KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (21 page)

Hanging and flogging were only two of the approved SS torture methods. In addition, Eicke’s catalogue of official
punishment included penal labor, pack drill (or “sport”), cuts to rations, detention in the dreaded bunker, and transfer to a special penal company (or penal block).
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Most of these sanctions remained in force until the end of the Third Reich, one of the many pernicious legacies of the prewar camps.

By the late 1930s, the SS had built up an elaborate bureaucracy of torture: before a prisoner
was officially punished, reports were written and forms were signed. SS leaders saw several advantages in this formal system. To begin with, it imposed some oversight. The leadership principle applied to the camps just as it did to other parts of the Nazi state, and some central control was deemed necessary to prevent chaos.
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Also, the new system had the desired effect of terrorizing prisoners.
Since every behavior could be construed as an infraction of the rules, every prisoner was at risk of punishment—and prisoners knew what this meant. As for the victims, the pain of torture was preceded by another torment. They had to wait for days or weeks, following their initial “infraction,” to find out how they would be punished.
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Finally, torture-by-the-book protected the Camp SS. Its leaders
were still concerned about the reactions of other Nazi agencies and used the official catalogue of punishments to erect a façade of orderliness around the KL. As Eicke told his men, he had plenty of sympathy for those who hit “cheeky detainees,” but he could not openly condone it “or we would run the risk of being described, by the Ministry of the Interior of the German Reich, as incapable of
dealing with prisoners.”
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But the official KL regulations did not put an end to other excesses. Nor were they meant to. SS guards saw violence as their birthright. They continued to torment prisoners and found ways to aggravate regular punishment, for example by flogging prisoners more than officially allowed.
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This happened with the support of local Camp SS officers, who knew that wild assaults
added yet another layer of fear for prisoners. Indeed, most commandants led from the front: at the same time as they signed official torture orders, they abused inmates without recourse to the written rules.
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It was this duality of regulated and spontaneous violence that created the unusual potency of SS terror in the camps.

The Janus face of Nazi terror—with its normative and prerogative side—reflected
the wider beliefs of Himmler and Eicke.
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In normal circumstances, they expected their men to respect the rules of engagement and the lines of command. But in an emergency, no political soldier could wait for written permission to strike. If the enemy behind the barbed wire went on the offensive—and prisoners were always suspected of being on the brink of insubordination—then guards had to throw
out the rule book. In the moral universe of the Camp SS, almost all attacks on inmates could be justified as acts of necessity. This had pragmatic advantages, too, as it would thwart judicial investigations. In a secret order, the leader of the Dachau sentries reminded his men that all prisoner abuses should officially be recorded as self-defense.
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Only in exceptional circumstances did SS leaders
discipline abusive guards. This is what happened to Paul Zeidler, mentioned in Eicke’s newsletter above. However, Zeidler was not expelled for torturing a prisoner, as Eicke suggested; if prisoner abuse had been a ground for dismissal, most SS guards would have been fired. Zeidler’s real crime, as far as his superiors were concerned, was that he had let himself be caught by the judiciary. Zeidler
had been part of a gang of SS guards who murdered the prisoner Friedrich Weissler in February 1937 in the Sachsenhausen bunker: after slowly beating Weissler to a pulp, they had strangled him with his own handkerchief. During the ensuing routine investigation, the local Camp SS covered up the crime. But it did not go away. Weissler had been a leading official in the Protestant Confessing Church—he
was arrested after a petition to Hitler, critical of the regime and the camps, was leaked to foreign newspapers—and his death caused alarm in German church circles and abroad. Moreover, Weissler was a former colleague of the Berlin state prosecutors; until he was dismissed in 1933 because of his Jewish heritage, he had been the presiding judge at a regional court. This prompted a more persistent
investigation than usual, quickly unraveling the SS lies. Only then, after the case threatened to engulf the Sachsenhausen SS more widely, was Paul Zeidler cut loose. By sacrificing the shifty Zeidler, who was later sentenced in a secret trial to one year of imprisonment, SS leaders managed to protect other implicated Sachsenhausen officials—men like Commandant Karl Otto Koch, who would go
on to become a dominant figure of the prewar KL.
