KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (28 page)

The Green Triangle

With the appointment of Heinrich Himmler as chief of German police in summer 1936, the path was clear for the creation of a nationwide criminal police. Over the following years, Himmler oversaw the formation of
a large and modern force, centrally coordinated in Berlin.
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Himmler quickly used his new powers to mastermind a strike against ex-convicts. On February 23, 1937, he ordered the Prussian State Criminal Police Office (the later Reich Office, or RKPA) to conduct the first nationwide raid against “professional and habitual criminals,” who would be arrested “abruptly” and taken to concentration camps.
Using lists compiled earlier by regional police officials, the Criminal Police Office selected the suspects and instructed forces around the country to strike on March 9, 1937. The raids went ahead as planned and over the coming days, some two thousand prisoners—the target set by Himmler—arrived in the KL, which had been primed by Eicke. Almost all the prisoners were men, among them Emil Bargatzky,
who was picked up by the police in Essen and sent to Lichtenburg with five hundred other so-called criminals.
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The raids in spring 1937 resulted primarily from Himmler’s determination to wipe out the criminal subculture. Earlier preventive police measures had not been as successful as anticipated and Himmler worried that the persistence of serious crime would damage the reputation of the Nazi
regime, which had promised to clean up Germany. The time had come, he believed, to extend preventive arrests beyond the few hundred most obvious suspects.
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Naturally, Himmler was quick to declare his initiative a great success, claiming in a speech to SS leaders a few months later that the crime rate had “dropped quite significantly” as a result. He predicted even greater benefits for the future,
since some of the detained criminals could be released after several years, once the SS had broken their will and taught them order.
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Himmler still believed in the transformative power of the camps, no doubt influenced by the conclusion of German criminologists that certain offenders could be reformed through discipline and labor.
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Himmler had some additional motives for the spring 1937 raids,
beyond his obsession with crime.
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Economic factors, in particular, began to influence police and SS policy. By the late 1930s, mass unemployment, which had helped propel the Nazis to power, was becoming a distant memory. Following the rapid recovery from the depression, Germany was beginning to face serious labor shortages, accompanied by growing concerns about workers’ discipline.
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At a meeting
of senior government officials on February 11, 1937, chaired by Göring, Himmler floated the idea of forcing some five hundred thousand “work-shy” individuals into “labor camps.”
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His proposal, which he had probably discussed with KL chief Eicke, was too radical even for the Nazi state, so when Himmler met senior civil servants from the Reich Ministry of Justice two days later, he only mentioned
plans for the selective detention of the “work-shy.” Hard work in a camp for up to fourteen hours a day, he announced (according to the minutes), would “show them, and others, that it is better to seek work in freedom than running the risk of being taken to such a camp.”
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Just ten days later, Himmler authorized the March 1937 raids, ordering the police to detain criminals “not in work.”
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No
doubt, Himmler intended these arrests as a warning shot to the so-called work-shy.
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As an ambitious empire builder, Himmler also saw the mass raids as a way to enlarge his camps, and thereby his power. Indeed, his purpose for calling a meeting with legal officials in February 1937 had been to poach their prisoners: Himmler wanted to get his hands on thousands of inmates in state prisons. Reich
minister Gürtner was still strong enough to brush aside Himmler’s advance, but it would not be the last time Himmler tried to add state prisoners to his fast-growing KL empire.
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SS concentration camps were soon packed, following the March 1937 raids against alleged criminals; further suspects arrived over the coming months.
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Meanwhile, the RKPA clamped down on their release, so that the great
majority of those arrested in spring and summer 1937 were still inside when war broke out over two years later.
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The total number of “criminal” prisoners remained high as a result, with several thousands held in the camps during 1937–38.
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In 1937, most of them ended up in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, completely changing the composition of the local prisoner population. Shortly after it opened,
the new Buchenwald KL took in over five hundred “professional criminals” from Lichtenburg, among them Emil Bargatzky, who arrived on the afternoon of July 31, 1937, with the same transport as his later accomplice Peter Forster.
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By January 1938, the Buchenwald SS counted 1,008 so-called criminals, making up more than thirty-eight percent of the camp’s prisoner population.
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Later in 1938–39,
most of them would leave for the new camp in Flossenbürg, which together with Mauthausen became the main KL for alleged criminals.
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Men arrested as professional criminals often faced the wrath of the Camp SS. Rudolf Höss spoke for many SS colleagues when he described the prisoners as “brute and base” villains devoted to a life of crime and sin. He claimed that these “real enemies of the state”
were impervious to normal punishment, however strict, thereby justifying the extreme violence of the Camp SS.
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A political inmate in Dachau later recalled the relish with which SS camp compound leader Hermann Baranowski greeted so-called criminals in spring 1937:

