KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (29 page)

There was no single driving force behind the all-out assault on “asocials” in 1938. Nazi leaders were attracted to the chilling vision of the police as a doctor that could cleanse Germany of all deviants and degenerates, a vision increasingly inflected with racism.
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Meanwhile, regional police officials and others involved in the raids—in German welfare offices and labor exchanges—used the mass
raids as a pragmatic opportunity to eliminate men long seen as nuisances and threats, including alleged benefit cheats, welfare clients resistant to state control, persistent beggars, and criminal suspects who could not be legally prosecuted. So enthusiastic were regional police officials about rounding up social outsiders that they far exceeded the minimum arrest targets set by Heydrich for the
June 1938 raids.
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Economic factors were important, too, even more so than before.
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The charge of “work shyness” had already featured prominently in early campaigns against social outsiders in the Third Reich. Not only were the “work-shy” seen as biologically inferior, as many scholars and scientists insisted at the time, they failed one of the major demands made on national comrades—the performance
of productive labor.
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The Nazi leaders’ desire to force “work-shy” men to work gained added urgency as the German economy was gearing up for war. As Reinhard Heydrich put it, the regime “does not tolerate asocial persons avoiding work and thereby sabotaging the [1936] Four-Year Plan.”
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Adolf Hitler shared these views and strongly supported—and possibly even initiated—the mass detention of the
“professional unemployed” and “scum,” as he called them.
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At the same time, SS leaders were beginning to pursue a far more ambitious economic policy inside the KL, and were eager to get their hands on forced laborers. Himmler’s hunger for more prisoners clearly influenced the raids in 1938, with the police orders for mass arrests of “asocials” stressing the importance of targeting men who could
work.
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The concentration camps expanded dramatically in 1938 and social outsiders were soon in the majority. According to one estimate, so-called asocials made up seventy percent of the entire prisoner population by October 1938.
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This figure would have dropped over the following months, but overall numbers still remained high, as many “work-shy” men waited in vain for their release.
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On the
eve of the Second World War, more than half of all the inmates in Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen were still classified as “asocial,” instantly recognizable by the black triangle on their uniform (some Gypsies wore brown markings instead).
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Initially, Buchenwald had been designated as the KL for all men detained in the 1938 mass raids.
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But the police arrested so many in June that Dachau and
Sachsenhausen threw open their gates, too; in fact, Sachsenhausen took in most detainees, with the total number of “work-shy” prisoners reaching 6,224 by June 25, 1938.
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Camp SS men labeled these prisoners “asocial parasites,” and dismissed them as dirty, dishonest, and depraved.
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The SS immediately set out to break them with overwhelming force. On arrival in Sachsenhausen in June 1938, prisoners
were greeted with invective, kicks, and slaps. Afterward, Commandant Baranowski, a recent appointment from Dachau, ordered his men to select some victims, who were strapped on a buck and whipped in front of the other horrified newcomers. And just as he had threatened “professional criminals” in Dachau, Baranowski had a word of warning for any “asocials” in Sachsenhausen who thought about
escape, loudly announcing the motto of his trigger-happy sentries: “Bang—and the shit is gone!”
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The prisoners with the black triangle endured particularly poor living conditions. The mass arrests in summer 1938 had caught the Camp SS off guard, leading to chaotic scenes inside overcrowded camps. In Sachsenhausen, the SS replaced bed frames with straw sacks to press some four hundred “asocials”
