History of the Dachau Concentration Camp

Flames as a signal for terror

The fire in the "Reichstag" of Berlin on February 27, 1933 delivered the perfect pretext for the national socialists to launch a devastating blow against their fiercest political rivals. The blaze was barely extinguished, when Hermann Göring declared publicly that communist arsonists had set the fire to the Parliament Building.

This was the signal for the start of a singular chase of man initiated by Hitler in order "to do away with those bolshevist subhuman creatures". Göring as Prussian Secretary of the Interior denounced the communists as terrorists prepared to commit further mischief. "I will certainly use the state and police power to the very end" he threatened his rivals in press conferences and radio speeches. And he proved that these were not empty words when the SA and SS troops started an arrest action to detain communists, soon followed by social democrats and union members. He had found the legal justification for that action in the "Decree of the president of the 'Reich' for the protection of people and state" issued on February 1933, which allowed the imprisonment of all political rivals without judicial sentence for an undefined period of time.

The way to Concentration Camp

In Bavaria, the leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, searches the country for political rivals. Soon the prisons are filled with "protective detainees", as the national socialists call their prisoners. The penal system becomes extremely strained by those mass arrests that would not end. However, a solution is close. On May 13, 1933 the State Commissary of the Interior, Adolf Wagner, advices his colleague Hans Frank of further options to concentrate the prisoners by saying: "If the prisons available to the judiciary institutions are not sufficient, I advise to use the methods that had been applied to the prisoners of the NSDAP. As you know, they were locked behind some empty walls and nobody cared if they could endure the effects of the wheather or not."

The establishment of a 'concentration camp' was first made public by Himmler on March 20 during a press conference. Two days later, on March 22, 1933 the NS opened the first official special camp for communist protective detainees at the site of a former ammunition factory near Dachau. In open trucks, the prisoners are carried to the deserted plant. At first, they occupy the former administration building, which is seperated from the plant by barbed wire. The night before, 54 police from Munich had come to be on guard and they tell the arriving men that they were now in protective custody.

The camp is taken over by the SS

When Himmler becomes Political Police Commander of Bavaria on April 1, 1933 he takes over control of the concentration camp as head of the political Emergency Police formed by members of the SA and SS. With this move, he hopes to take the responsability for the camp away from the Bavarian State Police and to transfer it to the SS. Leading deputies of the Protective Police in Munich formally protest against this action. The SS leader gives in and compromises on a troop of guards recruited from the SS but commanded and trained by the police.The Protective Police of Munich announces in a circular dated April 7, 1933: "The supervision of the Dachau camp will be taken over by the SS as of April 11, 1933. The commanders will be recruited from the Protective Police".

The SS men wake up the camp prisoners in the middle of the night. With horror they hear the words of the SS commander, Baron von Malsen-Ponickau, who shouts: "We haven't come here to be friendly with these sons of a bich. They are not humans like we are, they're only second class people". As fast as possible, the SS increase their position of strength in the camp. If the SS force consisted of approx. 60 men in the beginning, it grows to 196 by April 12, to 217 by April 20 and to 238 by April 30.

The bloodstained harvest of NS dictatorship

The change of supervision from the police to the SS also represents extreme changes to the prisoners as the head of the police - although still the leader of the entire camp to the outside - no longer is in charge of the inmates. The true leader of the camp now is Sturmhauptführer Hilmar Wäckerle, who starts a wave of terror that had not been known in Germany ever before. Until the day of liberation on April 29, 1945 a minimum of 206.206 prisoners of 27 nations had been encarcerated at the concentration camp of Dachau, according to information collected by the International Tracing Service for Missed Persons in Arolsen. At the registry office, the death of 31.951 prisoners had been documented. They had died by intentional and planned murder acts of the supervisors, by 'medical tests', malnutrition and exhaustion, by frostbite, deseases and mental distress. This figure however does not include the many persons sent to Hartheim castle near Linz in Austria with so-called disabled convoys to be gased there insidiously. Another figure never clarified is that of thousands of Russian prisoners of war, who in 1941 and 1942 due to the "commissary enactment" had been shot in Hebertshausen, a village not far away from the camp. Also, the number of persons is unknown who lost their lives in the death marches of March and April of 1945 when the SS tried to clear the camp while the Americans were approaching.

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