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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933â"1945
Volume I Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Main Office (WVHA) Part A
By Geoffrey P. Megargee Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2009 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00350-8
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION TO THE EARLY CAMPS
Nazi Germany's concentration camp system originated in 1933–1934 as an improvised response to cope with tens of thousands of opponents to the Nazi regime. The approximately 100 early camps (frühen Lager) appeared during the regime's consolidation of power. Most closed, however, with the emergence of an SS police system under Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler; the remainder were consolidated under the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps (IKL). Administrations outside the Nazi paramilitaries played important roles in their foundation. The new regime quickly recognized the camps' potential for persecuting not only opponents but also so-called outcasts from the "national community" (Volksgemeinschaft); embryonically, many exhibited the radical anti-semitism that became the essential feature of Nazi rule. For many detainees, called Schutzhäftlinge or Polizeihäftlinge because they had been taken into "protective custody" (Schutzhaft), detention in 1933 inaugurated an ordeal in camps and prisons lasting until 1945.
Before introducing the early camps, it is necessary to provide some brief political background to the Nazi dictatorship. The global slump of 1929 destabilized Weimar democracy. After the last elected government's fall in March 1930, Reich President Paul von Hindenburg appointed a succession of Reich chancellors under the Weimar Constitution's Article 48, which permitted presidential rule by decree in event of national emergency. The second appointee, National Conservative (German National People's Party, DNVP) Franz von Papen, overthrew the elected Social Democratic Party (SPD) government of Prussia, Germany's largest state (Land, pl. Länder), on July 20, 1932, and appointed in its stead a Reich commissar. This coup ironically facilitated Prussia's subsequent "synchronization" (Gleichschaltung) by the Nazis and furnished a model that the Nazis applied elsewhere after the March 5, 1933, national election.
When a backroom deal brought Adolf Hitler to power with Papen as vice-chancellor on January 30, 1933, Nazi Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick inaugurated a crackdown on leftist opposition in advance of the election. Issued on February 4, 1933, the "Reich Presidential Decree for the Protection of the German People" permitted the ban of open-air assemblies, the censorship of publications, and the taking of opponents into police custody (Polizeihaft). Unlike protective custody, it granted the incarcerated person limited legal protection through the courts. Frick also directed the other Länder where the Nazi Party already enjoyed strong support, particularly Oldenburg and Thuringia, to prepare lists of arrest targets for its long-threatened settling of accounts with the Left. Since August 1932, the Nazis had warned that, upon gaining power, they would dispatch German Communist Party (KPD) hardliners to concentration camps.
In February 1933, Papen assumed the office of Reich commissar in Prussia, while Nazi Hermann Göring held the post of Reich commissar for the Prussian Interior Ministry. Papen and Göring quickly synchronized Prussia, replacing county and police presidents (Regierungs- und Polizeipräsidenten) with Nazis and nationalists, establishing a rudimentary political police under Rudolf Diels, and deputizing Nazi and nationalist paramilitaries (SA, SS, and Stahlhelm) as police auxiliaries (Hilfspolizei). In their new role, the SA and SS, who had already committed atrocities during the Nazi "struggle for power" (Kampfzeit), acquired a license to torture and kill. Appointed minister president and interior minister of Prussia on April 11, Göring merged these functions and, on April 26, founded the Prussian Secret State Police Office (Geheime Staatspolizeiamt, Gestapa), with Diels as its head.
"PROTECTIVE CUSTODY"
Conveniently labeled a Communist plot, the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, furnished the pretext for mass arrests. On February 28, the cabinet promulgated the "Reich Presidential Decree for the Protection of People and State," or the "Reichstag Fire Decree," which suspended individual liberties under the 1919 Weimar Constitution, including the right of personal freedom (Article 114). Although it did not specify Schutzhaft, authorities justified the arrests on this basis. The pace of roundups accelerated after the March 5 election. Despite the first arrests, the KPD ban, and voting chicanery, the Nazis managed a Reichstag majority only in coalition with the DNVP. In the Länder parliaments and city senates where they did not gain majorities, the Nazis deposed the governments of Baden, Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg, and of the Hanseatic cities of Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck, between March 5 and 11. In each case, the roundups or the establishment of camps ensued immediately afterward. On March 24, with its KPD members either in custody, in exile, or underground, the Reichstag passed an Enabling Law (Ermächtigungsgesetz), thus giving Hitler quasi-legal backing for a four-year dictatorship. With the bans in June and July 1933 on the SPD, Bavarian People's Party (BVP), Center Party, DNVP, and other parties, the Nazis established a one-party state.
