Army of Evil: A History of the SS (16 page)
Read Army of Evil: A History of the SS Online
Authors: Adrian Weale
A
s we have seen, the German prison system simply could not accommodate the massive influx of real and imagined enemies of the National Socialist regime arrested in the wake of the Reichstag fire. In consequence, dozens of “wild” detention camps were created throughout Germany by the SA, the SS, the police and various other agencies of the state and National Socialist Party. These camps were subject to little or no external control, and were often set up in disused buildings, barns or police barracks, with few if any facilities for the detainees. Furthermore, the prisoners were subjected to random beatings and torture by vengeful—and often drunk—National Socialist thugs. Many of the detainees were eventually released, but Himmler remained determined to use his new policing powers to bring order to the system of political detention, and he searched for a member of his organisation to implement this. We have already met the coarse, aggressive, ruthless man he chose for the task, because the prewar SS concentration camp system was largely the creation of Theodor Eicke.
Born in Alsace—which was then under German rule—in 1892,
Eicke was the son of a stationmaster. He had an undistinguished school career before dropping out at the age of seventeen. With little prospect of civilian employment, he joined the army as a clerk and served as a paymaster throughout the First World War. He left in 1919, having gained the rank of career assistant paymaster, equivalent to a senior NCO.
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He and his wife then moved to the Rhineland, where he tried to find work as a policeman. He applied in several different towns, but every time he was taken on, he was soon dismissed for expressing extremist views or for participating in violent demonstrations against the Weimar Republic. Nevertheless, he earned some money as a paid informer.
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Eventually, in 1923, he became a security officer for the chemical company IG Farben at their plant in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, where he rose to the position of chief of the internal security team.
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In December 1928, he joined the National Socialist Party and the SA, in which he stayed for eighteen months before transferring into the SS.
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Himmler quickly promoted him to SS-company leader and gave him command of the SS unit in Ludwigshafen. Eicke displayed a talent for both recruitment of new members and organisation, which led to him being promoted again, this time to SS-battalion leader. Now he was tasked with raising a second “battalion” for the Rhineland-Palatinate, which he had achieved by the summer of 1931. In gratitude, Himmler promoted him to SS-regimental leader and gave him command of the 10th SS Regiment
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—the SS unit that covered the whole of the Rhineland-Palatinate.
By the end of that year, Eicke’s political activities had come to the attention of his employers and he was laid off. On 6 March 1932, he was convicted of being in possession of explosives and conspiring to carry out acts of political violence in Bavaria. This earned him a two-year sentence in July, but the Bavarian Minister of Justice, who was an NSDAP sympathiser, temporarily reprieved him from the sentence so that Eicke could “recover his health.”
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Eicke returned to Ludwigshafen and initially continued much as before, but this was a provocation too far for the local police authorities, and before long he was forced to go into hiding. Fearing political scandal at a critical time, in September 1932 Himmler ordered Eicke to go to Italy, where Mussolini’s regime had set up a camp for National Socialist exiles on Lake Garda. However, before Eicke left, Himmler promoted him to SS-
Oberführer
(senior leader) and placed him in command of the SS camp.
While Eicke was in Italy, Josef Bürckel, the NSDAP’s regional leader in the Palatinate and one of his enemies, attempted to have him dismissed from the party. Bürckel and Eicke had quarrelled the previous year over Bürckel’s plans to coordinate all activities of the SA and SS within his region. Eicke had seen off the threat, but now Bürckel evidently sensed a chance to gain his revenge. Eicke had enough friends among the senior party leadership for Bürckel’s attempt to fail, but when he returned to Ludwigshafen in March 1933, Himmler ordered the two men to forget their differences. Eicke, though, was never one to let any perceived slight go unpunished, so he led a squad of armed SS men to the Ludwigshafen party headquarters and detained Bürckel. However, party loyalists came to Bürckel’s rescue, and Eicke was arrested and committed to a psychiatric hospital in Würzburg, where he was placed under the care of Dr. Werner Heyde.
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Himmler was extremely annoyed by Eicke’s erratic behaviour, and for a short time he was struck from the SS’s seniority lists. However, Heyde, who was a National Socialist sympathiser, befriended his new patient and eventually persuaded Himmler that he should be released and reinstated into the SS. This was duly done in June 1933, and Eicke was immediately handed a new role: commandant of the concentration camp at Dachau.
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Eicke was not an obvious choice to take over from Hilmar Wäckerle at Dachau: his only experience of prisons had been his time on remand during and after his trial in 1932. However, he had an attribute that Himmler prized greatly in those under
his command: he was personally indebted to the National Leader for freeing him from the psychiatric hospital.
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Eicke arrived at Dachau in the middle of a scandal. Himmler had established the camp in the grounds of a semi-derelict factory back in March, and Wäckerle had been in charge ever since. His first task had been to draw up a set of rules for the camp, which he had done, but his rulebook contained various “crimes,” such as “incitement to disobedience,” which were punishable by a death sentence that was imposed by a tribunal of camp officers. In effect, Wäckerle had given himself the power of life and death over the prisoners within the camp. In the camp’s first three months, when it served solely as a detention centre for political opponents of the National Socialists, thirteen prisoners were killed or died as a result of their ill-treatment. The mother of one of the dead prisoners made a formal complaint to the Munich Police, and Wäckerle was charged with four murders.
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Himmler, in these early days of the Third Reich, had no option but to remove him from his post.
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Eicke’s brief was to impose order and discipline on the camp, not to make life any easier for the inmates, and that was precisely what he did. He organised administrative and logistics offices; he hired a doctor; and he drafted suitable prisoners into repair, maintenance and manufacturing roles to ensure that the camp was as self-sufficient as possible.
