KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (27 page)

Himmler’s swagger reflected his rising status in the late 1930s. To be sure, his SS was not yet all-powerful. The presence of a judge during the execution of Emil Bargatzky in Buchenwald was a reminder that a court
had pronounced the death sentence, not the SS. Moreover, the execution remained an exception in the prewar KL. Still, it was a sign for the growing confidence of SS leaders and for their desire to usurp legal powers like the judicial monopoly over the death penalty. In practice, the SS already did so: Camp SS men murdered far more prisoners during the late 1930s than ever before. In Buchenwald,
the SS conducted a major killing spree in the weeks after the death of Rottenführer Kallweit; in June and July 1938, 168 prisoners lost their lives, compared to seven prisoners during March and April.
14
In other camps, too, the SS stepped up its violence in the final years before the Second World War, which also saw a great expansion of KL sites and of slave labor. The relentless rise of the concentration
camp complex seemed unstoppable.

SOCIAL OUTSIDERS

Heinrich Himmler had big plans for his camps. In a secret speech in November 1937, he told SS leaders that he expected the three KL for men—Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald—to hold twenty thousand prisoners in all, and even more in the case of war.
15
This was an ambitious aim, at a time when his camps held fewer than eight thousand prisoners.
But Himmler’s target was quickly reached and exceeded in 1938–39, during a frantic period that saw the foundation of the three camps in Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrück. Thanks to large-scale police raids, prisoner numbers climbed fast, and by the end of June 1938, there were already twenty-four thousand or more inmates in the camps, a threefold increase in just six months.
16
Even that
was not enough for police and SS leaders, who soon envisaged a further rise to thirty thousand inmates and more.
17

As the size of the prisoner population changed, so did its composition, moving ever further away from the preponderance of left-wing German prisoners that characterized the camps early on. Camp SS officials struggled to keep up with all the new prisoner groups. In Sachsenhausen,
for example, five separate prisoner categories (early 1937) became twelve (late 1939).
18
Among the new prisoners were thousands of foreigners, after Nazi leaders began to flex their muscles on the international stage. In March 1938, the Third Reich invaded and annexed Austria, and the new rulers quickly arrested tens of thousands of alleged opponents. On the evening of April 1, 1938, the new criminal
police office in Vienna dispatched a first transport of Austrian prisoners—among them many members of the old political elite, including the mayor of Vienna—to Dachau; the men suffered extreme abuse on the train, which continued after their arrival the next day. “For a long time, we Austrians were the main attraction in the camp,” the nationalist politician Fritz Bock recalled. In all, 7,861
Austrian men were taken to Dachau during 1938 (almost eighty percent of them Jews).
19

Prisoners from Czechoslovakia were next, after Hitler bullied French and British leaders into accepting the German annexation of the Sudetenland at the Munich conference. In October and November 1938, well over 1,500 prisoners from the Sudetenland arrived in Dachau, including many ethnic Germans.
20
The isolated
Czechoslovakian government also succumbed to German pressure to extradite Peter Forster, who was in their hands after his escape from Buchenwald. Unlike his accomplice Emil Bargatzky, Forster had evaded the German police and managed to cross the border in late May 1938. Forster, a committed left-wing opponent of the Nazi regime, pleaded for asylum and defended the killing of the SS guard. “We
acted in self-defense,” he was quoted as saying, “because every prisoner in that camp lived in danger of being killed.” Despite an international campaign to save him, Forster was handed over to Nazi Germany in late 1938. His fate was the same as Bargatzky’s. Sentenced to death on December 21, he was hanged later that day in Buchenwald, the only other prisoner officially executed in a KL before the
war.
21
After the German invasion of the remaining Czech territory in March 1939, which was designated as the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the German police dragged further victims to the KL, among them numerous German émigrés and Czech Jews. However, in view of the international condemnation of Nazi aggression, the police moved rather cautiously and did not repeat the mass deportations
that had followed the incorporation of Austria one year earlier.
22

The arrival of prisoners from abroad foreshadowed the dramatic later changes in the concentration camps. Before the war, however, the number of foreigners generally remained small. In the late 1930s, the regime still saw the KL primarily as weapons against its own people, including Austrian nationals subsumed into the Third Reich
(and largely classified as German by the SS). Above all, the authorities were homing in on social outsiders, who were fast becoming the main target.

