CHAPTER I

DACHAU AND THE CONCENTRATION CAMP SYSTEM

According to the dogma of National Socialism, Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (Protection Unit, abbreviated SS) represented the cultural and racial elite of the new Germany. The sworn defenders of National Socialist ideology, this group served for its nation’s leadership a dual purpose. While it would breed, educate, and train the youth who would rise to become the “new ruling class” of an expanding Reich, the SS was also responsible for the elimination of any groups or individuals who (actively or even potentially) opposed Nazi rule.[1] The legal means for executing this latter purpose came less than one month after Hitler gained the office of Chancellor.

The impetus behind this was the burning of the Reichstag on the night of 27/28 February 1933. The Nazis alleged that a member or members of the German Communist Party started the fire, although some historians maintain that the Nazis actually set the fire themselves with the intent of laying blame on the Communists.[2] In any case, the new government pounced on the opportunity to suppress, with the protection of law, its domestic enemies. Hitler’s proclamation of 28 February 1933, the Presidential Order for the Protection of the People and State, suspended the rights of free speech and assembly and allowed the government to search homes and [END PAGE 1] monitor mail and telephone communications. Essentially, the proclamation placed the nation under martial law, with Hitler at its head.

From this decree also derived the practice of arresting political opponents and keeping them in what the Nazis termed Schutzhaft (protective custody). Tens of thousands of communists and socialists were imprisoned without trial as potential enemies of the state. This wave of widespread and openly public arrests served to show the remaining citizens the danger of opposing the new government, and as a deterrent it worked quite well.[3] However, the mass of arrests also resulted in severe overcrowding in the state prisons, and a solution needed to be found quickly.[4] Himmler assigned this responsibility to his SS.

On Tuesday, March 20, 1933, Himmler, SS Reichsführer as well as Chief of the Munich police, announced the opening of a concentration camp just outside of Dachau, a small Bavarian city located twelve miles northwest of Munich. Expanding around a World War I-era munitions factory that had been abandoned under the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, the camp would be used to contain political dissidents, especially members of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties, who, in the Reichsführer’s words, "endanger state security."^[5]

Even today, neither Dachau nor its population of 35,000 have been able to escape the connotation that Himmler’s camp thus welded to it. Before the Nazi [END PAGE 2] period, Dachau had enjoyed modest fame as an artists’ colony. When, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, artists developed a renewed predilection for depictions of pastoral settings, painters flocked to capture on canvas Dachau’s charming hills, rivers, and moors.[6] Dachau’s “golden years” as an artistic focal point ended in 1914, when the young painters, newly enlisted in the German Army, set out for France or Russia on what they expected would be nothing more than yet another romantic excursion.

Because the connection with Himmler’s camp system has superceded the fame of the artists’ colony, there are residents of the town who even today feel it necessary to register their vehicles in Munich to avoid a Dachau designation on their license plates. Similarly, some expectant mothers are known to deliver their children elsewhere so that the name Dachau will not appear on their birth certificates.[7] To this day, the city of Dachau wrestles, as it has since March 1933, with the relationship it has with the first of the Nazi concentration camps. This conflict stands as a very pointed representation of the idea of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, usually translated as “coming to terms with, or mastering, the past.”[8] Generally applied to Germany as a nation, the discussion around this idea seeks to place the Nazi period in Germany’s historical context, to deal with that period fully and openly, and to question the existence of a “collective guilt” among the German public for Nazi crimes, including the Holocaust. Despite the town’s repeated and sometimes highly publicized attempts to distance itself from the connotation that the former concentration camp carries, the [END PAGE 3] very word Dachau still inevitably evokes images of emaciated prisoners, of the smoke rising from the crematory ovens, of the terrible human consequences of the National Socialist regime.

Originally designed in 1933 for a capacity of 2,700 prisoners, the camp at Dachau had expanded by 1938 to a total of 6,000 inmates.[9] The physical expansion of the camp was undertaken by the first groups of arrestees: predominantly members of the Communist and Socialist Parties, along with those labeled “habitual criminals.” They constructed the barracks that would soon house prisoners arriving from the newly annexed territories of Austria and Czechoslovakia. In 1940, transports began bringing Polish prisoners to Dachau in large numbers, providing the foundation for what would constitute, throughout the course of the camp’s history, the largest national group.[10]

