Barracks of Hell
Uncover the dark and often untold history of Nazi concentration camps. From their chaotic beginnings in 1933 to their role in the devastation of millions, this podcast delves deep into the evolution, the stories of all victims, and the brutal realities behind the barbed wire. Through compelling eyewitness accounts and historical analysis, we shed light on a system of terror that must never be forgotten. Join us as we explore the harrowing truth behind one of history’s greatest tragedies.
Barracks of Hell
1. Seeds of Terror: The Birth of Nazi Concentration Camps (1933)
What happens when a regime systematically dismantles civil liberties to pave the way for unimaginable atrocities? Discover the chilling origins of the Nazi concentration camps, starting with the pivotal events of 1933. From the Reichstag fire to the infamous Reichstag Fire Decree, witness how the Nazis exploited fear to revoke basic freedoms and target their perceived enemies. Hear the harrowing accounts of those who lived through this dark transformation, as communists, social democrats, Jews, and many others found themselves in the crosshairs of Hitler’s brutal crackdown.
Explore the terrifying early days of the concentration camps, where "protective custody" became a sinister euphemism for arbitrary arrests and unimaginable suffering. Through the voices of survivors like Margaretha Buber Newman and Fitz Tyson, we unveil the chaotic and violent conditions of these primitive detention centers. Understand how the socioeconomic backgrounds of the guards, many of whom were previously unemployed, fueled a culture of extreme brutality and repression. This chapter also sheds light on the pre-existing political tensions in Germany, setting the stage for the pervasive violence that followed.
Finally, we examine the early horrors of Dachau, one of the first concentration camps, and the startling revelations that came to light through Bavarian investigations. Hear Friedrich Bauer's account of the shift from order to terror and the disturbing complicity of local businesses. As stories of torture and killings leaked out, both from former prisoners and early letters, the public's growing awareness painted a grim picture of the regime’s cruelty. These accounts not only underscore the barbarity of the early camps but also foreshadow the SS's eventual takeover and the dark future that lay ahead.
Welcome to Barracks of Hell. My name is Thijs and in this podcast series we will take a deep dive into one of the darkest chapters of human history the creation, evolution and horrors of the concentration camp system under Nazi rule. Many know about Auschwitz and the millions of Jews murdered during the Holocaust, but the story of the camps goes much deeper. Of the camps goes much deeper, from the very first camps in 1933 to the end of World War II in 1945, the concentration camps were a vast and complex system that spread fear, violence and death across Europe. And these camps held not just Jews, but political prisoners communists, social democrats, roma and many others whom the Nazis deemed enemies of the state. In this first episode, we will explore the chaotic origins of the concentration camps, starting in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power. We will see how the Reichstag fire became a turning point, how the Nazis manipulated the law to strip away basic freedoms and how the first makeshift camps began to hold Germany's so-called enemies. But more than just facts and figures, we will be hearing the accounts of those who lived through it, first-hand reports from victims, witnesses and even some of the perpetrators who shaped this brutal system. Their accounts will guide us through the chaos, the fear and the violence that marked the birth of the camps. This is a story not just of the Holocaust, but of the larger concentration camp system that touched countless lives in ways that many today may not know. It's a story of power, repression and, ultimately, survival. So join me as we uncover the untold story of the concentration camps, starting with their earliest days, a time of uncertainty, lawlessness and a grim foreshadowing of what was yet to come.
Speaker 1:Okay, so the starting point of our story is january 13, 1933. At that point the world looks okay. Out of hitler becomes rights council. He's appointed by hindenburg, the former general, the world war one general, and he's also president of the weimar republic, and he puts hitler into the position where he gets more power. It doesn't look like it's a really strange choice. Just because Hitler, a year earlier in the 1932 elections, gets enough democratic support to make this thing happen. Von Hindenburg thinks that Hitler is actually not a big obstacle for him and he can just throw him aside if he needs to. But then, a month later, it all changes. The Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933 happens, and it's the government building of Germany. It's in Berlin. It's a big building if you go to Berlin, you can still see it, and William Scheyer, an American, wrote the following about this the great dome of the Reichstag was in flames and the fire spread very rapidly.
