Heinrich Himmler : A Life (28 page)

On 12 March acting police chief Heinrich Himmler gave a press conference, at which he commented on the mass arrests that he had ordered during the preceding days:

I have made quite extensive use of protective custody [ . . . ] I felt compelled to do this because in many parts of the city there has been so much agitation that it has been impossible for me to guarantee the safety of those particular individuals who have provoked it. I must emphasize one point in particular: for us a citizen of the Jewish faith is just as much a citizen as someone who is not of the Jewish faith and his life and property are subject to the same protection. We make no distinction in this respect.

Apart from that, he had decided to arrest all the leaders and functionaries of the Communist Party (KPD) and of the Reichsbanner and the Iron Front (i.e. the paramilitary units of the democratic parties and the trades unions).
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On 15 March, six days after Himmler’s appointment as acting Munich police chief, Wagner appointed him to be ‘political adviser to the Interior Ministry’, thereby giving him effective responsibility for the political police throughout the state.
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Before the month was out Himmler had been appointed commander of the Bavarian auxiliary political police. This appointment was in his capacity as Reichsführer-SS, which meant that he could now appoint SS members to be auxiliary policemen; initially, a maximum complement of 1,020 was envisaged.
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On 1 April he was officially appointed ‘Commander of the Bavarian Political Police’. Himmler now controlled the political police, the auxiliary political police, and ‘those concentration camps that already exist and those that are still to be established’ throughout the state of Bavaria.
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Ten days later—in the meantime, Himmler had given up his post as Munich police chief to SAObergruppenführer August Schneidhuber
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—he was given responsibility for all matters relating to protective custody.
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As a result of these appointments and assignments of responsibility Himmler had accumulated a considerable amount of power within a very short period of time. He was in charge of a special police force that had been removed from the regular police structure. It was tightly organized, entirely focused on combating political opponents, and permitted to deploy the SS within its recently assigned area of responsibilities. He could arbitrarily put people in protective custody in his concentration camps, who would then be indefinitely subject to his whim. Above all, as commander of the political police—and this was certainly one reason for his appointment—Himmler
represented an effective counterweight to the special commissars whom Röhm had appointed from the ranks of the SA in order to control the Bavarian administration. While it was true that the special commissars had police responsibilities, for which they had the SA auxiliary police at their disposal, Himmler could give directives to the SA special commissars in matters concerning the
political
police.
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On 15 March the political police had already begun to establish a camp for prisoners in protective custody in the grounds of an old gunpowder factory in the town of Dachau near Munich.
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Himmler announced the measure on 20 March, justifying it on the grounds of ‘state security’. No attention would be paid to ‘petty objections’, and there were plans for an establishment of 5,000 prisoners. Himmler announced brashly that enquiries to police headquarters about the length of protective custody simply held up the police unnecessarily. The result was that ‘every enquiry would merely mean that the prisoner would have to spend an extra day in protective custody’.
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Initially the Dachau camp was guarded by a squad of Munich police. However, acting in his capacity as head of the Bavarian auxiliary political police, on 2 April Himmler ordered the camp to be handed over to the SS.
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With this move Himmler had wangled for the SS a task that officially came under the remit of, and was financed by, the state. On 11 April the Munich police left the camp in which there were at the time over 200 prisoners. Immediately after taking over the camp the SS indulged in an orgy of violence which cost four Jewish prisoners their lives. There were further murders, with prisoners either dying from mistreatment or being shot.
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Subsequent investigations revealed that the camp commandant, Hilmar Wäckerle, had issued ‘special regulations’, according to which ‘martial law’ was to prevail in the camp. Indeed, there was a camp court over which he presided and which could even pass death sentences.
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The indescribable conditions existing in Dachau not only became widely known,
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but led to the Munich prosecutor’s office becoming involved. In the course of his investigations the public prosecutor, Wintersberger, demanded from Himmler an explanation for four unaccountable deaths, and showed him, among other things, photographs of the disfigured corpses. The investigations came to nothing, but the affair did produce sufficient pressure to prompt von Epp to call a meeting attended by, among others, the Bavarian Ministers of Justice and the Interior, at which Himmler was obliged to agree to replace Wäckerle as commandant of Dachau.
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Himmler found a candidate to succeed him who at this moment was at the lowest point of his life, and who gratefully seized the chance offered him to make a new start. This was Theodor Eicke, the later Inspector of Concentration Camps and leader of the SS-Death’s Head military units formed from concentration camp guards.
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The appointment of Eicke, one of the first important ones made by Himmler following the seizure of power, is a classic example of his personnel policy. It involved recruiting failures who were turned into compliant subordinates by a mixture of strict discipline, gestures of concern for their welfare, and also the appearance of trust, as these offenders were assigned tasks that they had to carry out largely independently.

Born in 1892, Eicke was a military paymaster who, after his discharge from military service, had tried unsuccessfully to join the police several times and had finally ended up in charge of security at the IG Farben plant in Ludwigshafen. Having joined the party in 1928, in 1930 he was given the job of establishing the SS in Ludwigshafen, a task that resulted in his becoming an SS-Standartenführer the following year. In 1932 he was discovered constructing a bomb and arrested; IG Farben dismissed him without notice. According to his own account, the affair was the result of a trap set for him by the party’s Palatinate Gau, with which he was permanently at odds, and this explanation is not totally implausible. Be that as it may, he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. During a period of prison-leave granted on health grounds, he received an order from Himmler to escape to Italy. During his journey there he met the Reichsführer in Munich, who assured him of his goodwill and support and promoted him to the rank of Oberführer.

