ABSTRACT
Concentration camps have long been a method of terrorizing and neutralizing groups identified as ‘the enemy’. The very first of these were set up in Cuba in 1896 (campos de concentración), where the Spanish governor ‘concentrated’ Cuban rebels in camps in an attempt to break their resistance to Spanish colonial rule. In 1900, the British established ‘concentration camps’ in South Africa during the Boer War. Arguably, it was during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) that the first concentration camps were created in Germany. Reich President Ebert used emergency decrees in 1923 to quash political unrest: communists were taken into ‘protective custody’ in former prisoner-of-war (POW) camps. These camps, and those set up in the early 1920s in Stargard and CottbusSielow to ‘concentrate’ Eastern European Jews who had fled from the Poles and Russians, were in some very limited respects precursors to the Nazi camps (Drobisch and Wieland 1993:16-21). Although conditions in the Weimar Republic camps could be poor, they were not murderous; and they were not a typical feature of the Weimar political system. It was the Nazis who institutionalized, perfected and made a murderous machine of the concentration camp system. After the arson attempt on the Reichstag on 27 February 1933-which the Nazis blamed on the communists-the regime set about incarcerating communists in prisons and camps. The earliest camps were ‘ad hoc affairs, set up by local Party bosses, the police and the SA’ (Burleigh 2000:198-9). The most notorious ‘wild’ SA camp was probably that at Oranienburg (Morsch 1994). But it was under the SS that the concentration camp system was to be developed into a monstrous instrument. The first SS-run camp to be established was Dachau, opened in March 1933. In the course of the 1930s, the whole concentration camp empire was coordinated and centralized by SS leader Heinrich Himmler, who placed it under the authority of Theodor Eicke. Eicke had become Commandant at Dachau in June 1933. He was responsible for building up the notorious Death’s Head units, from which camp guards were recruited. Other camps followed Dachau: the main ones were Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenwald (1937), Flossenbürg (1938), Neuengamme (1938) and Ravensbrück (1938-1939), the
latter for women prisoners. The new camp at Sachsenhausen was valuable because of its proximity to Berlin-it could be used to incarcerate ‘enemies of the Reich’ quickly in case of war. But economic factors played an increasingly central role in the choice and development of sites, as the SS sought to turn the camp empire into a thriving economic concern. Thus prisoners at Sachsenhausen slaved away in nearby brickworks; bricks were needed to fuel Speer’s rebuilding programme in Berlin. In Flossenbürg prisoners were put to work in quarries. Many satellite camps were set up at the site of armaments firms.
