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The new
Nazi regime established the first concentration camp about 15
kilometers northwest of Munich, at a site where a munitions factory
had stood until it was abandoned in the wake of the economic crisis.
Heinrich Himmler dedicated the camp, meant to contain 5,000
prisoners, at a press conference on March 20. The first group of
prisoners-mostly Communists, Social-Democrats, and homosexuals-was
taken there on March 22. Bavarian police guarded the prisoners until
April 11, when the SS took over. Theodor Eicke, appointed commandant
of the camp in June 1933, elaborated its organizational structure
and its detailed rules. When Eicke was placed in charge of all
concentration camps, he applied the rules and the regimen that he
had developed at Dachau elsewhere, too. Because the institution
Eicke developed was meant, by its very existence, to sow fear among
the population, it became an efficient tool in silencing opponents
of the regime. The first Jewish detainees were among the best-known
political opponents of the Nazi regime, since Dachau was a
"political camp" throughout its 12-year tenure. However,
Jews were treated more harshly than other prisoners. Gradually,
members of the Sinti and Roma peoples (Gypsies) were imprisoned
there, along with the regime's political opponents, and more than
10,000 Jews from all over Germany were interned there after the
Kristallnacht pogrom. From autumn 1937 until the autumn of 1941,
those who could prove that they were about to leave Germany were
released. When the systematic genocide of Jews began, the Jewish
prisoners were deported from Dachau and other camps in the Reich to
the extermination camps in the East. |
