Christian Goeschel & Nikolaus Wachsmann. Journal of Contemporary History. Volume 45, Issue 3. September 2010.
Is there any more potent a symbol for the destructive power of modern state terror than the nazi concentration camp? In the concentration camps, the nazis pioneered new methods of mass detention, abuse and extermination, driven by a lethal mix of extreme nationalism, bio-politics and racial antisemitism. During the short lifespan of the Third Reich—little more than 12 years—millions of prisoners were taken to concentration camps run by the SS, and subjected to humiliation and degradation, dirt and disease, fear and hunger, ruthless discipline and random violence, forced labour and mass murder. In all, some two million prisoners lost their lives, including around one million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, in Auschwitz, the largest and deadliest of all the concentration camps.
Long before the regime’s final collapse in May 1945, the concentration camp came to be known as the most notorious invention of the Third Reich. To be sure, many details of the inner life of the camps remained hidden while they still existed. But it was already clear that the camps were places of brutal discipline and death. Outside Germany, reports about the camps had appeared since the nazi takeover of power. Among the earliest accounts was that of Gerhart Seger, a former Social Democratic Reichstag deputy, who had managed to escape from the Oranienburg camp outside Berlin in late 1933. Seger’s memoirs described in graphic detail the brutality of the camp authorities as well as the arbitrary nature of nazi terror. With a foreword by Heinrich Mann, one of Germany’s leading anti-nazi writers in exile, Seger’s book was soon translated into French, Swedish, Danish and Dutch. His account was just one of numerous testimonies published in books, pamphlets, exile and foreign newspapers during the Third Reich. As a result, many outside Germany came to associate the concentration camps with violence and destruction: by late 1944, for example, the majority of Americans had not only heard of the nazi camps, but knew that they were sites of mass murder on an enormous scale. Inside the Third Reich, too, it became hard for ‘ordinary Germans’ to ignore the camps’ brutal reality. Memoirs by survivors were banned, of course, but rumours had been rife since 1933. And the closer the war came to an end, the more visible the camps became, first through the proliferation of satellite camps and then the prisoner death marches across the territory still in German hands. By now, one had actively to ‘look away’ to ignore the starved, dead or dying prisoners who became an increasingly common sight in what was left of nazi Germany.
When Allied troops finally reached the concentration camps in 1944 and 1945, the full extent of suffering was revealed. The first insight had come after the Soviet liberation of Majdanek in July 1944, accompanied by graphic reports in the world press. Yet the real public reckoning came in spring 1945, after the Allies reached the last remaining concentration camps, such as Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen and their sub-camps. Hardened veterans of the battlefields were shaken by the apocalyptic scenes inside camps, and journalists rushed to the scene to tell the world about the atrocities. ‘I only reported what I saw and heard,’ the CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow remarked towards the end of his famous radio report about Buchenwald on 15 April 1945, ‘for most of it I have no words’. Images taken inside the camps—showing piles of naked corpses and mass graves, emaciated survivors and the walking dead—quickly spread through newspapers, magazines and newsreels, burning themselves into the public consciousness. Meanwhile, the Allies forced local German populations to confront the crimes committed on their doorstep.
Looking away was no longer possible, as civilians were ordered to walk past the heaps of corpses, to dig trenches for the dead and attend mass funerals. Concentration camps such as Buchenwald, concluded The Times on 23 April 1945, showed the ‘utter depravity of all tainted with nazism’.
Ever since 1945, the concentration camps have epitomized nazi terror. Historical scholarship has expanded at record pace in recent decades and now covers most aspects, from the development of the camp system as a whole to remote sub-camps, from the fate of entire prisoner groups to that of individual prisoners. No history of the Third Reich is complete without the camps. Even historians who claim that the relationship between the German people and the nazi regime is best understood in terms of consent, not of coercion, still use the concentration camp as a central reference point. Historians of the modern world more generally, meanwhile, have described the nazi camps as the most hellish creations in the ‘Century of Camps’. Of course, the intellectual engagement with the nazi camps has gone far beyond the historical profession: philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and political scientists have all reflected about the nazi concentration camps, offering new insights and impulses to historians. Meanwhile, a steady stream of survivor memoirs, novels, newspaper articles and films has cemented the place of the camps in Western popular culture as the place of ultimate evil. No historical site of state terror seems more visible today than the nazi concentration camp.
