Das war Dachau (review)

Translated into German from the original Czech, this volume combines the keen perspective of an eyewitness observer in the tradition of Langbein and Kogon with the analytical skills of a trained historian able to link developments in the camp to the history of the concentration camp system and to general political events in the Third Reich. As the author notes, Dachau prisoners “felt every significant change very quickly, and literally on their hides” (p. 10).

Assigned to the prison infirmary, Zámečník witnessed the arrival of prisoner transports at the main camp and was well placed to observe prisoners and guards, living conditions, and death at Dachau. He opines that archival sources alone cannot represent the history of Dachau, since the content of official orders and reports was frequently inconsistent with implementation and “reality.” Drawing upon his own memory sparingly, however, the author cautions that prisoner memoir literature is frequently “marked by a narrow, subjective perspective, and even by legends” (p. 9).

The first section in the book deals with the prewar years, outlining the relationship between the camps and the Nazi Security Police and stressing the latter’s prewar intent to deploy prisoner labor to produce building materials for the future SS empire. Also contained in this section is an account of Himmler’s public justifications for Dachau and the concentration camp system—from as late as 1939 (p. 91). Zámečník speculates that the effort of Bavarian prosecutor Carl Wintersberger to prosecute Dachau’s first commandant, Hilmar Wäckerle, may have minimized the number of “unnatural deaths” at Dachau in these early years. Nevertheless, Jews died at a higher rate than any other prisoner group in Dachau during these years: of 476 recorded deaths in the camp between 1933 and 1939, more than half (243) occurred between November 11, 1938 and February 2, 1939, a period when the majority of prisoners were Jewish.

After the war began, living conditions for the prisoners deteriorated rapidly, so that by 1941 most prisoners were too weak, gravely injured, or ill to produce much of anything. Based on camp records, some 2,437 prisoners died in Dachau between December 1940 and May 1941 out of an average prisoner population of 10,000.

Zámečník devotes space to two prisoner groups that were relatively unique to Dachau: the political prisoners—in particular the German Communists—as a prison functionary class; and Catholic priests. Unlike in other camps, German Communists retained their functionary positions at Dachau until the middle of 1944. The author analyzes their efforts to impress the SS with their discipline and productive potential, both to divert SS attention from themselves and other prisoners and to maintain their own control over the prisoner administration inside the camp. He also demonstrates how Communist cliquishness sometimes harmed and isolated non-initiated prisoners. The treatment of Catholic priests, who were concentrated at Dachau, was not always consistent. The SS delighted in torturing the Austrian clerics who arrived in 1938 and the Polish clergymen who came in 1940. Due in part to interventions from the Vatican, however, camp authorities removed all clerics from the prisoner work force in early 1941, bunked them in a separate barrack, assigned them to food distribution, and left them time and opportunity to worship. In September 1941, the SS threw non-German priests back into the regular prisoner pool, subjecting them again to brutal mistreatment. Of 2,720 priests deported to Dachau between 1938 and 1945, 1,034 (38%) died, among them 868 Polish priests. Unfortunately, Zámečník writes almost nothing about Lutheran clerics, who appear not to have been incarcerated in significant numbers at Dachau.

Zámečník traverses familiar ground in outlining SS efforts, beginning in 1942, to have an impact on the German war industry by supplying inexpensive forced labor. To augment this resource, Himmler sought laborers everywhere: in Justice Ministry prisons, among hostages in occupied France, and among so-called “asocials” of Polish nationality. Supply could...