KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (14 page)

At the beginning of the Third Reich, then, Germany was awash with rumors about the early camps. Not only were most Germans aware of their existence, they knew that the camps stood for brutal repression. Camps were held up as the ultimate sanction in private and public disputes, and
found their way into popular jokes, too:

“Sergeant,” anxiously said a warden in the concentration camp, “look at the prisoner in that bed. His spine is broken, his eyes are put out, and I think the damp has made him deaf. What shall we do with him?”

“Set him free! He is prepared to receive our Führer’s doctrine.”
256

Information about the abuses was not spread evenly across the nation, however.
There were differences among German regions—with far more early camps in urban than in rural areas—and between social groups. The best-informed Germans often came from the organized working class. After all, the vast majority of prisoners were Communist and Socialist activists, and their supporters—to say nothing of their wives, children, friends, and colleagues—were desperate to learn about their
fate. Moreover, left-wing workers were most likely to receive underground pamphlets and to hear from released prisoners, who tended to share their experiences within their traditional milieus. Finally, with so many early camps established in the middle of working-class areas, supporters of the Left often had direct insight into the daily violence.

Class was not all-decisive, of course. There
were middle-class professionals who knew all about the camps. Also, some reports by left-wing prisoners reached beyond the organized working class, sometimes circuitously. When the Dresden professor Victor Klemperer heard about the abuse of Erich Mühsam, for example, it was from a friend who had met up with exiled German Communists in Denmark.
257
On the whole, however, the middle classes—who largely
supported the Nazis by 1933—knew less about the reality of Nazi terror.
258
They were also more inclined to dismiss rumors about abuses as lies spread by enemies of the new state.
259
Still, Nazi followers were largely aware of the early camps’ dark side. So how did they react?

Nazi supporters from all classes and backgrounds hailed the regime’s crackdown on the Left. “You have to have order,”
one factory foreman told his son in spring 1933, regarding the arrests of left-wingers.
260
Many followers also welcomed harsh measures in the early camps; the Left’s danger justified brutal means, they believed, and “terrorists” deserved all the violence that came their way. Some even screamed abuse as prisoners were paraded through the streets. In Berlin, spectators egged on the brownshirts,
shouting things like: “Finally you’ve got the dogs, beat them to death, or send them to Moscow.” But support for attacks on left-wing organizations did not always translate into support for violent attacks on left-wing activists.
261
Looking back at the prewar years, Heinrich Himmler later admitted that the establishment of the camps had been greatly condemned by “circles outside the party.”
262
Himmler may have embellished for effect, but still, some Nazi sympathizers were clearly uncomfortable about reports of abuses. There were various reasons for their unease. Having been drawn to the Nazi movement for its promise to restore public order following the Weimar street fighting, some supporters worried about the growing lawlessness of the early camps.
263
Others were more concerned with
Germany’s image abroad, as news about atrocities quickly spread across the border, where the early camps became a byword for the inhumanity of Hitler’s new Germany.
264

The View from Abroad

“
If they could, they would take us to a concentration camp,” the satirist Kurt Tucholsky wrote from the safety of Switzerland about Nazi supporters, in a despairing letter on April 20, 1933, the day Germany
celebrated Hitler’s birthday. “The reports [about the camps] are horrible, by the way,” Tucholsky added.
265
German émigrés like Tucholsky learned about the Nazi camps from contacts inside the country and from the exile press. In France, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere, German-language publications sprang up. Following the arrest of its editor Carl von Ossietzky, for example, the influential
Weltbühne
was relaunched from Prague, featuring the first of many articles on the camps in September 1933. Exile papers and magazines focused on the most notorious camps, like Dachau, Börgermoor, Oranienburg, and Sonnenburg, which was also featured in a poem by Bertolt Brecht, another famous exile. Meanwhile, German left-wing parties in exile sponsored editions of eyewitness reports, like the Communist
Brown Book (
Braunbuch
) on Nazi terror. Printed in August 1933 in Paris and widely translated afterward, this bestselling book of anti-Nazi propaganda called the camps’ creation the “worst act of despotism by the Hitler government” and included more than thirty pages on crimes inside.
266

