Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany

The New Histories

Nikolaus Wachsmann, Jane Caplan, Nikolaus Wachsmann, Jane Caplan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415426503
• eBook ISBN: 9781135263218
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The notorious concentration camp system was a central pillar of the Third Reich, supporting the Nazi war against political, racial and social outsiders whilst also intimidating the population at large. Established during the first months of the Nazi dictatorship in 1933, several million men, women and children of many nationalities had been incarcerated in the camps by the end of the Second World War. At least two million lost their lives.

This comprehensive volume offers the first overview of the recent scholarship that has changed the way the camps are studied over the last two decades. Written by an international team of experts, the book covers such topics as the earliest camps; social life, work and personnel in the camps; the public face of the camps; issues of gender and commemoration; and the relationship between concentration camps and the Final Solution. The book provides a comprehensive introduction to the current historiography of the camps, highlighting the key conclusions that have been made, commenting on continuing areas of debate, and suggesting possible directions for future research.

1 The dynamics of destruction

The development of the concentration camps, 1933–1945

Nikolaus Wachsmann

There was no typical concentration camp in the Third Reich. To be sure, the literature on Nazi terror is full of references to ‘the’ concentration camp. But we need to be clear that the camp depicted in such works (written largely by sociologists and philosophers) is an artificial and ahistorical construct, meant to illustrate broader questions and conclusions about the human condition; it does not fully reflect the complex history of the camps.¹

For a start, the SS concentration camps were extremely diverse: they varied greatly in size, layout and conditions. No two camps were the same. ‘How different everything was here, compared to Dachau’, the German prisoner Edgar Kupfer- Koberwitz observed after his arrival in Neuengamme in early 1941.² And inside each camp, there was a gulf between individual inmates, whose fate was shaped by age, gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion, political views, social background, health, appearance, as well as pure luck. In 1943, Auschwitz meant something very different for Jews than for the few privileged German prisoners: the former were (with only some exceptions) gassed or worked to death; the latter were rewarded (at least temporarily) with proper beds, warm clothes, food and visits to the camp brothel. The contrast to the army of doomed, emaciated Muselmänner could hardly be greater.

What is most striking about the camp system, looking at the Third Reich as a whole, are its frequent mutations. The camp system never stood still; it was not static, but constantly evolved. In little more than 12 years, the concentration camps changed dramatically, not just once, but several times. A prisoner released from Dachau in the early months of the Third Reich in 1933 would barely have recognized the camp six years later, never mind in 1945. Of course it was not just the appearance of camps like Dachau that changed; their function within the Nazi web of terror was transformed, too, and with it the inmate population and its treatment.

Historians have long tried to capture the camps’ dynamic history by dividing it into separate periods, building on pioneering work by Martin Broszat and Falk Pingel.³ Today, there is considerable agreement on the major milestones in the camps’ development, though questions about the weighting of different phases remain. For example, did the camps change so decisively in the last year of the Second World War that one can speak of an entirely new stage? Or was this final year of terror still part of a broader development that had begun in 1941/2?⁴

This chapter provides a general outline of the complex history of the Nazi concentration camp system, highlighting major trends and turning points, as well as changes in function and conditions. It will focus on six distinct periods: the early camps, 1933–1934; formation and coordination, 1934–1937; expansion, 1937–1939; war and mass killing, 1939–1941; economics and extermination, 1942–1944; climax and collapse, 1944–1945. Of course, these periods were not fully self-contained. Some developments bridge different periods and there were always continuities from one stage to the next. Still, such a periodization offers the only way of capturing the dynamics of terror and destruction that shaped the Nazi concentration camps during the Third Reich.

The early camps, 1933–1934

In recent years, historians have gradually pushed Nazi terror against the mass of the German population into the background. As racism has moved to the centre of interpretations of the Third Reich, the scholarly focus shifted from the repression of ‘ordinary Germans’ to the Nazi war against ‘racial aliens’. In turn, some historians have placed much greater emphasis on the consensual elements of Nazi rule inside Germany, culminating in the picture of a wildly popular ‘Feel Good Dictatorship’.⁵ But we cannot write domestic political repression out of the history of the Third Reich, least of all during the capture of power in 1933. For the ‘Nazi revolution’ was also a revolution of violence. It was a massive campaign of political terror that helped to turn Germany into a totalitarian dictatorship; only then could it become a racial state.

For Nazi leaders, 1933 was about securing power. Victory was no foregone conclusion: Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor had only opened the door; the full conquest of the country still lay ahead. Propaganda and popular support played an important role here. But so did terror, indispensable during the rapid coordination of state and society. After all, most Germans had not backed Hitler; indeed, in the last free elections in November 1932, fewer Germans had voted for the Nazis than the two parties of the left, the Social Democrats and the Communists, whose paramilitary activists had long fought street battles with their Nazi rivals (especially the SA). For the Nazis, there could be no victory without the destruction of the organized working class.

As a result, the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship was accompanied by a storm of political violence against the left: houses were trashed, opponents beaten, party and union offices destroyed. By the end of 1933, hundreds of thousands of opponents had been abused, humiliated and injured, with many hundreds, if not thousands, killed. As for the number of those temporarily detained in 1933, figures probably reached 150,000 or even 200,000.⁶

In 1933, political detention was often chaotic. On the one hand, the rule of law – though already perverted – still applied: tens of thousands of opponents were arrested by the police as law-breakers, handed to the courts and put in jails and prisons run by the legal authorities. On the other hand, there was mass detention without such legal process, the hallmark of all revolutions. Many opponents were simply abducted by SA or SS men, who took their cue from Nazi leaders. Even more suspects – around 100,000 – were taken into indefinite ‘protective custody’ (Schutzhaft). Based on the Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February 1933 (which abolished basic rights), protective custody was not yet fully regulated and various authorities – central and regional government, police and party – laid claim to it. The result was a free-for-all and in practice, protective custody was nothing more than kidnapping with a bureaucratic veneer. As one uncommonly upright SA Group Leader complained in July 1933: ‘Everyone is arresting everyone else … everyone is threatening everyone else with protective custody, everyone is threatening everyone else with Dachau.’⁷

The prisoners detained without charge were held in hundreds of ‘early camps’.⁸ Again, there was much improvisation, as Nazi leaders had made no real preparations. Contrary to suggestions of some historians, the scattered references by Nazi leaders before 1933 to camps did not amount to much of a plan; when they came to power, the Nazi concentration camp still had to be invented.

