75 years ago - on April 29, 1945 - the US army liberated the Dachau concentration camp, outside the medieval town of Dachau, 16 km northwest of Munich. Dachau was the first such camp set up by the Nazis, and served as a prototype and a template for what followed - its layout and building plans used for building other camps. For this, and other, reasons, Dachau continues to cast a long shadow, touching countless lives and weaving its way back into contemporary politics in unexpected ways.
The camp was opened by the Nazis on March 21, 1933 to imprison political prisoners - communists, socialists, trade unionists, anarchists and other “trouble makers”. In addition to the better known - and much greater - figures of Jews and Roma murdered in Nazi camps, more than 3.5 million Germans were imprisoned in concentration camps or prison for political reasons between 1933 and 1945, while approximately 80,000 were killed for resistance or subversion against the Nazis.
Located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory, the camp at Dachau consisted of a barbed wire fence around the factory with numerous wooden huts built to house more prisoners. Along with the prisoners’ camp - which itself took up only 5 acres - an adjoining area of 20 acres was occupied by a Schutzstaffel (SS) training school and barracks. Railway tracks ran up to the gates, which carried the infamous phrase "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work shall set you free") - later replicated at the other camps including Auschwitz and Theresienstadt.
While Heinrich Himmler’s official announcement spoke of containing “threats to state security”, the SS men who arrived in the camp on 11 May 1933 were under no illusions about what the camp was for, their welcoming speech telling them: “We have not come here for human encounters with those pigs in there. We do not consider them human beings, as we are, but as second-class people … Therefore we have no room for sentimentalism … The more of these pig dogs we strike down, the fewer we need to feed.”
In 1919 Dachau had been the site of one of the few victories the Bavarian “Red Army” - mostly members of the soldiers' and workers' councils - of the Bavarian Soviet Republic (“Räterepublik Baiern”) over the proto-facist Freikorps paramilitary militia, during the short-lived revolution. During the 1933 Reichstag election campaign, Hans Beimler - an prominent anti-Nazi activist, militant trade unionist, and leader of the German Communist Party (KPD) in Bavaria - made that historic victory central to his address to a KPD mass meeting in Munich, rallying his comrades against the Nazi threat with the words “we shall all meet again at Dachau!".
The words were darkly prophetic. While Beimler was re-elected to the Reichstag in March, in April both he and his wife were arrested by the Nazis. They never saw each other again. Along with other Communist Party members, Beimler was subjected to two weeks of police beatings in Munich before being sent to Dachau, where the SS guards - some of them former Freikorps members - threw his words back in his face.
Within four weeks, however, Beimler had escaped, strangling his guard, stealing his uniform and brazenly walking out the front door. He fled, via Czechoslovakia, to the Soviet Union, published an account of his experiences in the camp, and then became active in Rote Hilfe ("Red Aid") in France and Switzerland. In 1936, Beimler led the first brigade of German anti-fascist volunteers to Spain, and was appointed commissar of all International Brigades until he was killed in the Battle of Madrid that November. Over 2 million people came out to pay respect as his body was transported to the cemetery in Barcelona.
Another notable victim of Dachau was the lawyer Hans Litten. Born into a conservative, privileged family with a Jewish background, Litten’s idealism led him from the law to Berlin and left wing politics, where he became active in political trials and public speaking. In 1929, Litten sought an indictment of Berlin’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) police chief for incitement to shoot communist protesters at the infamous “Bloody May” May Day rally, where 33 people were killed and hundreds wounded, including Litten himself.
Litten also laid bare, in a penetrating cross-examination during the "Eden Dance Palace Trial", the violence at the heart of the Nazi movement. Litten used the prosecution of Sturmabteilung (SA) thug attacks on three workers to expose Nazi violence and puncture the veneer of legality Hitler had adopted. In a three hour cross-examination of the future dictator in May 1931, he humiliated Hitler - showing that SA violence was a central plank of the Nazi program - and forced him to commit perjury. It was an insult that Hitler would neither forget, nor forgive.
From then on, Litten was continually targeted by the Nazis, police and authorities, but when Hitler took power in 1933, Litten rejected advice from friends that he flee Germany. He refused to abandon his clients, arguing: "the millions of workers can't get out, so I must stay here as well". The night of the Reichstag fire, Litten was one of the first arrested when left wing lawyers and activists were rounded up and taken into "protective custody".
