The Dachau concentration camp

On 20 March 1933 Heinrich Himmler, who for less than two weeks had been acting police president of Munich, called a press conference at police headquarters. He told the journalists that on the coming Wednesday the “first concentration camp”, with room for five thousand people, would be opened near Dachau. It was to hold Communist and, “where necessary”, Social Democratic functionaries deemed a danger to the state, who, he explained, could no longer be kept in the overcrowded prisons. Two days later, on 22 March, the first prisoners were brought to a disused gunpowder and munitions factory on the edge of the Bavarian town of Dachau, some 20 kilometres north-west of Munich. The camp existed without interruption for twelve years, until 29 April 1945. More than 200,000 people from several dozen countries passed through it, including tens of thousands of Poles, and at least 41,500 of them died there. Dachau concentration camp was not the Third Reich’s first concentration camp, but it was the first SS camp and the model on which the whole later system was built.

The wave of arrests after the Reichstag fire

When Adolf Hitler became chancellor on 30 January 1933, the Nazis had only three men in the government, but two of them controlled the police: Wilhelm Frick as Reich Minister of the Interior and Hermann Göring as commissioner of the Prussian interior ministry. After the Reichstag fire on the night of 27–28 February, the Decree for the Protection of People and State suspended personal liberty and allowed the police to lock people up in “protective custody” (Schutzhaft) without sentence, without trial and without time limit. Within a few weeks tens of thousands of Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists and other opponents of the new regime had been arrested. According to estimates by German historians, there were about 45,000 of them by the end of April 1933.

The prisons and police cells could not hold them. All over Germany, therefore, makeshift places of detention sprang up in the cellars of SA premises, in old castles, monasteries, barracks and disused factories. Historians call them the early or “wild” concentration camps; their number is estimated at several dozen, or over a hundred if the SA’s improvised lock-ups are included. They were guarded mostly by stormtroopers of the SA and the SS who had been taken into the auxiliary police and who took revenge on people they knew from the street fights of the republic’s last years. Beatings and torture were a daily occurrence. The first camp to be called a concentration camp in the press was set up by the Thuringian authorities on 3 March 1933 at Nohra near Weimar. The Heuberg camp in Baden followed on 20 March, and the camp at Oranienburg near Berlin on 21 March. The claim that Dachau was “the first concentration camp in Germany” thus comes from Himmler himself and is not accurate.

In Bavaria, the last large German state still governed by non-Nazis, power was taken over on 9 March. Berlin appointed General Franz von Epp Reich commissioner, and Himmler, leader of the SS since 1929, took charge of the Munich police. The political department of the Munich police was headed by his closest associate, Reinhard Heydrich. Thousands were arrested in Bavaria, and the Bavarian prisons, above all Landsberg and Munich’s Stadelheim, were soon overflowing.

The announcement of 20 March

According to researchers, Himmler had already ordered the creation of a camp near Dachau on 13 March. The site chosen was the former Royal Gunpowder and Munitions Factory, closed after the First World War: stone buildings, a wall and an enclosed area that could quickly be adapted. Himmler’s statement, printed the next day by the Munich newspapers, presented the camp as a practical and even lenient solution: the prisoners would be held there only as long as was necessary for the peace of the state. Yet the very announcement of a camp for five thousand people showed how widely the regime meant to pursue its opponents.

War chronologies often record that the Dachau camp was “completed” on 20 March. This is inaccurate: on that day the camp was announced, not completed. Nobody built it from scratch. The first prisoners were housed in the unheated halls of the old factory, and the camp was rebuilt and expanded over the following years. The press reported its opening widely. From the first day Dachau was public, because it was meant to deter.

The first prisoners and the first murders

On 22 March 1933 about 150 men were brought to Dachau by lorry from the prisons at Landsberg, Stadelheim and Neudeck, most of them Communists and Social Democrats. Number one went to the Communist Claus Bastian. For the first few weeks the camp was guarded by the Bavarian state police; from 11 April SS men took over as auxiliary police. The very next day, 12 April, the guards led four young prisoners of Jewish origin – Rudolf Benario, Ernst Goldmann, Arthur Kahn and Erwin Kahn – outside the fence and shot them, staging an “escape attempt”. Three died on the spot, and the fourth died in hospital a few days later. In the following weeks more prisoners were beaten to death or shot.

In May the first commandant, the SS man Hilmar Wäckerle, drew up camp regulations under which judicial authority in the camp belonged to the commandant alone, and a prisoner could be sentenced to death for resisting a guard or for “mutiny”. The Munich public prosecutor’s office was still trying to act at that point. The prosecutor Karl Wintersberger opened investigations into the killings and brought about Wäckerle’s removal at the end of June. The proceedings were, however, dropped, and the camp was permanently removed from the oversight of the justice system. In May 1933 the Communist Reichstag deputy Hans Beimler escaped from Dachau. In Prague he published a pamphlet, In the Murder Camp of Dachau, one of the first accounts of the camps to reach the outside world.

