Academics of violence | TLS
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Academics of violence
DAVID MOTADEL
Christopher Dillon
DACHAU AND THE SS
A schooling in violence
282pp. Oxford University Press. £65
(US $110).
978 0 19 965652 3
Timothy W. Ryback
HITLER’S FIRST VICTIMS
And one man’s race for justice
273pp. Bodley Head. £16.99.
978 1 84792 330 1
Kim Wünschmann
BEFORE AUSCHWITZ
Jewish prisoners in the prewar
concentration camps
367pp. Harvard University Press.
£33.95 (US $45).
978 0 674 96759 5
Günter Morsch and Agnes Ohm
TERROR IN DER PROVINZ
BRANDENBURG
Frühe Konzentrationslager 1933/34
180pp. Metropol. €19.
978 3 863 31211 4
Published: 2 December 2015
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, more
than ten years after her escape from Camp Gurs in France,
Hannah Arendt described concentration camps as the “most
consequential institution” of repressive states seeking total
control over their people. “In reality they are more essential
to the preservation of the regime’s power than any of its
other institutions”, she wrote. “Without concentration
camps, without the undefined fear they inspire and the very
well-defined training they offer in totalitarian domination,
which can nowhere else be fully tested with all of its most
radical possibilities, a totalitarian state can neither inspire
its nuclear troops with fanaticism nor maintain a whole
people in complete apathy.”
Arendt, though often criticized for her generalizations, was
proved right. Internment and labour camps were at the
heart of some of the most repressive regimes of the
twentieth century. In their monumental Le Siècle des camps
(2000), the French historians Joël Kotek and Pierre
Rigoulot even described them as one of the century’s most
defining features. They were part of a machinery of mass
oppression designed not only to isolate, punish and silence
those incarcerated, but also, more generally, to strengthen
political domination and social control. Often organized
within modern bureaucratic structures and ruled with
sophisticated methods of discipline and terror, the camps
subjected prisoners to slave labour, torture, malnutrition
and other forms of physical violence. They usually
comprised a combination of common criminals, political
dissidents and innocent outcasts, the latter being guilty of
nothing more than belonging to an ethnic, religious, or
social group that the regime, for some ideological reason,
singled out for persecution.
There were, of course, wide variations in the nature of the
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camps. They had their precedents in Europe’s colonial
empires around the turn of the twentieth century, most
notably in British South Africa, where at the height of the
Boer War colonial authorities forcibly interned tens of
thousands of men, women and children behind barbed wire,
popularizing the expression “concentration camp”, but also
elsewhere, in Spanish Cuba, Italian Libya, German
South-West Africa (now Namibia), and beyond. In the
dictatorships of the twentieth century they finally became
widespread institutions of suppression: millions suffered in
Franco’s concentration camps, in Stalin’s Gulag, in Mao’s
Laogai system, and in Kim Il-Sung’s labour and
indoctrination camps. By far the most repressive and
murderous of all, however, were those of Hitler’s Germany.
The Nazi concentration camps are today commonly seen as
synonymous with the death camps of the Second World
War, but the pre-war camps of the 1930s, places like
Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, or
Ravensbrück, were not extermination camps. They were set
up to imprison and subdue political opponents and social
outcasts, targeting Communists, social democrats and
critical intellectuals, as well as petty criminals, vagrants,
alcoholics, prostitutes, homosexuals and anyone else
Rudolf Höss, March 1946 Photograph: © OKS/ullstein
bild via Getty Images;
deemed inconvenient to the regime. They were not intended
to eliminate inmates, but to break, destroy and re-educate
them, before spitting them back into society. The extermination camps, in contrast, like Sobibor, Majdanek, or
Treblinka, were only set up from 1941, when the Nazis began to murder Europe’s Jews systematically.
Overshadowed by research on the extermination camps, the pre-war history of the concentration camps has
long received surprisingly little attention from historians. Often they have been treated as mere “antecedents”
of the death camps, as the Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg once put it. This has now changed thanks to a
number of recent publications on the subject, which draw a detailed, devastating picture of the camps before
the Holocaust.
Christopher Dillon’s Dachau and the SS looks at the history of Nazi Germany’s first concentration camp.
Dachau was founded in early 1933 as a “camp for protective custody”, just weeks after Hindenburg had
appointed Hitler Chancellor, on the grounds of a deserted munitions factory, near the picturesque Bavarian
town of Dachau, north-west of Munich. On March 22, 1933, the first truckload of prisoners arrived, mostly
Communists and other political opponents. They were all imprisoned without trial. Under appalling conditions,
these first inmates had to convert the factory into a prison camp, erecting barbed-wire fences, barracks and
watchtowers. Under the first camp commandant, Hilmar Wäckerle, a sadistic Freikorps veteran in his
mid-thirties whom new arrivals recognized by the bullwhip which he always carried with him, Dachau became
a place of uncontrolled violence and cruelty. Prisoners were whipped until their skin broke, beaten until they
suffered brain damage. Dillon describes Dachau as “an academy of violence”, which served the SS as a place to
practise techniques of terror. Among the young men who volunteered as a guard was Rudolf Höss, who later
became commandant of Auschwitz.