Litten spent the next five years in several concentration camps, enduring forced labour, beatings, torture, and endless interrogations. He twice attempted suicide to avoid revealing information under torture. Finally, in Dachau, unable to bear his physical and psychological scars any longer, Litten hanged himself in 1938. A communist anti-Nazi lawyer openly critical of Stalin - his legacy suited neither side of the Cold War, and he went all but forgotten during the following decades.
Over time, Dachau’s purpose expanded to include forced labor (both German and foreign) as well as Jews, criminals, “undesirables”, and foreign nationals from occupied countries - from Poland, France and the Balkans especially. In 1942, nearly 8,000 prisoners from Yugoslavia were sent to Dachau - including many who had worked with the partisans - and some 5,000 Soviet prisoners of war were interred there.
Over 200,000 prisoners, from more than 30 countries, passed through Dachau, one third of whom were Jews. After the Kristallnacht purges, almost 11,000 Jews were sent to Dachau before being expelled from the country. The camp also held Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Roma, the physically and mentally handicapped, several thousand Catholic priests, and anyone else unlucky enough to fall foul of the Nazis.
As the number of prisoners grew, the greater Dachau system developed to eventually include over 100 sub-camps - mostly labour camps for producing munitions - dispersed throughout southern Germany and into Austria. Some of these sub-camps evolved into full-blown concentration camps themselves, such as the infamous Mauthausen camp in Austria. A weapons factory at Gendorf, near the Austrian border, where my Bavarian grandfather was forced into working in dangerous conditions, also used slave-labour from a Dachau sub-camp set up specifically for the purpose.
Although Dachau was not one of the six camps created specifically for industrialised mass murder, 32,000 deaths have been documented at the camp and its satellites, with an estimated further 10,000 undocumented. The Nazis also used prisoners in brutal medical experiments, submerging them in tanks of ice water for hours at a time.
Liberation
The experience of the American soldiers in liberating Dachau and its sub-camps was harrowing. When the American army arrived, approximately 10,000 of the 30,000 prisoners were sick, and some 7,000 had been driven on a last-minute “death march”, first south, and then eastwards towards the Austrian border, 1,000 of them perishing en route.
One account of the liberation of Kaufering IV slave-labor sub-camp - near the town of Landsberg - describes “the camp afire and a stack of some four hundred bodies burning”. American soldiers went into Landsberg, rounding up all the male civilians they could find and marching them back out to the camp. The former camp commandant was forced to lie amidst a pile of corpses, while the male population walked by under orders to spit on him as they passed.
As they reached the main camp in Dachau, soldiers found thirty-nine railway boxcars containing 2,000 skeletal corpses parked immediately outside, and the air was heavy with the stench of decaying bodies and excrement. Inside the complex, they found more bodies - lying where they had fallen days earlier. There were rooms full of hundreds of near-naked dead bodies piled high, a crematorium, a gas chamber - supposedly “unused”.
Despite an official surrender, many guards resisted the liberating forces, some of them fiercely. Outraged at what they had seen in Dachau and elsewhere, American troops shot some 30 or 50 of the camp guards after they had surrendered, while a similar number of guards are believed to have been killed by the recently freed prisoners themselves.
After liberation, Dachau became a prison facility for SS soldiers awaiting trial - the jailer made the jailed - and the site of the “Dachau Trials” of German war criminals. By January 1946, some 18,000 SS members were being held there, along with 12,000 others, including Soviet deserters. After 1948, it became a resettlement camp for 2,000 ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia.
The Americans converted the buildings used by the SS and camp guards into the “Eastman Barracks”, which served as an American military post for many years. When the Americans closed their barracks, the Bavarian Bereitschaftspolizei - the police rapid-response units and riot police - moved in.
Germany’s ongoing struggle with timing and taste took a new turn on January 27, 2015 - the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi death camp Auschwitz. The nearby city of Augsburg decided to convert a former sub-branch of Dachau into a centre to accommodate the growing influx of refugees. The asylum seekers would have lived in a building where thousands of people suffered and died under the Nazis, carrying out forced labour for the aircraft manufacturer Messerschmitt.
Facing public outcry, Augsburg backed down, but the town of Dachau itself did not, housing about 50 of its most vulnerable inhabitants – including homeless people and refugees – in buildings in the former slave-labour “herb garden” complex, just across the road from where the main camp still stands, and within sight of the towers and barbed wire fences.
