Heinrich Himmler : A Life (44 page)

While during the second half of the 1930s the order police was heavily involved in training its own recruits, at the same time it was assigned numerous new functions in the Nazi police state, including the control of prices, dealing with passports and identity cards—which were now much more strictly controlled—and recording details for the national register, in which the police wished to include all Germans. In addition, there was the need to provide security for the numerous large-scale events, parades, marches, and state receptions as well as cordoning-off manoeuvres and, last but not least, the supervision of defence matters. Large contingents of the order police were also involved in the annexations of Austria, the Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia. Thousands of police remained in the occupied territories.
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In October 1936 Himmler integrated the Emergency Technical Assistance organization, which in the event of war, catastrophes, internal unrest, and the like was designed to ensure the continued functioning of essential services, into the police, and in June 1937 subordinated it to the Order Police Main Office.
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The voluntary fire brigades, which contained around 1.5 million men, and the professional fire service in the big cities were combined to form a fire protection service and subordinated to a newly created Inspector of Fire Services attached to the Chief of the Order Police.
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These were all measures intended to create a new central task for the police, namely, the guaranteeing of protection against air raids and the removal of bomb damage in the event of war.

Between the summer of 1936 and the summer of 1937 Himmler dissolved the small protective custody camps—Esterwegen, Sachsenburg, Columbia House, Lichtenburg, and Sulza. Of the old camps only Dachau remained. Instead, the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps developed a new type of
camp, of which the first to be built was Sachsenhausen near Berlin, the successor to the Esterwegen and Columbia House camps.
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The design of the camps was based on the principle of placing separate functional centres—the actual camp itself, the offices of the commandant, the guards’ barracks, the residential building of the members of the commandant’s staff—within a closed complex of buildings. In the words of Himmler, who inspected the camp at the end of 1936,
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it was ‘a completely new, modern, and contemporary concentration camp that was capable of being extended’, which secured ‘the Reich against enemies of the state in peacetime as well in the event of mobilization’.
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In the summer of 1937 the Concentration Camp Inspectorate established a second camp, Buchenwald, outside Weimar, after Himmler himself had personally inspected the site on the Ettersberg hill.
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In addition, Dachau was considerably extended on Himmler’s orders.
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In May 1938 the Flossenbürg concentration camp was established in eastern Bavaria,
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and in August 1938, after the Anschluss with Austria, Mauthausen was opened near Linz.
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In the same month the Concentration Camp Inspectorate established its new headquarters in Oranienburg in the immediate vicinity of Sachsenhausen. In December 1938 work began on the Neuengamme camp near Hamburg, a sub-camp of Sachsenhausen that initially had the aim of reopening a brick factory that had been closed.
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In May 1939 a female concentration camp was added at Ravensbrück.
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The expansion of the concentration camp system was clearly a preparatory measure for the outbreak of war. Already at the beginning of 1937 Himmler announced that ‘in the event of war’ one ‘would have to lock up a considerable number of unreliable characters’.
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In the light of this, the camp system was designed for 30,000 to 50,000 prisoners. The number of prisoners had already been slowly increasing from the end of 1936 onwards—at the turn of the year 1934–5 it had sunk to 3,000—and by the start of the war had reached 21,000. However, as a result of the mass arrests after the pogrom of November 1938 the number of prisoners had briefly amounted to over 50,000.
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As before, the decision over the confinement and release of prisoners was a matter for the Gestapo. Eicke’s office was responsible for conditions in the camps. Basically, within the camps there was a strict division between the guards and the commandant’s office, which consisted of the adjutant’s office, the political department, the protective custody leader, and the camp doctor, as well as the administration.
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Certain subordinate functions
were delegated to—often criminal—prisoners, who in return received certain privileges. In this way the SS included a section of the prisoners as tools of their terror system. The prisoners received a prisoner’s number, which had to be visible on their uniform. In the winter of 1938–9 it was decided to mark the prisoners with a uniform badge. Prisoners had to wear cloth triangles on their clothing, the colour of which indicated to which category they belonged: political prisoners, criminals, Jews, homosexuals, and so on.

According to Himmler, the inmates represented a real collection of oddities. ‘None of them has been put there unjustly,’ he declared to a group of Wehrmacht officers in January 1937. ‘They are the dregs of criminality, of people who have taken the wrong path. There could be no better demonstration of the laws of heredity and race [ . . . ] There are people there with hydrocephalus, people who squint, people with deformities, half-Jews, a mass of racially inferior material.’
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On 8 November 1937 he told the SS-Gruppenführer that ‘we shall have to keep people with several previous convictions in the camps for many years, at least until they have got used to living an ordered life, and that doesn’t mean becoming what we would consider to be decent people, but rather having had their will broken’. ‘The ‘Bolshevik leaders’ could also not expect to be freed.
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But what was to be done with all these prisoners? In 1938 Himmler geared the KZ system towards pursuing new goals and fulfilling new tasks. He began increasingly to deploy the prisoners for work projects, with plants being established in the KZs. The new intake of prisoners in the KZs were now predominantly people who were labelled as being work-shy or asocial. In other words, the phase associated with the ‘economization’ of the KZs had begun.