Yet the popular picture of the nazi concentration camps is rather selective. Many of the ‘typical’ characteristics of the camp system—its enormous size, with hundreds of camps and hundreds of thousands of prisoners from across Europe; its ruthless economic exploitation of inmates, mainly for the German war effort; its lethal nature, with deadly diseases, executions, gruesome experiments and systematic killings—only emerged during the second world war (mainly from 1941/2), long after the concentration camps had first been established. For the camps are almost as old as the nazi regime itself: set up in 1933, streamlined from 1934 and extended after 1937, they had played a prominent part throughout the early years of the Third Reich. But this crucial period—the formation of the camps—has largely vanished from popular memory. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the pre-war camps have been overshadowed by the wartime camps—a legacy of the memory of liberation and, later on, the growing awareness of the singular nature of the Holocaust. Nowhere was the horror of the camps more evident than in Auschwitz, which has become shorthand for concentration camps (and nazi terror more generally). But there was more to the nazi camps than Auschwitz. Indeed, by the time Auschwitz was set up in 1940, the Dachau concentration camp, the first to be established by the SS, had already been operating for more than seven years.
At first glance, the pre-war concentration camps were unlike the wartime ones: there were fewer camps, with overall prisoner numbers in their thousands, not hundreds of thousands; economic exploitation still took a back seat; and large-scale executions or mass killings were unheard of—death remained the exception, not the norm. And yet, despite these fundamental differences, the pre-war and wartime camps were obviously connected. There was no complete rupture in 1939; rather, the camps mutated from places of brutal abuse into sites of unprecedented atrocity. New camps like Auschwitz could build on years of SS experience with discipline and domination, while older camps like Dachau adapted to the murderous wartime climate and continued to operate until the end of the war. Among the many legacies for the wartime camps was the formation of the Camp SS as a tight-knit band of ruthless political soldiers, the establishment of camps as extra-legal sites for the exercise of extreme political and racial terror, the conception of camps as flexible and expandable spaces, and the creation of their inner administrative structures, with clearly defined roles for SS officials and the temporary promotion of selected prisoners to positions of authority over others (often referred to as the Kapo system). In this way, the early years of the concentration camps helped to lay the ground for the wartime camps and their atrocities. Without knowledge of the pre-war roots of the nazi camps—without understanding what ‘preceded the unprecedented’—it is impossible to comprehend the descent into previously unimaginable crimes during the war.
Of course, the pre-war camps’ history is also revealing in its own right, because it provides new insights into the early development of the nazi dictatorship. It offers different perspectives on the capture of power, the ambitions of nazi leaders, the local perpetrators of violence and abuse, the changing structures of the Third Reich, the relationship between central decisionmaking and local pressures, the role of ideology in nazi terror, the responses of the victims and the reactions of the wider German public.
And yet historians have been slow to explore the history of the pre-war concentration camps. In the first decades after the second world war, the picture of the camps was not shaped by historians at all, but by survivors. And the focus of their testimonies was, inevitably, on the mass extermination of European Jews and the unbearable suffering in the wartime camps more generally. Serious historical scholarship began to emerge only in the 1960s and 1970s. Particularly influential was Martin Broszat’s structural history of the concentration camp system, first published in 1965 and originally written as an expert witness report for the Frankfurt trial of Auschwitz SS officials (1963-5). Drawing on the files of the Nuremberg trials of major war criminals and SS documents, Broszat explored in some depth the emergence of the camps in the pre-war period and identified the establishment of a permanent system of concentration camps as emblematic of the gradual nazi dissolution of the rule of law. Yet, rather typically of German historians writing on the Third Reich at this time, Broszat had little to say about inmates’ experiences or the men on the ground running the concentration camps.
It was only in the 1980s that systematic research into individual pre-war camps and prisoner groups really began, in universities, camp memorial sites and history workshops. The first fruits of this research were reaped in two major monographs published in the early 1990s, which made a crucial and lasting contribution to our understanding of the pre-war camps. In his 1991 study, Johannes Tuchel clearly laid out the complex organizational history of the camps, from their uncertain beginnings in 1933 to the established SS system of the late 1930s. However, written from the vantage-point of the regime, the study ignored the prisoners themselves and the reactions of the wider German public. These missing perspectives were added in the 1993 monograph by Klaus Drobisch and Gunther Wieland. Crammed full of fascinating examples, their book described the changing conditions inside the camps and also offered a first overview of early public responses to the camps. However, the book’s approach was indebted to the authors’ political sympathies; though published after the fall of the iron curtain, it reflected the East German officious historiography of the camps as sites of communist martyrdom, solidarity and resistance, and failed to do full justice to the complex function of the camp system as an instrument of political, social and racial persecution.
