. The Waffen SS
Totenkopf division emerged from two significant
interrelated forces in the structure of Adolf
Hitler's Third Reich. These forces were individual
and personal on the one hand, and institutional and
ideological on the other. Individually, the SS
Totenkopf division in a real sense, was the personal
creation of Theodor Eicke. A major figure in the SS,
Eicke was the architect, builder, and director of the
prewar German concentration camp system. He was also
the founder and commander of the SS Totenkopf
division until his death in Russia in 1943.
Ideologically, the SS Totenkopf division was the
institutional outgrowth of the sinister SS Death's
Head Units (SS Totenkopfverbande), the militarized SS
formations Eicke recruited, organized, and trained to
guard and administer the concentration camps of the
Reich.
From its activation in October 1939
until its dissolution in May 1945, the SS Totenkopf
division retained a distinct and individual identity,
ethos, and character. Stamped indelibly with the
imprint of Theodor Eicke's personality and marked
unmistakably as the product of its prewar origins.
Since the interrelationships of these factors
antecedent to the creation of the SS Totenkopf
division are so vital to a clear and comprehensive
perception of the division's wartime rile and
significance. They are the natural and necessary
point of departure for this study.
The pattern of Theodor Eicke's life
before his entry into the Nazi party and the SS was
similar to that of many prominent figures in Hitler's
movement. Born on October 17, 1892, in the then
German province of Alsace, Eicke was the eleventh
child in a family originally from the town of
Gittelda in the Harz Mountains of Germany. His
father, Heinrich Eicke, was the railroad
stationmaster in the Alsatian village of Hampont.
Theodor Eicke attended both the Volkschule and the
Realschule in Hampont, but was a poor student and
left school without finishing in 1909. As a youth of
seventeen, Eicke relisted in the Twenty-third
Infantry Regiment at Landau in the
Rhineland-Palatinate and embarked on an
undistinguished service career as a clerk and
paymaster. During the First World War, Eicke served
successively as a paymaster with the 3rd and 22nd
Bavarian Infantry Regiments, earning in the process
the Iron Cross, Second Class. After the armistice and
the German revolutions, Eicke resigned from the army
in 1919 with the rank of career assistant paymaster
and found himself thrown into the chaotic cauldron of
postwar Germany.
Without prospects for a new career and
filled with hatred for the new government of the
Weimar Republic, Eicke and his wife settled in
Ilmenau in Thuringia, near her family. When his
meager savings evaporated and his father-in-law
refused to extend financial support, Eicke in
desperation secured employment as a paid police
informer in Ilmenau. He remained an informer until
July 1920, when he was dismissed by the police for
engaging in political agitation against the Republic.
Eicke found police work so agreeable
that he tried repeatedly during the following
eighteen months to make it his new career. From
Ilmenau, Eicke moved successively to Cottons, Weimar,
Sorau-Niederausitz, and finally to Ludwigshafen am
Rhein in his frustrated odyssey for status and
security as a professional policeman. In each
location, Eicke succeeded in gaining employment, but
in each instance he held it only briefly before being
dismissed either for expressing his fierce hatred of
the Republic or for participating in anti-government
demonstration. Finally, in January 1923, his luck
changed and he secured employment, first as a
salesman and then as a security officer in the I.G.
Farben plant in Ludwigshafen. From 1923 until his
entry into full-time service with the SS in 1932,
Eicke remained employed by I.G. Farben as a security
officer.
Eicke spent the years from 1923 to 1928
settled in Ludwigshafen, but remained unreconciled to
Germany's defeat and to his own postwar civilian
existence. The intensity of his hatred for the Weimar
Republic eventually attracted him to the Nazi party,
which by 1928 had become aggressive and successful in
recruiting in the Rhineland-Palatinate. On December
1, 1928, Theodor Eicke, having found a group that
shared his political views and offered him membership
in a paramilitary formation, joined the Nazi party,
with Party Card No. 114-901. At the same time, he
entered the ranks of the party's storm troopers
(Sturmabteilung, or SA).
Eicke remained in the Ludwigshafen SA
until August 20, 1930, when he transferred to the
small and better-disciplined SS (Schutzstaffel), a
separate group within the SA used to protect party
speakers and to maintain order at party political
rallies. Opportunities for influence in the smaller
SS seemed to Eicke much greater - an assumption amply
confirmed by the meteoric rise that within four years
carried him to one of the most important positions in
the SS.
