[pols, curr ev] How It Played Out
More from this on the Ravensbrück concentration camp, from the part contextualizing it in history: Hitler’s ‘respect’ for family life had never fooled Lina Haag, wife of a communist state parliament member in Württemberg. As soon as she heard on 30 January 1933 on the wireless that Hitler had been made chancellor, she felt sure that the new security police, the Gestapo, would come and take her husband: ‘In our meetings we had warned the country against Hitler. We expected a popular rising, it did not come.’
Then, sure enough, on 31 January Lina and her husband were asleep in bed when at five in the morning the thugs came. The roundup of Reds had begun. ‘Chinstraps, revolvers, truncheons. They stamped on the clean linen with repulsive zest. We were not strangers to them - they knew us and we knew them. They were grown-up men, fellow citizens - neighbours, fathers of families. Ordinary common people. And they looked at us now full of hatred with their cocked pistols.’
Lina’s husband began to dress. Why did he have his coat on so fast, Lina wondered. Was he just going to go without a word?
‘What’s up?’ she asked him.
‘Ah well,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders.
‘He’s a member of the state parliament,’ she shouted at the truncheonwielding police. They laughed.
‘Do you hear that? Communist, that’s what you are, but now we’re clearing all you vermin out.’
Lina pulled the couple’s screaming child, Katie, aged ten, away from the window as her father was marched away. ‘I thought the people will not long put up with that,’ said Lina.
Four weeks later, on 27 February 1933, as Hitler was still struggling to underpin his party’s power, the German parliament, the Reichstag, was set on fire. Communists were blamed, although many suspected the blaze was started by Nazi thugs as a pretext to terrorise every political opponent in the country. Hitler at once enforced a catch-all edict called ‘preventative detention’ which meant that anyone could be arrested for ‘treason’ and locked up indefinitely. Just ten miles north of Munich a brand-new camp was about to open to hold the ‘traitors’.
Opened on 22 March 1933, Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp. Over the next weeks and months Hitler’s police sought out every communist or suspected communist and brought them here to be crushed. Social democrats were rounded up too, along with trade unionists and any other ‘enemy of the state’.
Some held here, particularly amongst the communists, were Jews, but in the first years of Nazi rule Jews were not locked up in significant numbers; those held in the early concentration camps were imprisoned, like the rest, for resistance to Hitler, not simply for their race. The sole aim of Hitler’s concentration camps in the early days was to crush all internal German opposition; only once this had been done would other objectives be pursued.
And now you know the context of Niemöller famous words, "First they came for...", and his actual point about how things unfolded: first they came for the opposition.
More: Hitler proposed the use of concentration camps as places to intern and then crush his opposition, taking as a model the concentration camps used for mass internment by the British during the South African War of 1899-1902. The style of the Nazi camps, however, would be set by Himmler, who personally identified the site for the prototype at Dachau. He also selected the Dachau commandant, Theodor Eicke, who became head of the ‘Death’s Head’ units, as the SS concentration-camp guard squads were called - they wore a skull and crossbones badge on their caps to denote loyalty to death. Himmler charged Eicke with devising a blueprint for terrorising all ‘enemies of the state’.
[...]
Such was Eicke’s success that several more camps were soon set up on the Dachau model. But in these early days neither Eicke, Himmler, nor anyone else had contemplated a concentration camp for women; women opponents to Hitler were not taken seriously enough to be viewed as a threat.
In Hitler’s purges thousands of women were certainly rounded up. Many had found liberation during the Weimar years - trade unionists, doctors, lecturers, journalists. Often they were communists or wives of communists.
[...]
Nevertheless, as Himmler had calculated, women could be tortured in different ways from men; the simple fact that husbands had been killed and children taken away - usually to Nazi foster homes - was for most women pain enough. Censorship ruled out appealing for help.
Barbara Fürbringer, hearing that her husband, a communist Reichstag member, had been tortured to death at Dachau and her children had been taken to a Nazi foster home, tried to alert her sister in America: Dear Sister,
Unfortunately we are in a bad way. Theodor, my dear husband, died suddenly in Dachau four months ago. Our three children have been put in the state welfare home in Munich. I am in the women’s camp at Moringen. I no longer have a penny to my name.
