Hitler's Commanders (49 page)

8

The Waffen-SS

Theodor Eicke. Paul Hausser. Josef “Sepp” Dietrich. Helmut Becker. Michael Wittmann. Gustav Knittel.

T
heodor eicke
was a major figure in the history of the SS. Charles Syndor described him as “the architect, builder and director of the pre-war German concentration camp system.”
1
He also created the
Totenkopf
(“Death’s Head”) Division of the Waffen-SS (armed SS), which he drew largely from his own concentration camp guards. Eicke was born in Huedingen, in the then-German province of Alsace, on October 17, 1892, the eleventh child of Heinrich Eicke, a railroad stationmaster. Little is known of his early life except that he grew up in relative poverty and was a poor student. In 1909, he dropped out of
Realschule
(roughly the equivalent of high school) to enlist in the Imperial Army. He joined the Rhineland-Palatinate 23rd Infantry Regiment, then stationed at Landau, but was transferred to the Bavarian 3rd Infantry Regiment in 1913 and to the 22nd Bavarian Infantry Regiment in 1914.
2
He took part in the Lorraine campaign of 1914, the Ypres battles (1914–1915), and in the trench warfare in Flanders (1914–1916), serving at various times as a clerk, assistant paymaster, and frontline infantryman. In 1916, he was again transferred, this time to the 2nd Bavarian Foot Artillery Regiment of the 2nd Bavarian Infantry Division, which suffered 50 percent casualties in the battle of Verdun.
3
From 1917 until the end of the war he served in the reserve machine-gun company (
Ersatz-Maschinengewehr-Kompanie
) of the II Army Corps on the Western Front. He emerged from the war with the Iron Cross, First and Second classes,
4
very high decorations indeed for an enlisted man in the Imperial Army of this era. In late 1914, Eicke’s commanding officer gave him leave and approved his request to marry Bertha Schwebel of Ilmenau. She gave him two children: a daughter, Irma, born in 1916, and a son, Hermann, born in 1920. Eicke’s family life seems to have had little impact on his subsequent career, however. When he returned to Germany after four years on the Western Front, Eicke was a very violent and embittered man. The Second Reich that he had served had ceased to exist, and Germany was in the throes of revolution, which filled Eicke with hatred and disgust. He had no desire to serve in the “new” army of the Weimar Republic; like many disillusioned men of his day, such as Adolf Hitler, Eicke blamed the democrats, leftists, Communists, Jews, and other “November criminals” who, in their view, “stabbed Germany in the back” and caused her defeat. When he was discharged from the army on March 1, 1919, Theodor Eicke had almost nothing to show for 10 years’ service and had no career prospects whatsoever. He initially attended the technical school in Ilmenau, Thuringia, but had to drop out due to a lack of funds. Apparently he had hoped to receive financial assistance from his father-in-law but was disappointed. Unemployment was rampant in revolutionary Germany, and Eicke finally grew desperate enough to take a job as a paid police informer. He was fired in July 1920, for political agitation against the Weimar Republic and the “November criminals.” He had, however, developed a love for police work. For the next three years, Eicke wandered to at least four cities (Cottbus, Weimar, Sorau-Niederausitz, and Ludwigshafen). At least twice he secured employment as a policeman, only to be fired for anti-government activities. Finally, in January 1923, Eicke became a security officer for the I. G. Farben corporation in the small Rhineland city of Ludwigshafen. Here his fierce nationalism and hatred for the republic did not hinder him, and he remained with Farben until he became a full-time SS man in 1932.
5
Meanwhile, he joined the Nazi Party and the Stormtroopers (SA) in 1928 and transferred to the more highly disciplined SS (
Schutzstaffel
), then part of the SA, in 1930. In November of that year, Heinrich Himmler appointed him
Untersturmfuehrer
(second lieutenant of SS) and gave him command of the 147th SS Platoon (Sturm) in Ludwigshafen.
6

Eicke threw himself into his new work with fanatical energy. Within three months of joining the SS, his recruiting efforts had been so successful that Himmler promoted him to
SS-Sturmbannfuehrer
(major) and ordered him to recruit a second battalion for the 10th
SS-Standarte
(regiment), then being formed in the Rhineland-Palatine. Again he was extremely successful—so much so that Himmler promoted him to
SS-Standartenfuehrer
(colonel) and named him commander of the 10th Standarte on November 15, 1931. Although he had joined the Nazis rather late, Eicke was climbing rapidly indeed.

