Prison Camps

     Prison camps were origanlly made to hold those who opposed his political policies. The first prison camp setup was outside of the city Dachau. The camps first prisoners were 200 communists.  On Thursday, March 22, 1993 the Enabling act was passed. What this did was itgave him the legal right to do what ever he wanted baiscly. This act allowed hitler to inprison anyone that he disliked.      

     The first people inprisoned at dachau were political opponents of hitler. These prisoners were placed in, "Protective Custody". Which meant that they were protecting the states against subversive activity.     

     The first inmates of Dachau were Hitlers poitical enemys or opponents. These people consisted of people such as Communists, Socialists and other democrats, and also political catholics.  Dachau was built with 20 barracks inside of it. Each one of the barracks were made to hold 250 men. A total of 5000 men. However dachau was not built to punish criminals it was designed to show the nazis stength and power so that people would not bother to mess with them.

      The conditions in dachauh were very unliveable and the treatment was brutal . In each barracl there would be many rows of just plain wooden planks that would be the prisoners beds, they would be damp and withoiut any heat or light. Rations of food would be very small. You would have a chane of not even getting any food for a long period of time and possibly dieing from starvation. Prisoners were made to stand up still and straight for many hours and hours at a time. They would be burned with cigarettes, beaten with clubs and wet towels, and whipped with wire bound whips. Hitlers main plan of dachau was to treat the prisoners almost as cruel as he possibly could and then release them so that they could tell their stories of life in dachau. Hitler thought that this was going to make people feared of him, they would not want to mess with him.      

     By the end of hitlers first week of total control of germany, there were 15000 people in protective custody. Then it got werse, 6 months later the camps held 27000 political prisoners.

     In the fisrt months of 1993, 40 to 50 improvised camps were all over the country.  Each one of the camps operated independently. Hitler was working on making dachau a model for all others. For this task he appointed theodor eicke commandment. Immediatly eicke was on the job. He created a list for maintaing disipline and order. Any inmmates that made a a plan to rebell or escpae were then to be punished by eight to forty-two days of additional ddetention., hard labor, solitary confinment, twenty five lashes with a whip, or even death. Depending on how bad the offense was death would be bu wither shooting or hanging. Every guard at the camps would take an oath to enforce the disciplanary code, "ruthlessy and without mercy."          

     Straight after Eicke made his ruler, hitler then began shutting down some of the smaller camps. He would release many of the inmates to larger camps. Then by the summer of 1937, all of the makeshift faclties were closed and theie seven or eight thousand prisoners were sent to one of four camps: Dachau in the south, Sachsenhausen in the North, Buchenwald in the middle, and Lichtenburg for women. The regulations in Dachau for the treatment of prisoners became standard in all camps.

     Eicke also made a code for training regiem for camp guards. The soldiers who patrolled and operated camps became known as, Totenkopfverbande-or deaths head detachments. On their uniforms they would have skull and crossbones. Men who would later become commandments of later concentration camps learned how to intimidate, torture, and kill at Dachau.

     From the beginning, The overrulers of the camp established control through brabarity and kept it through fear. There was no challenge to this. Three weeks after the first prisoners arrived, four tried to cross the electrified barbed wire fence and the moat that surrounded the compound. Guards fired and immediatly mowed down three of them and seriously injured the fourth one. One month later two townspeople were arrested becuase they were simply peeping of the edge of the wall to see the inside of the camp. The newspaper then published a story about how the curious people would get put in the death camp for longer than one night if they got caught.

     One of the first incidents of a death of a prisoner becuase of sadism that took place in Dachau took place on may 25 1993. There was a death of Sebastian Nefzger. The summary of the camps doctor was simly that he took his own life, he bled from a cut of the artery in the left wrist. The chief public prosecuter dissagreed. He thought that the political prisoner was strangled to death. The same month anoter prisoner, Leonhard Hausmann was hot becuasae according to the guard he was attempting to escape and did not hault when the guard told him too. But the prosecuter learned that the bullet was shot into him less than a foot away. The number of violent deaths began to increase and the finding continued. The chief public prosectuer field charges againt single gurads, camp doctors and camp officials. He then began an investigation and elicted Himmlers promise of full cooperation. But himmlers authority of a high ranking nazi was above the law. The prosecuter then had to stop his investigation.

     Tword the end of 1936 a new use was found for the camps. Hitler was finally preparing germany for the war that he had already began. He had begun his four year plan for building a military machine that would restore german honor and give aryan people the living space he felt that they needed and deserved. Hitler had long belived that he needed to fill the land of the east. Getting living space meant war and required much preperation. All new weapons and equipment had to be createrd, more food had to be grown and also stored, and new forms of fuel needed to be created. Many more laborers were needed. However workers were very difficult to find at that time. Luckily hitler had many concemtration camps with thousands of unproductive men that would be good for the job and were fully able to work.

Sites:   

frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/holocamp.html

www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

www.finalsolution88.com/prisoncamps.htm

Book Source

The Holocaust Camps, by Ann Byers.