To lock up the prisoners, the authorities often put existing places of confinement – such as police jails, workhouses and regular prisons – to dual use. By late May 1933, for example, all but one of the 14 large prisons in the Hamm judicial district held both regular state prisoners and inmates in protective custody.⁹ In addition, many new places of detention were set up, largely during spring and early summer 1933. Local SS and SA men were particularly active, though they did not dominate (as some observers suggested). As historians have shown, state authorities, too, were involved in extra-legal detention from the start, collaborating with SA or SS camps and even founding their own.¹⁰ Of course, one cannot really draw a clear line between party and state during the seizure of power; after all, SA thugs now often carried badges as auxiliary police men and senior Nazi activists had become leading officials in regional or state government.

There was no prototype of an early Nazi camp. In size, the new camps ranged from SA torture cellars, with a handful of prisoners, to the Prussian state camps in the Emsland moor with 3,000 inmates (September 1933).¹¹ As for the camps’ appearance, there were no firm rules either. The authorities grabbed whatever space they could, including hotels and pubs, disused factories, sports fields, town halls, dilapidated castles, ships and abandoned army barracks. The watchword was improvisation, also with regard to the treatment of prisoners. Murder remained the exception, as the early camps were more about intimidation than killing. But beyond this, there were no agreed regulations: from camp to camp, there were great variations in terms of forced labour, food, discipline and everyday violence. Despite their stark differences, the early camps shared the same overall mission: to crush the opposition (political opponents, mostly Communists, made up the vast majority of prisoners). This was no secret. Many early camps were established in the middle of towns and cities, and guards were often unable or unwilling to hide abuses. More generally, the Nazi press was full of glowing reports about the camps, sharply contradicted by scores of former prisoners – releases were frequent, with most inmates discharged after a few days, weeks or months – who talked to family and friends. Before long, all Germans had heard of the camps, though their understanding of what went on inside varied greatly.

Efforts to streamline the confusing system of detention began early and gathered pace from mid-1933. By then, many early camps had already closed down again. After all, most had only ever been intended as temporary sites. And as the regime gradually secured its position – symbolized by Hitler’s call on 6 July 1933 to guide the revolution ‘into the secure bed of evolution’ – the early camps were starting to become expendable, or so it seemed.¹² Those camps still left behind included several large sites run by the individual German states: by September 1933, for example, the Prussian Ministry of Interior (under Hermann Göring) was in charge of six camps, holding at least 8,000 prisoners. Across Germany as a whole, prisoner figures initially remained high – in late October 1933, the Nazi daily Völkischer Beobachter spoke of 22,000 protective custody prisoners – but numbers did decline during autumn and winter, especially due to a Christmas amnesty, announced with much fanfare. By the end of the year, no more than a few dozen early camps were left.¹³

The early camps were born as political weapons. Set up during the seizure of power, they played a vital role in the Nazi assault on the opposition. Without the camps, the new regime would never have been able to establish itself so swiftly. Some early camps were prototypes of the later SS camps; at times, they were even called ‘concentration camps’. But this term was still used loosely and it was not yet clear what it meant. For the camps did not emerge fully-formed: there were often more differences than similarities among them. Even at the end of 1933, camps still varied widely and there was no nationwide system: individual German states pursued rival visions, and even within states, matters were not always settled. And so the future of the Nazi camps was still unwritten: there was no agreement on what camps should look like, who should run them and how prisoners should be treated. It was not even clear whether the camps would survive at all.

Formation and coordination, 1934–1937

The Nazi concentration camp system was forged between 1934 and 1937. The question of who would run it was settled first. The SS Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler had his eyes on the camps for some time, certainly since late 1933, and soon succeeded. An important first step was taken in late May 1934, when SS men reorganized the Lichtenburg camp, which had hitherto been run, at least on paper, by Prussian civil servants. But this was just the beginning: Himmler was already making plans to take over further camps in Prussia and Saxony. The SS seizure of the camps had begun and before long, Heinrich Himmler was the undisputed master of the camps.¹⁴

This would have been impossible without Himmler’s strengthening grip over the German police. His police career had begun modestly in March 1933 as acting Munich police president; but barely one year later, Himmler already controlled the political police (or Gestapo) in all German states. This gave him leverage over the early camps, not least because the Reich Ministry of Interior (in April 1934) passed the first nationwide rules for protective custody: it confirmed the Gestapo’s key role in imposing detention and the centrality of concentration camps as places of confinement. Police protective custody became the cornerstone of the camp system.¹⁵ The SS seizure of the camps was stepped up during and after the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ on 30 June 1934, when SS and police units eliminated the SA as a major political force. Within days, SS troops had formally taken control of three camps previously staffed with SA guards, with another camp following in m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1: The dynamics of destruction
• 2: The concentration camp personnel
• 3: Social life in an unsocial environment
• 4: Gender and the concentration camps 1
• 5: The public face of the camps
• 6: Work and extermination in the concentration camps
• 7: The Holocaust and the concentration camps
• 8: The death marches and the final phase of Nazi genocide
• 9: The afterlife of the camps
• Composite bibliography of works cited