Some of these exile publications were smuggled into the Third Reich. In exceptional cases, they even found
their way into early camps, boosting prisoner morale. But on the whole, their circulation was too small to make much of an impact in Germany.
267
More important was public opinion abroad, with some reports quickly picked up by foreign papers and politicians. On October 13, 1933, barely a week after a German-language paper in the Saarland (under League of Nations mandate until 1935) had printed
an article by a former Börgermoor prisoner, the
Manchester Guardian
ran the same story, reporting that Friedrich Ebert had been “struck with rifle butts until his face was covered with blood” and Ernst Heilmann had been “so badly beaten that he was prostrate for several days.”
268
The most vocal former prisoner was Gerhart Seger, who lectured, published, and lobbied in Europe and North America
in a campaign to draw attention to the Nazi camps.
269

In 1933, hundreds of articles about the camps appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. Many of these articles did not originate with German exiles, but came from foreign reporters in Germany; in 1933/34,
The New York Times
alone printed dozens of detailed stories by U.S. journalists. Other foreign papers did the same. As early
as April 7, 1933, the
Chicago Daily Tribune
featured an article about a Württemberg camp, with its correspondent describing the “shocking” appearance of the prisoners. Foreign journalists sometimes drew on secret contacts with the German resistance. In this way, a reporter of a Dutch newspaper obtained a sensational letter by Oranienburg prisoners about their torture.
270

Foreign press reports
highlighted the suffering of prominent prisoners, often as part of international campaigns backed by leading public figures. In November 1933, for instance, the British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald made an official inquiry about the fate of Hans Litten. Such pressure benefited some prisoners—despite the Nazi fury about outside meddling—though not Litten. In reply to MacDonald’s intervention, the
Prussian Gestapa refused to answer any questions about him, while the German foreign office concluded that “provocative” foreign campaigns had to be refuted as part of a wider German PR offensive to improve the camps’ image abroad.
271

The Nazi regime, which closely monitored foreign opinion, was acutely sensitive about critical reports. As articles about abuses inside early camps mounted up,
paranoid Nazi leaders suspected an international conspiracy by Jews and Bolsheviks, and drew comparisons to the Allied “atrocity propaganda” of World War I. As a popular Nazi tract explained at the time, the camps were used to defame Nazi Germany in the same way alleged crimes during the invasion of Belgium had been used to slander the German Empire in 1914. “Like in the war!” Propaganda Minister
Joseph Goebbels fumed in his diary.
272

Why were Nazi officials so thin-skinned? They were obviously concerned about critical reports filtering back to the Third Reich (where foreign papers remained on sale), adding more grist to the fast-spinning rumor mill.
273
Even more pressing was their concern about Germany’s standing abroad. In 1933, its position was still weak, and Hitler had to tread carefully
on the international stage to make other leaders believe his guise as a man of peace—a difficult enough feat even without the stream of reports about atrocities in Nazi camps.
274

In order to silence criticism abroad, German state officials held press conferences for foreign correspondents and staged visits to selected camps, which were meticulously prepared in advance.
275
This was a high-risk
strategy, though, as Nazi officials realized themselves.
276
Several visitors were not tricked and some crude propaganda backfired. When Dr. Ludwig Levy, a former Oranienburg prisoner, used a reader’s letter from Germany to refute a detailed eyewitness account in the London
Times
of September 19, 1933—which had named him as an SA torture victim—and praised the “thoroughly good and even respectful”
treatment he had received, the author of the original article replied in a letter of his own, offering yet more detail about the abuses:

Dr. Levy lived in the same room as myself at Oranienburg … I saw Dr. Levy with his left eye black and swollen and blood running from it. About a fortnight later his right eye was in the same condition. On both occasions he was fresh from an interview with the
camp “leaders.” I also saw him kicked and knocked about by the guards, like the rest of us, many times.