The censor rejected the letter so she wrote again: Dear Sister,
Unfortunately things are not going exactly as we might wish. Theodor, my dear husband, died four months ago. Our three children live in Munich, 27 Brenner Strasse, I live in Moringen, near Hanover, 32 Breite Strasse. I would be grateful to you if you could send me a small sum of money.
Himmler also calculated that as long as the crushing of men was terrible enough, everyone else would soon acquiesce. And this proved largely true, as Lina Haag, arrested just weeks after her husband and locked in another prison, would soon observe. ‘Did nobody see where we were heading? Did nobody see through the shameless demagogy of the articles of Goebbels? I could see it even through the thick walls of the prison; yet more and more people outside were toeing the line.’
By 1936 not only was the political opposition entirely eliminated, but humanitarian bodies and the German churches were all toeing the line. The German Red Cross movement had been co-opted to the Nazi cause; at its meetings the Red Cross banner was waved alongside the swastika, while the guardians of the Geneva Conventions, the International Committee of the Red Cross, had inspected Himmler’s camps - or, at least, the show blocks - and given their stamp of approval. Western capitals took the view that Nazi concentration camps and prisons were an internal German affair and not a concern of theirs. In the mid-1930s most Western leaders still believed that the greatest threat to world peace was posed by communism, not by Nazi Germany.
Despite the lack of meaningful opposition, at home or abroad, however, the Führer watched public opinion carefully in the early days of his rule. In a speech at an SS training centre in 1937 he said: ‘I always know that I must never make a single step that I may have to take back. You have to have a nose to sniff out the situation, to ask: “Now what can I get away with and what can’t I get away with?”’
Even the drive against Germany’s Jews proceeded more slowly at first than many in the party wanted. In his first years Hitler passed laws to bar Jews from employment and public life, whipping up hatred and persecution, but it would be some time, he judged, before he could get away with more than that. Himmler had a ‘nose’ to sniff out a situation too.
[...]
By 1936 the number of women in Germany’s jails was beginning to rise. Despite the terror, German women continued to operate underground, many now inspired by the outbreak of the Spanish civil war. Amongst those taken to the women’s ‘camp’ of Moringen in the mid-1930s were more women communists and former Reichstag members, as well as individuals operating in tiny groups or alone, like the disabled graphic artist Gerda Lissack, who designed anti-Nazi leaflets. Ilse Gostynski, a young Jewish woman, who helped print articles attacking the Führer on her printing press, was arrested by mistake. The Gestapo wanted her twin sister Else, but Else was in Oslo, arranging escape routes for Jewish children, so they took Ilse instead.
In 1936 500 German housewives carrying bibles and wearing neat white headscarves arrived at Moringen. The women, Jehovah’s Witnesses, had protested when their husbands were called up for the army. Hitler was the Antichrist, they said; God was the ruler on earth, not the Führer. Their husbands, and other male Jehovah’s Witnesses, were taken to Hitler’s newest camp, Buchenwald, where they suffered twenty-five lashes of a leather whip. Himmler knew that even his SS men were not yet hard enough to thrash German housewives, however, so at Moringen the Jehovah’s Witness women simply had their bibles taken away by the prison director, a kindly retired soldier with a limp.
In 1937 the passing of a law against ‘Rassenschande’ - literally, ‘race shame’ - which outlawed relationships between Jews and non-Jews, brought a further influx of Jewish women to Moringen. Then in the second half of 1937 the women there noticed a sudden rise in the number of vagrants brought in ‘limping, some wearing supports, many others spitting blood’. In 1938 scores of prostitutes arrived.
[...] After a further sweep through the Bahndamm, the officers had pulled in a total of twenty-four prostitutes, and by six in the morning all were behind bars, with no time given for release.