Speaker 2:The police had closed off the entire quarter surrounding the Reichstag and I had to identify myself to pass through. When I arrived, the scene was chaotic.
Speaker 1:I saw Marijnus van der Lubbe, the Dutch communist being held in custody, looking wild and disheveled. So while that fire is happening, then Hitler comes by. He blames a communist a Dutch communist to be exact, marinus van der Lubbe for the fire, and we don't really know what happened there. Did this lone communist from the Netherlands come over and put one of the most important buildings of Germany into flames? We don't really know that story but I doubt it, to be honest. But it's crucial to the story of the concentration camps.
Speaker 1:The day after, so February 28, 1932, or 1933, I'm sorry Hitler goes to von Hindenburg and he lets him issue an emergency decree. At that point Hindenburg still just thinks okay, I'm going to go along with this guy because what I said, he can be thrown aside if need be. The Reichstag fire decree is invoked by article 48 of the Weimar constitution and it basically gives the power to the Reich Chancellor to revoke numerous civil liberties. It is also called the decree for the protection of the people and the state and this shows we will. We will get into it a little bit later in this episode, but it shows exactly what that decree is about. It's also the starting point of these concentration camps and Wilhelm Frick, minister of the Interior and no Nazi, he said.
Speaker 3:With this decree, we have now put an end to the abuses of freedom of speech, of the press and of association and assembly. The abuse of these liberties will not be tolerated any longer, and we will not hesitate to use all means at our disposal to protect the German people.
Speaker 1:So various freedoms are restricted, including the freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assemble and, most importantly, the right of protection against unlawful detention. A German citizen who saw this happen, he said about this decree the police came to our home early in the morning.
Speaker 4:They had no warrant, but with the new decree they didn't need one. My father was a socialist, and that was enough for them to take him away. We never saw him again, so who were those enemies of Hitler.
Speaker 1:There is a step in the back theory, and that is a popular theory among Nazis, and especially Nazis that have fought in the first world war, which Hitler is one of, and they look at the communists, they look at the Jews, social democrats, and they thought that that group undermined their war efforts. So the first world war is lost. These people, they need to blame someone for that, for losing that war, and at a point in that war maybe even you could say that germany was on the winning hand. But because they lost, they had to blame someone, and that became these groups that I just mentioned. There is hate against these groups and it made it very easy for Hitler to rally people against them. And now, with the changing of the law and with the fire degree, the Reichstag fire degree, nothing stops the Nazis from taking action against these groups. So everything was ready for these arrests. And that brings us to the topic of what did those first camps look like?
Speaker 1:Before we start with that, before we talk about that, there were two ways of arrests, and the first one was prison, just regular prison. As we know it, not many, but some of the prisoners or people that were detained in the first months were detained in the prisons and there was mostly some sort of legal basis for those people that were taken off the streets and put into a regular prison and not everyone was properly charged. But mostly it meant that you were going to get a trial and you had better treatment there because the guards they just treat you like any other prisoner. What the most important one is the protective custody detainees. They are the well-known approach actually to get detained and put aside, put into a concentration camp.
Speaker 1:This was only enabled by the legal changes that were made after the fire. There was no legal base, mostly for picking up these people from the street or their home. There was no proper reason needed for doing that. They were sent to concentration camps, mostly in worse conditions, and there was no legal oversight. So people had no idea who they were, what they were doing there, why they were picked up. They were also not given a lawyer or anything like that.
Speaker 5:Rudolf Diels, who's the first head of the gestapo, explained this protective custody is, in reality, a euphemism for the power to arrest anyone at any time, to hold them indefinitely without charge or trial. It is the method by which we can silence our enemies and keep them behind bars as long as we deem necessary, without any judicial interference.