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He also organised the prisoners into “blocks” of 250, commanded by a “block leader,” who was normally a senior NCO. The block leaders were subordinated to a
Rapportführer
(reporting officer), who was normally an SS-
Hauptscharführer
(sergeant major). He, in turn, was commanded by a
Schutzhaftlagerführer
(protective custody
camp leader) of “officer” rank. However, most of the day-to-day supervision of the inmates was carried out by prisoner trusties, known as “Kapos.” These were normally recruited from the ranks of professional criminals who, for some reason, had been sent to Dachau rather than to regular prisons. According to Rudolf Höss, who served at Dachau under Eicke,
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the SS guards tried to have as little contact with the prisoners as possible.
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Rather than Wäckerle’s broad guidelines, Eicke drew up a detailed schedule of carefully defined offences with punishments to match. Just as importantly, he began to inculcate the guard force with a strong disciplinary code of conduct, based on blind obedience to orders from their SS superiors and on hatred and contempt for their prisoners: these became the rules on which the concentration camp system was based. The most serious offences were still punishable by death, but beneath that was a sliding scale of punishment: periods of between eight and forty-two days in solitary confinement on bread and water; corporal punishment in the form of whippings inflicted by SS men; periods of particularly hard labour; special exercises that were “usually performed with accompanying kicks and blows from the SS guards”;
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and tying the prisoner to a stake or a tree for a specified period of time. In addition to these formal punishments, the Kapos ruled over their fellow prisoners through informal bullying and brutality, to which the guards would turn a blind eye.
In the early years at Dachau, prisoners were subjected to hard labour of a particularly nugatory type: digging ditches and filling them back in; quarrying stones for aggregates; levelling ground. This was not designed to be productive in any sense, but simply to add to the burden of the prisoners’ lives and “educate” them to forget their opposition to the National Socialist regime. As time passed, however, the SS decided that better use could be made of their captives, and they were
rented out as slave labour in factories and plants controlled by both the SS and private industry.
Even more appallingly—particularly during the war—camp inmates were used for SS-sponsored medical experiments, being treated like human guinea pigs. For the most part, these experiments originated outside the SS and simply exploited the supply of prisoners within the SS system. Researchers would apply to the chief SS doctor, Ernst-Robert Grawitz, who would forward the requests to Himmler for approval.
One example of this was a series of experiments conducted on behalf of the Luftwaffe at Dachau by Sigmund Rascher to investigate the effects of low pressure and high altitude on the human body.
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Rascher was a thirty-year-old physician working in a Munich hospital when the war broke out, and he was conscripted into the Luftwaffe as a medical officer. His wife had worked as Himmler’s secretary at one time (she may also have had an affair with him), and Rascher was a member of the SS, having transferred from the SA in June 1939. At the beginning of 1942, after an introduction from his wife, he asked Himmler for permission to begin high-altitude experiments on inmates from Dachau. How far Rascher was acting on his initiative or under orders from the Institute of Aviation Medicine in Berlin remains unclear. Himmler approved his proposal, provided him with an assistant and a special low-pressure chamber, and gave him access to as many prisoners as he needed. The experiments began in April 1942. A report survives of the effects they had on those unfortunate enough to be selected:
The third experiment of this type took such an extraordinary course that I called an SS physician of the camp as a witness, since I had worked on these experiments all by myself. It was a continuous experiment without oxygen at a height of 12 kilometres on a 37 year old Jew in good general condition. Breathing continued up to 30 minutes. After 4 minutes the experimental subject
began to perspire, and wiggle his head; after 5 minutes cramps occurred; between 6 and 10 minutes breathing increased in speed and the experimental subject became unconscious; from 11 to 30 minutes breathing slowed down to three breaths per minute, finally stopping altogether.
Severest cyanosis developed in between and foam appeared at the mouth.
At 5 minute intervals electrocardiograms from three leads were written. After breathing had stopped the ECG was continuously written until the action of the heart had come to a complete standstill. About half an hour after breathing had stopped, dissection was started…
When the cavity of the chest was opened the pericardium was filled tightly (heart tamponade). Upon opening the pericardium, 80cc of clear yellowish liquid gushed forth. The moment the tamponade had stopped, the right auricle of the heart began to beat heavily, at first at the rate of 60 actions per minute, then progressively slower. Twenty minutes after the pericardium had been opened, the right auricle was stopped by puncturing it. For about 15 minutes, a thin stream of blood spurted forth. Thereafter, clogging of the puncture wound in the auricle by coagulation of the blood and renewed acceleration of the action of the right auricle occurred.
One hour after breathing had stopped, the spinal marrow was completely severed and the brain removed. Thereupon, the action of the auricle of the heart stopped for 40 seconds. It then renewed its action, coming to a complete standstill 8 minutes later. A heavy subarachnoid oedema was found in the brain. In the veins and arteries of the brain, a considerable quantity of air was discovered. Furthermore, the blood vessels in the heart and liver were enormously obstructed by embolism.
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It is significant that a good proportion of the post-mortem section of the report dwells on the effects of the damage that Rascher himself
had inflicted during his dissection. His qualifications to conduct medical research were dubious at best, and he is believed to have faked evidence to obtain “correct” results during pre-war cancer research. In later experiments, he simulated parachute descents. For example, a former delicatessen worker was given an oxygen mask and raised to a simulated height of 47,000 feet in the pressure chamber, at which point the mask was removed and freefall simulated. The prisoner’s reactions were described in detail in Rascher’s report: “spasmodic convulsions,” “agonal convulsive breathing,” “groaning,” “yells aloud,” “convulses arms and legs,” “grimaces, bites his tongue,” “does not respond to speech,” “gives the impression of someone who is completely out of his mind.”