On November 27, 1930, Heinrich Himmler,
Hitler's loyal Reichsfuhrer, appointed Eicke to the
rank of SS Sturmfuhrer and gave him command of Sturm
No.148 at Ludwigshafen am Rhein. Eicke's energetic
recruiting and organizing abilities were so obvious
and successful that within three months Himmler
promoted him to SS Sturmbannfuhrer and ordered Eicke
to create a second SS Sturmbann for the projected
10th SS Standarte of the Rhineland-Palatinate. By the
summer of 1931 Eicke had filled the ranks of the new
SS Sturmbann. His success and single-minded zeal
earned for him Himmler's admiring recognition, and on
November 15, 1931, he promoted Eicke to SS
Standartenfuhrer and gave him command of the 10th SS
Standarte.
By this time the combination of the
depression and his SS activities cost Eicke his job
with I.G. Farben. Free to devote his time and energy
to his SS command and to party activities, Eicke
embarked on a new career in political violence. On
March 6, 1932, Eicke was jailed for illegal
possession of high explosives and for conspiring to
carry out a series of bombings and political
assassinations in Bavaria. He remained in custody
until July 7, 1932, when a Bavarian court sentenced
him to two years in prison. The sympathetic Bavarian
minister of justice, Franz Gurtner (later Hitler's
minister of justice) quickly intervened and granted
Eicke a temporary parole to 'regain his health'
before beginning his prison sentence. Upon his
release on July 16, 1932, Eicke returned directly to
Ludwigshafen and resumed his political activities.
The police quickly noted his
reappearance and forced Eicke into hiding with party
friends in Landau. These circumstances clearly
embarrassed Himmler, who ordered Eicke via courier to
come secretly to Munich for important instructions.
Himmler had decided to remove Eicke to some location
where he would do no harm and would be out of the
reach of the authorities. Consequently, when Eicke
arrived in Munich, Himmler sent him immediately to
Italy. On September 18, 1932, complete with disguise
and false papers, Eicke traveled through Austria to
Malcesine in northern Italy. As a sop, the
Reichsfuhrer promoted him to SS Oberfuhrer and gave
him command of the fugitive SS camp which Mussolini's
government had organized at Malcesine on Lake Garda
to house similar exiles.
While he was in Italy, Eicke's command
of the 10th SS Standarte was threatened by the
swaggering Gauleiter of the Palatinate, Josef
Burckel. Burckel and Eicke had begun a fierce quarrel
in 1931, when the Gauleiter attempted to coordinate
all the SA and SS units in the Palatinate under his
control. Eicke's successful resistance killed the
plan but not Burckel's ambitions. With Eicke
conveniently in Italy, Burckel tried to strip the SS
Oberfuhrer of his power in the Palatinate by having
him expelled from the party. Word of Burckel's
machinations reached Eicke in Italy, and in a series
of latter written to his comrades in Ludwigshafen
during the winter of 1932-1933 he swore that upon
returning to Germany he would use the 'old methods'
to prevent Burckel from imposing 'Jesuit politics' on
the Nazi revolutions.
Hitler's appointment as chancellor of
the Weimar Republic on January 30, 1933 liberated
Eicke from exile. Franz Gurtner thoughtfully provided
amnesty for his 1932 Bavarian conviction, and on
March 10, 1933 Eicke returned to Ludwigshafen - after
promising Himmler that he would not renew the old
quarrel with Burckel. Once in Ludwigshafen, however,
Eicke forgot his promise. With his loyal SS followers
he celebrated his return by staging an armed putsch
against Burckel. Eicke and the mutineers stormed the
Ludwigshafen Gau headquarters and locked Burckel in a
janitor's closet before the forces loyal to the
Gauleiter managed to call in the local Schutzpolizei,
who arrested the mutineers and forced Eicke to
release Burckel. The humiliated Gauleiter exacted
full revenge upon his cantankerous enemy. He had
Eicke arrested, judged 'mentally ill and a danger to
the community', and deposited for psychiatric
observation in the Nervenklinik in Wurzburg. An
infuriated Himmler also removed Eicke's name from the
service list of the SS on April 3, 1933, and
consented to Eicke's indefinite confinement in the
Wurzburg clinic. While in the clinic, Eicke managed
to make friends with his psychiatrist, Dr. Werner
Heyde, who later wrote to Himmler that Eicke appeared
perfectly normal, always behaved quietly, and had
given no one at the clinic the impression that he was
either disturbed or a chronic troublemaker.