Speaker 1:So the first weeks after the fire were chaotic. You could say it was like a state of lawlessness and anyone could be arrested at any point in time and there was no need to explain why you got arrested or why you were taken off the streets Once you were arrested, it was a very unsure situation you got into, but where did they end up? Well, there's a big difference between the camps that you know from the war the Auschwitz and also even Dachau that really changed a lot going into the war and the camps that started out in these early months, early weeks for of hitler's rule.
Speaker 5:rudolf diehl said about these early camps the concentration camps of 1933 were not yet the organized apparatus of later years. These were hastily set up chaotic places, the sa and ss often operated with complete freedom and the brutality they inflicted was unrestrained you could say that was complete improvisation from leadership.
Speaker 1:To where the camp was located, they had no, they had no clue what was going on. Mostly they were local camps. So I'm not going to say that every town had its own camp, but there were in many towns and large towns, sometimes small towns there were these camps and there were SA members that were bringing in these opponents to the camps. The locations could vary wildly, for example, old factories, football club canteens, nazi pubs and other places. Margaretha Buber Newman gives an example.
Speaker 6:In one camp prisoners were held in a disused brewery cellar. There were no beds, no blankets, just cold concrete floors. The guards were mostly drunk and took pleasure in beating us. I saw many people come in healthy and leave beaten and broken in body and spirit so the leadership of these camps is in hand of the local SA.
Speaker 1:The SS will later on have a way bigger role in this whole thing, but at the at the start that's, that's a smaller role. So the SA, most of the leaders are from the SA. The local leaders decide everything from the location of the camp and sometimes they change these locations of the camps to how people were treated. And many of the higher ranking officers with the SA, but also in just the government, had no clue who was arrested, where they were put into detainment, so where the camp was at and basically which camps existed. Of course they knew about some of the camps, they had an idea, but not that much. And one of the most important people of the camp system and we will talk about him in the next episode a lot is Theodor Eiken. He said about these early camps.
Speaker 7:There is no need for pity. The enemy of the state must be destroyed and we will show them no mercy. What happens within these walls is our business and no one outside has the right to interfere.
Speaker 1:The Führer has given us the responsibility to cleanse the nation and we will do it by any means necessary. And also the conditions of these camps varied greatly. Some areas, people were treated okay I'm not going to say they were treated well and good and provided for. It was not like in a hotel or anything like that but they were provided with food, clothing and the violence was kept in check by the leaders of the SA. But most of the camps were not okay.
Speaker 8:and Fitz Tyson, who was a former Nazi supporter and later a prisoner, he talks about this and he says Some camps were run by men who seemed to believe they were carrying out a holy mission, treating prisoners like devils to be punished. In others there was a strange, almost disciplined order, but still it was a place of misery and despair.
Speaker 1:But still, it was a place of misery and despair. So what we talked about until now is how it became possible for the Nazis to detain people and where those early camps were placed, located, and how they looked. So the next topic, and I think the topic that you will hear throughout the entire podcast, is how violent were those camps? Anyone that knows the history of the concentration camps knows that this violence and the camps they go hand in hand, and for the start of that system of concentration camps it's no different. As mentioned earlier, though not everywhere and not at every camp camp, the violence was the same. So, for example, in camp chema, which was near wuppertal in germany, conditions were not that bad. The leader of the sa, the leader of the camp, was fit schrupert and his mission was to suppress local communists and socialists and and that man that he did detain them, but he did not use that much violence. I'm not saying it was a great camp, but it was less violent than other camps, which brings us to these other camps.
Speaker 1:So in many of these camps there were very violent guards and there were several key reasons for the violence of these guards, and the first one is the economic circumstances of them. They were mostly unemployed people before Hitler came to power and the camps were seen as a good job opportunity and it provided food, it provided an income and many of these guards that got into the camps they were from the lower ranks of society, so they had no job, they had difficulties getting around and here all of a sudden they get a chance to join something with a mission and also get paid for it and provided food and shelter. They were highly motivated to prove themselves and also to subdue Hitler's opponents, which are mostly also their opponents. Former political prisoner Jürgen Kogan wrote about this in the Theory and Practice of Hell.