About this time, Eicke left I. G. Farben. One source suggests that he was fired, perhaps because his political activities caused him to neglect his job, but this cannot be confirmed. In any event, he embarked upon a career of political violence that led to his arrest and conviction for illegal possession of high explosives and conspiracy to commit political assassination. Fortunately for him, the Bavarian minister of justice—a Nazi-sympathizer—granted him a temporary parole for reasons of health in July 1932. Eicke promptly resumed his violent activities, but the police were soon after him, and he was forced to flee to Italy in September, using a false passport. To console him, Himmler promoted him to
SS-Oberfuehrer
7
and named him commandant of the SA- and SS-Refugee Camp at Bozen-Gries, Italy,
8
but Eicke was not able to return to Germany until Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933. While Eicke was in exile, one of his many enemies, Josef Buerckel, the Gauleiter of the Palatinate, tried to have him replaced as commander of the 10th Standarte. When he returned, Eicke, as usual, acted without restraint. On March 21, 1933, he and a group of armed followers stormed the Ludwigshafen party headquarters and locked Buerckel—who held a position roughly equivalent to a U.S. governor—in a broom closet for two or three hours, until he was rescued by the local police.

Once again Eicke had gone too far, and the humiliated Buerckel extracted full revenge. He had Eicke arrested, declared mentally ill, and thrown into a psychiatric facility at Wuerzburg as a “dangerous lunatic.”
9
Heinrich Himmler was also furious at Eicke (it must be remembered that the Nazis had not yet consolidated their power, and this incident was a major embarrassment to the party). On April 3, 1933, the Reichsfuehrer-SS struck Eicke’s name off the roles of the SS and approved his indefinite confinement to the mental institution.

Finally cowed, Eicke managed to keep his fierce temper under control for several weeks and even succeeded in acting as if he were normal—a tremendous feat of acting! He also wrote to Himmler several times and, with the assistance of a Wuerzburg psychiatrist, finally persuaded the former chicken farmer to have him released and restored to his former rank. Himmler, of course, knew better than to send Eicke back to the Palatinate, so, on June 26, 1934, SS-Oberfuehrer Theodor Eicke left the mental institution and went directly to his new assignment: commandant of Dachau, the first German concentration camp for political prisoners.

When Eicke arrived at the camp, located about 12 miles northwest of Munich, Dachau was a mess from the Nazis’ point of view. The original commandant was being prosecuted for the murder of several inmates, and the guards were corrupt, undisciplined, brutal, and prone to brag about their activities in public places. Eicke soon discovered that Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, SS regional district commander, had “dumped” his worst men (thieves, antisocial types, etc.) on Dachau. Eicke quickly replaced or dismissed half the staff (about 60 out of 120 men) and established the code of conduct that became the model for all concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Undisciplined brutality was replaced by disciplined, well-organized brutality, based upon the principle of unquestioned and absolute obedience to all orders from superior SS officers. Eicke subjected prisoners to close confinement, solitary confinement, beatings, and other corporal punishment. Usually this amounted to 25 lashes with a whip in front of the assembled prisoners and SS staff. The whippings were administered on a rotating basis by all officers, NCOs, and privates in order to toughen them so that they could torture their prisoners impersonally, without remorse or conscience. “Under Eicke’s experienced direction,” Heinz Hoehne wrote later, “anyone who still retained a shred of decency and humanity was very soon brutalized.”
10
Eicke was particularly hard on Jewish prisoners, whom he hated most of all. Roger Manvell and Heinrich Faenkel called him “one of Himmler’s most trusted adherents on racial matters.”
11
He frequently delivered anti-Semitic lectures to the staff and had
Der Stuermel
, a violently racist Nazi newspaper, displayed on bulletin boards in both the camp and the barracks. He even tried to incite hatred and anti-Semitism among the prisoners.
12

Heinrich Himmler was so impressed by Eicke’s “success” at Dachau that he promoted him to
SS-Brigadefuehrer
on January 30, 1934, and once again came to look upon him as a loyal and valuable servant.