Since the 1990s historical scholarship, emanating mainly from Germany, has continued to elucidate the pre-war camps’ role, approaching the camps from different directions and opening up new areas of research. New work has appeared on the emergence of the camps in individual German states. And historians have begun to explore in great detail many of the camps themselves, some of which had long been forgotten. Meanwhile, general studies of nazi camps—focusing on themes such as their economic and organizational development—have added important findings for the pre-war period.
Yet, despite this sizable new research, its impact on the historiography of the Third Reich and totalitarian terror has been limited. Above all, only specialists tend to read this highly detailed research, and none of this work—not even the standard literature—has been translated into English. This is one reason, no doubt, why even eminent historians of modern Germany still remain confused about the foundations of the concentration camp system. It also reflects the limitations of the new research on the pre-war camps: its breadth is not matched by depth. In its obsession with detail, it constitutes a rather distinct and increasingly self-referential field of ‘concentration camp history’ which produces ever narrower encyclopaedic accounts of individual camps, heavy on empirical fact but light on analysis. As a result, the camps have become artificially isolated from the broader political and social history of the Third Reich.
It was the aim of a recent AHRC-funded research project at Birkbeck College, University of London, to address some of these shortcomings. The project focused on the formation of the nazi concentration camps before the second world war, and highlighted their variety and dynamic nature. It has resulted in several original studies on major themes rather than individual camps, as well as an extensive edition of primary sources to stimulate further research. In addition, an international conference on the prewar nazi camps, held in London in July 2008, for the first time brought together experts from around the world to share the conclusions of their work and to debate areas of agreement and controversy. The discussion touched on vital aspects of the camps’ history, relevant not only for specialists in the field, but also for those interested in the history of nazi Germany and the comparative social and cultural history of modern discipline, penal policy, state terror and totalitarianism more generally. Key contributions arising from the conference are presented in this special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History and offer the first overview of recent scholarship on the pre-war camps in English.
Throughout its 12 years, the nazi dictatorship never stood still, with many local, regional and national powers competing to translate Hitler’s perceived will into reality. Radicalization was built into the very structure of the regime. The same was true of the nazi concentration camps. Like the regime they served, the camps were characterized above all by their protean nature. The camps were always changing, often at great speed, in terms of function, organization, size, appearance, conditions and prisoner population. Historians have tried to systematize the rapid shifts of the camp system by dividing it into several distinct periods (there are rival models, though there is general agreement on the broad outlines). Not only was there a break between the time before and during the second world war, but the pre-war period itself can be divided into three stages, roughly corresponding to broader development of the nazi state: first, during the nazi takeover of power, the period of the early camps (1933-4); second, the formation of the SS concentration camp system (1934-7); and third, the expansion of the SS camp system (1937-9) during the radicalization of the nazi dictatorship in the run-up to war.
In popular memory, the concentration camps are seen as tools for the persecution and destruction of European Jews. Yet it was only from 1942 that some camps became sites of the Holocaust, as vast numbers of Jewish prisoners were dragged inside. The camps were not set up as weapons of racial persecution but as weapons of domestic political terror. It is easy to forget that the nazi capture of power was accompanied by a great wave of political violence—fuelled by the nazi determination to crush all possible opposition, especially from the left. Caught up in their own anti-Marxist paranoia, the nazis anticipated a communist backlash and uprising. Therefore the regime carried out mass arrests from spring 1933 onwards. By the end of the year, some 150,000 or even 200,000 real or imagined enemies of the new rulers had been temporarily detained, overwhelmingly left-wing activists, Social Democrats, union officials and, above all, communists. Thousands were brought before judicial courts and sentenced. But many more had not broken any laws. Locked up for who they were—not for what they had done—these prisoners were detained outside the law, often in so-called protective custody (Schutzhaft) based on the Reich President’s Decree for the Protection of People and State (28 February 1933), which had abrogated basic civil rights. Some of these extra-legal prisoners were crammed into existing places of confinement, such as prisons and workhouses. But more space was needed and new sites were established: the early camps.
