A November 1937 article left our readers without any doubts about the nature of the new Germany.
The New Statesman and Nation 13 November 1937
This anonymous article was published in the New Statesman and Nation. It was not given a prominent place in the magazine. But it could have left no readers with any doubts about the nature of the new Germany.
Selected by Robert Taylor
Those who have been imprisoned in the Concentration Camp at Dachau, ten miles from Munich, will not talk. The following account of current conditions, for whose authenticity the writer can vouch, is derived directly from members of the SS guard revolted by the regime of systematised brutality.
Every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday the grey police van collects the men bound for Dachau from the Police Prison at Ettstrasse and from the headquarters of the Political Police at Brienerstrasse. There are three special “coffins” at the end of the van – compartments without light or air, where men are locked in. These are usually reserved for “bad cases”, which often means men who have not confessed. Protected by four heavily armed storm-troopers, the van goes out to Dachau. On arriving within the walled camp, the men are collected in ranks and called in one after the other to the commandant’s office. There they have to give full details of their history. Then, in an adjoining room, a protective custody order (Schutzhaftbefehl) is read to them. This often ends ironically by saying that the subject has been sent to the camp to become a good National-Socialist. Next, the “bad cases”, who are destined for special treatment in the cells near the commandant’s headquarters, are separated from the others. Under the shouts of watching SS-men the rest follow the storm-trooper who is in charge of barrack allotment. The prisoners have to leave their clothes, shoes and other effects behind and are served out with prison uniform, boots, a black wool cap, and (in a separate barrack) blue-checked linen covers for their straw mattress and pillow, an old tin bowl, spoon, fork and knife and a loaf of black bread. Thus equipped, they march to their respective barracks; their hair is cut, and camp life begins.
There are ten barracks, in two rows of five facing each other, and nine are inhabited by prisoners. No.1 is the worst. Surrounded by barbed wire, it houses the “hopeless” cases, men who have come to the camp for the second time. No.9 is filled with old men and invalids. Jews and “race degraders” have a barrack separated from the other prisoners, so as “not to infect them,” and are never allowed to mix with them except while they work. There is also a special barrack for criminals who have been in jail already and have finished their punishment, but are kept for reformatory reasons. Another barrack is allocated solely to arrested émigrés, former members of the Nazi Party and homosexuals. No.10 contains a sort of hospital and a small library. It used also to include five cells in which prisoners could be chained. These were recently given up, as some of the prisoners got frozen limbs or died in them. Moreover, it was found more convenient to place “special cases” in the cells near the commander’s quarters, out of sight of the other prisoners.
Each barrack contains four or five departments (Korporalschaften) with about 50 to 60 men in each. There are now about 2,600 prisoners at Dachau. In summer the prisoners are awakened at 4am, in winter at 5am, by a siren. They have a quarter of an hour in which to wash in the lavatory, make their beds, put everything in order and await their morning coffee, which is fetched by special men. By 6.30 the barracks have to be cleared. At 6.45 the prisoners assemble (except those in the cells) near the entrance gate, in their respective labour groups. The occupants of barrack No. 1 leave first for their work. They have permanent hard labour, mostly in the so-called “Abbruch-Kommando” (breaking down of old buildings) or carrying coal in baskets on their shoulders from a van to the coal store at a distance of about three-quarters of a mile. The watching SS-men constantly beat and kick these prisoners, and report them as “saboteurs”, if they drop any coal from an overfilled biscuit. A prisoner thus reported is usually fastened to a bench. Two storm-troopers hold down his shoulders, while others beat him with ox-tails.
The other prisoners build roads near the camp, cut wood, dig drains, erect new barracks for the SS-men, clean the barracks or work at a trade – joinery, saddlery, tailoring, shoe-making, etc. Work lasts till noon with half-an-hour’s interval at 9.30. After the mid-day meal, work begins again at 2pm. The prisoners return for supper at a quarter past six, and are usually employed on lighter work again from seven to eight. Everybody has to be inside the barracks by eight. At 9pm all lights are turned out, all the windows are closed and nobody is allowed to talk. A prisoner who leaves the barrack after this time is shot. There was formerly a Catholic and a Protestant service every Sunday, but this was given up. The prisoners who attended were usually punished or maltreated, and the visiting clergymen were informed that none of the prisoners was “interested” any longer in religious services,
It is while they work that the prisoners are particularly maltreated. The SS-men or their officers usually have instructions which of the prisoners should be badly used. “Race-degraders” come off worst. One of the officers, by name Max Schmidt, who has been at Dachau since 1933, is notorious for his bestialities, which usually begin while the prisoners march out of the camp to their work. They are forced to sing songs like “My Heart is Full of Joy”. Then, under some pretext, the storm-troopers kick the prisoners with their boots or hit them in the face. When work begins, the chosen victims are maltreated on the pretext they are slacking. They have to lie face-downwards in mud or nettles, are kicked (“sex-offenders” especially on the testicles) or prodded with knives. Covered with mud, exhausted, bleeding, they return to the camp, where they are reported for laziness. In the evening they are brought into a special hut outside the prisoners’ camp and are beaten again by a whole troop of SS-men, while they have sometimes to count the blows in a loud voice. If the man is a “race-degrader”, he is not even allowed a straw mattress during the night, but is usually locked up after the beating in a dark cell, chained, and kept on bread and water, except every third day.
Every man arriving at the camp for a second time is flogged and confined to a dark cell for at least a month, before he is allowed to enter the general camp. Since the coming of the present commandant, Loritz, conditions have become even worse than in 1933. He invented the system of beating prisoners in front of the others. He is a former policeman and shares the work by personally unfastening the trousers of the victim, and even giving the first blows himself. After their floggings, the men frequently faint. For lesser offences men used to be fastened with their arms round trees in Red Indian manner. This punishment was abandoned as, after half an hour, the men usually began to shriek like animals in pain. As an alternative, they are lashed to a post with a placard round their neck, giving the reason for this treatment.
Prisoners may send their families a postcard every fortnight. All letters they receive or write are censored, and letters are often returned to the prisoners for little reason. The prisoners are not allowed to see any relatives or friends, and only in exceptional cases their lawyer. Murders in the camp by the guards reached their maximum probably in 1933, and after June 30th 1934. But, even now, prisoners are often killed in the camp. Recently one man in the cells was beaten by the storm-troopers and subsequently bitten to death by SS-men, while one of them, a man of decent antecedents, burnt the victim with his lighted cigarette in the face.
Unsuccessful suicide is punished with thirty lashes and thirty days in a dark cell. The uncertainty of the duration of their confinement in Dachau makes many prisoners try to commit suicide. There is no rule: a man found guilty of a trivial offence, but with little influence outside the camp, may stay in Dachau for years. The minimum confinement is for three months. Christmas is a bad period. Last year the storm-troopers rushed into the camp in the evening, drunk, and drove out the prisoners naked to do physical drill. The doctor in charge of the camp hospital is a storm-trooper, by name Ostermeier. He proudly says of himself that he is a storm-trooper first, and a doctor second. This seems to be true, as his chief work is to examine the prisoners before they are flogged, to see how much they can stand.
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