into space meant to hold 146 men; as an emergency measure, the SS also threw up eighteen new barracks, northeast of the roll call square, which formed the so-called little camp. The new prisoners’ uniforms were ill fitting and dirty, and the shortage of shoes and caps caused bleeding feet and sunburned heads.
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If anything, things were even more harmful in Buchenwald. Not only was it still under
construction, but the local SS men were also fired up after the murder of SS Rottenführer Albert Kallweit just a few weeks earlier.
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To make matters even worse, the “asos” (as they were known) stood near the bottom of the prisoner hierarchy. Just like those with the green triangle, they faced plenty of contempt from fellow inmates. Unlike them, however, prisoners with the black triangle largely
failed to gain influential Kapo positions, despite their much larger numbers. And while there was some camaraderie—with inmates helping others, or diverting them with jokes and with romantic tales of life on the road—their sense of shared identity was weak, as “asocials” had even less in common than so-called criminals.
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Worst off were those regarded as disabled or mentally unstable, who often
found themselves isolated under the most dreadful conditions. In Buchenwald, the SS pressed them into the so-called idiots’ company, wearing white armbands with the word “stupid.”
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Some “asocial” prisoners were butchered in the name of Nazi eugenics. The new German rulers had lost no time in 1933 in introducing a law for the compulsory sterilization of the “hereditary ill.” By 1939, at least
three hundred thousand women and men (many of them inmates of mental asylums) had been mutilated, owing largely to the prejudices of physicians and judges at newly established Hereditary Health Courts.
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Professor Werner Heyde supervised the sterilization program inside the KL, having been put in charge of “hereditary monitoring” after a 1936 meeting with Inspector Eicke, whom he had last encountered
as a patient in his Würzburg clinic. Apparently, all prisoners were to be screened for possible sterilization, with so-called asocials especially vulnerable, since Heyde believed there to be “quite a few feebleminded” among them. Having initially worked alone, Heyde soon taught Camp SS doctors to complete the formal court applications. In the late 1930s, some otherwise indifferent SS doctors
developed a sudden zeal when it came to prisoner sterilizations, which were largely carried out in local hospitals.
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Inhumane SS treatment, together with the general deterioration of conditions in the late 1930s, killed prisoners on a scale never seen before in the concentration camps. The first huge rise in the death rate came in summer 1938, after the victims of the June raids arrived. During
the first five months of 1938 (January to May), ninety men are known to have died in all the KL. Over the next five months (June to October), at least 493 men perished—almost eighty percent of them “asocials.”
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In Sachsenhausen, at least thirty-three “asocials” lost their lives in July 1938 alone, when one year earlier (in July 1937) the Sachsenhausen SS had recorded just a single death among
all its inmates.
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Worse was yet to come; if summer and autumn 1938 were already toxic, the following months were truly lethal. From late 1938, the death toll among “asocials” rocketed to new heights. During the six-month period between November 1938 and April 1939, at least 744 “asocial” men perished in the KL.
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In Sachsenhausen, the most deadly month was February 1939, when 121 so-called
asocials died, dwarfing the eleven deaths among all other prisoner groups that month. In total, at least 495 “asocials” lost their lives in Sachsenhausen during a single year, from June 1938 to May 1939, accounting for a staggering eighty percent of all prisoner fatalities. The main causes, one survivor of the camp recalled, were “starvation, freezing, shooting, or the effects of abuse.”
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Clearly,
death became far more commonplace in the KL during the late 1930s, and men arrested as asocial bore the main brunt: between January 1938 and August 1939, well over 1,200 “asocial” men died across all the SS concentration camps.
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Even today, it is widely unknown that these men from the margins of society made up the largest group of KL victims in the final period before the war.