From spring 1933, hundreds of early camps were set up. There was no central co-ordination and, soon, a bewildering array of camps spread across Germany, established by various local, regional and federated state and party agencies, often in collaboration with each other, sometimes in competition. Local nazi party activists in the SA (storm troopers) and SS (protection squads) played a leading role, though the term ‘wild camps’ sometimes used to describe their camps—coined by the Gestapo’s first chief Rudolf Diels in his apologetic memoirs, and later popularized in the study by Martin Broszat—obscures the fact that SA and SS camps had close links with state institutions from early on, reflecting the rapid blurring of party and state in the Third Reich. The early camps differed greatly in terms of their structures, conditions and appearance, with all sorts of spaces—from former factories to pubs—converted into camps. Nazi activists and state officials could not even agree on the terminology: some detention centres came to be known as ‘concentration camps’, while others were called ‘collection camp’, ‘work camp’ and ‘transit camp’, among other descriptions. Most of these early camps were soon closed down again, often only weeks after they had opened, and some more order was imposed from the top of federated states. But there was still much improvisation and, by early 1934, the camps still seemed to be no more than temporary phenomena. Yet this was soon to change.
Between 1934 and 1937 the nazi concentration camp system was established. The Gestapo (state police) was put in sole charge of arrests, transfers to camps and releases. And it was the SS, a nazi party formation, which came to rule the camps (through the new Inspection of the Concentration Camps in Berlin). Instead of different authorities controlling a plethora of individual camps, the SS either closed down remaining camps or co-ordinated them. Gradually, the camps were established as fixed parts of the nazi state, permanent places of detention for ‘community aliens’ outside the criminal justice apparatus. To be sure, the small size of the nascent SS camp system—with no more than 4000 prisoners in summer 1935, compared with well over 100,000 in state prisons—reflected its peripheral status at this stage. And yet it was in this period that the basis for its later extension was laid. Inside the camps, SS co-ordination meant greater uniformity, with common rules, uniforms and guards (with the formation of the so-called Death’s Head SS). The camps even started to resemble each other in appearance, as the SS developed its own ideal type: a purpose-built barrack-style camp that was always expandable to accommodate more prisoners, yet remained closed off from public view (as opposed to many early camps, which had been set up right inside towns or cities).
Reich Leader SS Heinrich Himmler was the key player behind the concentration camp system, backed by Adolf Hitler. By spring 1934, Himmler had taken control of the political police forces in all German states (two years later, Hitler appointed him Chief of German Police), which put him in pole position to take over the camps. His loyal enforcer was SS Brigadefu¨ hrer Theodor Eicke, a belligerent old nazi fighter, whom he had installed back in 1933 as commandant of Dachau, the first SS camp set up under Himmler’s authority (as Munich Police President). From May 1934, Eicke—soon awarded the title Inspector of Concentration Camps—began to co-ordinate the early camps in Himmler’s name, using Dachau as his initial model. The following years were characterized by hectic activity, with Eicke overseeing takeovers, closures and new construction. This phase came to an initial end in 1937. By the end of the year, there were four central SS concentration camps, holding around 7750 prisoners. Two of these camps—Dachau and Lichtenburg—had first been set up back in 1933. The other two—Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald—were new sites of terror, constructed in 1936 and 1937 respectively and modelled on the new vision of the SS concentration camp.
Once established, the camp system rapidly expanded until the outbreak of war in September 1939. The number of men in the Death’s Head SS shot up, from 4833 (late 1937) to 22,033 (summer 1939), after Hitler had ruled that some could serve at the frontline in the case of war, a vital step towards the creation of the Weapons SS (Waffen SS). Meanwhile, the SS added three new concentration camps to its portfolio: Flossenburg and Mauthausen in 1938, and Ravensbruck in the following year, the first purpose-built camp for female prisoners, who were in some ways ‘supplementary’ to the male-dominated nazi camp system of the pre-war period. Prisoner numbers also increased sharply, as the concentration camps came to play a more prominent role in the escalating nazi war on social and racial outsiders. By the end of June 1938, the SS camps already held some 24,000 prisoners, following nationwide police raids on beggars, the homeless, petty criminals and other so-called ‘asocials’ and ‘professional criminals’. Social outsiders had been taken to the camps since 1933, but only now were they detained in very large numbers, outnumbering political prisoners. This push for more prisoners was driven in part by the growing economic ambitions of the SS, planting the seeds for the lethal exploitation of prisoners during the war. And as the camps expanded, the prisoners faced worse conditions than ever, evident in the high death rates in some of the new concentration camps. The nadir was reached after the November 1938 pogrom, when some 26,000 male Jews were temporarily imprisoned in Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, as part of the nazi policy to terrorize German Jews into leaving the country. Most Jewish prisoners were released after some weeks, but for a brief period they constituted the largest group of all prisoners (previously, there had been comparatively few Jews in the camps). And they suffered—from mass overcrowding, deprivation and extreme antisemitic abuse—on a scale not seen before, foreshadowing the atrocities in the concentration camps during the war.