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Death’s Head Careers

The Death’s Head SS expanded fast during the second half of the 1930s, growing from 1,987 men (January 1935) to 5,371 (January 1938).
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In each KL, these men were divided into two main groups. A select few, easily identifiable by the letter “K” on their uniforms, joined the so-called Commandant Staff and controlled most
key aspects of the camps, including the prisoner compound itself.
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The rest belonged to the so-called Guard Troop sentries, with one Death’s Head battalion (later regiment) stationed at every concentration camp for men. The Guard Troops were responsible for external security. They patrolled the camp perimeter and manned the watchtowers, and shot prisoners who crossed the sentry line. They also
guarded prisoners working outside, offering them the opportunity for hands-on violence.
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Although there were many points of contact between Guard Troops and Commandant Staff, the SS tried to maintain a division of duties; normally, sentries were not even permitted inside the camp compound. This separation between running a camp and guarding it—a separation already in place in early camps like
Dachau—became the basic organizational feature of the KL.
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The great majority of Camp SS men served as sentries in the Guard Troop, outnumbering Commandant Staff personnel by a ratio of around 11:1 in late 1937.
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Like other SS members at the time, these sentries had gone through a selection process, essential for maintaining the elite image of the SS. All recruits had to be healthy and at
least 5 feet, 6 inches tall, with physical prowess equated with manliness and character. And they had to conform to Himmler’s crank ideas of racial purity, tracing their “Aryan” heritage back to the eighteenth century.
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Beyond these general requirements, selection for the camps had initially been haphazard. But with the coordination of the KL system in the second half of the 1930s, Theodor Eicke
pursued a more systematic recruitment strategy for the Guard Troop, focusing on two aspects—youth and voluntarism.
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Eicke was after “bright-eyed” and “brawny” sentries. He welcomed even sixteen-year-olds into the fold, while he considered anyone much over twenty “only a burden.” The “boys,” as Himmler called them, were thought to be easily malleable into political soldiers. A more pragmatic
motive, given the tight purse strings of the SS, was that single young men came cheap.
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Eicke’s obsession with youth changed the Camp SS, with the average age dropping to around twenty by 1938; many new recruits had enrolled straight out of the Hitler Youth.
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But Eicke did not welcome all applicants. They were supposed to show passion for their chosen path and be eager to devote their lives
to the SS. Here, Eicke was drawing on the ideal of the volunteer soldier, a figure long associated in nationalist circles with dedication and self-sacrifice.
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Although Eicke could not afford to be too selective, given the fast expansion of his troops, he achieved his primary aim. By the late 1930s, the Camp SS was made up almost entirely of volunteers, and mostly of teenagers.
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What had drawn
many of them to the Death’s Head SS was its image as a crack military formation. SS recruitment material painted parallels to the army and alluded to special missions for the Führer, holding out the promise of playing at war while Germany was still at peace. By contrast, the camps and their prisoners were not mentioned at all. Most applicants must have known where they would be stationed, but
recruiters did not consider the KL a selling point.
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The training of Guard Troop recruits—with continuous parades, marches, obstacle courses, and weapons exercises—was hard. The newcomers were at the mercy of older SS officers, some of them First World War veterans, who harassed and humiliated their charges at every turn. “They drilled us,” one SS man later recalled, “till we howled with rage.”
This brutal induction was designed to weed out “weak” men, and more than a few recruits collapsed or broke down in tears; they had signed up for four (later twelve) years of service, but did not even last the three months of probation. Others, by contrast, positively enjoyed the hazing—the harder, the better—as a showcase for their toughness.
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Recruits who endured the initiation rituals were
taken over into the Guard Troop. But their daily lives bore little resemblance to the adventures some had expected. By the late 1930s, Guard Troops worked on strict rotation. Most of the time was taken up with routine military exercises and training, interrupted by one week of sentry duty each month, which often proved tiring and tedious. Most men lived regimented communal lives and some grumbled
that they were no more than “prisoners with rifles.” The sentries envied other SS formations bearing arms, like the Leibstandarte, which were better equipped and paid. These were the real elite units, while the Guard Troops were mocked as dull watchmen.
