Himmler asked me to join the SS in June 1934. This now was to pull me away from our planned path. For a long, long time I struggled trying to make a decision. This was not my usual habit. The temptation to be a soldier again was really strong, much stronger than my wife’s doubts about whether this profession would fulfiU and satisfy the inner me. She agreed, however, when she saw how very much I felt attracted to becoming a soldier again, even though I would have to deviate from our agreed course. I was confident that we would be able to hold on to our dream, since I was promised quick promotion, and with all the financial advantages connected with it. This goal, the farm as a home, a home for us and our children, remained with us even in the later years. We never deviated from that. After the war I planned to leave active duty and return to the farm. After considering the facts for a long time, still full of doubts, I decided to join the General SS.
Today i deeply regret leaving the course that I had originally chosen. My life and that of my family would have run a different couise, even though we still would now be equally without home or without a farm. But at least we would have shared several years of satisfying work together. But who can foresee the course of people whose fates are intertwined?
What is right? What is wrong?
When Himmler made the call to join the SS, to enter the guard troop of a concentration camp, I had no thought at all about the concentration camps which were mentioned in the postscript. During the isolation of our farm life in Pomerania, we had hardly heard about concentration camps. The only thing I could see was the active military life of being a soldier again.
I arrived at Dachau and became a recruit again, with all its joys and sorrows, and then I became a drill instructor.* The soldier’s life captivated me. During instruction and lectures, I learned about the use of arms and
1. H6ss entered as a noncommissioned officer in the guard troop of Concentration Camp Dachau with the rank of SS sergeant. Broszat, p. 53.
About the dangerous nature of the ENEMIES OF THE STATE, as Inspector of the Concentration Camps Eicke called the prisoners behind the barbed wire. I saw prisoners at work marching in and out, and I heard about them from fellow soldiers who had been in service there in the camp since 1933.
I remember precisely the first flogging I ever witnessed. According to Eicke’s orders, at least one company of troops had to be present at the administration of this punishment.
Two prisoners had stolen cigarettes from the canteen and were sentenced to twenty-five blows of the cane. The soldiers lined up in a U-shaped formation with their weapons. The punishment bench stood in the middle. The two prisoners were presented by the block leaders. The Komman-dant put in his appearance. The camp commander and the senior company commanders reported to him. The duty officer read the sentence and the first prisoner, a small, hardened, lazy man, had to lie down across the bench. Two soldiers from the troop held his head and hands firmly while two block leaders carried out the sentence, alternating after each blow. The prisoner didn’t utter a sound.
It was different with the second one, a strong, broad-shouldered, political prisoner. After the first blow, he screamed wildly and wanted to tear himself loose. He continued screaming to the last blow, even though the Kom-mandant told him repeatedly to be quiet.
I stood in the front rank and I was, therefore, forced to watch the entire procedure in detail. I say forced because if I would have stood further back, I would not have looked. Hot and cold chills ran through me when the screaming started. In fact the whole procedure, even the first beating, made me shiver. Later, during the first execution at the beginning of the war, I was not as upset as during this corporal punishment. For this I can find no explanation.
Until the 1918 Revolution corporal punishment was a normal procedure, until it was later abolished in the penitentiary. The official who always administered this punishment was still employed in the prison and was called the “bonebreaker.” This coarse and depraved man always smelled of alcohol and to him all prisoners were only numbers. One could very well imagine him as a person who liked to beat people. In the solitary confinement area in the basement I once saw the punishment bench and the canes that were used. My skin crawled as I imagined the “bonebreaker” using them. During all the corporal punishments for which I had to be present, and for the whole time I was with the company, I always disappeared to the back rank. Later, when I was the block leader, I always avoided being present if possible, at least during the beatings. This was easy because some of the block leaders and camp commanders were always eager to be there. But when I became duty officer and later camp commander,
1 had to be present. I did not like to do this when I was Kommandant and when 1 had to order corporal punishment, I was hardly ever present. Certainly I did not thoughtlessly order these punishments.
Why did I shy away from this punishment so much? Even though I try, 1 cannot explain this. There was another block leader at the time who felt the same way and also avoided being there. It was Schwarzhuber, who was later camp commander in Birkenau and Ravensbriick. The block leaders who were so eager to watch them and whom I really got to know later were almost always two-faced, vulgar, very violent, and vile creatures who behaved in the same way toward their fellow soldiers and their famihes. To them prisoners were not human beings.
Several years later three of them hanged themselves after they were arrested for brutally mistreating prisoners in other camps and they were held accountable for it. Among the SS troops there were those who looked upon the flogging of prisoners as a welcome spectacle, a kind of entertainment. I certainly was not one of them.
When I was still a recruit in Dachau the following incident happened: Some SS sergeants together with some prisoners were carrying out an extensive operation of stealing meat from the slaughterhouse and selling it on the black market. Four members of the SS were sentenced to severe prison terms by a Munich civil court because there were no SS courts at the time. The four of them were led in front of the entire guard regiment and stripped of their rank by Eicke and dishonorably discharged from the SS. He personally tore off all the insignia of rank and regiment, had them paraded past all the companies, and then handed them over to the police to serve their sentences. Afterwards he used this incident to give a long lecture and a warning. He said he really would have liked to put the four of them into concentration camp uniforms, and after flogging them, put them behind bars with their partners in crime, but Himmler did not give him permission. A similar fate awaited anyone who got involved with the prisoners behind the barbed wire, regardless of whether it was with criminal intent or out of compassion.
Eicke thought that he would show the ENEMIES OF THE STATE a weakness which they would immediately take advantage of. Any compassion at all toward the ENEMIES OF THE STATE would be unworthy of an SS soldier. There was no place for weaklings in his ranks, and they would be well-advised to disappear into a monastery as quickly as possible. He said he could use only hard and determined men who would obey every order, no matter what the cost to themselves. They were not wearing the skull insignia and carrying a weapon for nothing. Eicke said that the SS were the only soldiers in peacetime facing the enemy day and night:
The enemy behind the barbed wire.
The stripping of rank and the expulsion from the SS were a disturbing experience which affected every soldier who viewed this for the first time.
But at the time I didn’t understand what Eicke meant by ENEMIES OF THE STATE, the enemy behind the barbed wire, for I did not get to know them well enough yet. I would find out soon enough.
After I was in service with the outfit for six months, suddenly there came an order from Eicke that all older officers and noncommissioned officers were to be separated from the regular outfit and were to be used in the departments in the camp. I was one of these. I was transferred as a block leader to the concentration camp. I didn’t like this at all. Eicke arrived shortly thereafter, and when I reported to him I made a request that he should make an exception in my case, and transfer me back to the General SS. I told him that I was body and soul a soldier, and only the opportunity to become a soldier again had actually brought me into the General SS. He knew my life story completely, and knew, therefore, that I was especially suited for the concentration camp based on my personal experience in associating with and handling prisoners. No one else, he said, would be more suited for the concentration camp than I. His orders were concrete and would not be changed for anything.
I had to obey, because, after all, wasn’t I a soldier? And didn’t I choose this course? At that moment I wanted to go back to the difficult but free path that I had followed before. Now there was no turning back for me. With mixed feelings, I entered into my new area of responsibility, into a new world to which I would be chained for the next ten years. Yes, I had been a prisoner myself for six long years, and I knew about the life of a prisoner. I knew his habits, his good and bad sides, all his impulses and his needs, but the concentration camp was new to me. I was to learn the tremendous difference between life in a jail or prison and life in a concentration camp. And I learned it from the ground up, often more thoroughly than I really liked.
World History