Although Dachau was not one of the six camps created specifically for industrialised mass murder, 32,000 deaths have been documented at the camp and its satellites, with an estimated further 10,000 undocumented. The Nazis also used prisoners in brutal medical experiments, submerging them in tanks of ice water for hours at a time.
Liberation
The experience of the American soldiers in liberating Dachau and its sub-camps was harrowing. When the American army arrived, approximately 10,000 of the 30,000 prisoners were sick, and some 7,000 had been driven on a last-minute “death march”, first south, and then eastwards towards the Austrian border, 1,000 of them perishing en route.
One account of the liberation of Kaufering IV slave-labor sub-camp - near the town of Landsberg - describes “the camp afire and a stack of some four hundred bodies burning”. American soldiers went into Landsberg, rounding up all the male civilians they could find and marching them back out to the camp. The former camp commandant was forced to lie amidst a pile of corpses, while the male population walked by under orders to spit on him as they passed.
As they reached the main camp in Dachau, soldiers found thirty-nine railway boxcars containing 2,000 skeletal corpses parked immediately outside, and the air was heavy with the stench of decaying bodies and excrement. Inside the complex, they found more bodies - lying where they had fallen days earlier. There were rooms full of hundreds of near-naked dead bodies piled high, a crematorium, a gas chamber - supposedly “unused”.
Despite an official surrender, many guards resisted the liberating forces, some of them fiercely. Outraged at what they had seen in Dachau and elsewhere, American troops shot some 30 or 50 of the camp guards after they had surrendered, while a similar number of guards are believed to have been killed by the recently freed prisoners themselves.
After liberation, Dachau became a prison facility for SS soldiers awaiting trial - the jailer made the jailed - and the site of the “Dachau Trials” of German war criminals. By January 1946, some 18,000 SS members were being held there, along with 12,000 others, including Soviet deserters. After 1948, it became a resettlement camp for 2,000 ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia.
The Americans converted the buildings used by the SS and camp guards into the “Eastman Barracks”, which served as an American military post for many years. When the Americans closed their barracks, the Bavarian Bereitschaftspolizei - the police rapid-response units and riot police - moved in.
Germany’s ongoing struggle with timing and taste took a new turn on January 27, 2015 - the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi death camp Auschwitz. The nearby city of Augsburg decided to convert a former sub-branch of Dachau into a centre to accommodate the growing influx of refugees. The asylum seekers would have lived in a building where thousands of people suffered and died under the Nazis, carrying out forced labour for the aircraft manufacturer Messerschmitt.
Facing public outcry, Augsburg backed down, but the town of Dachau itself did not, housing about 50 of its most vulnerable inhabitants – including homeless people and refugees – in buildings in the former slave-labour “herb garden” complex, just across the road from where the main camp still stands, and within sight of the towers and barbed wire fences.
A Red Thread in the Gloom
This harrowing history has made Dachau an indelible symbol for what took place when the Nazis took over, but it also deserves to be better remembered for what happened when they fell as well. In the brief interregnum after the Nazis were defeated, a strange three-way power struggle emerged in Dachau, that is emblematic of the direction German democracy took after the war.
In 1935, a local Social Democrat, Georg Scherer, was arrested for his stubborn dedication to working class sporting activities, and spent 6 years in the camp, where he was appointed “Lagerältester - responsible for all prisoners - until his release. On April 28, 1945, fearing the SS would escalate their atrocities before the Americans arrived, he led a short-lived - and violently repressed - armed insurrection in the town of Dachau, coordinated with other resistance action in Munich.
When the Americans did arrive, they made him deputy mayor. The tasks he faced were enormous - over 6,000 dead bodies in the camp, 30,000 survivors to be fed, a typhoid outbreak. Labour and transport, food, fuel, clothing and accommodation had to be organised. Within the camp, the Communists in particular had been able to establish their own organisational structures, and after liberation this experience became vital. With supply chains broken, the economy collapsed, and government all but dissolved, Scherer and his fellow communist and social democratic ex-prisoners divided the town into 17 districts, organising the 22,000 inhabitants into committees of 7, and set to work.