Overcrowding was an ever-present feature of the concentration camp at Dachau, and the condition became especially severe after 1942 and grew to catastrophic proportions by 1945. After 1942, the population of the camp exceeded 12,000, and it never fell below this figure until after liberation.[11] The reality of the overcrowding problem was most immediately evident in the barracks, where the prisoners found their only real opportunity for rest. In each of the four dormitories in each barrack, two hundred or more prisoners found themselves sharing the multi- [END PAGE 4] tiered bunks originally designed to accommodate ninety. By lying head to toe, they were able to fit as many as five men into two and one–half feet of bunk space.[12]

The extreme closeness of quarters was a contributing factor to the prevalence of disease in the camp. There were major outbreaks of typhus in January 1943, November 1944, and March 1945, usually brought into the camp by shipments of prisoners from the ghettoes and camps of Eastern Europe, although one Dachau survivor advises that the “possibility that the Nazis had purposely introduced typhus bacteria in the camp should not be ignored.”[13] Diseases of the digestive system were ubiquitous, particularly diarrhea and enteritis. Pulmonary infections such as pneumonia, along with cases of diphtheria and scarlet fever, also appeared.[14] The probability of contracting a disease during incarceration at Dachau was a simple reality for the prisoners, as “[a]ll men arriving at Dachau, even if of strong constitution and in good health, were liable to contract one disease or another, owing to … lack of food, ill-treatment, exhausting work and bad living conditions.”[15]

Throughout the camp’s existence, the food provided to the prisoners “did not conform to minimum needs, in either quantity or quality.”[16] In the mornings, inmates received half a liter of ersatz coffee or tea, followed at noon by one liter of thin vegetable soup. The evening meal consisted of about six ounces of a coarse black bread and less than an ounce of a low-grade sausage. Occasionally, prisoners were [END PAGE 5] also allotted a small amount of margarine.[17] This diet provided the prisoners with roughly 1000 calories daily, until complications of supply stemming from the Allied advance into Germany resulted in the reduction of daily rations to as little as 500 calories in April 1945. The carbohydrate content of this diet remained between eighty and ninety percent. In the absence of significant intake of fats and proteins, the human body will begin to break down the fats and proteins stored in its own tissues for fuel, resulting in dramatic weight loss and, if not checked, eventual death.[18] This systematized process of starvation was a hallmark of the concentration camp system.

The condition of the prisoners already thus degraded and weakened, the SS added exhaustive labor to the regimen of the camp. They sought to obtain no practical results from this work other than the work itself. Camp labor often “took the form of unnecessary digging of the soil and removing it from place to place, of transporting stones or of sifting gravel.”[19] Prisoners worked like draught animals, harnessed to wagons or to the plows in the plantation at the north end of the camp. All work was accompanied by the ever-present brutality of the camp authorities. Not only the SS guards, but also the prisoner-trustees (Capos) beat and abused the laborers. The Capos, generally selected from among the criminals or so-designated “asocials,” a group including all manner of undesirable elements, from vagrants to alcoholics to citizens who had been denounced by neighbors for any number of [END PAGE 6] reasons in the prisoner population.[20] The great majority of Capos abused their positions of authority for the express purpose of retaining the privileges (including better rations and little or no expectation of performing actual labor) associated with the title. If whipping and beating his charges increased their work production, a Capo stood a better chance of keeping his position. The SS guards, however, removed from all accountability for labor output, practiced a more sadistically leisurely, almost playful, brutality on the prisoners. For example, a guard might toss a prisoner’s cap into the neutral zone that ran along the camp walls and order the unlucky victim to retrieve it. Once the prisoner entered the neutral zone as commanded, the guard, or one of his cohorts in the watchtowers, was obligated to shoot him as having attempted to escape.[21]

The horrible conditions of the concentration camp – the prevalence of disease, the severe malnutrition, and the brutality of camp authorities – took a terrible toll on the prisoners. Over the course of its twelve-year existence as a concentration camp, Dachau housed over 200,000 inmates.^[22] Of these, over 38,000 died, including the 6,000 Russian prisoners of war executed during the course of the war at the rifle range at nearby Hebertshausen.^[23]

The establishment of the concentration camp at Dachau in 1933 provided the SS with a functioning model after which its concentration camp system would develop. The Nazi leadership identified four major segments of society that it [END PAGE 7] deemed undesirable. These included criminal repeat offenders, political opponents of the regime, the “inferior races,” and the “asocials.” These segments could simply be removed from society and collected in the camps. There it would be possible, supposedly, for the state to reform or reeducate the political, social, and criminal offenders, molding them into useful and productive (as well as obedient and conformist) subjects of the state. This would be done by fostering in detainees an appreciation for the value of labor, hence the inscription on the gates of several camps: “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work makes one free”). Such inscriptions were commonplace in the camps. The roof of the Jourhaus (administrative building) at Dachau displayed the motto: “There is one path to freedom. Its milestones are: Obedience, Diligence, Honesty, Orderliness, Cleanliness, Sobriety, Truthfulness, Self-Sacrifice, and Love of the Fatherland.” Inscriptions such as these demonstrated the importance of “reeducation” through hard labor performed in the camps as a means to establishing the German “master race.”[24]