Heyde's evaluation and Eicke's constant
pleas to the Reichsfuhrer SS finally persuaded
Himmler to have Eicke released and reinstated into
the ranks of the SS. On June 26, 1933, Eicke left the
Wurzburg clinic with his old rank of SS Oberfuhrer,
with direct orders from Himmler (chief of the
Bavarian political police) to assume a new post. The
Reichsfuhrer SS had selected Eicke to become
commandant of one of the first Nazi concentration
camps for political prisoners at Dachau. Himmler had
established the Dachau camp on March 20, 1933, three
days before and in anticipation of the passage of the
Enabling Act in the Reichstag. This legislation gave
Hitler the sweeping legal powers he needed to
incarcerate the political enemies of the Nazi party.
Like many of the other early 'wild' concentration
camps, Dachau initially was staffed by local SA and
SS men who practiced indiscriminate brutality upon
the helpless prisoners in their custody.
Himmler's first SS commandant at Dachau,
SS Sturmbannfuhrer Hilmar Wackerle, attempted to
regulate the mistreatment of prisoners with stringent
punishment regulations - rules that classified as
crimes 'violent insubordination' and 'incitement to
disobedience' and made them punishable by death.
Hanging was imposed by a tribunal of camp SS
officers, over which the camp commandant's vote was
decisive, a procedure that invested him with absolute
life-and-death power over every prisoner in the camp.
Wackerle's tenure as Dachau commandant
ended in June 1933 when Himmler dismissed him to
dampen the scandal that arose over the murder of
several prisoners in the camp - murders which
subsequently resulted in charges against Wackerle by
the Bavarian criminal prosecutor's office. The direct
result, then, of the publicity stemming from the
Dachau murders was Eicke's appointment as the new
commandant. At Dachau, Eicke began immediately to
reorganize Wackerle's rough outlines for
administering the camp and to refine the regulations
for oppressing the prisoners. The results were
Eicke's own system of terror and organized brutality
- hideous procedures that subsequently became
standard practice in all the German concentration
camps. Eicke's first task at Dachau involved
reshuffling the camp guard personnel. As commandant,
Eicke was responsible directly to Sepp Dietrich, then
commander of SS Oberabschnitt S\'fcd with
headquarters in Munich. Dietrich controlled the
selection of Eicke's replacements for the Dachau
guard units, a situation Eicke claimed created
serious problems in the camp. In letters to Himmler,
Eicke charged that Dietrich sent him corrupt and
undesirable asocial, whom Dietrich simply dumped into
the camp command. This, Eicke complained, resulted
initially in serious disciplinary problems and cases
of theft - difficulties Eicke solved by transferring
or dismissing some sixty of the SS men sent him.
Eicke also complained of initial material shortages,
and later wrote Himmler that at first there were no
boots and socks for his men, few cartridges and
rifles, no machine guns, and only dilapidated and
unsanitary sleeping quarters for the SS guards.
Shortly after assuming command at
Dachau, Eicke began urging Himmler to make the Dachau
command independent of Dietrich's SS Oberabschnitt by
subordinating the camp directly to the office of the
Reichsfuhrer SS. As Eicke made a success of his
tenure at Dachau, this desire to bypass Dietrich and
increase his own power and independence grew into a
restless craving for further power and influence that
led him to guard jealously his own prerogatives and
to look upon his important SS colleagues with
suspicion, hostility, and hatred.
While commandant at Dachau, Eicke
developed two basic camp policies that were to have
enduring significance in the history of the Third
Reich. The first was his unwritten code of conduct
for the SS guards, and the second consisted of new,
elaborate disciplinary and punishment regulations for
use against camp prisoners. These latter regulations
eventually established the 'legal' basics for
handling prisoners in all the German concentration
camps; while the basic concepts in the code of
conduct for the SS guards were refined, expanded, and
implemented with horrific efficiency in the camps
within the Reich, and in the wartime extermination
centers in the German-occupied east.