A central coordination committee of 8 was set up, with the broadest possible base. It contained 2 Communists, 2 Social Democrats, 2 from the conservative former Bavarian Peoples’ Party, and 2 with no affiliation. Named the “Anti-Fascist Action" committee (AFA), it set about coordinating the post-Nazi reconstruction work. Similar united front “antifa” organisations sprung up across Germany as the Third Reich collapsed, populated largely by members of the working class, but generally mistrusted by middle-class Germans. While the AFA could claim to be representative, however, it was unelected and had no claim to authority, and it carried out its work under cautious US military supervision.
While the AFA initially supported US “denazification” measures, tensions increased as it became clear that efforts were focusing on “little Nazis” - many of whom had joined Nazi organisations out of necessity or convenience - while more powerful individuals with better connections - and dirtier pasts - managed to evade punishment. The Americans also began to recruit new civil servants to run the administration, while the AFA continued its work more and more independently, resulting in the development of elements of “dual power” that had echoes of the situation in 1918-19.
The AFA and the new civil authorities soon ended up in competition for US support. Even before Germany’s capitulation in May, the Americans had decided to restore the pre-Nazi administrative system, and in Dachau they appointed Heinrich Kneuer to run the district. A conservative, mid-level bureaucrat, with a dubious history during the 1930s, Kneuer immediately set about trying to dissolve the AFA, which he considered to be a communist threat to the social order. His exchanges with the American commandant show he was - at the very least - a technocrat who considered democracy a threat, the people stupid, and advocated a government of “clever men”.
To Kneuer’s dismay, then, the Americans created a new town council on July 21, exactly half of whom were on the left - 5 Social Democrats and 3 Communists, with elections to follow. A return to democracy would be a mixed blessing for the Communists, however, and they knew it. From August 1945, the Americans had identified the AFA as “something of a problem”, not so much because of the ongoing inconveniences it caused Kneuer, but because of its dominant leftwing politics.
Local elections were scheduled for January 1946, deliberating forcing the Communists and Social Democrats into competition before they had settled on a common programme. The Communist Party ran the Social Democrat Scherer as their lead candidate, but his former SPD comrades ran against him, ensuring the left vote was splintered, and the KPD result was worse than before the war.
From a right-wing and anti-Communist perspective, the strategy was a success. The conservative silent majority - having sat in uncomfortable quietude as the crimes of Nazism were uncovered and investigated - was given an opportunity to reassert itself. The Bavarian Volksbund (later to become the Christian Social Union - CSU) won 59 percent of the vote in Dachau on a platform of conservative anti-Nazism, combined with opposition to the “Socialist-Communist common action programme”. The anti-Communist sentiment that had led many middle-class voters to support the Nazis had found a new, more “respectable”, outlet.
Meanwhile, disunity in left wing politics had been ensured. In the Soviet zone, the KPD and SPD had been merged, but similar attempts in the West failed. Applications from the KPD to register as either the "Socialist Unity Party" (SED) or the "German Socialist Peoples’ Party" were rejected, and they were forced to run as Communists. The AFA - even with its significant middle-class involvement - and the hopes of antifascist unity, were in tatters. The hard work of the AFA, its idealism, energy, even-handedness and dedication, had succeeded in reconstructing a world that rejected its values, and bourgeois normality - now shed of the memory of its disquieting accommodation with Nazism - had been restored.
This harrowing history has made Dachau an indelible symbol for what took place when the Nazis took over, but it also deserves to be better remembered for what happened when they fell as well. In the brief interregnum after the Nazis were defeated, a strange three-way power struggle emerged in Dachau, that is emblematic of the direction German democracy took after the war.
In 1935, a local Social Democrat, Georg Scherer, was arrested for his stubborn dedication to working class sporting activities, and spent 6 years in the camp, where he was appointed “Lagerältester - responsible for all prisoners - until his release. On April 28, 1945, fearing the SS would escalate their atrocities before the Americans arrived, he led a short-lived - and violently repressed - armed insurrection in the town of Dachau, coordinated with other resistance action in Munich.
When the Americans did arrive, they made him deputy mayor. The tasks he faced were enormous - over 6,000 dead bodies in the camp, 30,000 survivors to be fed, a typhoid outbreak. Labour and transport, food, fuel, clothing and accommodation had to be organised. Within the camp, the Communists in particular had been able to establish their own organisational structures, and after liberation this experience became vital. With supply chains broken, the economy collapsed, and government all but dissolved, Scherer and his fellow communist and social democratic ex-prisoners divided the town into 17 districts, organising the 22,000 inhabitants into committees of 7, and set to work.