The treatment of the women at the police station was also different. The desk officer - a Sergeant Peine - knew most of the women as regular overnighters in his cells, and taking out his large black ledger, booked them in painstakingly as usual, noting names, addresses, and personal effects. Under the column headed ‘reason for arrest’, however, Peine carefully printed ‘Asoziale’, ‘asocial’, against each name - a word he had not used there before. And at the end of the column, likewise for the first time, he wrote in red: ‘Transport’.
The raids on Düsseldorf brothels were repeated across Germany throughout 1938, as the Nazi purge against its own unwanted underclasses entered a new stage. A programme called ‘Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich’ (Action Against the Work-shy) had been launched, targeting all those considered social outcasts. Largely unnoticed by the outside world, and unreported within Germany, more than 20,000 so-called ‘asocials’ - ‘vaga bonds, prostitutes, work-shy, beggars and thieves’ - were rounded up and earmarked for concentration camps.
In mid-1938 war was still a year away, but Germany’s war against its own unwanted had been launched. The Führer let it be known that the country must be ‘pure and strong’ as it prepared for war, so such ‘useless mouths’ were to be removed. From the moment Hitler came to power, mass sterilisation of the mentally ill and social degenerates had already been carried out. In 1936 Gypsies were locked in reservations near big cities. In 1937 thousands of ‘habitual criminals’ were sent to concentration camps, with no legal process. Hitler authorised the measures, but the instigator of the crackdown was his police chief and head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. It was also Himmler who in 1938 called for all ‘asocials’ to be locked in concentration camps.
The timing was significant. Well before 1937 the camps, established at first to remove political opposition, had begun to empty out. Communists, social democrats and others, rounded up in the first years of Hitler’s rule, had been largely crushed, and most were now sent home, broken men. Himmler, who had opposed these mass releases, saw his empire in danger of decline, and looked for new uses for his camps.
To date nobody had seriously suggested using the concentration camps for anything other than the political opposition, but by filling them with criminals and social outcasts, Himmler could start expanding his empire again. He saw himself as far more than a police chief; his interest in science - in all forms of experimentation that might help breed a perfect Aryan race - was always the main objective. By bringing these degenerates inside his camps he had begun to secure a central role for himself in the Führer’s most ambitious experiment, which aimed to cleanse the German gene pool. Moreover the new prisoners would provide a ready pool of labour for rebuilding the Reich.
The nature and purpose of the concentration camps would now change. As the number of German political prisoners decreased, social rejects would pour in to replace them.
Then, sure enough, on 31 January Lina and her husband were asleep in bed when at five in the morning the thugs came. The roundup of Reds had begun. ‘Chinstraps, revolvers, truncheons. They stamped on the clean linen with repulsive zest. We were not strangers to them - they knew us and we knew them. They were grown-up men, fellow citizens - neighbours, fathers of families. Ordinary common people. And they looked at us now full of hatred with their cocked pistols.’
Lina’s husband began to dress. Why did he have his coat on so fast, Lina wondered. Was he just going to go without a word?
‘What’s up?’ she asked him.
‘Ah well,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders.
‘He’s a member of the state parliament,’ she shouted at the truncheonwielding police. They laughed.
‘Do you hear that? Communist, that’s what you are, but now we’re clearing all you vermin out.’
Lina pulled the couple’s screaming child, Katie, aged ten, away from the window as her father was marched away. ‘I thought the people will not long put up with that,’ said Lina.
Four weeks later, on 27 February 1933, as Hitler was still struggling to underpin his party’s power, the German parliament, the Reichstag, was set on fire. Communists were blamed, although many suspected the blaze was started by Nazi thugs as a pretext to terrorise every political opponent in the country. Hitler at once enforced a catch-all edict called ‘preventative detention’ which meant that anyone could be arrested for ‘treason’ and locked up indefinitely. Just ten miles north of Munich a brand-new camp was about to open to hold the ‘traitors’.
Opened on 22 March 1933, Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp. Over the next weeks and months Hitler’s police sought out every communist or suspected communist and brought them here to be crushed. Social democrats were rounded up too, along with trade unionists and any other ‘enemy of the state’.