Why did the concentration camps emerge so quickly in March 1933 across Germany, weeks after Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933? Some historians have suggested that the nazis had long planned to set up camps. After all, Hitler had already announced back in 1921, when he was no more than a local firebrand in Munich, that enemies of the state, including Jews, would be locked up in concentration camps: ‘Let us stop the Jews from undermining our nation, if necessary by keeping their agents safely in concentration camps.’ And the constitution which the nazis had planned to implement in 1923—had they succeeded in seizing power in the November beerhall putsch—also threatened the detention of enemies of the state in camps. But ultimately, such early nazi references to the camps were unspecific and haphazard and amounted to little more than political rhetoric in the Weimar Republic’s deeply polarized political atmosphere. Still, the question remains: what were the nazi camps’ roots? Did the detention of supposed or real enemies of the state in concentration camps build upon earlier precedents?
In the Third Reich, nazi propaganda itself repeatedly stressed that its camps were not entirely original creations. After all, it was claimed, it was the British who had built the first concentration camps, to house enemy civilians during the South African War, also known as the Boer War (1899-1902). These camps had become notorious across Europe at the turn of the century because of their poor conditions and high death rates: between 25,000 and 28,000 Boer women and children are said to have died in the camps. Three decades later, nazi officials were quick to remind British critics of these camps. On 12 March 1935, for example, an SS official, concerned about foreign reports on atrocities in nazi camps, argued in a memorandum to the German Foreign Office that ‘it might be especially effective to point to the starvation of thousands of innocent women and children in English concentration camps in the Transvaal during the Boer War’. A few years later, in a widely broadcast speech on 30 January 1941 marking the eighth anniversary of the nazi capture of power, Adolf Hitler himself insisted that: ‘Concentration camps were not invented in Germany, it is the English who are their inventors’. Such claims were pure propaganda, of course, intended to distract from the horrors now unfolding inside the nazis’ own camps. In reality the British camps of the Boer War had little in common with the later nazi camps, except for the name ‘concentration camp’. In South Africa, most inmates were women and children, they were largely free to move around the camp (and sometimes beyond) and deaths were the result of indifference, not deliberate mass murder.
Some historians have tried to place the nazi camps into the wider continuum of modern state detention, as one among several types of concentration camps. Often, the starting point in such accounts is not South Africa but a different colonial setting: the ‘reconcentration camps’ established in 1896 by the Spanish under General Valeriano Weyler in Cuba, amidst the local guerrilla uprising. At the time, Spanish troops forcibly resettled the local population to Spanishcontrolled towns and villages to quell the uprising. These places soon became overcrowded and in all, about 170,000 men and women (or 10 per cent of the overall Cuban population) are said to have died as a result of diseases and starvation. Despite these terrible conditions, however, it is hard to see how these villages for the rural population could be said to have inspired the later nazi camps.
More recently, historians have pointed to other colonial roots of the nazi camps, connected to Germany’s own imperial past. In German South-West Africa, the German army detained more than 15,000 Herero and 2,000 Nama, the area’s indigenous populations, in prisoner-of-war camps during the bloody war of 1904-7. The German army treated these prisoners, including women and children, so brutally that several hundred are said to have died each month. Jurgen Zimmerer and Benjamin Madley, among others, have pointed to these atrocities to suggest continuity between the German camps of the Herero war and the nazi Holocaust. They argue that the Imperial German army, just like the SS during the second world war, used camps to deliberately eliminate ‘unproductive elements’. According to Madley, the nazis borrowed greatly from existing models and templates, including from the concentration camps that had first been tested in German South-West Africa. In other words, instruments of terror such as the concentration camps were first introduced to ‘modern German history through the Namibian colonial experience.’
But this claim is based on conjecture and ignorance of the nazi camps. Madley’s speculative thesis—patched together with words such as ‘indicates’, ‘appears’, ‘suggests’ and ‘most likely’—posits a misleading continuity between the colonial camps and the later nazi camps. For example, the Bavarian Reichsstatthalter Franz Xaver Ritter von Epp (who had been an army officer in German South West Africa) did not preside ‘over the construction of Dachau’ in 1933—Heinrich Himmler did. What is more, Epp actually tried to intervene against Himmler’s attempts to cover up murders in Dachau. Madley is equally mistaken about the role of Hermann Goring—whose father had served as Reichskommissar in German South West Africa (though well over a decade before the Germans built camps there)—in the nazi camps’ establishment. For Hermann Goring, in his role as Prussian Minister of the Interior, did not establish ‘nazi Germany’s first concentration camps’. In fact, the initiative for the first nazi camps in March 1933 came from below. Moreover, Goring was soon pushing for a sharp reduction in the number of prisoners in the early camps in Prussia, just as Epp was in Bavaria.
