I should have gone to Eicke or to the Reichsführer SS[30] then, and explained that I was not suited to concentration camp service, because I felt too much sympathy for the prisoners.
I was unable to find the courage to do this.
I did not want to make a laughingstock of myself. I did not wish to reveal my weakness. I was too obstinate to admit that I had made a mistake when I abandoned my original intention of settling on the land.
I had voluntarily joined the ranks of the active SS and I had become too fond of the black uniform to relinquish it in this way.
My admission that I was too soft for a job assigned to the SS would unquestionably have led to my being cashiered, or at least immediately discharged.
And this I could not face.
For a long time I wrestled with this dilemma, the choice between my inner convictions on the one hand and my oath of loyalty to the SS and my vow of fidelity to the Führer on the other. Should I become a deserter? Even my wife knows nothing about my mental struggle on this issue. I have kept it to myself until this very moment.
As a National Socialist of long standing, I was convinced of the need for a concentration camp.
True opponents of the state had to be securely locked up; and asocials and professional criminals, who under the law as it then stood could not be imprisoned, must be deprived of their freedom in order to safeguard the rest of the people from their evil deeds.
I was also convinced that this task could only be carried out by the SS in their capacity as the guardians of the new state.
But I was not in agreement with Eicke’s attitude toward the inmates of these camps. I disagreed with the way he whipped up the vilest emotions of hatred among the SS guards, and with his policy of putting incompetent men in charge of the prisoners and of allowing these unsuitable, indeed intolerable, persons to keep their jobs.
Nor did I agree with the arbitrary method of fixing the term of imprisonment.
Nevertheless, by remaining in the concentration camps I accepted the ideas and the rules and regulations that there prevailed.
I became reconciled to my lot, which I had brought upon myself quite freely. Silently I continued to hope that one day I might find another form of service.
But for the time being there was no prospect of this. In Eicke’s opinion I was pre-eminently suitable for the job of looking after prisoners.
Although I became accustomed to all that was unalterable in the camps, I never grew indifferent to human suffering. I have always seen it and felt for it. Yet because I might not show weakness, I wished to appear hard, lest I be regarded as weak, and had to disregard such feelings.
I was then given the post of adjutant at Sachsenhausen.[31]
I now got to know the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, its work and its usages. I became more closely acquainted with Eicke and with the effects of his influence upon the camp and the troops.
I came into contact with the Gestapo.
From the mass of official correspondence I learned to understand the relationships within the higher reaches of the SS. In short, I acquired a broader view.
I heard a lot about what went on in the Führer’s immediate circle, from a friend on Hess’s liaison staff. Another of my old friends held an important post at the headquarters of the Reich Youth Organization, while yet a third was a public relations officer on Rosenberg’s staff and a fourth was with the Reich Chamber of Medicine. Tn Berlin I often saw these old comrades of mine from Freikorps days, and became increasingly knowledgeable concerning the ideals and intentions of the Party, since I enjoyed their confidence. During these years a powerful upsurge could be felt throughout Germany. Industry and trade flourished as never before. Hitler’s foreign policy successes were plain enough to silence all doubters and opponents.
The Party ruled the state. Its successes could not be denied. The means and the ends of the NSDAP were right. I believed this implicitly and without the slightest reservation.
My inner scruples about remaining in the concentration camp, despite my unsuitability for such work, receded into the background now that I no longer came into such direct contact with the prisoners as I had done in Dachau.
Also, in Sachsenhausen there was not the same atmosphere of hatred that existed in Dachau. And this in spite of the fact that Eicke’s own offices were located in the camp.
The troops were of a different type. There were many young recruits and many junior SS officers from the Junker school.
“Old Dachauites” were only to be met with now and then.
The commandant, too, was a different sort of man.[32]
Strict and severe, it is true, but with a meticulous desire for justice and a fanatical sense of duty. He was for me the prototype of the original SS leader and National Socialist. I always regarded him as a much enlarged reflection of myself. He, too, had moments when his good nature and kind heart were in evidence, yet he was hard and mercilessly severe in all matters appertaining to the service. He was a perpetual example to me of how, in the SS, “hard necessity” must stifle all softer emotions.
The war came, and with it the great turning point in the history of the concentration camps. But who could then have foreseen the horrifying tasks to be assigned them as the war went on?
On the very first day of the war, Eicke delivered an address to the officers of the reserve formations which had relieved the regular SS units in the camps.
In it he emphasized that the harsh laws of war now prevailed. Each SS man was committed body and soul, regardless of the life he had hitherto led. Every order received must be regarded as sacrosanct and even those which appeared most harsh and severe must be carried out without hesitation. The Reichsführer SS demanded that every SS man should exhibit an exemplary sense of duty and should be prepared to devote himself to his people and his fatherland even unto death.
The main task of the SS in this war was to protect Adolph Hitler’s state from every kind of peril and especially against internal dangers. A revolution, as in 1918, or a munition workers’ strike, such as that of 1917, was out of the question.[33]
Anyone identifiable as an enemy of the state and any saboteur of the war effort must be destroyed.
The Führer demanded of the SS that they protect the homeland against all hostile intrigues.
He, Eicke, therefore demanded that they, the men now serving with the reserve formations in the camps, should display an inflexible harshness toward the prisoners. They would have most difficult tasks to perform and the hardest orders to obey. That, however, was the reason for their being there. The SS had now to show that the intensive training they had received in peacetime was justified. Only the SS were capable of protecting the National Socialist State from all internal danger. All other organizations lacked the necessary toughness.
On this same evening the first execution of the war was carried out in Sachsenhausen.
It was of a Communist who had refused to carry out ARP work at the Junkers factory in Dessau. The responsible factory authority had reported him, and he was arrested by the local police and taken to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, where he was interrogated. A report of the proceedings was laid before the Reichsführer SS, who ordered that he be shot forthwith.
According to a secret mobilization order, all executions ordered by the Reichsführer SS or by the Gestapo were to be carried out in the nearest concentration camp.
At ten o’clock that night Müller of the Gestapo[34] telephoned to say that a courier was on the way with orders.
32
SS-Standartenführer Hermann Baranowski. From 1936 to early 1938 he had been commander of the protective custody camp at Dachau, under Loritz, where he got to know Hoess, whose transfer to Sachsenhausen he requested.