The Reichsführer SS believed his assurances that everything in his domain was in exemplary order and exceedingly prosperous.
APPENDIX 8
Eicke
He can be regarded as the actual founder of all the concentration camps, with the exception of Dachau. It was he, too, who gave them their form and shape.
Eicke came from the Rhineland and during the First World War fought on every front and was many times wounded and decorated. When the Rhineland was occupied he took a leading part in the resistance movement against the French. He was sentenced to death in his absence by a French military tribunal and remained in Italy until 1928. When he returned home he went to the NSDAP and became an SS man.
In 1933 the Reichsführer SS took him out of the general SS and made him Colonel and commandant of Dachau, from which post two of his predecessors had already been dismissed for incompetence. He at once set about reorganizing the camp in accordance with his own ideas.
Eicke was an inflexible Nazi of the old type. All his actions sprang from the knowledge that National Socialism had made many sacrifices and had fought a long battle before coming to power, and that this power had now to be used against every enemy of the new state. He regarded the concentration camps in this light.
In his view, the prisoners were sworn enemies of the state, who were to be treated with great severity and destroyed if they showed resistance. He instilled the same attitude of mind into his officers and men. At the beginning of Eicke’s period of service as commandant, the majority of the guards came from the Bavarian country constabulary and they also occupied most of the important posts. To Eicke the police were like a red rag to a bull, especially the country constabulary, who had made life so difficult for the Nazis during their early struggles. In a very short time he replaced all the police (except two, whom he brought into the SS) with SS men and chased the “laponesten,” as they were called in camp slang, out of the camp.
The prisoners were treated harshly and were flogged for the slightest misdemeanor. Floggings were carried out in the presence of the assembled guards (at least two companies of them had to be present) with the intention, as he saw it, of toughening up the men. In particular, the recruits were regularly forced to witness these proceedings.
At that time, the inmates consisted almost exclusively of political prisoners from the Bavarian Communist and Social Democratic parties, and from the Bavarian People’s Party.
Eicke’s instructions from first to last were: behind the wire lurks the enemy, watching everything you do so that he can use your weaknesses for his own advantage. Do not let yourselves be taken in, but show the enemy your teeth. Anyone who displays the slightest sympathy with these enemies of the state must vanish from our ranks. My SS men must be tough and ready for all eventualities and there is no room among us for weaklings.
Eicke did not, however, tolerate independent action by his men against the prisoners. They were to be treated harshly but fairly and they were to be punished only on his orders. He organized the supervision of the protective custody camp and so had it under his control.
Little by little he built up the whole camp and gave it the form which was later used as a model for all the other concentration camps.
He made the guards into a tough body of men, who were correct in the performance of their duties, but who were also quick with their weapons, if an “enemy of the state” should escape.
He punished any lapse on the part of the guard with great severity. Yet his men loved “papa Eicke,” as they called him. In the evenings he sat with them in the canteen or in their barracks. He spoke with them in their own language, and went into all their troubles and worries, and taught them how to become what he wanted, hard, tough fellows, who would shrink at nothing that he ordered them to do.
“Every order is to be carried out, however harsh it may be!” That is what he required and what he preached in all his instructions to his men. And these instructions stayed fast and became part of their flesh and blood. The men who were guards at the time when Eicke was commandant of Dachau were the future commanders of protective custody camps, Rapportführers, and other senior camp officials. They never forgot the instructions that Eicke had given them. The prisoners were enemies of the state, so far as they were concerned, and would always remain so.
Eicke knew his men and he knew how to go to work on them, and the training he gave them was farsighted.
In 1934 he became the first Inspector of Concentration Camps. To begin with he directed affairs from Dachau, but later he went to Berlin in order to be near the Reichsführer SS.
He now started with great enthusiasm to remold the existing camps Esterwegen, Sachsenburg, Lichtenburg, and Columbia on the Dachau model. Officers and men from Dachau were constantly transferred to the other camps in order to inject them with the “Dachau spirit” and with a dose of Prussian militarism.
The Reichsführer SS gave him a completely free hand, knowing that there was no more suitable person to whom he could entrust the camps. Himmler had often emphasized his complete agreement with Eicke’s views concerning the concentration camps and the “enemies of the state.”
In Berlin, Eicke became convinced that the jolly, comradely, Bavarian type of military “instruction,” with plenty of sociable evenings and a lot of Bavarian beer, was quite insufficient for the training of a really efficient soldier, capable of being employed in any capacity.
He therefore looked for a Prussian “instructor” and found one in Schulze, a police captain, whom he then charged with the task of instilling some Prussian spirit into the easygoing Bavarian methods, and of giving the officers and men some of the old Prussian type of military training. It caused a lot of ill-feeling in Dachau, when the “Prussian pig” initiated his more rigorous system of training. The older members of the Dachau guard were never able to get over it, and they obstructed Schulze to such a degree that after a year they succeeded in getting rid of him.
He was told that the reason for his sudden dismissal was that although he was an excellent officer and had achieved exceptional results by his methods of training, yet he was not a National Socialist or SS man and therefore did not understand how to handle the men properly!
Eicke retained his habit, both when he was Inspector and afterward, of talking with the guards and the lower ranks without their superior officers being present. In this way, he enjoyed a popularity and devotion in the eyes of his men which was exceptional even in the SS (where a special value was placed on comradeship), and which was keenly observed by the Reichsführer SS. The superior officers greatly disapproved of this habit of Eicke’s. For one thing, Eicke got to know all that went on in the camp and nothing of any importance was hidden from him. For another, he was kept constantly informed about the behavior of the SS officers, both on and off duty, and the SS men naturally made use of this opportunity to tell some malicious tales. Many SS officers had to answer to Eicke for matters which existed only in the imagination of the SS men who had recounted them.
Eicke, however, attained his object and got all the camps completely under his control.
Later on he had letter boxes put up- in every camp, which could only be opened by him and which gave every SS man a means of communicating reports, complaints, and denunciations direct to him. He also had his confidants among the prisoners in every camp, who, unknown to the others, informed him of anything that was worth knowing.