and moderate left-wing legal commentator, even managed
to draft a treatise on criminal law that was published a few months later in a respected German criminological journal.
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Most important, prisoners like Ludwig Bendix and Centa Beimler were mostly safe from assaults. Physical violence had long been banned from German prisons and workhouses, and the old guards were drilled to uphold this rule. This accounts for the “mild” and “peaceful” atmosphere
in Spandau, as Bendix put it a few years later, where guards had even showed some sympathy to him.
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In some other prisons and workhouses, inmates were in greater peril, following an influx of SA and SS guards. But while these men committed some assaults, as did police officers during interrogations, they were largely held in check by the regular staff.
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Also, the legal authorities insisted that
protective custody prisoners in their care would generally be treated like inmates on remand, barring the police and Nazi paramilitaries from exerting any major influence.
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The Nazi use of the term “protective custody” was supremely cynical. As one daring inmate of a small jail complained to the Prussian authorities in late March 1933, he was “touched” by all the “concern for my person,” but
did not need any “protection” because “no decent people are threatening me.”
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Still, protective custody in prisons and workhouses did save some detainees from excesses in more brutal early camps, at least for a while.
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This prompted Nazi extremists to complain that their enemies were being handled with kid gloves—rehashing an old right-wing myth about prisons as sanatoria—and to demand their
immediate transfer to so-called concentration camps, where much tougher treatment would be guaranteed.
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SA and SS Camps

On September 4, 1933, the life of Fritz Solmitz, a Social Democratic journalist and local councillor from Lübeck, took a terrible turn. At the time, Solmitz was one of around five hundred men in protective custody in Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel, the largest German prison complex,
with space for thousands of inmates. Since late March 1933, Fuhlsbüttel included a wing for police prisoners like Solmitz. It was initially controlled by restrained older prison officials, but the period of relative calm did not last. In early August 1933 the Hamburg Gauleiter (NSDAP district leader) Karl Kaufmann expressed his outrage at the lenient treatment of the prisoners and vowed to shake things
up. Just one month later, he oversaw the opening of Hamburg’s first central concentration camp, in another part of Fuhlsbüttel. The new camp, soon known as Kola-Fu (Konzentrationslager Fuhlsbüttel), was essentially the personal fiefdom of Kaufmann, who appointed a close confidant and Nazi veteran as commandant. Kaufmann and his men watched as Solmitz and the other protective custody prisoners
were marched out of their old quarters on the early morning of September 4 and lined up in the yard. After a menacing speech by one of the officials—who announced that the inmates would be taught that no one could disrupt Adolf Hitler’s Germany—came the first round of systematic violence, with the new guards, some thirty SS men, kicking and punching the prisoners.
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The Fuhlsbüttel guards singled
out Fritz Solmitz, who was Jewish, for special abuse from the start. After nine days, on September 13, 1933, they moved him from a large community cell into the cellar for solitary confinement, reserved for torturing supposedly recalcitrant prisoners. Solmitz was immediately surrounded by nine men who pounded him with whips, continuing even after he collapsed semiconscious on the floor. When
the guards finally let up, they were covered in the blood that poured from their victim’s head. After Solmitz regained his senses, he recorded his torment on small pieces of cigarette paper hidden inside his watch. He wrote another note on the evening of September 18, just after a group of SS men had left his cell, threatening him with more torture the next day: “A very long SS man steps on my toes
and yells: For me you’ll bend over. ‘Oi, say yes, you pig.’ Another: ‘Why don’t you hang yourself? Then you won’t get whipped!’ The seriousness of the threat is not to be doubted. God, what shall I do?” A few hours later, Solmitz was dead, most likely murdered by his torturers. He was one of at least ten prisoners who lost their lives in Kola-Fu in 1933, all the others being Communist activists.
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The death of Fritz Solmitz highlights, in the harshest light, the contrast between different kinds of early camps, in particular those dominated by civil servants and those dominated by Nazi paramilitaries. There were hundreds of early camps controlled by SA or SS men. Some were set up to ease overcrowding in state prisons, following calls by legal officials for police prisoners to be moved elsewhere.
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This suited Nazi hard-liners, as it gave them greater control over prisoners. Adolf Wagner, the new state commissar in charge of the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior—and a close confidant of Hitler—declared as early as March 13, 1933, that, when state prisons ran out of space, arrested enemies should instead be exposed to the elements in “abandoned ruins.”
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In fact, this was exactly what some
brownshirts were already doing.

During spring and summer 1933, early camps run by SA and SS men sprang up in the most unlikely locations. Nazi activists occupied whatever space they could, including run-down or vacant hotels, castles, sports grounds, and youth hostels.
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Even restaurants were converted, like the Schützenhaus in the town of Annaberg in Saxony; its landlord was the local SA Sturmbannführer,
who ran the new camp while his wife prepared the prisoners’ food.
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Most common was the use of so-called SA pubs, which often held just a handful of prisoners. For years, the life of local brownshirts had revolved around these pubs, which served as informal headquarters to meet, drink, and plan the next attacks. In the Weimar Republic, violence against Nazi enemies had spilled from these pubs
onto the streets. In spring 1933, terror flowed the other way, moving from the streets inside the pubs.
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“The number of Nazi torture dens is countless,” the Communist Theodor Balk wrote about Germany in the spring of 1933. “No village or city quarter is without such private martyring dens.”
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Although this was something of an overstatement, camps run by the brownshirts really did cover Germany.
Designed as weapons against the labor movement, most of these early camps were established in cities and industrial regions.
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The focal point was “Red Berlin.” During 1933, SA and SS troops ran more than 170 early camps in Berlin, clustered in districts known for their opposition to Nazism. In the working-class areas of Wedding and Kreuzberg, for example, where the two parties of the Left had
still gained an absolute majority in the tainted March election, no fewer than thirty-four early camps were set up in spring 1933 alone (by contrast, there was just one such camp in leafy Zehlendorf). Because of the density of the new terror network, it often took Nazi thugs just minutes to drag their victims into one of these camps, largely in SA pubs, private apartments, or so-called SA homes,
which had offered shelter for unemployed and homeless brownshirts in the final years of the Weimar Republic.
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