Propaganda and
Prejudice

The shift from browbeating political opponents to terrorizing social outsiders shaped the public presentation of the KL. To be sure, the regime never drew a strict line between its opponents, and the longer it stayed in power, the more the criminal, racial, and political enemy categories merged in the minds of Nazi leaders; by the end of the war, Heinrich Himmler spoke of having faced
a “Jewish-communist asocial organization” in 1933.
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Still, the early camps had concentrated on the destruction of the left-wing opposition, as we have seen, and this target had also dominated reports and rumors at the time.
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As the function of the KL changed, however, so did their official image in Nazi Germany. Already in the mid-1930s, media reports placed growing emphasis on the detention
of social outsiders.
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Most prominent was a five-page story on Dachau, published in late 1936 in a glossy Nazi magazine, with twenty pictures of the camp and its inmates. Right from the beginning, the article stressed how much the prisoner population had recently changed:

These are no longer the political inmates of 1933, of whom only a small percentage is still in the camp while the rest have
long since been released, but for the most part a selection of asocial elements, recidivist political muddle-heads, vagabonds, work-shy persons, and drunkards … émigrés and Jewish parasites on the nation, offenders against morality of every kind, and a group of professional criminals on whom preventive police custody has been imposed.

Said prisoners were now learning strict military discipline,
rigorous cleanliness, and hard labor, “which many of them have shunned all their lives.” Lest anyone worried about SS abuse, the article reassured readers that prisoners were healthy and well fed. Indeed, some of the inmates “from totally wrecked social circumstances” had never had it any better. This was just as well, since it was clear that many of them would never be allowed to taste freedom
again—locked up for good to protect the national community.
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Other Nazi propaganda underscored this last point, stressing that the permanent detention of social outsiders was driving down crime.
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Such claims found a receptive audience inside Germany. Weimar society had been fixated on crime, especially during its final years, with an ever-louder chorus clamoring for harsher measures against
deviants.
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The Third Reich could build on this noxious legacy, with even some political prisoners supporting the indefinite detention of selected social outsiders.
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Nazi media reports about the KL exploited existing prejudices, with staged photos of prisoners in menacing poses and covered in tattoos. “On our walk through the camp,” the 1936 magazine feature about Dachau declared, “we often
encounter the typical face of the born criminal,” playing on popular beliefs in physiognomic theories.
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Such stories had some impact in the Third Reich, perpetuating the image of the camps as places full of dangerous deviants and strengthening the common conviction that Hitler had made the streets safe again, a myth that long outlived the Nazi regime inside Germany.
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Nevertheless, the camps
were not foremost in the minds of ordinary Germans in the second half of the 1930s; the strong emotions of 1933—curiosity, acclaim, anger, fear—had given way to greater indifference; even among former supporters of the Left, the novelty of the KL had long worn off. In addition, the detainees now largely came from the margins of society, and were often arrested away from the public eye. Even the
mass raids against so-called asocials and criminals, despite their propaganda potential, went largely unreported in the German press.
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This was part of a wider trend, as the KL gradually faded from view. Many factors were in the mix. To start with, hundreds of semipublic early camps had been replaced by a handful of secluded sites. At the same time, eyewitness accounts by victims—the main source
of popular knowledge about the camps in 1933—largely vanished. There were fewer prisoners, and those who returned were often too scared to say much at all.
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The ones who did speak, meanwhile, could barely make themselves heard, now that the organized resistance was in tatters. Most important, perhaps, the audience for critical reports was smaller than ever, as the Nazi dictatorship grew in popularity.
The German population did not forget the KL, of course, nor did it forget earlier stories of terror inside; in the public mind, the camps remained associated with violence and abuse—to the irritation of some local notables, like those in Dachau, who realized that the bad reputation of the camp was driving away tourists from their town.
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Still, for the great majority of Germans—content with the
regime or at least resigned to it—fears about the KL were now at most dim and abstract.
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As for the Nazi dictatorship itself, it was content to let the KL blend into the background, with only occasional reminders of their existence for deterrence. Beyond that, the regime showed no desire to push the KL back into the media limelight. There was no more need for rescuing their reputation, now
that rumors about abuses were less virulent.
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What is more, the Nazi authorities were still unsure about the popularity of the KL, despite their alleged contribution to the Nazi fight against crime. Barely a week after the big Dachau photo spread had appeared in 1936, the authorities even issued a secret order to cut down on press reports about incidents inside camps; such reports, Reich press
chief Otto Dietrich announced confidentially, “are apt to trigger damaging effects at home and abroad.”
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