KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (5 page)

Structure

The main constant of the KL was change. True, there were continuities from one period to the next. But the camps took an unsteady route, with many twists and turns during little more than a decade. Only a largely chronological narrative can capture their fluidity. This study opens, therefore, with an account of the prewar origins (chapter 1), formation
(chapter 2), and expansion (chapter 3) of the KL system between 1933 and 1939. The picture of this first half of the camps’ existence—when most inmates were released after a period of suffering—is often overshadowed by the later wartime scenes of death and devastation.
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But it is essential to examine what “preceded the unprecedented,” as the historian Jane Caplan has put it.
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Not only did
the prewar camps leave a baleful legacy for lawless terror during the war. Their history is important in its own right, as it throws fresh light on the development of Nazi repression and the paths that were left untaken.
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The Second World War had a dramatic impact on the KL system and forms the backdrop for the remaining chapters of the book, beginning with its descent into mass death (chapter
4) and executions (chapter 5) during the first phase of the war, between the German attack on Poland in autumn 1939 and the failure of the blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union in late 1941. The book then turns to the Holocaust, examining the transformation of Auschwitz into a major death camp (chapter 6), and the daily lives of prisoners and SS staff in occupied eastern Europe (chapter 7). The
following chapter covers the same period from a different perspective, exploring the wider development of the KL system in 1942–43, especially its growing emphasis on slave labor (chapter 8). This theme dominates the next chapter, too, which charts the rapid spread of satellite camps in 1943–44 and the exploitation of hundreds of thousands of prisoners for the German war effort (chapter 9). The study
then turns to prisoner communities during the war and the often impossible choices inmates faced (chapter 10), before concluding with the destruction of the Third Reich and its camps in 1944–45, in a final paroxysm of violence (chapter 11).

This broadly chronological approach will highlight a fundamental feature of the Nazi regime. Although the Third Reich was propelled by what Hans Mommsen called
a “cumulative radicalization,” with terror escalating over time, this process was by no means linear.
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The KL system did not swell like an avalanche, gathering ever more destructive force as it hurtled toward the abyss; its trajectory sometimes slowed and even reversed. Conditions did not always go from bad to worse; occasionally they improved, both before and during the war, only to deteriorate
again later on. A close analysis of this development will give new insights into the history of the camps, and indeed of the Nazi regime as a whole. Terror stood at the center of the Third Reich, and no other institution embodied Nazi terror more fully than the KL.