Speaker 9:Many of the guards were unemployed men who saw their role as a chance for a steady income and status. The SA attracted those who had little else to live for. They were ready to take out their frustration on the prisoners, who were seen as the enemy of the people.
Speaker 1:The second reason for the violence in these camps is the political culture in germany before hitler came to power, street fights between political groups were very common and that meant that deadlock discussions were taken to streets and the communists, nazis, fascists and social democrats they they fold each other on these feet, on these on the streets. Many SA members were veterans of world war one and that meant that they were used to using violence in order to get their point across. Also, the 1920s was a very difficult and violent time in Germany, especially the early 1920s, and violence is just a part of life. Historian Historian Richard Evans wrote about this.
Speaker 10:The SA and SS men carried with them the street fighting mentality of the political battles of the 1920s. They were brutal, uncompromising and saw violence as a legitimate means to an end. They had no qualms about using their fists, batons or whatever was available to enforce their will.
Speaker 1:The third point is they know each other. Most camps were local. That means that the guards that guarded the camp and the people that were arrested in the camps, they all come from the area that the camp is in. And, as I already talked about local politics, in these towns and in these little places, they are fueled by the political struggle that has been going on for years. There's envy, there's competition, there's misunderstanding, and all the tension was building up for years. And now, all of a sudden, the SA members. They have an opportunity to retaliate against that hated enemy Guards. They couldn't let that opportunity pass, and so one of the prisoners, paul Lobe he's also the former Reichstag president, so he's a high-ranking politician in these days.
Speaker 11:He says the following about his treatment the camp guards knew exactly who we were. They recognized us from local political meetings or rallies. It felt personal. They wanted revenge for every argument, every scuffle we'd had before the Nazis came to power. It was a settling of old scores and we were at their mercy.
Speaker 1:So one note I have to make here is that these camps are not very deadly, and we will talk more about this later in this episode as well, and of course, in the podcast. Death will be a big part of it as well, but the numbers of deaths are not that big in these camps, and violence was used for mostly re-educating purposes, as Fitz Tyson, a former Nazi supporter, said.
Speaker 8:It was not yet mass killing killing, but the violence was calculated. We were tortured to break our spirit, to make us obedient and to educate us into conformity with nazi ideology.
Speaker 1:The guards told us that this was our chance to learn and change our ways and also another point that I want to make is many of these prisoners because they were re-educated. If you will, they will be released, and we will talk about that later as well. So then it brings us okay. So now we know why these guards were violent types and why the camps were filled with violence. What types of violence were used is the next topic that we will discuss, and I think the best known for the whole and entire camp system from 1933 to 1945 are the beatings and whippings and carl swasek.
Speaker 9:He recalls them we were beaten daily, with whips and fists dragged out of our cells and forced to stand for hours in uncomfortable positions. It was not just about punishing us physically but breaking us mentally, making sure we knew that we were powerless, that our fate was entirely in their hands.
Speaker 1:Another torture method that was used in these early camps is locking prisoners in small spaces or uncomfortable positions, or both at once. This is what happened to Hans Beimler, a communist politician, who was taken off the streets.
Speaker 12:In the camp there were cells called the bunkers, where they would lock prisoners in complete darkness for days, sometimes weeks. The aim was not necessarily to kill us, but to so. Beside physical violence, there's also psychological violence, and it's very common.
Speaker 1:Threats, humiliation and intimidating interrogations were really frequently employed. Margaret Buber-Numan, who we heard earlier talk about her experiences, shares her experiences when it comes to the psychological violence.
Speaker 6:They would threaten us with death and scream into our faces that we would never see our families again. It was pure psychological terror. They played with our minds and many prisoners simply broke down, and as goes for the whole and entire camp system labour was also used as a punishment, but also used as pure violence.