In February 1933 Eicke returned to Germany, assuming that under the new regime his punishment would be suspended. Shortly afterwards he once more became involved in serious internal party conflict. Himmler ordered him to come to Munich and gave him a dressing down on account of his behaviour. According to Eicke, he made him promise in future not to become involved in political matters or in those involving the SS.
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However, on 21 March Eicke was arrested once more because he was considered guilty, possibly unjustly, of having been involved in an unauthorized action by the Ludwigshafen SS which had led to a confrontation with the police. After going on hunger strike he was transferred to a mental hospital in Würzburg, whereupon Himmler removed him from the list of the SS (a milder form of discharge than dismissal), on the grounds of his having
broken his word of honour, although the Reichsführer acknowledged his ‘poor health and nervous breakdown’ as mitigating circumstances.
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During this period Eicke sent several letters appealing to Himmler, including one of eighteen sides justifying his position. The director of the clinic in which Eicke was held, Werner Heyde, told Himmler that in his view Eicke was not mentally unbalanced (a few years later Heyde was to provide Eicke, who was by then Inspector of Concentration Camps, with hereditary-biological assessments, and later on played a leading role in the ‘euthanasia’ murders).
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Himmler responded by supporting Eicke’s family with a gift of 200 Reich marks and requested Heyde to release Eicke from the hospital at Whitsun. He was intending ‘to employ him in some way, if possible in a state post’.
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By appointing Eicke to be commandant of Dachau camp on 26 June, Himmler was effectively deploying someone as his tool who owed his rehabilitation entirely to him. Eicke was fully aware of the fact: ‘If my Führer had not achieved power in Germany,’ he wrote to Himmler in November 1933, ‘I would have spent all my life going to prison and would never have been able to take up public office.’
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Eicke did not disappoint Himmler. Within a short time he had developed a type of regime in Dachau that differed markedly from that in the other concentration camps during the early Nazi years: the so-called Dachau model.
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Among the essential elements of this system were: the sealing off of the camp from the outside world, in particular the determination to prevent escapes; the separation of the guards from the commandant’s office; the introduction of work details for the prisoners; systematized use of force through the introduction of a uniform set of punishments, the ‘Disciplinary and Punishment Code’;
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as well as strict discipline for the guards, who were subject to a specific disciplinary code.
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The aim of creating the impression that the old arbitrary regime had now been replaced by one that was strict but nevertheless bound by certain rules was an additional aspect of this new system. In actual fact the camp was ruled by arbitrary terror; the prisoners lived in continual fear for their lives. Eicke was concerned above all to prevent arbitrary murders by the guards; the right to kill prisoners should be confined solely to the camp authorities.

The ‘Disciplinary and Punishment Code’ made it clear that within the camp any behaviour by a prisoner could be construed as encouragement to protest or mutiny, in other words, as a crime that carried the death penalty. It stated that anyone who ‘makes political statements designed to encourage
protest, or makes provocative speeches’, anyone who ‘collects, receives, buries, or passes on by word of mouth or in any other way information, whether true or false, designed for hostile propaganda, anyone who encourages others to flee or to commit a crime shall be hanged as an agitator by right of revolutionary law’. A prisoner who physically attacked a guard, encouraged another to mutiny, or ‘who during a march or during work yells, shouts, agitates or holds speeches’ would be ‘shot on the spot as a mutineer’ or hanged. Whereas under Eicke’s predecessor there had been ‘martial law’, now the decision over life and death was no longer bound by a formal process, and in fact murders did not cease. However, as a result of the camp being sealed off, the improved discipline of the guards, and the systematization of terror, the murder cases could be more easily concealed, so that the judiciary could not find any justification for intervening. In general the murders were portrayed as suicide or as the prisoner having been shot while trying to escape.
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The commander of the political police, Heinrich Himmler, on whose authority the ‘Disciplinary and Punishment Code’ was explicitly based, was responsible for implementing this process of concealment. For it was Himmler who was obliged to inform the Bavarian Interior Ministry about the deaths in Dachau, and who confirmed the falsified accounts of suicide or ‘attempts at flight’.
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For this reason alone it is clear that Himmler was aware of the excesses and murders in Dachau. In other words, he knew that the image projected to the outside world of Dachau as a ‘model camp’ was a complete distortion of the facts. Himmler visited the camp on a number of occasions. In August 1933 Röhm joined him in inaugurating a memorial stone in memory of Horst Wessel, ‘donated’ by the prisoners,
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and in January 1934, on the occasion of a party meeting, he invited the Reich Party leaders and the Gauleiters to look round the camp. In the course of these visits he was reassured that the camp authorities were capable of effectively maintaining the illusion that this was a normal and well-regulated prison camp. In March 1934 Himmler received a letter from the Bavarian Prime Minister, Ludwig Siebert, who had recently visited Dachau, in which he was explicitly congratulated on the conditions in this ‘model prison camp’. The letter was published in the German press.
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Nevertheless, in December 1933 a series of unexplained deaths in Dachau was the subject of discussion at a meeting of the Bavarian cabinet. The cabinet had already discussed Himmler’s performance as commander of the political police on a number of occasions.
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At this meeting Reich Governor
von Epp decided that the investigations into the deaths should not be shelved, as requested by Interior Minister Wagner, acting for Himmler,
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but instead should be pursued with the full rigour of the law.
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Thereupon Himmler appealed to Röhm for support. Röhm informed the civil servant in the Ministry of Justice assigned to the political police to deal with the matter that he intended to discuss the affair with Hitler.
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Röhm and Himmler adopted delaying tactics which in the end proved successful. Nothing happened before the prosecutor involved in the case was transferred in the summer of 1934, and his successor then closed the case. In effect, Dachau had become
terra incognita
for the judiciary.
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