The new regime built upon but transformed the previous German practice of protective custody. Originating in the Revolution of 1848, Schutzhaft had a dual legal and semantic meaning. On the one hand, Schutzhaft signified arrest for personal protection. On the other hand, it meant taking seditious elements into custody during emergencies. The second meaning derived from the Prussian Siege Law of 1851. During World War I, the Reich patterned a similar ordinance after this law to quell mounting war opposition. Although the 1919 constitution established safeguards against political arrest, KPD members and foreign nationals were taken into Schutzhaft during Weimar's first turbulent years under Article 48 but released after the passage of the emergencies. As Jane Caplan points out, the previous practice of Schutzhaft framed how non-Nazi bureaucrats understood political detention in the political setting of 1933. For conservative civil servants, protective custody seemed a temporary and acceptable remedy for dealing with the supposed leftist threat.
The Nazis transformed the scope and scale of political detention. Creating a perpetual emergency, they seized opponents for unlimited duration and persecuted non-Communists from the start. In 1933–1934, protective custody did not necessarily preclude legal prosecution but facilitated continued detention in the event of judicial acquittal or sentence completion. By early 1934, the Gestapo exclusively controlled Schutzhaft in Prussia, a monopoly Himmler later extended throughout the Reich. By this time, the regime further broadened the scope of detention, with the creation of police preventive custody (Vorbeugungshaft) on November 24, 1933. This category provided for the indefinite incarceration of criminal recidivists (Berufsverbrecher) by the Criminal Police (Kripo). A few common criminals had already entered the camps in 1933, but, thanks to Vorbeugungshaft, many thousands more were detained by the late 1930s. Otto Geigenmüller's legal dissertation (1937), dedicated to Himmler, demonstrated how broadly the Gestapo applied protective custody. Dismissing anyone as a "political dummy or pighead" who denied its "necessity," Geigenmüller observed that it afforded the means to combat groups allegedly detrimental to the "national community." As Robert Gellately suggests, the elasticity of Schutzhaft and Vorbeugungshaft enabled the police to conduct Nazi social engineering through the limitless expansion of criminal categories.
The number of detainees taken in 1933–1934 is difficult to determine with precision. Caplan estimates that there were some 50,000 detainees in the regime's first months and that the arrests may have exceeded 100,000 by 1934. More conservatively, Johannes Tuchel holds that some 30,000 opponents were dispatched to camps in 1933. In August 1933, the exile paper Neuer Vorwärts reckoned that some 80,000 individuals had already been placed in Schutzhaft, of whom up to 45,000 had been sent to concentration camps. Three factors confound the estimates. First, a person taken into protective custody sometimes spent only hours or a single day in jail before release. Second, former detainees were subject to re-arrest. For example, a BVP official in Bamberg, Georg Banzer, was taken into Schutzhaft three times between March and June 1933. Finally, the SA and SS Hilfspolizei sometimes seized individuals without police authorization.
SITES OF IMPROVISATION
In accordance with Weimar's federal system, which the new regime was then in the process of dismantling, local officials and Nazis founded early camps at state and local, not national, levels. The clustering of detention sites around the industrial areas of Berlin, Hamburg, the Ruhr, and Saxony underscored that the first targets of persecution were the working-class parties. Because some areas seized relatively few opponents, not every state set up camps, only Baden, Bavaria, Oldenburg, Prussia, Saxony, Thuringia, Württemberg, and the Free Cities of Bremen and Hamburg. As the review below of what Tuchel calls the Prussian and Dachau "models" indicates, the patterns of camp establishment and consolidation varied by locality.
