KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (16 page)

Hitler’s reckoning with Röhm had been a long time coming, though few would have predicted such a violent end. Over the previous months, many SA men had ignored Hitler’s call for calm. Inspired by their bullish leader Röhm, they had pushed
for a “second revolution” and an “SA state.” Such violent talk, combined with open acts of disorder and brutality, caused a major political headache for Hitler. Not only did the rowdy SA add to the growing popular dissatisfaction with the regime during the second year of Hitler’s rule, it alienated the German army. The generals felt threatened by Röhm’s military ambitions and his vast paramilitary
force, which had grown to well over four million men by mid-1934. What is more, Röhm had also made enemies among jealous Nazi leaders, who now conspired to eliminate their rival. Himmler and Heydrich, in particular, fed Hitler a diet of lies about a supposed SA coup.

In June 1934, after months of vacillation, Hitler finally made his move. Indeed, Hitler worked himself into such a rage about Röhm’s
“betrayal” that he acted ahead of the secret schedule. In the early hours of June 30, 1934, he headed straight for the SA leaders’ retreat in Bad Wiessee, with little backup, and had Röhm and others arrested. A few hours later, Hitler ordered the first executions, though he spared Röhm until the following day. Meanwhile, police and SS forces struck elsewhere in Germany, using lists of suspects
drawn up in preparation. The victims were not only SA men. The purge also provided a cover for silencing national-conservative critics of the regime and other alleged enemies or renegades. In the end, the so-called Night of the Long Knives—which actually lasted for three days—may have claimed some 150 to 200 lives.
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During this bloody purge, the Dachau SS proved itself as Hitler’s most energetic
executioner. Several days before, Eicke had held discussions with leading Dachau SS men, planning raids and arrests across Bavaria. Then, on June 29, the Camp SS was put on alert. Later that night Eicke told his men about an SA plot against Hitler, which had to be put down without mercy; Eicke was raging and is said to have smashed a photograph of Röhm. It was still dark when several hundred guards,
some armed with machine guns taken from the watchtowers, left the camp a few hours later on trucks and buses, led by Eicke. They eventually stopped a few miles outside Bad Wiessee to rendezvous with another SS unit, Hitler’s Leibstandarte. However, because Hitler had moved prematurely, the Dachau SS came too late and eventually had to follow Hitler’s convoy back to Munich. Here, Eicke met other
Nazi leaders in the Party HQ, the so-called Brown House, where a hysterical Hitler railed against the “worst treachery in world history” and promised that all SA rebels would be shot. At this point, Eicke probably received instructions for a state-sponsored massacre in Dachau, and soon after he returned to the camp, later on June 30, the murders began.
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One of the first victims, and by far the
most prominent, was the seventy-one-year-old Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who was dragged to Dachau after his arrest by SS men in Munich in the evening of June 30. The former monarchist Bavarian minister president was a hated figure on the far right ever since he had helped to put down Hitler’s feeble putsch back in November 1923.
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When the Dachau SS men recognized von Kahr, as he emerged from a black
police cabriolet, they almost lynched him. A baying mass of uniformed guards pulled the old man before Theodor Eicke, who had been sitting on a chair outside the commandant’s office, smoking one of his cigars. Like a Roman emperor, Eicke apparently raised his right thumb in the air and then pointed downward. The SS mob pushed von Kahr through a nearby iron gate into the new Dachau bunker. Soon
afterward, a shot rang out.
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The murders continued deep into the night, after cars brought more “traitors” from Munich to the camp. Like von Kahr, most of them died in or around the bunker, but at least two men were executed in the harsh glare of camp searchlights on the SS shooting range. The Dachau inmates, locked into the camp compound, heard the shots, followed by roars of SS men intoxicated
by bloodshed and alcohol; on the orders of Eicke, who was in triumphant mood, beer flowed freely in the SS canteen, with loud music playing.
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The macabre SS party was periodically interrupted by more shootings and beatings; some victims were tortured to death, their faces smashed and their bodies butchered.