Speaker 1:Hard, long and grueling labor without enough food becomes a real issue for prisoners and it hurts. It basically hurts and it could eventually also kill people, and Friedrich Kellner describes what happened to him.
Speaker 13:The conditions were dire. The guards would make us carry heavy stones back and forth, not for any purpose, but just to exhaust us and make us suffer. Anyone who didn't comply or tried to resist was beaten until they could no longer stand.
Speaker 1:I mentioned earlier that deaths were not as common in these camps, in these earliest camps, as they were later in the concentration camp system. To pull in some statistics of the 4,500 people in Dachau that stayed in Dachau in 1933, 25 died. Dachau would later become way more deadly but at the start of it it was, you know, not as deadly as it would be. You know not as deadly as it would be in the first weeks that Dachau was established. Regular police were the guards, and that is a big change from what it would later be.
Speaker 14:And Karl Müller was a prisoner of this early Dachau when I was brought to Dachau in 1933, it was a place of fear, but not of mass death. We knew that beatings were part of daily life, but the thought of dying here felt distant, at least at the start.
Speaker 1:Later the SS took over and things changed. Friedrich Bauer was also an early prisoner of Dachau and he said about these changes when the SS took over, the camp changed overnight.
Speaker 15:The guards were no longer just enforcing order, they were enforcing terror. They told us that if we even looked at them the wrong way, we would be shot on sight. We knew that these were not idle threats.
Speaker 1:So after the SS took over, in the first six weeks 12 people died and the pretext for those deaths or those murders you would say were attempted escapes. So the guards would say that the prisoner tried to escape and was killed in his try. This was almost always an excuse and as local resident of the village Dachau on a hardman witnessed Everyone knew the escape attempts as abnormal by outstanders.
Speaker 1:Further zooming in on Dachau. The state of Bavaria learned of these deaths and they sent a public prosecutor to investigate what happened there. Camp guards got into trouble and they couldn't really explain what happened because they never really thought that they had to explain their actions. Even Himmler, the leader of the SS, got into trouble and Himmler protected his men, but he was forced to make some changes in Dachau. Hans Weber was a civil servant during those investigations.
Speaker 13:When word got out about the deaths in Dachau, people were genuinely shocked. Even those who supported the new government did not expect prisoners to be killed like this. It felt like the Nazi promises of law and order were quickly turning into something much darker.
Speaker 1:So Himmler knew that if the concentration camps were to have a future, things had to change. He sacked camp leader Wackerle, who was the first commander of Dachau, and he put a new camp leader in place, which was Theodor Eike, and we will talk about this man later in the next episode. But there was a huge move for the whole camp system, not only Dachau but the whole camp system. He will be one of the most important people in this whole system. Joseph Scheider was a guard.
Speaker 4:When that change happened when the prosecutor arrived. It caused a panic among the guards. They thought they could get away with anything, but the investigation proved otherwise. Wackerle looked like a man who knew his time was up. It was clear that Himmler needed someone who could clean up the mess.
Speaker 1:The situation was eventually resolved by Rome, who was the leader of the SA and he supported Himmler, and through threats and pressure he made the problem go away. But we can see from the reaction of the state of Bavaria, but also people that were learning of these violent acts and also of the deaths in the camps, that violence was not accepted in Germany. Gerda Fischer was a reporting journalist and she wrote about this.
Speaker 17:The German people did not know how to react to the stories coming out of the camps. On the one hand, they wanted to believe that the camps were there for our education and order. On the other, they heard whispers of beatings, shootings and men dying under mysterious circumstances. It was the first real crack in the image of a lawful regime.
Speaker 1:So we have heard about the violence, we've heard about the deaths and we have seen that even people reacted on these deaths. They knew about it. So the next question is what was known of these early camps back in the day, and not only of the camps, but also of the violence and the killings? So the issue faced by this early camp was that it was a re-educating program that meant that people were arrested, they were tortured, they were sometimes killed, but the biggest thing was that they were released at some point. Of course, if you were killed, that wasn't the case, but normally that was the way to go.
