Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

This sense of looming normalcy was apparent in other spheres as well. The official tally of unemployed workers showed a rapid decline, from 4.8 million in 1933 to 2.7 million in 1934, although a good deal of this was due to such measures as assigning one-man jobs to two men and an aggressive propaganda campaign that sought to discourage women from working. The “wild” concentration camps had been closed, thanks in part to Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels. Within the Reich Ministry of the Interior there was talk of doing away with protective custody and concentration camps altogether.

Even Dachau seemed to have become civilized. On February 12, 1934, a representative of the Quakers, Gilbert L. MacMaster, set out to visit the camp, after having been granted permission to see an inmate, a sixty-two-year-old former deputy of the Reichstag named George Simon, who had been arrested because he was a socialist. MacMaster caught a train in Munich and half an hour later got off in the village of Dachau, which he described as an “artists village.” From there he walked another half hour to reach the camp.

He was surprised by what he found. “More atrocity reports have come from this camp than any other one in Germany,” he wrote. “The outward appearance though is better than any camp I have seen.” The former gunpowder plant in which the camp was located had been built during the past world war. “There were good houses for the chemists and the officers; the barracks for the workers were more stable, and the whole plant was steam heated,” MacMaster saw. “This makes Dachau seem better equipped for the comfort of the prisoners, especially in cold weather, than the provisional camp in an old factory or farm house. In fact the appearance of the whole is more that of a permanent institution than that of a camp.”

The inmate, Simon, was soon brought to the guardhouse to meet with MacMaster. He wore a gray prison suit and seemed well. “He had no complaint,” MacMaster wrote, “except that he was suffering a great deal from acute rheumatism.”

Later that day MacMaster spoke to a police official who told him the camp housed two thousand prisoners. Only twenty-five were Jews, and these, the official insisted, were held for political offenses, not because of their religion. MacMaster, however, had heard reports that at least five thousand prisoners were housed within and that forty to fifty were Jews, of whom only “one or two” had been arrested for political offenses; others had been arrested following denunciations by people “who wanted to injure them in business and others because they were accused of associating with non-Jewish girls.” He was surprised to hear the official say that he saw the camps “as temporary and would welcome the day when they could be done away with.”

MacMaster found Dachau even had a certain beauty. “It was a very cold morning,” he wrote. “There had been such a dense fog the night before that I had had a hard time finding my hotel. This morning there was a perfect blue sky, Bavarian colors were white, for the clouds, and blue for the Bavarian sky, and the fog of the night before covered the trees with a thick hoar-frost.” Everything was coated with a glistening lace of ice crystals that gave the camp an ethereal look, like something from a fable. In the sun the birches of the surrounding moor became spires of diamond.

But as in so many situations in the new Germany, the outward appearance of Dachau was misleading. The cleanliness and efficiency of the camp had little to do with a desire to treat the inmates in a humane fashion. The preceding June an SS officer named Theodor Eicke had taken command of Dachau and composed a set of regulations that later became the model for all camps. Issued on October 1, 1933, the new rules codified the relationship between guards and prisoners and in so doing removed the act of punishment from the realm of impulse and caprice to a plane where discipline became systematic, dispassionate, and predictable. Now everyone at least knew the rules, but the rules were harsh and explicitly left no room for pity.

“Tolerance means weakness,” Eicke wrote in the introduction to his rules. “In the light of this conception, punishment will be mercilessly handed out whenever the interests of the fatherland warrant it.” Minor offenses drew beatings with a cane and stints in solitary confinement. Even irony was costly. Eight days’ solitary and “twenty-five strokes” were meted out to “anyone making depreciatory or ironical remarks to a member of the SS, deliberately omitting the prescribed marks of respect, or in any other way demonstrating unwillingness to submit himself to disciplinary measures.” A catchall clause, Article 19, dealt with “incidental punishments,” which were to include reprimands, beatings, and “tying to stakes.” Another section laid out the rules for hangings. Death was the penalty for anyone who, “for the purpose of agitating,” discussed politics or was caught meeting with others. Even collecting “true or false information about the concentration camp” or receiving such information or talking about it with others could get an inmate hanged. “If a prisoner attempts to escape,” Eicke wrote, “he is to be shot without warning.” Gunfire also was the required response to prisoner uprisings. “Warning shots,” Eicke wrote, “are forbidden on principle.”

Eicke made sure all new guards were fully indoctrinated, as one of his trainees, Rudolf Höss, would later attest. Höss became a guard at Dachau in 1934 and recalled how Eicke repeatedly drummed home the same message. “Any pity whatsoever for ‘enemies of the State’ was unworthy of an SS-man. There was no place in the ranks of the SS for men with soft hearts and any such would do well to retire quickly to a monastery. He could only use hard, determined men who ruthlessly obeyed every order.” An adept pupil, Höss went on to become commandant at Auschwitz.

AT FIRST GLANCE, persecution of Jews seemed also to have eased. “Outwardly Berlin presented during my recent stay there a normal appearance,” wrote David J. Schweitzer, a senior official with the American Joint Distribution Committee, nicknamed the Joint, a Jewish relief organization. “The air is not charged, general courtesy prevails.” Jews who had fled during the previous year now actually had begun returning, he wrote. Some ten thousand Jews who had left in early 1933 had returned by the start of 1934, though outbound emigration—four thousand Jews in 1934—continued as well. “So much is this the actual situation or so well masked is it that I heard an American, one who has just spent a week passing on to a neighboring country, remark that he could not see that anything has actually happened that so stirred the outside world.”

But Schweitzer understood this was in large part an illusion. Overt violence against Jews did appear to have receded, but a more subtle oppression had settled in its place. “What our friend had failed to see from outward appearances is the tragedy that is befalling daily the job holders who are gradually losing their positions,” Schweitzer wrote. He gave the example of Berlin’s department stores, typically owned and staffed by Jews. “While on the one hand one can observe a Jewish department store crowded as usual with non-Jews and Jews alike, one can observe in the very next department store the total absence of a single Jewish employee.” Likewise the situation varied from community to community. One town might banish Jews, while in the next town over Jews and non-Jews continued “to live side by side with their neighbors and pursue their occupations as best they can unmolested.”

Likewise Schweitzer detected divergent outlooks among Berlin’s Jewish leaders. “The one tendency is that there is nothing to hope for, that things are bound to get worse,” he wrote. “The other tendency, however, is quite the opposite but just as definite, namely a tendency resulting from thinking in terms of March 1934 instead of March 1933, reconciling themselves to the present situation, accepting the status of the inevitable, adjusting themselves to move in their own restricted circles and hoping that just as things have changed from March 1933 to March 1934 they will continue to improve in a favorable manner.”