As the functions of the SS broadened from those of a police and quasi-military organization, they began to include economic enterprise. Not only did the concentration camps collect the Reich’s undesirable elements, they also exploited their labor for the profit of the regime. Camps actually leased prisoners to local businesses, large and small. The prisoners excepted of course, this arrangement benefited all involved. The business owners and managers received labor for a fraction of the cost of a regular worker, and the SS had found a way to increase its funds while still impressing upon prisoners the value of hard work. [END PAGE 8]

Besides providing for the imprisonment of undesirables and the exploitation of slave labor, the concentration camp system also served as the training grounds where the future elite of the German nation would learn to rule over Europe.[25] Especially important to the camp system in this respect were the SS Totenkopf (Death’s Head) Units. During the initial stage of the coming Europe-wide Nazi dominance, as envisioned by Himmler, the Totenkopf Units would mold fanatical Nazis who would become experts in brutality. These would be essential in subjugating Germany’s “racial enemies” and in keeping the German people under control, as well.

In particular, the SS compound at Dachau, comprising approximately two-thirds of the entire installation, was a major school for the SS leadership. Before promising members could ascend to the higher ranks within the SS, they had to complete a special course given at Dachau.[26] Graduates included such names, soon to grow in infamy, as Eicke, Höss, Eichmann, and Weiss. Eventually, all camp commandants would be trained in Dachau. The Nazis were very proud of their concentration camp system, and they praised its contributions to the new “racial state.”[27]

One distinction must be made absolutely clear when comparing Dachau to other concentration camps. Its operation was that of a collection, detention, and labor camp, not an extermination camp like those later established at Treblinka or Auschwitz. Nonetheless, Dachau was a place where death was an everyday [END PAGE 9] occurrence and suffering was omnipresent. As April of 1945 approached, it seemed to the inmates that the only hope of surviving the camp rested on the advances of the American army from the northwest.^[28] Unsure of what the SS would do with them when the Americans arrived and liberated the camp, the prisoners could only speculate on what the near future might hold for them. With the end of the camp imminent, they hypothesized that Himmler might order an evacuation to an area further from the front or, more alarmingly, that the guards might simply slaughter them all with machine guns and flamethrowers before the Americans could reach them.[29] Until that unknown day on which their liberators would arrive, a day that in April 1945 seemed so tantalizingly close, the prisoners of the concentration camp at Dachau could only wait.

Popular perception and “collective memory” of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps holds that the American Army, chasing a retreating Wehrmacht, happened upon a camp and threw open the gates, perhaps leaving behind some food and care packages before hurriedly resuming their campaign. The newly freed prisoners, overjoyed and relieved beyond imagination, could then begin their journeys home for the difficult tasks of rebuilding their lives. Though this narrative appears to be generally consistent with accounts of Russian liberations in the East, it was simply not the case behind the American lines. Rather, the Americans, driven by the best of humanitarian intentions, handled the liberation of camps in their theater with a much [END PAGE 10] more complicated administrative approach, the ramifications of which have not yet been investigated fully by historians.

Despite the excellent humanitarian and medical care that the Americans provided, in the crucial first weeks of their administration of the camp the problem of overcrowded living quarters dissipated only slowly, the camp itself remained under strict quarantine, and for several days an alarming prisoner death rate persisted. These conditions stood in marked contrast to the elation that the liberators’ arrival had brought on 29 April 1945. The story of the liberation and subsequent administration of KZ Dachau highlights some of the inevitable problems the Americans encountered in their rehabilitation and repatriation of concentration camp survivors, and it serves as an excellent representation of this poorly illuminated, often neglected aspect of Holocaust history.

The significance of this story is the revelation of the continuation of the effects of the National Socialist concentration camp system, which lingered even in the absence of the SS. It must be acknowledged that the liberation of the camp at Dachau was not an event that occurred at a single precise moment in time. Rather, one must recognize and keep firmly in mind that liberation constituted a process, initiated by the military capture of the camp facility, but also encompassing the Americans’ attempts to overcome conditions created by the SS and extending to the eventual repatriation of the prisoners by June 1945.

