After the separation of the troops from the concentration camps, Eicke no longer took such an active interest in the latter as he had previously done. His main preoccupation was with the troops. The work in connection with the expansion of the camps was done on his authority, but he was concerned only with the outside appearances and no longer worried about the internal arrangements. He remained stuck in his ideas about “enemies of the state,” but he was now out of date. Only about 10 per cent of the inmates of the concentration camps were political prisoners, the rest being professional criminals, asocials, and so on. Eicke’s later orders and regulations on matters concerning the prisoners were made at his desk and were still based on his Dachau experiences and opinions. He made no more innovations or upheavals. In spite of his inexhaustible capacity for work and his resilience, and in spite of his perpetual urge for improvements and reforms, he had nothing to offer to the concentration camps. His energies were directed toward the troops. His position as Inspector of Concentration Camps was purely nominal.
When German troops marched into the Sudetenland, Eicke was with the Upper Bavarian Death’s Head formation, as the guard regiment at Dachau was later named. The 4th Regiment assisted in the occupation of Danzig. Isolated units of the Death’s Head formation also took part in the Polish campaign. After the campaign Eicke received orders from the Führer to form the Death’s Head Division as speedily as possible. He himself was created Lieutenant General.
At the beginning of the war all the front-line Death’s Head units in the camps were replaced by reservists from the General SS. This was also tried as a temporary expedient during the occupation of Czechoslovakia. It gave rise to many difficulties, since the veteran reservists had no knowledge whatever about guarding prisoners, and many of them were physically unsuited to the arduous requirements of the service. The professional criminals quickly took advantage of many of them and used them to abet their escape or for similar delinquencies.
Dachau concentration camp was evacuated to enable the Death’s Head Division to be formed, and the prisoners were transferred to Flossenburg and Mauthausen. After F Division had been formed and marched off to the training ground, the prisoners were brought back.
While the division was being formed, Brigadeführer Glücks, who up till then had been chief of staff to the Inspector of Concentration Camps, was appointed Inspector by order of the Reichsführer SS.
The Death’s Head Division first took part in the fighting in France and was then employed in occupation duties on the Spanish frontier, until the campaign against Russia, when it was constantly used where the fighting was fiercest. They were several times encircled, as at Demiansk, and suffered terrible losses.
Eicke’s behavior during the building up of this division was typical.
The army departments used all their endeavors to impede and delay the build-up. First it was to be a motorized division, then a cavalry division, then it was to be a partially motorized division.
With imperturbable calm Eicke watched all this happening and stole for himself, whenever he could, the weapons and equipment he required. In this way he collected all his heavy artillery from transports destined for Romania.
The training of active service guards into tough soldiers now began to bear fruit.
The achievements of the Death’s Head Division were only made possible because of the ironclad training which Eicke had given the troops, and because of the affection which they had for Eicke himself.
In the spring of 1942 he was shot down during a reconnaissance flight near Kharkov, while he was searching for a tank company commanded by his son-in-law. All that was found of him was a piece of his uniform, with the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords.
In this way he met the soldier’s death, which he had sought ever since the time, a short while before, when his only son had also fallen in battle.
APPENDIX 9
Glücks
Glücks originally came from Dusseldorf and had spent several years before the First World War in Argentina. When war broke out he got through the British control by smuggling himself on board a Norwegian ship and eventually reported for military service. He served throughout the war as an artillery officer. After the war he was appointed a liaison officer with the armistice commission, and later on joined a Freikorps in the Ruhr district. Up to the time when Hitler assumed power, he was engaged in business activities.
Glücks was one of the early members of the Party and the SS. In the SS he at first spent some years as a staff officer in the Senior Sector West, after which he commanded a regiment of the general SS in Schneidemühl. In 1936 he joined Eicke as a staff officer on the Concentration Camp Inspectorate.
Glucks’s attitude of mind was that of the typical office-worker who has no knowledge of practical matters. He imagined that he could direct everything from his office desk. Under Eicke, he scarcely made his presence felt in connection with the camps, and the occasional visits which he paid to individual concentration camps, in Eicke’s company, had no practical effect on him, for he saw nothing and learned nothing.
Nor had he any influence with Eicke in this connection in his capacity as staff officer, for Eicke handled these matters himself, mostly through personal contact with the commandants during his inspections of the camps.
But Eicke held him in great esteem and Glucks’s opinions on questions dealing with personnel were practically decisive, to the disadvantage of the commandant’s staff. Various commandants had repeatedly tried to cold-shoulder Glücks, but his status with Eicke remained unassailable.
On the outbreak of war, as I have already stated, the active service guards were transferred for military duties and their places were taken by reservists from the General SS.
In addition, new formations of the Death’s Head units were built up from the younger age groups, which were intended at first to be used for strengthening the police and as occuontion troops. Eicke became “General Inspector of the Death’s Head Formations and of the Concentration Camps,” with Glücks as his chief of staff. When Eicke was given the job of building up the Death’s Head Division, the general inspectorate of the Death’s Head formations was taken over by the administrative office of the Waffen SS under Jüttner, and Glücks became Inspector of Concentration Camps and also subordinate to the administrative office (later the headquarters office) of the Waffen SS. In 1941 the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps became incorporated in the Economic Administration Head Office as Department D.
The Reichsführer SS never had any particular confidence in Glücks and had often considered employing him in a different capacity. But Eicke and Pohl always warmly supported him, and so he retained his position as Inspector.
The appointment of Glücks as Inspector made no difference to the camps. Glücks always felt that Eicke’s arrangements and his orders and instructions should not be disturbed, even when they had obviously become out of date. Moreover he believed that his position as Inspector was only a temporary one. He did not consider himself justified in making the smallest alteration in the existing organization of the camp without the permission of the Reichsführer SS. Any changes suggested by the commandants were either turned down or shelved. During the whole time he held office he had an almost unbelievable fear of the Reichsführer SS. A telephone call from Himmler would throw him into the utmost confusion. If he had to pay a personal visit to Himmler, he would be useless for anything for several days beforehand. His otherwise imperturbable calm would completely forsake him when Himmler requested him to forward reports or comments.