The code of conduct for the SS guards
was based upon Eicke's demand for blind and absolute
obedience to all orders from SS superior officers,
and upon his insistence that each prisoner be treated
with fanatical hatred as an enemy of the State. By
drilling his SS guards constantly to hate the
prisoner, and simultaneously by buttressing this
hatred with the legality of orders (which enabled the
guards to mete out the harshest punishments to
prisoners), Eicke invented what subsequently became
the standard SS formula for mistreating all
concentration camp inmates. Eicke's new regulations
for the 'Maintenance of Discipline and Order' (zur
Aufrechterhaltung der Zucht und Ordnung) were issued
on October 1, 1933. These regulations defined a
number of crimes for which a prisoner could be
punished, prescribed the penalties, and gave the SS
guards extensive freedom to deal harshly with the
'enemy behind the wire'. To an extent, Eicke's
regulations were patterned after Wackerle's,
especially in delegating the the camp commandant full
and absolute power to determine the punishment for
prisoners convicted of infractions. Eicke's
originality lay in his definition of the serious
offenses that were punishable by death. These
included political agitation, the spreading of
propaganda, any acts of sabotage or mutiny, attempted
escape or aid in an escape, attacking a sentry or
guard tower; and a long list of less-serious
infractions.
In addition, Eicke devised a graded
system (eight, fourteen, twenty-one, and forty-two
days) of close confinement with a warm meal only
every fourth day; he subjected prisoners so long
periods of solitary confinement with only bread and
water. To supplement these measures with physical
abuse of the prisoners, Eicke introduced corporal
punishment usually consisted of twenty-five lashes
with a whip, carried out at his specific order in the
presence of the assembled SS guards, all the
prisoners, and the camp commandant. Eicke rotated the
responsibility for these whippings among the SS
officers, noncommissioned officers (NCOs), and SS
guards in the camp. This made the punishment more
impersonal and hardened the SS camp personnel into
laying-on the whip routinely and without flinching.
Other forms of punishment included suspension of mail
privileges, especially heavy or dirty forms of manual
labor, tying prisoners to stakes or trees for varying
periods, and special exercises - usually performed
with accompanying kicks and blows from the SS guards.
Eicke also sought to instill among the
guards a particular hatred for the Jewish prisoners.
Being himself violently anti-Semitic, Eicke
considered the Jews the most dangerous of all the
enemies of National Socialism. He frequently
delivered anti-Semitic lectures to the guards, and
displayed regularly copies of Julius Streicher's
notorious racist newspaper, Der Sturmer, on bulletin
boards in the SS barracks and canteen. To foment
anti-Semitic violence among the prisoners he posted
copies of Der Sturmer all over the protective-custody
camp as well. Of all punishments Eicke devised at
Dachau, the most psychologically devastating was
reserved for the Jewish inmates. Whenever an atrocity
report about the concentration camps appeared in a
foreign newspaper, Eicke ordered all the Jewish
prisoners locked in their barracks. The windows were
then nailed shut, and the Jews had to lie in the
sealed barracks for one to three months - leaving
their beds only at mealtime and for roll-call. Eicke
insisted that all atrocity stories were circulated by
emigrating German Jews, and that the Jews in the
concentration camps should suffer collective
punishment as a result.
To strengthen his own power as
commandant and to make the camp run efficiently,
Eicke also supervised the dividing of the camp
administration into different departments. He secured
a camp doctor to be head a medical department, and
appointed an administrative officer to run the camp
pay office and purchase all supplies. Another office
was established to keep the personal property
surrendered by each prisoner upon entering the camp,
and Eicke himself organized a camp repair and
maintenance bureau to be responsible for maintaining
the camp's physical plant, procuring supplies, and
making uniforms for the prisoners.
Eicke divided the inmates in the camp
into 'blocks' of 250 prisoners each. The commander of
a 'block' was an SS guard, usually an SS Scharfuhrer.
He in turn was responsible to a Rapportfuhrer
(coordinating leader), who normally held the rank of
SS Hauptscharfuhrer. The Rapportfuhrer's superior was
designated detention camp officer
(Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer), and always held commissioned
rank in the SS. With the subsequent enlargement of
Dachau, Eicke appointed additional Schutzhaftlager
commanders to handle the increasing numbers of
prisoners, and to rotate duty every twenty-four
hours.