Listen up, you filth! Do you know where you are?—Yes?—No, you don’t know? Well then, I’ll explain it to you. You are not in a prison
and you are not in a penitentiary, either. No. You are in a concentration camp. That means you are in an educational camp! You are to be educated here—and we’ll educate you all right. You may rely on that, you stinking swine!—You will be given useful work here. Anyone not performing it to our satisfaction will be helped by us. We have our methods! You’ll get to know them. There’s no loafing about
here and let no one believe he can run away. No one escapes from here. The sentries have instructions to shoot without warning at any attempt to escape. And we have here the elite of the SS!—our boys are very good shots.
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Baranowski was not bluffing. Camp SS officers really did regard so-called professional criminals as masters of escape and warned guards to be vigilant and to use their weapons
without hesitation.
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And SS men were quick to attack “criminals” inside the KL, too; they were easy to pick out because of special markings on their uniforms, with a green triangle becoming standard in the late 1930s.
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In Sachsenhausen, at least twenty-six “criminals” died in 1937, ten of them in March and April, exceeding the death rate among political prisoners in this period.
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The same was
true in Buchenwald, where at least forty-six so-called professional criminals died during their first year inside the camp in 1937–38.
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Prisoners with the green triangle could expect little support from other inmates, whose hostility toward the “BVer,” as they were often called (short for
Berufsverbrecher
, or professional criminal), sometimes matched that of the SS men. Just like Soviet political
prisoners in the faraway Gulag, many political inmates in the KL despised so-called criminals as coarse, cruel, and corrupt—“the dregs of society,” as one of them put it.
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Such loathing grew from social prejudices against men thought to have been arrested as brutal thugs and from the daily encounters inside the KL, with political prisoners claiming that the new arrivals used their criminal energies
against fellow inmates and collaborated with the SS.
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The picture of the “criminal greens” has long been shaped by these testimonies of political prisoners.
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But it requires correction. Even in the late 1930s, the vast majority of so-called professional criminals were property offenders, not violent felons; just like Emil Bargatzky, most of those arrested during the spring 1937 raids were suspected
burglars and thieves.
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Also, the “greens” forged no united front against other KL inmates.
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Of course, some formed friendships and cliques inside, since they often worked together and slept in the same barrack.
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These bonds appear to have been looser than those among political prisoners, however, since so-called criminals could rarely build upon a shared past or ideological beliefs.
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Finally,
although the tensions between some “red” and “green” prisoners were real, they did not always arise from the latter group’s alleged brutality, but simply from competition for scarce resources, a struggle that would escalate during the war.
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Following the 1937 police offensive against so-called criminals, Himmler and his police leaders soon plotted the next move in the war against social outsiders.
To coordinate and extend the preventive fight against crime, the RKPA drafted the first nationwide regulations, introduced in a confidential decree of the Reich Ministry of the Interior on December 14, 1937.
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This decree enshrined preventive police custody of criminal suspects in the KL, drawing on the earlier Prussian regulations. Even more important, it greatly extended the number of suspects.
In addition to hardened offenders, it threatened “anyone who, without being a professional or habitual criminal, endangers the general public through his asocial behavior.”
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The scene was set for a massive police crackdown on deviance.

Action “Work-Shy Reich”

Why was a pauper like Wilhelm Müller hounded as an enemy of the German state? Divorced and unemployed, the forty-six-year-old was living
hand to mouth in Duisburg, deep in the German industrial heartland. The welfare authorities forced him to perform menial labor, four days a week, in return for a paltry 10.40 Reichsmark, barely enough to get by. He occasionally asked for money on the streets, and on the afternoon of June 13, 1938, a police officer caught him in the act. Wilhelm Müller had been fined twice before for begging. This
time, the police took a far more drastic step and placed him into preventive custody as an “asocial human being.” Müller found himself labeled as a work-shy beggar and criminal who “cannot accustom himself to the discipline required by the state,” and on June 22, 1938, he was taken to Sachsenhausen.
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Wilhelm Müller was among some 9,500 “asocial” men arrested during mass raids in June 1938 and
dragged to concentration camps.
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These nationwide raids by the criminal police, its most radical attack yet on social outsiders, had begun in the early hours of June 13 and lasted several days, with officers searching railway stations, bars, and shelters.
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The raids followed an earlier concerted action: in the last ten days of April 1938, the Gestapo had arrested almost two thousand “work-shy”
men and forced them to Buchenwald.
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Meanwhile, local police forces carried out their own measures against so-called asocials in 1938–39, bringing even more suspects to the camps, including several hundred women accused of moral offenses.
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Many of the men rounded up during the 1938 mass raids were shocked and bewildered by their sudden detention.
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Regional police officials had an almost free
hand when it came to arrests, as the definition of “asocial” was left deliberately vague, a catch-all term for all kinds of deviant behavior. According to Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the security police (which combined the criminal and political police), the targets included “tramps,” “whores,” “alcoholics,” and others who “refuse to integrate into the community.”
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In practice, the mass raids
centered on vagrants, beggars, welfare recipients, and casual workers. In addition, the police arrested a number of suspected pimps, some of whom were guilty of nothing more than frequenting bars of ill repute.
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German police leaders also extended the attack on “asocials” to men regarded as racially suspect. In his orders for the June 1938 raids, Reinhard Heydrich specifically targeted “criminal”
Jews. In addition, he picked out men described as Gypsies, who had a criminal record or “have shown no liking for regular work.”
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Because of their often nonnormative lifestyle, the small minority of so-called Gypsies (today frequently referred to as Sinti or Roma) had long faced official harassment in Germany. State-sponsored discrimination escalated dramatically in the Third Reich, especially
from the late 1930s. After the June 1938 raids, hundreds of male Gypsies arrived in the KL; Sachsenhausen alone held 442 by August 1, 1938 (almost five percent of the prisoner population). Many had been arrested as self-employed musicians, artists, or itinerant merchants.
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One of them was the thirty-eight-year-old August Laubinger, a father of four who had been living in poverty with his family
in Quedlinburg near Magdeburg. Although he had no criminal record, had worked for years as a textile trader, and had tried to find a steady job, the criminal police still arrested him on June 13, 1938, as “work-shy,” accusing him of having “wandered around the country” without fixed employment. A few days later, Laubinger arrived in Sachsenhausen, where he would remain for more than a year.
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