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Not all the dead had arrived from outside the camp. In their frenzy, the Dachau SS executed
five long-term prisoners from the bunker, among them at least two German Jews. In contrast to the other killings—where Dachau SS men had followed superior orders, presumably relayed to Eicke by police and SD (Security Service) leaders—the SS men now acted as judge and executioner; to cover up their rogue action, Eicke and his men apparently told Himmler that the murdered inmates had declared
their solidarity with Röhm and incited prisoners to rise up. Word about the prisoner executions quickly reached other inmates of the camp, who were already agitated and now feared that the SS might come for them, too.
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After a long night of violence, Theodor Eicke appeared early on July 1, 1934, at the barbed wire of the Dachau camp compound. To quash the panic among prisoners, he informed them
about the purge and announced that Röhm would soon be hanged inside the camp.
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But when Eicke’s convoy returned from Stadelheim that evening—driving at top speed, with a loud siren—Röhm was already dead, shot by Eicke and Lippert. Eicke was still determined to put on a murderous performance in Dachau, however. He had brought with him four lower-ranking SA men, who were led to the canteen while
the camp was prepared for their execution. SS guards assembled outside the bunker, on the edge of the shooting range. Opposite, the regular prisoners were watching from behind the wire fence, on Eicke’s orders. Then the victims were led out, one by one, into the evening sun shining across the range. Eicke pronounced their death sentence and a commando of SS sentries took aim. After each salvo, the
crowd of SS guards, some still hungover from the night before, broke into wild screams and shouts of “Heil!”
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After yet more murders the following morning—in the forest north of the SS parade ground—the massacre in Dachau finally came to an end. On the same day, July 2, 1934, Hitler officially declared that the purge was over and that calm had been restored across the Reich.
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By then, more
than twenty people had been murdered on the Dachau camp grounds, and several more in the vicinity.
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The dead were victims of vengeance and vendettas, and included senior SA officers, personal associates of Röhm (such as his chauffeur), the girlfriend of an alleged spy (the only woman among the dead), and several dissident writers and politicians. The SS had also executed a music critic by the
name of Dr. Schmid, mistaken by the Bavarian political police for a journalist of the same name; by the time the authorities had realized their mistake and placed an urgent call to Eicke in Dachau, the wrong Dr. Schmid was already dead.
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The Röhm purge of summer 1934 was a watershed in the history of the Third Reich. With one stroke, the SA was cut down to size, destroying the greatest internal
threat to Hitler’s rule. Its demise as a major political force led to the submission of grateful German generals. And it was not just the generals who applauded Hitler. All across Germany the Hitler myth grew, as many Germans praised him for restoring order and decency by dealing a decisive blow against SA thugs and deviants (Nazi propaganda made much of Röhm’s homosexuality, previously tolerated
by Hitler). The unassailable position of Hitler was confirmed in August 1934, after the death of President Hindenburg, when he took the title “Führer and Reich chancellor.”
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The purge was also a crucial point in the history of the camps. It helped to clear the way for a permanent system of lawless imprisonment in SS concentration camps. And it accelerated the creation of a professional corps
of SS guards, held together by their shared crimes. In Dachau, the massacre claimed as many lives in three days as during the entire previous year, making it a formative experience for many local SS men. “These events greatly impressed me,” recalled Hans Aumeier, then a twenty-seven-year-old rookie with only a few months’ experience in Dachau, who would go on to serve as a camp leader in Auschwitz.
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A PERMANENT EXCEPTION

The Röhm purge was a golden opportunity for Theodor Eicke. He had hyped his men as more than mere guards. They were the “most loyal pillars” of the Nazi state, he had boasted a few weeks earlier, ready to “rally round our Führer” and defend him with their “merciless spirit of attack.”
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The purge, Eicke realized, was the chance to prove himself, and he did not slip up. He
reminded Himmler afterward of the “important task” his men had executed, demonstrating their “loyalty, courage and fulfillment of duty.”
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Dachau had been the main killing ground, though other SS camps had been involved, too, detaining prisoners under brutal conditions.
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Most important, Eicke himself had helped to put away the mastermind of the “plot” against Hitler, Ernst Röhm. This would become
his calling card in SS circles. During a celebration of the winter solstice in Dachau, some 18 months later, Eicke is said to have exclaimed: “I am proud that I shot this faggot swine with my own hands.”