Eicke's success in organizing Dachau
into a model detention center for political enemies
of the Nazi regime made a deep impression upon
Himmler. On January 30, 1934, the Reichsfuhrer
promoted Eicke to SS Brigadefuhrer and began to
listen seriously to Eicke's complaints that
subordination to SS Oberabschnitt Sud was hampering
even greater progress at Dachau
Himmler apparently was motivated not
only by Eicke's success but also by a desire to
retain a firm grip on his own position by setting his
subordinates in competition with each other. Eicke
clearly was a talented, rising, and potentially
important figure in the SS, and if he were given an
independent command subordinate to Himmler, he could
serve as a check against the Reichsfuhrer's cunning
and ambitious protege, Reinhard Heydrich. By the time
Himmler moved to Berlin to take command of the
Prussian Gestapo in April 1934, he had decided to
centralize all the SS-run concentration camps into
one system by creating a specific SS office to
organize and administer the camps. Because of his
success at Dachau, Eicke appeared the natural choice
to direct this new and vital organization. In May
1934 Himmler and Eicke discussed the prospects, and
the Reichsfuhrer SS told the elated Eicke he would
have the responsibility for this reorganizing.
As a further sign of his confidence in
Eicke, Himmler appointed him Fuhrer im Stab (officer
on the staff) of the Reichsfuhrer SS on June 20,
1934. This appointment invested Eicke with the
prestige of direct subordination to Himmler, and more
importantly separated the Dachau command from SS
Oberabschnitt Sud. Eicke thus had reached a second
and crucial stage in his SS career. In less than a
year after his release from the psychiatric ward, he
again possessed Himmler's personal confidence,
commanded a significant institution in Hitler's
terror apparatus, and stood within reach of vastly
enlarged power in the SS as the muggy heat of June
1934 brought the dispute between Hitler and Ernst
Rohm's SA to a climax.
The events leading to Hitler's purge of
the SA leadership in the infamous 'Night of the
Knives' have often been described. Until recently,
little was known about the conspicuous and important
role Theodor Eicke played in the SA purge. On direct
orders from Hitler, Eicke murdered Rohm on the
evening of July 1, 1934.
Eicke's part in the purge began when he
and men picked from the Dachau guard assisted Sepp
Dietrich and two companies of the Leibstandarte SS
Adolf Hitler (Hitler's personal SS bodyguard) in
rounding up the important SA leaders during the night
of June 30 and depositing them in the Stadelheim
prison in Munich, where the executions where to take
place. Sometime during the early afternoon of July 1,
Hitler gave the order to liquidate Rohm. As a
principal director of the purge, Himmler received the
necessary instructions. The Reichsfuhrer SS
telephoned Eicke at the Munich offices of SS
Oberabschnitt Sud in the Amalienstrasse, told him
Hitler's decision, and ordered Rohm shot. The one
qualification, at Hitler's insistence, was that Eicke
first give Rohm the chance to commit suicide.
Accompanied by his adjutant, SS
Sturmbannfuhrer Michael Lippert, and by SS
Gruppenfuhrer Heinrich Schmauser, the liaison officer
between the SS and the army for the purge, Eicke set
out by auto for the Stadelheim prison. When the three
arrived and were taken to the prison director, Robert
Koch, Eicke explained why they had come. Koch tried
to stall, claiming that he could not deliver Rohm
without the necessary instructions and papers.When
Eicke began to shout and threaten. Koch telephoned
the Nazi minister of justice, Hans Frank, and asked
for orders. During the conversation Eicke grabbed the
receiver from Koch and screamed into the mouthpiece
that Frank had no business interfering in the Rohm
affair, as he (Eicke) was acting on direct orders
from the Fuhrer. This satisfied Frank, who order Koch
not to intervene further. Eicke, Lippert, and
Schmauser then proceeded to the cell where Rohm was
confined.
Entering the cell, Eicke announced
loudly, 'You have forfeited your life! The Fuhrer
gives you a last chance to avoid the consequences!'
He then placed an extra pistol on the table and told
Rohm he had ten minutes to end everything. Eicke,
Lippert, and Schmauser withdrew and waited in the
corridor for fifteen minutes. No sound came from
Rohm's cell. Finally Eicke glanced at his watch and
both he and Lippert drew their pistols. Pushing the
cell door open, Eicke shouted, 'Chief of Staff, make
yourself ready!' He and Lippert then fired at the
same time, and Rohm collapsed to the floor. One of
the two SS men then crossed the cell and shot Rohm
point-blank through the heart.
By
Pz_Totenkopf