Early detention sites fell into three broad categories: protective custody camps (Schutzhaftlager), concentration camps (Konzentrationslager), and torture sites (Folterstätten or Folterkeller). The first type consisted of wings or blocks of existing prisons, penitentiaries, and pretrial detention centers, usually separated from common criminals. Practically every local court prison (Amtsgerichtsgefängnis) briefly held a few detainees who were then released or removed elsewhere. If a "camp" is defined as a detention site holding 10 prisoners for 10 days, then some entries in this volume indicate that the estimate of 30 Schutzhaftlager is low. Although most closed by the fall of 1933 and the winter of 1934, a few continued to operate for a longer period, most notably the München-Stadelheim prison, which held female detainees until January 1936. As Nikolaus Wachsmann shows, persecution in prisons did not cease with the disappearance of protective custody sections. Instead, prison conditions noticeably worsened, in line with Nazi propaganda against Weimar's allegedly soft treatment of criminals. By the mid-1930s, the prisons emerged as the central sites for political persecution, as they incarcerated thousands of individuals convicted of trumped-up political offenses.
In 1933, most concentration camps were structures pressed into service by bureaucrats and local Nazis on a space-available basis. Except for Papenburg/Emsland and Dachau, the approximately 70 concentration camps established in 1933 generally did not have barbed wire, barracks, and guard towers. Practically any type of structure served for confinement, the foremost being factories bankrupted during the Depression, and institutions and buildings the state already deemed multipurpose, namely, workhouses and, especially in Saxony, castles. Germany's first concentration camp was Nohra, established on March 3 at a school by Thüringian Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel. Stretching the limits of improvisation, the Bremen police, for instance, installed a concentration camp aboard a disused barge at Ochtumsand in September 1933. The camps' heterogeneity extended to the staffs, because the Länder police, SS, and SA supervised most in succession or combination. Occasionally the Stahlhelm and, in one case, the National Socialist Women's Association (NS-Frauenschaft, NSF) oversaw camps. Most early camps closed before the IKL's establishment in July 1934, but many were recycled as detention sites under other authorities in the Nazi era, as, for example, Colditz, which became a notorious Wehrmacht prisoner-of-war (POW) camp. The majority of early camps were not "wild camps" (wilde Lager). This misleading term, coined by Diels after 1945 in order to disclaim responsibility for them, implied an absence of governmental oversight. As Tuchel demonstrates, even those camps approximating this appellation, like Oranienburg, founded by the SA at a brewery near Berlin on March 21, 1933, eventually came under state control.
The confusion over wild camps stemmed in part from the torture sites. In Nazi barracks and brewpubs (Lokale), the Hilfspolizei tormented individuals under the guise of interrogation (Verhör). Helmut Bräutigam and Oliver C. Gleich have estimated that Berlin alone held 150 such sites, where the SA continued their war against the Left that had begun in the streets: now one-sidedly, behind closed doors, and with impunity. Seizing the KPD national headquarters, the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, the SA renamed it after their hero, Horst Wessel, and used it for torturing prisoners. Sites like Berlin (General-Pape-Strasse) and Köln {Mozartstrasse) blurred the categories of Folterstätte and camp.
THE PRUSSIAN MODEL
In the first months of 1933, the Prussian police arrested over 40,000 opponents, thus posing an urgent incarceration problem. In mid-March, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior directed the Regierungspräsidenten to search for detention sites. Nearly 30 were established by March 31 and many more in April and May. Most closed in the summer and fall of 1933, in part because of numerous releases but also on account of local complaints about murder and torture. In the summer of 1933, Prussia organized a network of "state" and regional camps for then just under 15,000 detainees. The centerpiece was Papenburg/Emsland, but it also included "assembly camps" (Sammellager) in the former prisons at Brandenburg, Lichtenburg, and Sonnenburg and regional camps in workhouses and prisons at Benninghausen, Brauweiler, Breitenau, Glückstadt, Gollnow, Moringen, and (briefly) Quednau. Brauweiler and Moringen had women's protective custody sections; Moringen eventually emerged as the Reich's "unofficial" camp for women.
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Excerpted from The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933â"1945 by Geoffrey P. Megargee. Copyright © 2009 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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