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Dillon’s book sheds new light on the guards, on their personal and social backgrounds, their training, their
social milieu in the camps, and their future careers. He convincingly rejects the idea that they were a group of
unreflective, obedient, disciplined executioners whose acts of violence were the result of the camp’s
institutional structures. The guards were neither ordinary men nor psychopaths, he argues. Instead, Dillon
demonstrates – confirming the results of other research in the field, most notably Tom Segev’s study of camp
commandants, and Karin Orth’s work on senior camp officers – that the guards were deeply politicized
persons, driven by nationalism, anti-Communism and anti-Semitism, and influenced by ideals of masculinity
and revolutionary justice, which, in the brutalizing environment of the camps, easily translated into violence.
He shows that it was the complex interaction of cultural ideals and ideology, cognition and situation that
determined the guards’ behaviour. Based on unpublished sources, post-war testimonies and memoirs, the book
provides revealing insights not only into the camp’s personnel, but also into the dynamic nature of Nazi
violence more generally.
Dachau was also the camp with the first murdered inmates. Their story is told in Timothy W. Ryback’s Hitler’s
First Victims. On April 12, 1933, some SS men took four political prisoners, all of them Jewish, outside the
camp, where they beat them up, shot them in the head, and dumped their dead bodies. As became usual in such
cases, the SS justified their actions in the official report with the fixed formula: “shot while trying to escape”.
But the murders took place at a time when the Nazis were still consolidating their power, and when many parts
of the state were not yet under their control. Some civil servants were still committed to the rule of law. Among
them was a state prosecutor in Munich, Josef Hartinger, who took on the official investigation of the case. On
April 13, together with a forensic expert, Moritz Flamm, he drove out to Dachau. Realizing that the victims had
been shot at close range, Hartinger started a formal prosecution of the SS officers he believed to be responsible,
as well as Wäckerle for aiding and abetting. Soon, as more suspicious deaths occurred in the camp, Hartinger
began investigating these as well. A First World War veteran, conservative and a pious Catholic, Hartinger was
by no means a radical, but a dedicated civil servant with a firm faith in the legal system. Under pressure,
Himmler eventually had to replace Wäckerle as camp commandant, but also managed to stop Hartinger, who
was forced to drop the investigation and transferred to another jurisdiction. The murderers were never brought
to justice. Yet Hartinger’s case file, locked up during the Nazi years in a drawer in Munich’s ministry of justice,
was later used against the SS at the Nuremberg Trials. Hartinger survived the Third Reich and died in 1984,
aged ninety-one.
Ryback, with a great eye for detail, tells an intense, chilling story. His book draws a fascinating picture of the
early history of the camps and the dissolution of the independent judicial system after Hitler’s seizure of power.
It is an impressive account of the sudden transformation of a fully functioning state into a repressive political
apparatus. And yet the book also has some conceptual flaws. Hartinger was not, as Ryback implies, a lone hero
in his struggle for the rule of law, but one of many civil servants who, across Germany, continued their work in
the early months of 1933, and who consequently became embroiled in conflicts with the new regime. This
should by no means diminish the Munich persecutor’s bravery; but it is important to put him in context.
Moreover, the author’s claims that these killings marked the beginning of the Holocaust are not unproblematic,
either. The Holocaust – the systematic, industrialized mass murder of European Jewry – only started in late
1941. The pre-war concentration camps were prison and labour camps, not extermination camps. And they
were established to confine and suppress political opponents and social outcasts, not Jews. To present the case
of the four murdered Jewish political prisoners in Dachau as linked to the Holocaust is anachronistic.
A more rigorous examination of the history of Jews in the pre-war concentration camps is offered by Kim
Wünschmann’s Before Auschwitz. Wünschmann makes it clear that the early camps were not an official part of
the regime’s anti-Jewish measures, although they could play a role in the increasing exclusion of Jews from
German society. Nazi policy before the Second World War aimed to make life for German Jews so unbearable
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that they would emigrate. Most of the Jewish internees in the early camps were political prisoners or
businessmen who had been accused of criminal practices by their anti-Semitic rivals. After the passing of the
Nuremberg Laws in the autumn of 1935, Jews were also interned as “race defilers” for consorting with
non-Jewish Germans. A landmark was Kristallnacht in November 1938, which ended with the mass arrest of
thousands of Jews – it was the first time that Jews were detained for being Jewish. More and more often they
were only released from the camps on condition that they left Germany.