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Hitler did not forget the murderous services rendered by Eicke and his men. Just days after the purge, he promoted Eicke to SS Gruppenführer, just three ranks below Himmler. The growing status
of the SS as Hitler’s favored instrument of terror was reflected in an order of July 20, 1934, making it a fully independent force, free from its previous subordination to the SA organization. SS leader Himmler knew that the purge had been a pivotal moment. Almost a decade later, he still commended his men for the resolve they had shown by “putting comrades, who had done wrong, against the wall
and shooting them.” In fact, the greatest beneficiary of these murders had been Himmler himself. His star had already been on the rise, but the purge hastened his ascendancy, which would eventually bring him control over the German police and the camps, though not before some fierce internal struggles.
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The Inspectorate of Concentration Camps

“
Like mushrooms growing after rain”—this is how
Himmler later described the formation of political police forces during the Nazi capture of power.
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Initially, German states had directed their own troops. But it did not take long before the forces were coordinated, and the man who did so was Himmler. From late 1933, he moved beyond his Bavarian base, and within a few months, the dogged Reichsführer SS had secured, one by one, control over the
political police in virtually all German states. The last major state to fall into Himmler’s clutches was the biggest—Prussia, where various rivals had been vying for preeminence over the byzantine terror apparatus. In the end, the Prussian strongman Hermann Göring agreed to appoint Himmler on April 20, 1934, as inspector of the Prussian secret state police. Himmler’s trusted chief of staff, Heydrich,
became the new head of the Prussian Gestapa, with its six hundred officials in the Berlin headquarters and two thousand more officers across the state. On paper, Göring remained in control as head of the Prussian Gestapo, and initially still played a significant role. But ultimately, he was no match for his shrewd subordinates.
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Himmler’s mastery over the German political police—the main authority
imposing protective custody—provided him with the perfect launching pad for taking over the camps. This Himmler realized only too well. He had recognized the camps’ potential more clearly than any other Nazi leader and had planned for some time, certainly since late 1933, to take the remaining early camps into his own hands.
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Now that he had gained dominance over the political police, the time
had come to act.
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To realize his plans, Himmler turned to Theodor Eicke. Sometime in May 1934, just weeks before the Röhm purge, Himmler instructed him to carry out a “fundamental organizational restructure” of the camp system, beginning in Prussia. Himmler wanted to bury the flawed Prussian model and replace it with the SS system he had perfected in Dachau.
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The first test came in Lichtenburg.
Eicke, who now styled himself as “inspector of concentration camps,” arrived on May 28, 1934, and took control of the camp from its civilian director, a police official called Faust, who had nominally supervised the Lichtenburg SS guards. One day later, Eicke had Faust arrested on trumped-up charges (the luckless former director soon found himself in protective custody on Himmler’s orders, first
in Berlin and then in Esterwegen). Eicke also sacked the two police administrators who had worked for Faust. Instead, he put his trust in the murderous commander of the local SS guards. To ensure a stricter regimen, Eicke also introduced new punishment rules for prisoners on June 1, 1934, virtually identical to the Dachau ones.
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He completed the initial shake-up the following day, with a first
written order to the Lichtenburg guards: “Until now your superiors were officials and a corrupt director, from now on soldiers will be in charge of your well-being and your troubles. Together we will place stone upon stone until completion, but cast aside bad stones as worthless.”
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Encouraged by the retooling of Lichtenburg, which continued apace over the coming weeks, Himmler mapped out the
next steps. In June 1934, he trained his sights on Sachsenburg (Saxony) and on Esterwegen, the largest Prussian state camp—a far more ambitious maneuver, since both camps were still guarded by the SA. Esterwegen would be first, and Eicke was already planning his move for the camp—scheduled for July 1, 1934—when he was overtaken by the bloody events of the Röhm purge, which hastened the SS capture
of the early camps.
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In its wake, SS forces not only took over Esterwegen and Sachsenburg, as planned, but two other SA-run camps, Hohnstein and Oranienburg.
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The SS domain was growing, and over the coming weeks, Theodor Eicke—officially confirmed as inspector of concentration camps on July 4, 1934, three days after he shot Röhm—shuttled between the new sites.
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