There is one complicating factor which must be mentioned where the discussion of the source material for this type of study is concerned. It is one that [END PAGE 11] involves the very functioning of human memory and recollection. When one analyzes the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, looking for their recollections or opinions of the days or weeks immediately following liberation, one will generally find that the testimonies do not address this brief but important period. This problem has to do with the overwhelming power of the participants’ memory of the actual liberation, in retrospect. The events of the day of liberation were so packed with emotion that most memoirs, both from former prisoners and from liberators, understandably use it as a natural endpoint for the recounting of the experience. It seems that the power that the liberation holds in memory is so great that it entirely dominates recollection of the later camp experience, with the result that memory of the six weeks of American post-liberation administration of the camp wanes in importance.

In fact, the great majority of survivor testimonies end with the day of liberation, and the few that do mention post-liberation life in the camp give it only scant attention. Perhaps the best known of the post-liberation memoirs is Primo Levi’s “The Story of Ten Days,” in his account Survival in Auschwitz. Although concerned with the example of life immediately after the SS abandonment of the camp at Auschwitz, Levi details the immediate problems of starvation, disease, and horrific physical conditions facing the inmates there, as well as their successes and setbacks in overcoming these.[30] [END PAGE 12]

In spite of their extremely sparse mention in survivor testimonies, we know that problems arose during the American management of the camp. If it only scarcely appears in the recollections recorded years after the fact, evidence of these problems exists more plentifully in the documents produced during and soon after May 1945. This evidence exists in the minutes, preserved in the Charles Rosenbloom Dachau Collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, of meetings of the International Prisoners’ Committee, the body responsible for the government of the inmate population after liberation. It exists in the various memoranda distributed among the inmates, memoranda that addressed the key problems and prescribed solutions for them, and it exists in more plentiful proportion in the accounts of the liberators than it does in those of the liberated prisoners.

This phenomenon may be due in part to the fact that, in former prisoners’ recollections, the American liberators are the protagonists opposed to the obvious antagonists, the SS guards, and therefore receive only heroic acclaim in the memories of the triumph of “good” over “evil.” Or, perhaps, the Americans’ surprise at the emergence and incidence of these unintended and unforeseen problems has caused them to stand out in their memories, particularly for those in the higher levels of the administration, where taking note of such problems was a necessary function of the bureaucracy. Whatever the reason may be, the testimonies of the liberators and administrators form the bulk of the primary sources available to a study such as this, with substantiation coming from the survivor accounts, few but adequate in number, that do deal with this topic. [END PAGE 13]

However trivial or unimportant this brief but crucial period may seem in the process of recollection, there is no denying the importance it held during those six weeks in 1945 when the former prisoners experienced them. This period is important because it reveals the transitional nature of the liberation. The cruel reality was that the elimination of actual Nazi control of the camp was not enough to halt the effects of that control. Thus, there was unfortunately no clean break with the camp’s terrible past. It would take time for these effects – starvation, disease, and psychological anguish, to name but a few – to wane and for the former prisoners then to be able to live once again free from the oppression of the Nazi state. In truth, liberation occurred not any particular moment in time, or even on any certain day. Although 29 April 1945 is recognized as the day of liberation, true liberation occurred as a process, unfolding over a long period of time. [END PAGE 14]

[1] Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them, trans. Heinz Norden (New York: Berkley Books, 1984), 19.

[2] Jackson J. Spielvogel, Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History, 3d ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1996), 70.

[4] Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 21.

^[5] Münchner Neuste Nachrichten, 21 Mar. 1933, quoted in Barbara Distel and Ruth Jakusch, eds., Concentration Camp Dachau 1933-1945, trans. Jennifer Vernon (Brussels: Comité International de Dachau, 1978), 38.

[7] Timothy W. Ryback, “Report From Dachau,” The New Yorker, 3 August 1992, 52.

[10] Johannes Neuhaüsler, What Was It Like in the Concentration Camp at Dachau?: An Attempt to Come Closer to the Truth, 28^th ed. (Dachau: Trustees for the Monument of Atonement in the Concentration Camp at Dachau, 1999), 15-6.

[12] Neuhaüsler 15, Paul Berben, Dachau 1933-1945: The Official History (London: Comité International de Dachau, 1980), 66.

[13] Bernard Nissenbaum, “My Deportation Testimony.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives. RG-02.005*01.

[17] Marcus J. Smith, Dachau: The Harrowing of Hell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 106.

[18] J.P.W. Rivers, “The Nutritional Biology of Famine,” in Famine, ed. G.A. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 60.

[30] Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 151-73.