More generally, there is no evidence that the nazis borrowed organizational or other features from the German colonial camps, nor was there any continuity of personnel. It is also worth repeating that the early nazi camps were not about murderous slave labour or mass extermination, but about the intimidation, disciplining and abuse of left-wing opponents and other ‘community aliens’. It was not until the second world war that nazi concentration camps became places of mass death, evolving in the specific context of the nazi ‘war of annihilation’ out of the pre-war camps, which had operated on very different lines from the deadly Namibian ones. The nazis were of course familiar with Germany’s colonial past, but this does not explain why they opened concentration camps in 1933 nor does it help us understand the nature of these camps and their later development. A few superficial parallels between German colonial and nazi violence should not be confused with direct lines of continuity from Windhoek to Auschwitz.
More fruitful comparisons can be made between nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union, the only other major European dictatorship to maintain a vast system of camps (in fascist Italy, by contrast, the practice of banishing political enemies to isolated islands off the coast of Southern Italy was used comparatively rarely). In the Soviet Union and in nazi Germany alike, the camps were emblematic of ideologies based upon the sharp dichotomy between belonging and exclusion, and in both regimes the camps functioned as instruments of ‘ideological warfare’, aiming at the ‘redemptive destruction of the enemy’. There were some obvious similarities between the nazi camps and the Soviet Gulag. In the Soviet Union, too, camps had initially emerged as makeshift weapons to destroy the opposition: conceived by the Cheka in 1918, so-called class enemies and political opponents were forced into about 300 improvised camps. As the Soviet regime consolidated itself following the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, the camp system was centralized and coordinated. According to Soviet propaganda, this system was always supposed to be about the reform and re-education of inmates (just like the later nazi camps), but in reality, economic exploitation soon moved to the centre (more so than in the Third Reich). Meanwhile, political prisoners were quickly outnumbered by criminals, often petty offenders, foreshadowing a similar shift in the nazi camps in the late 1930s. Looking more closely inside the camps, one can also identify some similar rituals and daily practices.
Equally, however, there were striking differences between the Soviet and nazi camps, both in terms of their layout and organization—compare the massive Karaganda complex, substantially bigger than countries like Denmark, with small camps like Ravensbruck, with a few barracks enclosed by barbed wire—and in their function and treatment of prisoners. These differences became particularly stark during the second world war, as nazi camps became places of systematic mass extermination. Moreover, it is a very long way from delineating some parallels between Soviet and nazi camps to the notorious claim by the German historian Ernst Nolte that the Gulag Archipelago was somehow a precedent for Auschwitz. In fact, there is no persuasive evidence that the Soviet camps substantially influenced nazi thinking about their own concentration camps—one reason, perhaps, why the Gulag never featured prominently in nazi anti-Bolshevik propaganda.
More immediate precedents to the early nazi concentration camps can be found closer to home, inside Germany, where there was a long tradition of arresting prisoners without trial, going back to the practice of ‘military security detention’, first introduced in Prussia in 1851. This practice enabled military authorities to detain individuals in a state of siege and hold them indefinitely. So, at least on paper, the practice of protective custody could build on the mid-nineteenth-century practices of detention without trial, and was first used to lock up hundreds of left-wing activists and strikers in the first world war. Of course, in 1933 the nazis used protective custody on a completely unprecedented level and to quite different ends: to destroy the German left.
Apart from such legal precedents, existing disciplinary institutions also left their mark on the early concentration camps. This was true for workhouses and the paramilitary camps of the Voluntary Labour Service, set up by the Weimar Republic’s Bruning government from 1931 for recipients of welfare payments at a time of mass unemployment. Some local authorities saw the unemployed as ‘workshy’ and used work camps as a deterrent. Bruning’s scheme also paid for public institutions—including local councils, churches and political bodies such as the paramilitary national-conservative Stahlhelm or the pro-Republican Reichsbanner—to run these labour camps. Some of these camps, such as Ahrensbok (near Eutin), were turned into concentration camps in spring 1933, with the standardized wooden barracks of the labour service now housing prisoners. The authorities who ran these early nazi camps declared that political prisoners would be reformed through physical labour for the national community’s sake—just as workhouse or work camp inmates had been before 1933.
Regular prisons were another significant influence on the camps. Many leading nazis and SS officials, including Theodor Eicke and Hitler himself, had been held inside Weimar prisons, which were largely run according to notions of military discipline. As in later nazi camps, ‘education’—through hard and often pointless physical labour, as well as myriad strict rules designed to be broken—was still the norm in most Weimar prisons (as it had been in the German Empire), despite some cautious attempts at reform.