Some held here, particularly amongst the communists, were Jews, but in the first years of Nazi rule Jews were not locked up in significant numbers; those held in the early concentration camps were imprisoned, like the rest, for resistance to Hitler, not simply for their race. The sole aim of Hitler’s concentration camps in the early days was to crush all internal German opposition; only once this had been done would other objectives be pursued.
And now you know the context of Niemöller famous words, "First they came for...", and his actual point about how things unfolded: first they came for the opposition.
More: Hitler proposed the use of concentration camps as places to intern and then crush his opposition, taking as a model the concentration camps used for mass internment by the British during the South African War of 1899-1902. The style of the Nazi camps, however, would be set by Himmler, who personally identified the site for the prototype at Dachau. He also selected the Dachau commandant, Theodor Eicke, who became head of the ‘Death’s Head’ units, as the SS concentration-camp guard squads were called - they wore a skull and crossbones badge on their caps to denote loyalty to death. Himmler charged Eicke with devising a blueprint for terrorising all ‘enemies of the state’.
[...]
Such was Eicke’s success that several more camps were soon set up on the Dachau model. But in these early days neither Eicke, Himmler, nor anyone else had contemplated a concentration camp for women; women opponents to Hitler were not taken seriously enough to be viewed as a threat.
In Hitler’s purges thousands of women were certainly rounded up. Many had found liberation during the Weimar years - trade unionists, doctors, lecturers, journalists. Often they were communists or wives of communists.
[...]
Nevertheless, as Himmler had calculated, women could be tortured in different ways from men; the simple fact that husbands had been killed and children taken away - usually to Nazi foster homes - was for most women pain enough. Censorship ruled out appealing for help.
Barbara Fürbringer, hearing that her husband, a communist Reichstag member, had been tortured to death at Dachau and her children had been taken to a Nazi foster home, tried to alert her sister in America: Dear Sister,
Unfortunately we are in a bad way. Theodor, my dear husband, died suddenly in Dachau four months ago. Our three children have been put in the state welfare home in Munich. I am in the women’s camp at Moringen. I no longer have a penny to my name.
The censor rejected the letter so she wrote again: Dear Sister,
Unfortunately things are not going exactly as we might wish. Theodor, my dear husband, died four months ago. Our three children live in Munich, 27 Brenner Strasse, I live in Moringen, near Hanover, 32 Breite Strasse. I would be grateful to you if you could send me a small sum of money.
Himmler also calculated that as long as the crushing of men was terrible enough, everyone else would soon acquiesce. And this proved largely true, as Lina Haag, arrested just weeks after her husband and locked in another prison, would soon observe. ‘Did nobody see where we were heading? Did nobody see through the shameless demagogy of the articles of Goebbels? I could see it even through the thick walls of the prison; yet more and more people outside were toeing the line.’
By 1936 not only was the political opposition entirely eliminated, but humanitarian bodies and the German churches were all toeing the line. The German Red Cross movement had been co-opted to the Nazi cause; at its meetings the Red Cross banner was waved alongside the swastika, while the guardians of the Geneva Conventions, the International Committee of the Red Cross, had inspected Himmler’s camps - or, at least, the show blocks - and given their stamp of approval. Western capitals took the view that Nazi concentration camps and prisons were an internal German affair and not a concern of theirs. In the mid-1930s most Western leaders still believed that the greatest threat to world peace was posed by communism, not by Nazi Germany.
Despite the lack of meaningful opposition, at home or abroad, however, the Führer watched public opinion carefully in the early days of his rule. In a speech at an SS training centre in 1937 he said: ‘I always know that I must never make a single step that I may have to take back. You have to have a nose to sniff out the situation, to ask: “Now what can I get away with and what can’t I get away with?”’
Even the drive against Germany’s Jews proceeded more slowly at first than many in the party wanted. In his first years Hitler passed laws to bar Jews from employment and public life, whipping up hatred and persecution, but it would be some time, he judged, before he could get away with more than that. Himmler had a ‘nose’ to sniff out a situation too.
[...]