The first notion of deploying KZ prisoners for labour tasks can be traced back to the turn of the year 1936–7.
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The motive was not primarily economic; what was decisive was rather the fact that the growing labour shortage in the Reich inevitably made people consider the idea of utilizing KZ prisoners for labour projects (as had already happened with judicial prisoners). Had the SS not made any efforts in this direction the KZ prisoners would eventually have been taken over by the Labour Ministry.
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The large-scale employment of prisoners was prompted by cooperation with Albert Speer, who in January 1937 had been assigned by Hitler the job of rebuilding Berlin. Speer, however, was in danger of failing in this task because labour and building materials were in short supply as a result of the
rearmament boom. In this situation Himmler offered Speer his assistance: KZ prisoners could provide the granite and bricks for Berlin’s major buildings. Speer could finance the construction of brickworks and granite quarries from his budget. An agreement was signed on 1 July 1938, in other words, immediately after 10,000 people had been put in the camps as a result of the action ‘Work-shy Reich’. Himmler’s line of confining ‘asocials’ on the basis of ‘general prevention on racial grounds’ now seemed to have an economic pay-off as well.
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The upshot of the cooperation between Himmler and Speer was the creation, in April 1938, of a company, the German Earth and Stone Quarries Ltd. (Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH). The company set about establishing three brickworks and two granite quarries in close proximity to concentration camps. The decisions concerning the location of the new Flossenbürg KZ and the extension to Dachau were determined largely by the fact that there were quarries in the immediate vicinity. The granite quarries would even prove profitable; this was not the case with the brick-works, which suffered from poor management.
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As was the case from the first days of Dachau concentration camp on, the prisoners in all the camps suffered under a cruel and arbitrary system. They were subjected to every conceivable form of chicanery, torture, and mistreatment. Punishment exercises; hours of standing for roll-calls, often in bad or icy weather; forced labour in work details, for example under marshy conditions until they were exhausted: all these were commonplace. Draconian punishments such as floggings on a punishment-block or solitary confinement in tiny cells with minimum food for weeks on end were imposed arbitrarily, and interrogations were carried out with the most brutal methods of torture. Moreover, the guards frequently murdered prisoners, such murders being either disguised as suicide or simply filed under the terse formula ‘shot while trying to escape’. Being forced to live in an extremely confined space, inadequate and poor-quality food, and excessive hours of work of the most physically demanding kind also formed part of camp life.
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Himmler made a vigorous defence of the terror regime in the concentration camps, for example in an argument with the Justice Minister, Franz Gürtner, in the spring of 1938. In March 1938 Gürtner spoke to Himmler about the large number of prisoners who had been shot while ‘trying to escape’ from the concentration camps. Two months later he received a letter from Himmler.
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To begin with, Himmler explained that after his
conversation with Gürtner he had instructed Eicke ‘to remind the Death’s Head units once more that they should shoot only in the case of extreme emergencies’, but in the meantime had come deeply to regret having taken this step. For, as he put it to the Justice Minister, he had been ‘very shocked’ by the result of his intervention. Only two days before, he himself had had to view the corpse of ‘a fine 24-year-old SS man whose skull had been bashed in by two criminals with a shovel’. He was ‘seriously upset by the idea that, as a result of excessive lenience, [ . . . ] now one of my decent men had lost his life’. As a result, he had reinstated the old instruction ‘that, strictly in accordance with service regulations, after someone has been called upon three times [to halt] or in the event of a physical attack the [guards] should shoot without warning’. Moreover, he had mentioned the case to Hitler and had received his approval to hang one of the escaped prisoners, who had been caught in the meantime, in front of the assembled inmates. He informed Gürtner of this a fortnight later, and ordered the execution to be carried out.
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Himmler repeatedly used the opportunity to deal with the issue of conditions in the concentration camps in public, for example in his speech to Wehrmacht officers in January 1937:

The camps are surrounded with barbed wire, with an electrified fence. If anybody enters a banned zone or goes where he is not supposed to, he will be shot. If anybody makes even the slightest attempt to flee from his workplace, for example while working on a moor or on building a road, he will be shot. If anybody is impertinent or rebellious, and that sometimes happens, or at least is attempted, he will either be put in solitary confinement, in a dark cellar with bread and water or—please don’t be shocked, I have applied the old Prussian penitentiary regulations of 1914–1918—he will in the worst cases receive twenty-five strokes. Claims by the foreign press that acts of cruelty, of sadism, occur are completely inconceivable.
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In a speech broadcast to mark German Police Day in January 1939 he said, among other things:

Imprisonment in a concentration camp is certainly, like any loss of personal freedom, a form of punishment and a strict measure. Tough new values, hard work, a regular life, exceptional residential and personal cleanliness, impeccable food, strict but just treatment, the requirement to relearn how to work and thereby to learn artisanal skills are all part of the educational process. The sign above these camps states: there is a way to freedom. Its milestones are: obedience, hard work, honesty, order, cleanliness, sobriety, truthfulness, self-sacrifice, and love of the fatherland.
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This ‘doctrine’ of the Reichsführer-SS’ was prominently displayed in large letters above the assembly-ground of Sachsenhausen.
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Himmler made regular inspections of the camps: ‘Every year I visit the camps myself,’ he explained in January 1937, ‘and arrive unannounced to have a look around.’
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Walter Janka, who was imprisoned in KZ Sachsenburg for his communist activities, described in his memoirs such an inspection by Himmler in February 1935. However, this visit was not unannounced. Over three days and nights, ‘everything had been swept, cleaned, and put in order’. Those prisoners who were going to be in the front row were given new prison uniforms. ‘With a gesture that could have meant anything, Himmler, escorted by the commandant, strode up and down the ranks of the SS. Now and then he stopped and exchanged a few words. In front of the prisoners he increased his step and no words were exchanged with them. Himmler did not waste a single glance on the assembled prisoners.’

According to Janka’s report, the Reichsführer later made a tour of the camp and in the process visited the bookbinder’s workshop, in which Janka worked together with a number of other communist prisoners, and asked them some very awkward questions. For example, Himmler asked Janka whether he held the SS responsible for the death of his brother, who had allegedly hanged himself in a KZ in April 1933. Janka preferred not to answer.
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