A particular close parallel between the Weimar prison and the nazi concentration camp was the so-called stages system, introduced in the 1920s in many prisons throughout Germany. Under this regime, inmates were split into three groups, with corresponding rewards (such as additional privileges) for good behaviour, and additional punishment for ‘incorrigibles’ and those found guilty of transgressions. As a disciplinary tool, this proved a success, and from 1933, many early camp officials applied a similar system. In September 1933, for example, Max Lahts, the nazi director of the Hamburg prison administration, gave a speech to the detainees of the new Hamburg-Fuhlsbuttel concentration camp (one of several early camps located on the site of a former or current state prison). In his speech, Lahts described the new stages system and also warned that its administration would ‘inflexibly, implacably and ruthlessly, with the use of all means, prove to you, as avowed enemies of the National Socialist state, that no one may with impunity disrupt Adolf Hitler’s state in its reconstruction effort.’ In the Dachau camp, the first commandant Hilmar Wackerle, a particularly ruthless SS officer, also introduced a stages system in May 1933 as part of his notorious camp regulations (which stipulated the death penalty for supposedly disobedient prisoners). Here too, prisoners were divided into three categories, at the SS’s discretion. Prisoners ‘whose previous life justifies a particularly severe supervision in the interest of calm and order in the camp’, that is communist and Social Democratic activists, and prisoners ‘who behave badly are transferred in the third category’, where they only received one quarter of normal food rations, condemning them to agonizing hunger.
There were further influences from the prison service, the nazis claimed. In January 1937, for instance, Himmler declared in a speech at a political conference, organized by the Wehrmacht, that the SS practice of flogging camp prisoners had been derived from pre-1918 Prussian prisons. He insisted: ‘If someone is cheeky or recalcitrant, and that happens now and again, or even if he just tries to be, he is taken into solitary confinement, into dark confinement with bread and water, or—and I ask you not to be alarmed: I have taken the old penitentiary regulation of Prussia, dating from 1914-1918—he may, in bad cases, receive 25 lashes.’ Corporal punishment was indeed allowed in Prussian penal institutions until the end of the first world war; but, in contrast to the excesses inside the concentration camps, it had been used only very rarely in the decades before it was abolished. Here was another attempt by Himmler to legitimize terror in the nazi camps by pointing to supposed precedents.
Another important influence on the nazi concentration camps was undoubtedly the German army, in which many camp officials and guards had served during the first world war, including leading figures such as Theodor Eicke. Some, including the later Dachau commandant Hans Loritz, had also been held in prisoner-of-war camps, giving them a further insight into the strict routines of camp life. It was the experiences of military discipline, drill and blind obedience, combined with radical German nationalism, which later coalesced in the distinctly masculine notion of the Camp SS as political soldiers. On 2 June 1934, Theodor Eicke, just put in charge of the Lichtenburg camp, insisted:
The development of the state is still at its beginning; the revolutionary elan of the SS and its esprit de corps must not be watered down by the fact that they want to re-educate us into prison warders. We shall never become officials, but remain men of action and the black assault force. Officials become comfortable, fat and old. We, as fighters, remain healthy and alive. No SS leader will become an official, but must remain a soldier and leader.
Camp officials applied the mores of the German army in an extreme and perverted form to the concentration camps, leading to the humiliating treatment of prisoners. One common military ritual, the roll call, soon became the norm in almost all concentration camps, as a site of daily humiliation and abuse, just as military-style exercises became a common means of SS torture. In most camps, a prisoner hierarchy along military lines emerged, reflected even in the evolving language of the camps: prisoners were grouped into platoons (Kompanien) and led by prisoner sergeants (Gefangenenfeldwebel).
Other martial influences did not come directly from the army but from Weimar’s extremist right-wing paramilitary organizations, built on brutal political violence and virulent antisemitism. Rudolf Hoss, for example, who rose through the Camp SS’s ranks during the pre-war years before his appointment in 1940 as the first commandant of Auschwitz, devoted himself to paramilitary violence after the first world war and served four years in a penitentiary in the 1920s for murdering an alleged communist traitor. It was also no coincidence that SA units in 1933 used existing SA homes for (often unemployed) storm troopers in major towns and industrial areas, and turned them into early camps. In Berlin alone, SA units established at least 170 torture cellars during 1933, including at the headquarters of the Berlin-Brandenburg SA in Hedemann Street, in the working-class Kreuzberg district. Here, SA men, led by Gruppenfuhrer Wolf Count von Helldorf (soon to become Berlin’s police commissioner), brutally attacked political prisoners. A communist inmate later testified that he survived this camp with a ‘triple fracture of the jaw, injury to the temporal bone, light concussion, several wounds to the face, contusions on the thorax and on the right hand, a wound on the left thigh caused by kicks’.