By 1936 the number of women in Germany’s jails was beginning to rise. Despite the terror, German women continued to operate underground, many now inspired by the outbreak of the Spanish civil war. Amongst those taken to the women’s ‘camp’ of Moringen in the mid-1930s were more women communists and former Reichstag members, as well as individuals operating in tiny groups or alone, like the disabled graphic artist Gerda Lissack, who designed anti-Nazi leaflets. Ilse Gostynski, a young Jewish woman, who helped print articles attacking the Führer on her printing press, was arrested by mistake. The Gestapo wanted her twin sister Else, but Else was in Oslo, arranging escape routes for Jewish children, so they took Ilse instead.
In 1936 500 German housewives carrying bibles and wearing neat white headscarves arrived at Moringen. The women, Jehovah’s Witnesses, had protested when their husbands were called up for the army. Hitler was the Antichrist, they said; God was the ruler on earth, not the Führer. Their husbands, and other male Jehovah’s Witnesses, were taken to Hitler’s newest camp, Buchenwald, where they suffered twenty-five lashes of a leather whip. Himmler knew that even his SS men were not yet hard enough to thrash German housewives, however, so at Moringen the Jehovah’s Witness women simply had their bibles taken away by the prison director, a kindly retired soldier with a limp.
In 1937 the passing of a law against ‘Rassenschande’ - literally, ‘race shame’ - which outlawed relationships between Jews and non-Jews, brought a further influx of Jewish women to Moringen. Then in the second half of 1937 the women there noticed a sudden rise in the number of vagrants brought in ‘limping, some wearing supports, many others spitting blood’. In 1938 scores of prostitutes arrived.
[...] After a further sweep through the Bahndamm, the officers had pulled in a total of twenty-four prostitutes, and by six in the morning all were behind bars, with no time given for release.
The treatment of the women at the police station was also different. The desk officer - a Sergeant Peine - knew most of the women as regular overnighters in his cells, and taking out his large black ledger, booked them in painstakingly as usual, noting names, addresses, and personal effects. Under the column headed ‘reason for arrest’, however, Peine carefully printed ‘Asoziale’, ‘asocial’, against each name - a word he had not used there before. And at the end of the column, likewise for the first time, he wrote in red: ‘Transport’.
The raids on Düsseldorf brothels were repeated across Germany throughout 1938, as the Nazi purge against its own unwanted underclasses entered a new stage. A programme called ‘Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich’ (Action Against the Work-shy) had been launched, targeting all those considered social outcasts. Largely unnoticed by the outside world, and unreported within Germany, more than 20,000 so-called ‘asocials’ - ‘vaga bonds, prostitutes, work-shy, beggars and thieves’ - were rounded up and earmarked for concentration camps.
In mid-1938 war was still a year away, but Germany’s war against its own unwanted had been launched. The Führer let it be known that the country must be ‘pure and strong’ as it prepared for war, so such ‘useless mouths’ were to be removed. From the moment Hitler came to power, mass sterilisation of the mentally ill and social degenerates had already been carried out. In 1936 Gypsies were locked in reservations near big cities. In 1937 thousands of ‘habitual criminals’ were sent to concentration camps, with no legal process. Hitler authorised the measures, but the instigator of the crackdown was his police chief and head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. It was also Himmler who in 1938 called for all ‘asocials’ to be locked in concentration camps.
The timing was significant. Well before 1937 the camps, established at first to remove political opposition, had begun to empty out. Communists, social democrats and others, rounded up in the first years of Hitler’s rule, had been largely crushed, and most were now sent home, broken men. Himmler, who had opposed these mass releases, saw his empire in danger of decline, and looked for new uses for his camps.
To date nobody had seriously suggested using the concentration camps for anything other than the political opposition, but by filling them with criminals and social outcasts, Himmler could start expanding his empire again. He saw himself as far more than a police chief; his interest in science - in all forms of experimentation that might help breed a perfect Aryan race - was always the main objective. By bringing these degenerates inside his camps he had begun to secure a central role for himself in the Führer’s most ambitious experiment, which aimed to cleanse the German gene pool. Moreover the new prisoners would provide a ready pool of labour for rebuilding the Reich.
The nature and purpose of the concentration camps would now change. As the number of German political prisoners decreased, social rejects would pour in to replace them.