Communists to be interned: first camp in Bavaria
From our own correspondent
21 March 1933
Berlin, 20 March
The president of the Munich police has informed the press that the first concentration camp holding 5,000 political prisoners is to be organised within the next few days near the town of Dachau, in Bavaria.
Here, he said, communists, “Marxists”, and Reichsbanner leaders who endangered the security of the state would be kept in custody. It was impossible to find room for them all in the state prisons, nor was it possible to release them. Experience had shown, he said, that the moment they were released they always started their agitation again. If the safety and order of the state were to be guaranteed such measures were inevitable, and they would be carried out without any petty considerations.
This is the first clear statement hitherto made regarding concentration camps. The extent of the terror may be measured from the size of this Bavarian camp – which, one may gather, will be only one of many.
The Munich police president’s statement leaves no more doubt whatever that the socialists and republicans will be given exactly the same sort of “civic education” as the communists. It is widely held that the drive against the socialists will reach its height after the adjournment of the Reichstag next week.
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German ‘Marxist’ camp: 140 prisoners there already
From our own correspondent
The Observer, 26 March 1933
Munich, Saturday
Preparations are going on apace with the new concentration camp in the neighbourhood of Dachau, a village not far from here.
The Völkischer Beobachter’s correspondent is the first German press representative to obtain permission to see this place. The camp, he says, was a munition factory during the war, employing about 6,000 people. The majority of the machinery was destroyed under the Versailles Treaty; the remainder has rusted, but the buildings are still in a comparatively good condition.
One-hundred-and-forty prisoners are now there, but after alterations have been made there are to be 2,500. The camp is strongly guarded, and is surrounded by a barbed wire fence. The prisoners in the barracks are in gangs of from five to 30 men.
The terror in Germany: camp brutalities
From our special correspondent recently in Germany
22 June 1933
No more than occasional glimpses of what goes on in the German concentration camps are possible, so elaborate are the precautions taken to secure secrecy. But such glimpses are, cumulatively, enough to leave no doubt at all as to the inhuman treatment of the interned prisoners. The prisoners are pacifists, liberals, socialists, communists, lawyers who specialised as counsel for the defence of accused persons belonging to the left, or writers who sympathised with the left or with pacifism. Their number is not known with any certainty – estimates vary, from 13,000 to 50,000 or 60,000. The number is steadily growing.
The treatment combines hard labour, rigorous military discipline, ferocious corporal punishments, and the arbitrary ill-treatment of individuals. Many of the prisoners were first ill-treated in one of the “Brown Houses”, which are really torture chambers (what goes on in these “Brown Houses” has been described repeatedly in the Manchester Guardian), before being sent to a camp. Few, if any, of the prisoners have been tried – many of them do not know why they are interned. The camps are not in charge of the police but of Brown Shirts (prisoners in ordinary gaols are much better treated).
The concentration camps are an organic part of the Brown Terror with which the Hitlerite dictatorship keeps the political opposition repressed. The camps are, so to speak, the continuation and amplification of the Terror in the streets and in the “Brown Houses”. The Brown Shirts claim that the military discipline, the hard labour and the patriotic songs that are forced upon the prisoners are an educative process which will turn “Marxists” into good German citizens. The murders committed in the camps are officially concealed beneath phrases like “shot while trying to escape”, “died of haemorrhage”, “died of heart failure”, and so on.
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