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Early Camps

“So you want to hang yourself?” SS Private Steinbrenner asked as he entered Hans Beimler’s cell in Dachau on the afternoon of May 8, 1933. The tall Steinbrenner looked down on the haggard prisoner in his filthy brown jacket and short trousers, whom he had tortured for days in the camp’s lockup, the so-called bunker. “Well, watch closely so that you learn how to do it!” Steinbrenner
ripped a long piece of fabric from a blanket and tied a noose at the end. “Now all you have to do,” he added in the tone of a helpful friend, “is to put your head through, fix the other end to the window, and everything is ready. It is all over in two minutes.” Hans Beimler, his body covered in welts and wounds, had withstood earlier SS attempts to drive him to suicide. But he knew that time
was running out. Only an hour or two earlier, Private Steinbrenner and the Dachau SS commandant had shown him into another cell, where he found the naked corpse of Fritz Dressel, a fellow Communist politician, stretched out on the stone floor. Over the previous days, Dressel’s screams had echoed through the Dachau bunker and Beimler assumed that his old friend, unable to bear more abuse, had cut
his wrists and bled to death (in fact, SS men probably murdered Dressel). Still in shock, Beimler was dragged back to his own cell, where the commandant told him: “So! Now you know how to do it.” Then he issued an ultimatum: if Beimler did not kill himself, the SS would come for him the next morning. He was given little more than twelve hours to live.
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Beimler was among tens of thousands of Nazi
opponents dragged to makeshift camps like Dachau in spring 1933, as the new regime, following Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30, rapidly turned Germany from a failed democracy into a fascist dictatorship. The early hunt for enemies of the regime focused above all on leading critics and prominent politicians, and for the authorities in Bavaria, the largest German state after
Prussia, few prizes were bigger than the thirty-seven-year-old Beimler from Munich, who was regarded as an extremely dangerous Bolshevik. When he was arrested on April 11, 1933, after several weeks on the run with his wife, Centa, local officers at the Munich police headquarters were jubilant: “We’ve got Beimler, we’ve got Beimler!”
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A veteran of the imperial navy mutiny of autumn 1918, which
brought down the German Empire at the end of World War I and ushered in the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first experiment in democracy, Hans Beimler had fought single-mindedly against the republic and for a Communist state ever since. In spring 1919, he had served as a “Red Guard” during a doomed Soviet-style uprising in Bavaria. After the brittle German democracy had weathered the initial assaults
from the far left and right, the trained mechanic became a fanatical follower of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The rough and gruff Beimler lived for the cause, throwing himself into battles with police and opponents (like Nazi storm troopers), and rose steadily through the ranks. In July 1932, he reached the pinnacle of his party career: he was elected as a KPD deputy to the Reichstag, the
German parliament.
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On February 12, 1933, during one of the final Communist mass gatherings before the national election of March 5, 1933 (the first and last multiparty elections under Hitler), Hans Beimler gave a speech in the Munich Circus Krone. To rouse his supporters, he invoked a rare victory from the 1919 civil war, when Bavarian “Red Guards,” Beimler among them, had briefly crushed government
forces near Dachau. He ended his speech with a prophetic rallying cry: “We’ll meet again at Dachau!”
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Just ten weeks later, on April 25, 1933, Beimler did indeed find himself on the way to Dachau, though not as a revolutionary leader, as he had predicted, but as a prisoner of the SS. The brutal twist was not lost on him or his gleeful captors. A group of SS men was already waiting in giddy anticipation
as the truck carrying Beimler and others pulled up in Dachau that day. The mood among the screaming guards was “electric,” Private Steinbrenner later recalled. They jumped on the prisoners and quickly pulled Beimler out for his first beating, together with a few more denounced as “swine and traitors” by the commandant. Forced to wear a large sign saying “Welcome” around his neck, Beimler
was marched toward the bunker, which had been set up in the former toilets of the old factory building now used as a camp. On the way, Steinbrenner hit Beimler so hard with his horsewhip that even prisoners far away could count each blow.
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Among the Dachau SS, wild rumors spread about Beimler, their new trophy prisoner. The commandant falsely claimed that Beimler had been behind the execution
of ten hostages, including a Bavarian countess, by a “Red Guard” detachment in a Munich school back in spring 1919. This massacre—overshadowed by the subsequent slaughter of hundreds of leftist revolutionaries by far-right paramilitary units, the Freikorps, which crushed the ill-fated Munich Soviet—had fired the imagination of right-wing extremists ever since. Passing around graphic photographs of
the murdered hostages, the Dachau commandant told his men that, fourteen years later, they would exact revenge. At first, he wanted to kill Beimler himself, but he later decided that it would be more discreet to drive his victim to suicide. On May 8, however, after Beimler had held out for several days, the commandant had had enough; either Beimler used the noose or he would be murdered.
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But
Hans Beimler survived Dachau, escaping certain death just hours before the SS ultimatum expired. With the help of two rogue SS men, apparently, he squeezed through the small window high up in his cell, passed the barbed wire and electric fence around the camp, and disappeared into the night.
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After Private Steinbrenner unlocked Beimler’s cell early the next morning, on May 9, 1933, and found it
empty, the SS went wild. Sirens sounded across the grounds as all available SS men turned the camp upside down. Steinbrenner battered two Communist inmates who had spent the night in the cells adjacent to Beimler, shouting: “Just you wait, you wretched dogs, you’ll tell me [where Beimler is].” One of them was executed soon after.
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Outside, a huge manhunt got under way. Planes circled near the
camp, “Wanted” posters went up at railway stations, police raids hit Munich, and the newspapers, which had earlier crowed about Beimler’s arrest, announced a reward for recapturing the “famous Communist leader,” who was described as clean-shaven, with short-cropped hair and unusually large jug ears.
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Despite all their efforts, Beimler evaded his hunters. After recuperating in a safe house in
Munich, he was spirited away in June 1933 by the Communist underground to Berlin and then, in the following month, escaped over the border to Czechoslovakia, from where he sent a postcard to Dachau telling the SS men to “kiss my ass.” Beimler moved on to the Soviet Union, where he penned a dramatic account, one of the earliest of a fast-growing number of eyewitness reports about Nazi camps like Dachau.
First published in German by a Soviet press in mid-August 1933, his pamphlet was soon serialized in a Swiss newspaper, printed in English translation in London, and secretly circulated inside Germany. Beimler also wrote articles in other foreign papers and spoke on Soviet radio. Furious Nazi officials, meanwhile, denounced him as “one of the worst peddlers of horror stories.” Not only had Beimler
escaped his punishment, he publicly humiliated his former torturers by telling the truth about Dachau. The decision by the Nazi authorities in late autumn 1933 to strip Beimler of his German citizenship was no more than an empty gesture. After all, Beimler had no intention of ever returning to the Third Reich.
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Hans Beimler’s story is extraordinary. Few prisoners in the early Nazi
camps were targeted as mercilessly as he was; in 1933, attempted murder was still the exception. Even more exceptional was his escape; for many years, he would remain the only prisoner to successfully flee from Dachau, as the SS immediately strengthened its security installations.
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Still, Beimler’s story touches on many key aspects of the early camps: the violence of guards driven by a hatred
of Communists; the torture of selected prisoners, partly to intimidate the great mass of other inmates; the reluctance of the camp authorities, who were liable to judicial oversight, to commit open murders, preferring instead to drive selected prisoners to their deaths or to dress up murders as suicides; the high levels of improvisation, evident in the SS use of the broken-down Dachau factory; and
the prominent place of the camps in the public sphere, with press reports, underground publications, and more. All these elements shaped the early camps that emerged in the nascent Third Reich in 1933.