Speaker 1:So people were arrested and they were released and there was an intention behind that. It was not like a mistake that they made. Releasing was part of the terror. So you have to see that when people were in that situation, they were tortured and they came out of it. They knew so the Nazis. They knew the stories would go around. They would talk to their people, to their family, friends, and they would talk about their stories and they would go around and that was part of the terror. A lawyer and former prisoner, hans Litten he wrote about this.
Speaker 5:When I was released from Dachau, the first thing I did was to speak about what I saw. People were shocked, but many didn't want to believe me. They said I was exaggerating. But I couldn't stay silent. The world had to know what was happening behind those walls.
Speaker 1:And the second thing. Another effect is that many of these stories became public so they didn't only talk to their families, but many of the former prisoners. They fled to other countries and they were allowed to speak openly about their experiences. They were put in newspapers and so they would go around and many in other countries, so countries surrounding Germany. The existence of the camps was known and many of these reports they made their way back to Germany because you could buy newspapers from other countries in Germany. And Margaret Stern fled with her husband after the release and talks about how they talked about it and how that went from there on.
Speaker 18:We fled to Paris immediately after my husband's release. He was a broken man after his time in the camp and we felt we were not safe in Germany anymore. In Paris, we spoke to anyone who would listen Newspapers, political groups, even churches. We told them about the beatings, the torture and the fear. I don't know if they believed us, but we had to try.
Speaker 1:So these stories didn't only spread from newspapers in other countries, but also from victims that just shared their stories in circles with like-minded people, and these accounts spread through Germany. A third point that I wanted to address is that these camps, they needed ordinary people to exist. Camps were improvised in this first year. They had no established system or structure and that means that local businesses were involved to keep the camps going. Carpenters, bakers, electricians and many other professions were hired to make sure that the camp had its food, that it could function, that new barracks were built and things like that. So, of course, people that came in there, they were not necessarily Nazi supporters or whatever. They were just people that lived near a camp and they were hired to do stuff and because it was their job they did it as well. They witnessed what happened in these camps.
Speaker 19:My father was a carpenter in our town and he was contracted to do repairs at the camp. He didn't talk much about it at home, but I could see the look on his face when he came back. It was like he had seen a ghost. He said there were men in rags, starving and too scared to even look up. It was clear to all of us that something terrible was happening inside those walls.
Speaker 1:And the last point that I want to make is that there were also letters sent home from prisoners. In these early days, prisoners were allowed to send and write letters to their loved ones, their friends and so on, and Heinrich Rosenberg's brother, for example, was imprisoned in the early months and he recalls this.
Speaker 20:My brother was in a camp and he managed to send a letter. He wrote about being beaten, being deprived of food and the hopelessness of it all. We tried to bring it to the local church but they refused to intervene, saying they didn't want to cause trouble. The letter made it clear that he was being tortured, but nobody wanted to listen.
Speaker 1:So, basically, people knew about these camps and what happened within them the tortures, the violence and also, of course, the deaths that we talked about. So lots of information was coming out via different ways. This put the camp system under enormous pressure and that's what we will be looking at in the next episode. So in this episode we talked about the change of law that made it all possible the camp system. We talked about the change of law that made it all possible the camp system. We talked about the chaos in the early camps and how and where they were located, how they were ruled by these SA members. We talked about the violence in the camps. We talked about the deaths and the reaction of the public to that, and we also talked about what the public already knew when the camps were active.
Speaker 1:In our next episode we will discover that the camp system was not firmly set yet. We will talk about year two and the struggles of maintaining the camp system. How did the camp system survive? It's going to be one of the questions. What changes were implemented and how did the SS take over the camp? So that's what we will be looking at in episode two of this series about the concentration camps.