Eicke and the “Dachau model”

On 26 June 1933 the new commandant became Theodor Eicke, a former paymaster officer from the First World War who had been dismissed from several posts for troublemaking and had just been released from a psychiatric clinic. It was he who gave Dachau the shape later adopted by the other camps. On 1 October 1933 he introduced disciplinary and penal regulations: “incitement” and talking politics were punishable by hanging, attacking a guard or refusing to work by shooting, and lesser offences by flogging, solitary confinement on bread and water, or being hung from a post. Guards were to shoot without warning. Eicke trained his SS men to hate the prisoners as “enemies of the state” and taught them that pity was weakness. The camp became, as historians later wrote, “a state within a state”: a place with its own law, which not even the fire brigade was allowed to enter.

In 1933, 4,821 people passed through Dachau. About half were released, and at the end of the year the camp held just under 2,500 prisoners. Those released were supposed to keep quiet, but word of the camp spread, and Bavarians repeated a little rhyme: “Dear Lord, make me dumb, that I may not to Dachau come.” That was the purpose: to intimidate those still at liberty.

The Dachau model prevailed in the rivalry with the SA camps. In 1933 and 1934 Göring and Frick closed most of the “wild” camps, which had slipped out of state control. During the Night of the Long Knives SS men from Dachau shot more than a dozen people in the camp, including the former Bavarian state commissioner-general Gustav von Kahr and the Catholic journalist Fritz Gerlich, and on 1 July 1934 Eicke personally shot Ernst Röhm in Stadelheim prison. A few days later Himmler appointed him Inspector of Concentration Camps and commander of the SS guard units. Eicke transferred the Dachau regulations to all the SS camps, and his guards became the nucleus of the SS-Totenkopfverbände and of one of the divisions of the Waffen-SS. Many future camp commandants began their careers at Dachau, among them Rudolf Höss, later commandant of Auschwitz, who became a block leader there in 1934.

From political enemies to “community aliens”

By the end of 1934 Dachau was one of the few camps to have survived. From 1935 it increasingly received not only political opponents but also people the Nazis considered harmful to the “national community”: criminals who had served their sentences, people deemed “asocial” and “work-shy”, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Roma and Sinti. In 1937–1938 the prisoners built a new camp with barracks, a roll-call square and a bunker of isolation cells, and a gate bearing the inscription “Arbeit macht frei”. After the Anschluss, in April 1938, the first Austrians were brought in, and after Kristallnacht in November 1938 almost 11,000 Jewish men from Germany and Austria. Most of them were released within a few months on condition that they emigrated immediately and surrendered their property.

Dachau during the war

After the outbreak of war Dachau filled with prisoners from conquered Europe. In the spring of 1940 the first transports of Poles arrived, and they soon became one of the largest groups in the camp. Some of the Kraków professors arrested in Sonderaktion Krakau were sent there, and from December 1940 the SS concentrated clergy from all the camps at Dachau. Of more than 2,700 priests and members of religious orders, mostly Catholic, about 1,800 were Poles, and nearly half of them died. The auxiliary bishop of Włocławek, Michał Kozal, died at Dachau in 1943. SS doctors carried out criminal experiments on the prisoners, among them Polish priests: Sigmund Rascher studied the effects of low pressure and hypothermia, and Claus Schilling infected people with malaria.

Dachau was not an extermination camp, but killing took place there on a large scale. In 1941–1942 the SS shot more than four thousand Soviet prisoners of war at the nearby firing range at Hebertshausen. In 1942 several thousand sick prisoners and those unable to work were taken to the euthanasia centre at Hartheim near Linz and gassed. In the autumn of 1942 all the Jewish prisoners were deported to Auschwitz. In 1943 a new crematorium with a gas chamber was built, which, in the prevailing view of historians, was not used for mass killing. In the last year of the war the camp, with more than a hundred subcamps – among them the Kaufering complex, where Jewish prisoners built underground armaments factories – claimed thousands of victims a month through starvation, labour and typhus. On 9 April 1945 Georg Elser, who had tried to kill Hitler with a bomb in 1939, was murdered there.

On 29 April 1945 the camp was liberated by soldiers of the US Seventh Army. They found more than 30,000 emaciated prisoners and, on a railway siding, a train full of corpses. That day shocked soldiers and prisoners killed some of the SS guards, an event that went down in history as the Dachau massacre. According to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, at least 41,500 people died in the camp and its subcamps, a figure that does not include many victims of executions and death marches.

Significance

Dachau was the instrument with which the Nazis crushed the opposition in their first months in power. Fear of the camp deterred Germans from resistance more effectively than any law, and within a few years there was no one left in Germany who could organise opposition to Hitler’s road to war. Even more important was the model that took shape at Dachau: the camp as a place outside the law, answerable only to the SS, with Eicke’s regulations and guards trained in cruelty. In the 1930s Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg and Mauthausen were built on this pattern, and after the outbreak of war the camps in occupied Poland, Auschwitz among them. Men trained at Dachau ran them, and millions of victims fell into their hands, including hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens. What began in March 1933 as a camp for a few thousand Communists, announced in the press, was the first link in a system that during the Second World War became one of the principal instruments of German terror in Europe.