A BLOODY SPRING AND SUMMER

In the early afternoon of January 30, 1937, on the anniversary of his appointment as chancellor, Adolf Hitler addressed Nazi grandees in the defunct Reichstag, taking
stock of his first four years in power. In a typically rambling speech, Hitler evoked a gloriously resurgent Germany: the Nazis had saved the country from political disaster, rescued its economy from ruin, unified society, cleansed culture, and restored the nation’s might by throwing off the shackles of the despised Versailles treaty. Most remarkable of all, Hitler claimed, was that all this had
been achieved peacefully. The Nazis had captured power back in 1933 “almost entirely without bloodshed.” To be sure, a few deluded opponents and Bolshevik criminals had been detained or struck down. But overall, Hitler boasted, he had overseen a completely new kind of uprising: “This was perhaps the first revolution during which not even one window was smashed.”
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It must have been hard for Nazi
bigwigs to keep a straight face as they listened to Hitler. All of them remembered well the terror of 1933, and in private they continued to revel in the memory of the violence they had unleashed against their opponents.
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However, fully entrenched as the regime now was, some self-satisfied Nazi leaders might have been keen to forget just how precarious their position had been just a few years
earlier. By the early 1930s, the Weimar Republic had been in terminal decline, pulled apart by a catastrophic depression, political deadlock, and social unrest. But it was not yet clear what would replace the republic. Even though the Nazi Party (NSDAP) established itself as the most popular political alternative, most Germans did not yet support Nazi rule. Indeed, even though they were deeply hostile
to each other, the two main parties of the Left—the radical Communists (KPD) and the moderate Social Democrats (SPD)—gained more combined votes in the last free elections of November 1932 than did the Nazis. It took the machinations of a small cabal of antirepublican power brokers to install Hitler as chancellor on January 30, 1933, as one of only three Nazis in a cabinet dominated by national
conservatives.
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