Looking at all these influences, it is clear that by drawing on existing customs, ideas and structures, the nazi camps did not initially appear like a complete break with Geman traditions. As Jane Caplan has put it, the establishment of the concentration camps in 1933 blurred ‘the boundaries between the normal and the abnormal, making the exceptional into a new norm by responding to immediate practical pressures’. This process was not predetermined. There was obviously no blueprint for the concentration camp when the nazis came to power in January 1933, just as there were no precise nazi plans on how to implement their ideology. This explains the jumble of ideas which influenced the early camps, the administrative chaos that characterized their establishment and their varied operation until the nazi regime had consolidated itself.
The roots of the early camps prior to the nazi capture of power are just one of many open questions of research. There are still many areas of the pre-war camps that remain unexplored. This special issue examines some of these aspects, both in terms of the development of the pre-war concentration camps as well as their broader significance for the nazi dictatorship. The articles have been grouped together thematically, starting with an exploration of the emergence of the camps in 1933. Christopher Dillon’s contribution examines in detail the gradual development of the Camp SS in Dachau, which soon became the SS model camp. Dillon traces the development of the Dachau SS from a small group of local, amateur auxiliary police to a 3200-strong regiment of political soldiers poised for a notorious role in the second world war. Dirk Riedel’s article also analyses the formation of the Camp SS into a professional force of committed nazis, taking Hans Loritz, one of the most influential commandants of the pre-war nazi camps, as a case study. Riedel builds on the growing body of literature on SS perpetrators and explores Loritz’s career within the small network of senior camp officials—many of whom would become key players in nazi terror during the second world war—that emerged before 1939.
Moving on to inmates, Kim Wunschmann’s article examines Jewish prisoners, who began to arrive in the concentration camps as early as 1933. Who exactly were these prisoners? Wunschmann’s article ventures into the inner structure and dynamics of one of the most heterogeneous groups of concentration camp inmates, analysing cohesion and conflict that arose from the prisoners’ different backgrounds. Wunschmann also shows that the Camp SS treated Jews especially brutally, paving the way for more radical nazi antisemitic policies across Germany more generally. Like Wunschmann, Guido Fackler restores inmates’ agency in his article on music in the concentration camps. For the camp authorities, ordering prisoners to sing songs or play in orchestras was an instrument of domination. Yet for the prisoners, music could also be an expression of solidarity and survival: inmates could retain a degree of their own agency in the pre-war camps, despite the often harsh living conditions and the abuse by guards.
What happened inside the camps did not go unnoticed in Germany and abroad. Prisoner abuse, especially the murder of inmates by camp guards, was often the source of tensions between the SS and the judiciary. Christian Goeschel examines the dynamic relationship between the legal system and the SS concentration camps, looking at suicides in the prewar concentration camps. The recurring clash between the judiciary and the SS over jurisdiction over the concentration camps was not a conflict between ‘good’ and ‘evil’; rather, it was a power struggle between the established institution of state punishment and its new rival. One of the nazi regime’s chief propagandistic concerns was foreign and domestic reactions to its concentration camps. After all, from their inception the camps had a public remit, serving as a deterrent for Germans not to step out of line. For the nazi regime, it was therefore important to manage public reactions to the camps, as Paul Moore’s article reveals. His article examines nazi propaganda on the subject of non-German ‘concentration camps’, and shows how the regime publicized foreign internment facilities in Austria, Poland, the Soviet Union and South Africa for rhetorical effect. Moore contextualizes his examination with the extensive nazi propaganda on the Third Reich’s own camps and demonstrates that the two propaganda strands worked in a mutually reinforcing way.
Yet, as Victoria Harris emphasizes in her article, concentration camps were not the only instrument of nazi repression and control. Her article—which highlights the complex meaning of the pre-war nazi concentration camp as a management strategy for female prostitutes—demonstrates clearly that the concentration camps, even though they increasingly served as sites of repression of social outsiders in the late 1930s, always remained but one instrument of repression in nazi Germany. Thus the camps were part of a wider network of nazi terror. They emerged as the most violent and destructive expression of the nazi policy of exclusion, laying the foundation for systematic mass murder during the second world war.