Early Attacks on “Criminals” and “Asocials”

The pursuit of social deviants was a major part of the Nazi policy of exclusion, aimed at removing all those who did not (or could not) fit into the mythical national community. The motives of the officials
in the welfare services, the courts, and the police were as diverse as the men and women they targeted, and often reflected demands which predated the Nazi rise to power. Some officials had utopian visions of rooting out all social ills; some placed their trust in the teachings of racial hygiene; some hoped to stimulate the economy by terrorizing the jobless. The ensuing offensive against Germans
on the margins of society led to benefit cuts and surveillance, as well as to detention, not just in traditional state institutions like prisons and workhouses, but in the concentration camps, too.
23

The fate of social outsiders in the KL was widely ignored after the Second World War, when these prisoners joined the ranks of other forgotten victims. If writers mentioned their persecution at all,
it was in a derogatory manner, describing it as a tactical maneuver by the Nazi authorities to gain popular support or to besmirch the reputation of political prisoners.
24
Only in recent decades have historians recognized the assault on social outsiders as a key Nazi policy in its own right.
25
Many historians now argue that the police and SS turned to a policy of “racial general prevention” from
1936, attacking social outsiders in a bid to “cleanse” the “body of the nation” of alleged deviants and degenerates.
26
Important as this new research has been in revealing the ideological drive behind the mass detention of social outsiders in the late 1930s, it neglects previous Nazi attacks on the same groups. While the early camps in 1933–34 were primarily about political opponents, the authorities
had also used them to detain and punish social outsiders.
27

As soon as Heinrich Himmler became Munich police president in March 1933, he declared the “eradication of the criminal class” as a priority.
28
Over the coming months, he developed his vision of policing as social cleansing, with the early camps as places of detention, retribution, and correction.
29
Himmler’s approach altered his model
camp Dachau already from summer 1933, when the police dragged the first alleged criminals and vagrants inside.
30
Their numbers soon increased, after the police arrested tens of thousands of beggars and homeless in nationwide raids in September 1933. Although the authorities quickly released most detainees, some ended up for longer in camps and workhouses.
31
Just a year after the SS had set up
Dachau, the composition of its prisoner population had changed markedly. Political prisoners still accounted for the great majority of all Bavarian inmates in protective custody, but their proportion had fallen to around eighty percent by April 1934, with social outsiders making up the rest; among them were 142 “work-shy” men, 96 “national pests,” and 82 men accused of “asocial behavior.”
32

The detention of social outsiders in Dachau did not escape the attention of the Bavarian Reich governor von Epp. During his general drive to reduce prisoner numbers, Epp protested in March 1934 that the arrest of alleged criminals and asocials violated the “meaning and purpose of protective custody.”
33
Himmler was undeterred. In the rude reply he drafted (see chapter 2), he dismissed any criticism
and spelled out his wider convictions: “The observation that imposition of protective custody for alcoholism, firewood theft, embezzlement of moneys belonging to organizations, immoral lifestyle, work shirking, etc., do not quite correspond to the letter of the valid regulations, is entirely accurate. They do, however, correspond to National Socialist sentiment.” In Himmler’s mind, Nazi “sentiment”
trumped everything, including the law. Because the courts did not deal swiftly and firmly with asocials and criminals, he argued, the police had to take the suspects to Dachau. The results, he added, were impressive: the arrests played “the most essential part in the decline of criminality in Bavaria.” Himmler saw no reason to change course.
34