I do not blame Dr. Levy for making the statement which you have published, as I am well aware of the kind of pressure to which he, still living in Potsdam [outside Berlin], must be exposed.
277

The Nazi PR campaign also scored some successes, however, especially when it played upon fears of
Communism. Some foreign news editors published positive stories, or became wary about running negative ones.
278
Several diplomats were duped, too, among them the British vice-consul in Dresden. In an enthusiastic report on his October 1933 visit to Hohnstein in Saxony—one of the worst early camps, with at least eight prisoner deaths—the vice-consul praised it as “a model from all points of view,”
with “exemplary” SA guards and prisoners who made a “distinctly satisfied impression.”
279

Nazi propaganda tried to persuade a skeptical foreign audience that the camps were orderly and benevolent institutions, which turned terrorists into worthy citizens.
280
This message was summed up in an extraordinary radio report recorded on September 30, 1933, inside Oranienburg, for broadcast on Germany’s
international station. During the lengthy report, which aimed to refute “lies and atrocity stories” abroad, a reporter strolled through the grounds, the dining hall, and the sleeping quarters, accompanied by Commandant Schäfer, who extolled his decent treatment of left-wing criminals and the exemplary discipline created by his SA men. The broadcast even featured interviews with prisoners, including
the following exchange:

[REPORTER]:
The fellow German standing before me, this incited Communist, doesn’t know me and I don’t know him, he has not been coached for this but has just been called over to us … You don’t have to worry, you will not be punished even if you tell me that you are dissatisfied. You need say nothing more than the truth.

[INMATE]:
Yessir.

[REPORTER]:
Tell us how you feel
about the food.

[INMATE]:
The food here is good and plentiful.

[REPORTER]:…
Has anything at all happened to you here?

[INMATE]:
Nothing has happened to me.
281

It is unclear if the report was actually broadcast and if anyone was fooled by its heavy-handed direction. Still, the regime persisted with its narrative of the good camps—not just abroad, but also at home in Germany.

Nazi Propaganda

The Oranienburg camp was less than a week old when local Nazi leaders felt compelled to jump to its defense. The resulting article, published in a local paper on March 28, 1933, included many ingredients that would define the domestic image of the Nazi camps, as authorized for public consumption by the regime. The central message of this article, and many others like it, was that prisoners enjoyed
“decent, humane treatment.” Sanitary conditions were said to be more than adequate, labor was “neither degrading nor exhausting,” and food was ample, with prisoners eating from the same pots as SA guards. The prisoners’ military exercises were salutary, no harder than those performed by the guards themselves, and were followed by games in the yard. Then, at the end of the day, prisoners could
relax, “lazing comfortably in the sunshine” with cigarettes in hand. Turning to the function of Oranienburg, not only did the camp protect the general public from political enemies, it safeguarded the very same enemies from the fury of the people.
282
This, then, was the alternative reality of the early camps: orderly institutions staffed by selfless guards who treated the captured men (women were
rarely mentioned, presumably because their detention was thought unpopular) strictly but fairly, in healthy surroundings and with plenty of leisure time. “They can’t complain,” ran a typical headline.
283

This fairy-tale image of the early camps was disseminated in various ways across the Third Reich. Nazi officials praised the camps in public speeches and authorized newsreels shot in camps.
284
But the main medium was the press, including articles with staged photos of prisoners working, exercising, and relaxing.
285
In addition to the template set by the March 1933 article on Oranienburg, such reports typically included one additional feature. They depicted the early camps as places of reform and reeducation, above all through productive labor.
286
Only occasionally did articles acknowledge
that certain prisoners were thought to be beyond redemption. “The owner of this or that semi-animal face cannot be anything other than an incorrigible Bolshevist,” a regional paper said about Oranienburg in August 1933, concluding that “no instruction can help in these cases”—a hint at the possible long-term future for the camps.
287