Wünschmann shows that the number of Jews in the pre-war camps, although very small in absolute terms, was
(in relation to their number in German society) disproportionally high, and that Jewish prisoners were
routinely singled out for particular brutality, suffering under their guards’ anti-Semitic sadism, under verbal
abuse, beatings, torture, and at times even murder. The book provides some horrific examples. Among the most
disturbing is the killing of Kurt Riesenfeld, a Jewish lawyer from Breslau, who was interned for race defilement
at Dachau, where he worked under the command of the SS man Wolfgang Seuss on an excavation detail. One
day, in the autumn of 1937, the camp commandant, Hans Loritz, accused him of pausing during work:
Riesenfeld was punished with one hour of hanging at the pole, one of the most dreaded disciplinary measures
in Dachau, in which inmates were fastened to wooden poles with their hands tied behind their backs. After this
torture, he could barely move but had to return to work. Seuss then forced the prisoner into a container that
was used to transport building materials into a mixing machine. The container was lifted up and then released
to crash to the ground. After this gruesome procedure was repeated a couple of times, Riesenfeld lost
consciousness. He died of his injuries in the camp infirmary.
And yet, despite describing such excesses in detail, Wünschmann stresses that they were overall the exception,
not the rule.
Particularly insightful is Wünschmann’s study of the Jewish social milieu in the camps. Although they often
had very little in common, coming from diverse social, economic and political backgrounds, Jews were
increasingly segregated from other prisoners and categorized as “Jews”, an act described by the author as one
of “brutal collectivization”. The place thus forged a Jewish identity even among prisoners who would not have
necessarily identified themselves as Jews before their internment. Based on a vast body of archival materials,
including SS reports, newspaper articles, prisoner letters and post-war memoirs, Before Auschwitz is a
remarkable, humane, thought-provoking book.
Terror in der Provinz Brandenburg, the richly illustrated catalogue of a German exhibition of the same title,
edited by Günter Morsch and Agnes Ohm, provides the first comprehensive account of the early history of the
camps in the Brandenburg province. By the summer of 1933, the Nazis had founded no fewer than nine
concentration camps in the region, based in abandoned factory halls, former prisons and old schools. Many of
them were set up on the initiative of eager local party functionaries, and only existed for a few weeks or months.
The first inmates were members of the local Communist Party, social democrats, trade union leaders, and
others who were deemed politically hostile or simply unreliable. The book is a trove of powerful biographical
accounts of some of the long-forgotten inmates and their guards. It provides unique insights into the local
dimension of the camps, showing that many victims and perpetrators, especially in the rural areas, had been
neighbours, sports club mates, and even members of the same families. There is, for instance, the story of the
prisoner Willi Ruf, a member of the Communist Party who grew up with his single mother, and who
encountered his father, Willi Ruf senior, a stormtrooper and camp guard, at the Oranienburg camp. The
catalogue also shows that the early camps were well known among the local population and a popular subject in
the local press, which presented them as a necessary evil. In fact, the public humiliation of the prisoners in
illustrated newspaper articles, broadcast reports and even short films shown in the cinemas, was an important
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part of early Nazi propaganda, aimed at intimidating enemies and demonstrating the power and reach of the
revolutionary regime.
Although Auschwitz looms over all of the books, none of the authors, perhaps with the exception of Ryback,
suggests that there was a direct path leading from the early concentration camps to the wartime death factories.
None of them fully engages in the old, and by now somewhat outdated, debate about the origins of the
Holocaust: the question of whether it was Hitler’s intention to kill Europe’s Jews from the beginning, or
whether the Holocaust was the result of a long process of gradual radicalization, the last phase in an escalating
series of policy experiments that began with repression and schemes of forced migration and ended in late 1941
with the decision to murder Europe’s Jewish population in a concerted manner, as was first argued in Karl
Schleunes’s classic The Twisted Road to Auschwitz (1970), and is today accepted by most serious Holocaust
scholars.
In the end, the books make it very clear that the camps were not static institutions, but constantly changing,
and that the form and function of the early concentration camps were very different from those of the death
camps of the Second World War. At the same time, though, the authors show that the organizational structures,
terror methods and personnel of the early camps also played an important part in the later extermination
camps. Although the early camps did not inevitably lead to Auschwitz, their history tells us much about the
development and radicalization of Nazi policies of suppression and violence. The history of the institutions of
the early camps, as told here, or the history of ideologies like anti-Semitism, völkisch nationalism and racism,
as once shown by the great George Mosse, are important for a full grasp of the history of the Holocaust. They
were necessary (though not sufficient) preconditions for the industrial mass murders of 1941–5.
All these books reveal the extreme brutality, physical violence and atmosphere of hatred of the early camps,
which makes them difficult to compare to other concentration and labour camps – even to the horrors of
Stalin’s Gulag. Taken together, they teach us much about Nazi Germany’s machinery of repression,
demonstrating that there is still much to learn about the camps even today, seventy years after their liberation.
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