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“Morale among the comrades is not very good,” one guard admitted in 1935. There was a great gap between the heroic self-image of the Camp SS
and their mundane lives, a gap that even Eicke’s bombastic oratory could not always bridge. “I am aware of your hardships and am striving every day to remove them,” he assured his men, “but this can only be done one step at a time.”
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There were plenty of Guard Troop recruits who believed Eicke, despite the privations, and such men could reap rich rewards. The Camp SS offered rapid advancement
toward better pay and other perks. Nowhere else in the SS could men with a modest education go further; it was not uncommon for recruits to ascend from private to officer in just a few years.
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Their rise often led them to the Commandant Staff. In the eyes of their superiors, they had proven themselves as political soldiers and were now allowed to rule the lives of prisoners inside the compounds.
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One of these fast risers was Rudolf Höss. Born in 1900, he dreamed of becoming a soldier, and soon after the First World War broke out, he escaped from his stifling home into the army, just fifteen years of age. He threw himself into the war and was repeatedly wounded and decorated. Even the German defeat could not dim his devotion to a martial male lifestyle. He spent most of the hated Weimar
years among far-right paramilitaries, fighting vicious battles in the Freikorps and then joining isolated rural communities of like-minded men. He never lost his taste for violence, either, and in 1924 Höss was convicted for his part in the slaughter of a supposed Communist traitor (he served four years in a penitentiary). The radical right-wing connections Höss forged during the Weimar years would
later bring him to the SS concentration camps. He had joined the Nazi movement in the early 1920s, when he met Himmler for the first time. Their paths would cross again over the coming years, and in summer 1934, during an inspection of the regular SS in Stettin (Höss had joined up the previous year), Himmler advised him to enter the Camp SS. Höss accepted, tempted not least by the prospect of rapid
promotion. He joined the Dachau SS as a sentry in December 1934. Just four months later, Eicke plucked him from the Guard Troop and transferred him to the Commandant Staff, the springboard for his later meteoric rise.
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Höss would advance faster and further than almost any other new recruit, but his background was similar to many others in the KL Commandant Staffs. Like Höss, they were largely
in their late twenties and thirties, far older than the youngsters from the Guard Troop. Most had gained their first military or paramilitary experiences prior to 1933, often showing early enthusiasm for the Nazi movement; in spring 1934, eight of the eleven officers in the Dachau Commandant Staff carried prestigiously low SS membership numbers of ten thousand or lower.
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Among the most experienced
Camp SS men were the commandants. Almost all prewar SS commandants had seen action during the First World War—around half of them as professional soldiers—and had later drifted to the Nazi movement, joining the SS before 1932 and reaching officer rank by early 1933.
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These commandants reported to Eicke’s IKL, but inside their camps they exercised the ultimate authority over prisoners and SS
men; to do so, commandants relied on their staff office, above all on their adjutants, who often became powerful figures in their own right.
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Commandants had authority over the Guard Troops on sentry duty.
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And they controlled the Commandant Staff, passing on orders and directives during large assemblies, and supervising officers from the various KL departments.
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From the mid-1930s, the
Commandant Staff included five main departments, a basic division—based on the organizational structure of Dachau—which would remain largely unchanged until the end of the war.
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In addition to the commandant’s staff office (Department I), it included the so-called political office (Department II), which registered prisoner arrivals, transports, releases, and deaths, keeping files as well as
photographs of inmates. In addition, it was in charge of the bunker and prisoner interrogations, using a range of torture methods. This was why a summons to the political office “was quite likely to induce a heart attack in a prisoner,” a former Buchenwald inmate wrote after the war. Crucially, the leaders of the political office reported not just to the commandant but to the police, as well. They
were career policemen appointed by the police authorities, and as a sign of their special status frequently wore civilian dress.
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