Heinrich Himmler may have faced some internal critics,
but he was not alone in his aggressive pursuit of social outsiders.
35
All over Germany, state and party officials placed social outsiders into protective custody during 1933–34, with the initiative often coming from below. In Hamburg, the police temporarily arrested hundreds of beggars, pimps, and homeless in 1933, as well as several thousand female prostitutes. Elsewhere, too, Nazi officials
moved against so-called asocials, especially after the “beggar raid” in September; on October 4, 1933, the
Völkischer Beobachter
reported on the “first concentration camp for beggars” in Meseritz (Posen).
36

As for the fight against crime, Prussia pursued an even more radical policy than Bavaria in 1933, inspired by a nationwide offensive against persistent criminals. German jurists had pushed
for years for indefinite sentences against dangerous re-offenders and their wish finally came true in the Third Reich. Under the Habitual Criminals Law of November 24, 1933, judges could punish defendants with custodial sentences followed by open-ended security confinement (
Sicherungsverwahrung
) in a prison or penitentiary; by 1939, judges had passed almost ten thousand such sentences, chiefly
against minor property offenders.
37
However, senior Prussian police officers saw the new law as deficient, since it only targeted those found guilty of new crimes. To wipe out the criminal underclass, they argued, it was also necessary to detain “professional criminals” who could not be brought to court due to insufficient evidence. Hermann Göring shared this view and had introduced preventive
police custody (
polizeiliche Vorbeugungshaft
) by decree on November 13, 1933. From now on, the Prussian criminal police could hold so-called professional criminals in state concentration camps without trial or sentence. The main targets were ex-convicts with long criminal records for property offenses; but even someone who had never been tried before could be detained if the police alleged “criminal
intent.”
38

At the time, the Prussian criminal police did not envisage mass arrests. Senior police officials believed that a small hard core of offenders was responsible for the great majority of property crime, and that their selective detention would suffice to deter the others. The Prussian Ministry of the Interior initially set an upper limit of 165 prisoners, soon raised to 525; at first,
the arrested men were gathered in Lichtenburg, where they soon made up the majority of inmates.
39
Despite the relatively small number of arrests, the Prussian initiative amounted to a radical new approach to preventive policing and set the stage for the future.

The extralegal detention of social outsiders grew during the mid-1930s. In Prussia, the police arrested more men as professional criminals,
focusing on “usual suspects” like burglars and thieves with many previous convictions. In 1935, the police authorities concentrated them in Esterwegen, prompting Inspector Eicke to describe that KL as the most difficult to rule; by October 1935, it held 476 so-called professional criminals, forming the largest prisoner group.
40
Meanwhile, several other German states adopted the radical Prussian
policy and placed criminals into preventive police custody in concentration camps, too.
41

Parallel to the pursuit of criminals, the detention of so-called asocials also continued in the mid-1930s. As before, Nazi officials mainly targeted the destitute. In Bavaria, for example, the political police arrested more than three hundred “beggars and vagabonds” in summer 1936 and sent them to Dachau,
in a cynical attempt to smarten up the streets before the Olympics.
42
In addition, the authorities trained their sights on “indecent” individuals. Dozens of female prostitutes were dragged to Moringen, among them Minna K., arrested by the Bremen police in late 1935 as a streetwalker. The forty-five-year-old had been held many times before and was accused of drunken attempts to “capture men” in
seedy bars, undermining police efforts “to keep the town’s streets and establishments clean in a moral respect,” thereby endangering public order and the Nazi state.
43

By the mid-1930s, then, the KL had become well-established weapons against social outsiders. To be sure, their primary focus was still on political opponents, broadly defined. But social outsiders now made up a significant part
of the prisoner population, in Dachau and elsewhere. When a delegation of the British Legion visited Dachau on July 21, 1935, the SS hosts (who included Theodor Eicke himself) told them that of the 1,543 prisoners inside, 246 were “professional criminals,” 198 “work-shy,” 26 “hardened criminals,” and 38 “moral perverts”—in other words, some thirty-three percent of inmates were detained as social
deviants.
44
Such figures would rise even further across the KL in 1937–38, as the police centralized and escalated the earlier measures against social outsiders.
45