Dachau and the SS: A Schooling in Violence by Christopher Dillon (review)

In the popular imagination Dachau is, after Auschwitz, perhaps the most recognizable symbol of the National Socialist concentration camp system. Indeed, films of Allied military forces liberating concentration camps in Germany in 1945 had an immediate and powerful impact on world opinion. Pictures of skeletal survivors juxtaposed with piles of human corpses stacked like cordwood in barracks or railway cars continue to serve for many as the iconic images of the Holocaust. In the aftermath of the war, Auschwitz came to epitomize the labor and extermination camp system, but Christopher Dillon’s important study takes us back to the beginning by tracing the origins of the labor camp system to the creation of Dachau in March 1933. More important, Dillon’s historical analysis of the camp as the “cradle of a new and terrible spirit of destruction” (p. 1) is intertwined with an ambitious effort to discern the motivations of the camp’s SS personnel, from the sentries in the watch towers to the senior leaders on the commandant’s staff.

Dillon’s work combines historical study, demographic analysis, social psychology, and gender theory (or more specifically, masculinity studies) to chart the emergence of Dachau as both a “laboratory of terror” and the incubator of what came to be known as the “Dachau spirit”—a malevolent Geist abetted by a command culture that promoted the routinization of violence. Acts of cruelty aimed at the camp’s prisoners included the notorious “welcome beatings,” random incidents of verbal and physical abuse, and the summary execution of those “shot while trying to escape.” Dillon’s analysis draws a clear distinction between the motivations of the relatively youthful Dachau guard troops and the older cohort of SS officers and senior enlisted personnel. He argues that the younger guard troops, mostly men in their early twenties, joined the SS Death’s Head primarily for extrinsic rewards such as stable employment and a regular salary, rather than out of ideological commitment. In the case of the older cohort, it was the task of senior SS officers such as Theodor Eicke and his epigones to model desired behaviors and “to provide ideological sustenance to his men just like a field chaplain in war” (p. 80). Even then, the author contends, in cases of atrocity committed by sentries “the evidence points to toxic environment rather than [to] dispositional pathology as the primary cause” (p. 84).

Dillon’s work offers a welcome addition to the literature in that he attempts to “discern the fragments of a complex social psychology otherwise obscured by the reductive tendencies of the historical record” (p. 154). In pursuit of this goal, he discusses and critiques the well-known experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram, as well as the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) conducted by Philip Zimbardo. Dillon clearly notes the problems resulting from Zimbardo’s personal “interventions” in the SPE, but is generally positive in his evaluation of the applicability of Milgram’s experiments concerning obedience to authority. Despite his extended evaluation of Milgram’s work and its reception, however, Dillon overlooks an important and often underappreciated finding in Milgram’s study: when the “teacher/subject”was forced to have physical contact with the victim, “obedience was significantly reduced as the victim was rendered more immediate to the subject.” In those cases, seventy percent of the teachers chose to defy the experimenter.¹ By contrast, within the camps in Germany, members of the commandant’s staff—like SS and police perpetrators in the occupied East—regularly brutalized their victims in a direct and personal way with little psychological or physical separation.

Dillon’s analysis moves beyond Milgram and Zimbardo to more contemporary theories including the work of James Waller, Harald Welzer, and Thomas Blass. In fact, he embraces “interactionist analysis,” an approach—credited to Blass—according to which “culture, cognition, and situation interact in perpetrator behavior” (p. 7). This approach, Dillon contends, exposes the ways in which violence was “encouraged, instilled, and excavated from...