Loyal to Himmler and the Fuehrer he certainly was. When Hitler purged the SA in the so-called Night of the Long Knives, Eicke played a major role in the planning and helped draw up the death lists. His men formed some of the death squads, and Eicke was selected by Himmler to personally execute Ernst Roehm, the chief of the Brownshirts. He obeyed this order without question on the evening of July 1.
13
Apparently this order was much to Eicke’s liking, for he shot the SA chief and then taunted him as he lay dying. For his services during the purge, Eicke was appointed the first inspector of concentration camps and commander of SS guard units (
Inspekteur der Konzentrationslager und Fuehrer der SS Wachverbaende
) on July 5. Six days later he was promoted to
SS-Gruppenfuehrer
(equivalent to lieutenant general in the German Army).
14

Eicke established his headquarters on the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, assembled a staff, and began work on the task of converting the Nazis’ dispersed and locally directed concentration camps into one centralized system. Soon he moved his offices to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp at Oranienburg, north of Berlin, where the inspectorate remained until the fall of the Reich in 1945. By 1937, Eicke had closed several smaller camps and had set up four large camps: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald (near Weimar), and Lichtenburg. After the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria) in 1938, he established a fifth camp at Mauthausen, near Linz, to handle Austrian political prisoners, Jews, and other people arrested by the Gestapo. Perhaps more important, he imposed the Dachau model of conduct on all the camps. “By 1937,” Snydor wrote, “Eicke had a formidable reputation among his SS colleagues as a tough and vicious figure. Ever suspicious, quarrelsome, cruel, humorless, and afflicted with a cancerous ambition, Eicke was a genuinely fanatic Nazi who had embraced the movement’s political and racial liturgy with the zeal of a late convert.”
15

Once he had the new camp system fully operational, Eicke turned his attention to converting his SS Death’s Head guard units (the
SS Totenkopfverbaende
, or SSTV) into Nazi Party paramilitary formations. Skillfully worming his way through the political jungle of the Third Reich, Eicke had formed and equipped six motorized SSTV battalions by early 1935. By the end of 1938, he had expanded these into four regiments, each named after a region and headquartered at a major concentration camp.
16
By the time the war broke out, several other Standarte were on the drawing boards or in the process of forming.
17

Eicke’s SSTV guards spent one week each month guarding prisoners and three weeks in training, which involved rigorous physical exercise, military maneuvers, weapons familiarization, and political indoctrination aimed at making them insensitive and unquestioning political soldiers for Adolf Hitler. Eicke imposed a ruthless discipline on his men, most of whom were fanatical young Nazis, aged 17 to 22. Those who did not measure up or were not sufficiently obedient were dismissed or transferred to the
Allgemeine-SS
(General SS). Eicke also brought about an indefinable camaraderie among officers, NCOs, and men, who were much closer than their counterparts in the German Army. Simultaneously, Eicke waged a war against Christianity, because he hated any form of religion, not just Judaism. Adolf Hitler was his god, and he wanted men who felt the same way. By 1937, the overwhelming majority of his troops had officially renounced their religion. When this led to a permanent breach between a young SS man and his family (which it frequently did), Eicke would open his own home to a lonely young SS man who was on leave and wanted to spend time with a family. He also encouraged his officers, NCOs, and men to make special efforts to befriend comrades who were, in his view, badly treated by their parents.

When World War II broke out, Eicke mobilized three of his regiments (Oberbayern, Brandenburg, and Thuringen—about 7,000 men in all) and followed the army into Poland. His men behaved like robots and killing machines, just as Eicke had trained them to do. They did no fighting against the Polish Army (except to run down an occasional straggler) but rather along with Reinhard Heydrich’s SD formed the infamous Einsatzgruppen (“action groups” or murder squads), which confiscated livestock and engaged in acts of terrorism, extortion, and murder against Polish civilians, especially aristocrats, political figures, clergymen, intellectuals, and especially Jews. One Standarte commander burned all the synagogues in a Polish community and then had the local Jewish leaders beaten until they signed a confession stating that they had set the fires. He then fined them thousands of marks for arson. As brutal as this incident was, these victims were luckier than many. Most of those who fell into the hands of the Einsatzgruppen were simply “shot while attempting to escape.” Entire lunatic asylums were emptied and their helpless inmates gunned down, and there were dozens of other atrocities.