A central coordination committee of 8 was set up, with the broadest possible base. It contained 2 Communists, 2 Social Democrats, 2 from the conservative former Bavarian Peoples’ Party, and 2 with no affiliation. Named the “Anti-Fascist Action" committee (AFA), it set about coordinating the post-Nazi reconstruction work. Similar united front “antifa” organisations sprung up across Germany as the Third Reich collapsed, populated largely by members of the working class, but generally mistrusted by middle-class Germans. While the AFA could claim to be representative, however, it was unelected and had no claim to authority, and it carried out its work under cautious US military supervision.
While the AFA initially supported US “denazification” measures, tensions increased as it became clear that efforts were focusing on “little Nazis” - many of whom had joined Nazi organisations out of necessity or convenience - while more powerful individuals with better connections - and dirtier pasts - managed to evade punishment. The Americans also began to recruit new civil servants to run the administration, while the AFA continued its work more and more independently, resulting in the development of elements of “dual power” that had echoes of the situation in 1918-19.
The AFA and the new civil authorities soon ended up in competition for US support. Even before Germany’s capitulation in May, the Americans had decided to restore the pre-Nazi administrative system, and in Dachau they appointed Heinrich Kneuer to run the district. A conservative, mid-level bureaucrat, with a dubious history during the 1930s, Kneuer immediately set about trying to dissolve the AFA, which he considered to be a communist threat to the social order. His exchanges with the American commandant show he was - at the very least - a technocrat who considered democracy a threat, the people stupid, and advocated a government of “clever men”.
To Kneuer’s dismay, then, the Americans created a new town council on July 21, exactly half of whom were on the left - 5 Social Democrats and 3 Communists, with elections to follow. A return to democracy would be a mixed blessing for the Communists, however, and they knew it. From August 1945, the Americans had identified the AFA as “something of a problem”, not so much because of the ongoing inconveniences it caused Kneuer, but because of its dominant leftwing politics.
Local elections were scheduled for January 1946, deliberating forcing the Communists and Social Democrats into competition before they had settled on a common programme. The Communist Party ran the Social Democrat Scherer as their lead candidate, but his former SPD comrades ran against him, ensuring the left vote was splintered, and the KPD result was worse than before the war.
From a right-wing and anti-Communist perspective, the strategy was a success. The conservative silent majority - having sat in uncomfortable quietude as the crimes of Nazism were uncovered and investigated - was given an opportunity to reassert itself. The Bavarian Volksbund (later to become the Christian Social Union - CSU) won 59 percent of the vote in Dachau on a platform of conservative anti-Nazism, combined with opposition to the “Socialist-Communist common action programme”. The anti-Communist sentiment that had led many middle-class voters to support the Nazis had found a new, more “respectable”, outlet.
Meanwhile, disunity in left wing politics had been ensured. In the Soviet zone, the KPD and SPD had been merged, but similar attempts in the West failed. Applications from the KPD to register as either the "Socialist Unity Party" (SED) or the "German Socialist Peoples’ Party" were rejected, and they were forced to run as Communists. The AFA - even with its significant middle-class involvement - and the hopes of antifascist unity, were in tatters. The hard work of the AFA, its idealism, energy, even-handedness and dedication, had succeeded in reconstructing a world that rejected its values, and bourgeois normality - now shed of the memory of its disquieting accommodation with Nazism - had been restored.
Even 75 years on, the sheer magnitude of the horrors of Dachau and the other Nazi camps ought to serve as a stern correction for humanity’s moral compass for generations to come. Unfortunately, the span of history that has passed since they were closed has not served that memory any justice. The bloody violence and oppression we have seen since the Second World War may not have been carried out with the same calculating intensity, but it has been horrific nonetheless, and even now we run the risk of repeating some of the worst mistakes of humanity’s brief existence.
In the words of Milan Kundera, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. To truly succeed in this, however, we must preserve not only the memory of suffering and despair, but the memory of hope. For this reason, then, when I hear the word “Dachau”, the echoing screams of all those who perished in the nightmare machine are joined by the quiet, firm voices of those who said “Never Again”, who persevered in their struggle against fascism in all weather, and who sought against all odds to build a better world in the ashes of the old.
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