Prof. Marcuse, UCSB Hist 33D, L 14:

Dachau, 1890-1933-1945

0. Q3
1. Last time: The final phase of the Holocaust
2. Dachau, 1890-1933
3. Dachau 1933-1945
4. Announcements
   (final exam choices; journals after class)
5. slides

Question 3

1. Name ANY TWO of the eight different "holocausts" recollected/portrayed in Dachau. (2pts.; only first two will count)
2. a. Name ONE religious memorial at Dachau besides the Jewish one
   b. Name/describe ONE significant feature of that memorial, or of the Jewish memorial

Question: How did the Holocaust end?
Answer:

• Chaos as Germans were clearly losing the war
• Death came home to Germany (statistics!)
  (ext. camp evacuations, epidemics in German camps)
• Allies discovered these scenes & publicized them:
  ("media blitz"): Germany as epitome of barbarism
• Consequences:
  a. More openness to Jewish state in Palestine
  b. Nuremberg trials

• Artists' mecca (quotations Legacies of Dachau, pp. 17f)
  compare Fontainebleau, Worpswede
  From a 1979 tourist guide to Dachau, by Hans-Gunther Richardi:
  "In 1890 Dachau's golden age as an artists' colony began. ... Painters of the highest quality came to the market town: Lovis Corinth [and] Max Liebermann ... . 1890 was the year Adolf Hölzl (1853-1934) came to Dachau, too. To him it owes its art historical significance. Together with his friends Ludwig Dill (1848-1940) and Arthur Langhammer (1855-1901), whom he brought to Dachau, he founded the "New Dachau School" in 1897, which received much attention in artists' circles and turned Dachau into an artists' Mecca. ... Finally so many artists lived in Dachau that in the years around 1900 people used to say that every tenth person one met on the street was an artist."
  anecdote by the Swedish writer Carl Olof Petersen (1880-1939), who came to Dachau in 1903 and made it his home of choice. In his book Moosschwaige (Hut in the Moor), Petersen described what prompted him to leave his job as a grocer in Sweden: "I first heard the name Dachau from the Swedish painter and writer Ernst Norlind in Malmö. He was studying to be a sculptor in Munich. Suddenly, however, he switched to painting and moved out to Dachau, which had just become famous as a painters' colony. I always listened enthusiastically when Norlind described the venerable old market that dreamed of its former days of glory on a sunny hill on the Amper river, or when he told about the great wide expanse of the moor that stretched to the Alps on the distant horizon."
• Great War (World War I)
  munitions factory (Pumf)
• Decommissioned under Versailles Treaty
  lots of unemployment
• 1933: wanted a "work camp"
  compare US "Civilian Conserv. Corps" camps
• Nazi plans for camps:
  In preparation for Hitler's first attempt to seize power in November 1923, the Nazi Party conspirators drafted a dictatorial new constitution. Its sixteenth paragraph stated:
  " The regional administrators will immediately ... take measures to purge and unburden the cities and resort towns, in particular they will remove all security risks and useless eaters. These people are, if necessary, to be put into collection camps, and if possible to be put to work on communal projects. Whoever resists or attempts to resist the transfer will be punished by death."
  On 8 March 1933 Reich Interior Minister Frick announced that:
  " When the new Reichstag convenes on 21 March 1933 more important and more useful work will prevent the Communists from participating. They will have to get used to doing productive work again; they will be given an opportunity for that in the concentration camps. If they let themselves be educated to become useful members of the nation again, they will be welcomed as full national comrades. However, not only the Communists must disappear, but their red Social Democratic compatriots as well, since Social Democracy is the root that brought forth Communism."

• Did not vote disproportionately for Hitler
• Gleichschaltung: "coordination" of percentages
  (D: Cath=29%, SPD/"Sozis"=28, Nazis=24)
  (Reich: Nazis=44%)
• 22 March 1933: crowds watch first 200 prisoners arrive
• Dachau's special role:
  Himmler=Munich police chief AND SS chief
  Commandant Eicke "cleans up" camp
  In a 1936 self-assessment, Eicke summarized what he had accomplished since his appointment as commandant of Dachau:
  " The SS death's head formations were created from a corrupt guard detachment of about 120 men in Dachau in the Fall of 1934. There were times when no uniforms, no boots and no socks were available. Without complaints the men wore their own clothing while on duty. We were generally thought of as a necessary evil that only cost money, as drab guards behind barbed wire. ... My men lived in drafty factory halls. Everywhere there was poverty and misery; ... I found disloyalty, embezzlement and corruption. For those reasons I had to dismiss 60 men in four weeks time."
  Rudolf Hoess on his training under Eicke:
  "Eicke thought that every trace of pity showed the enemies of the state a vulnerable spot that they would immediately exploit. Any empathy with enemies of the state was unworthy of an SS man. There was no room for the soft-hearted in the ranks of the SS; they would do best to disappear into a monastery as soon as possible. He [Eicke] could only use hard and determined men who would obey every command without a second thought. Not for nothing did they wear the death's head and carry a loaded weapon at all times. They were the only soldiers who, even in times of peace, had to face the enemy day and night, the enemy behind the fence. ... Eicke drummed the concept of dangerous enemies of the state so vividly and convincingly into his SS men ... that every one who did not know better was completely permeated with it. ... Eicke's intention was to use his constant reprimands and the corresponding orders about criminal dangerousness to orient his SS men completely against the prisoners, to make them hate the prisoners, to suppress any feelings of pity right from the start. [emphasis in original] "
• June 1934 Röhm assassination: cleaner

• Spring 1935: Himmler persuades Hitler to expand camp system (happens 1936-39)
  Legacies, p. 31f:
  "Let us return to the development of the concentration camp system. In 1935 it was by no means clear that the institution would be permanent. "Protective custody" may have been necessary while the Nazis were consolidating their hold on power, but after the "Night of Long Knives" in 1934 that goal had been attained. Some high government officials, such as Reich Interior Minister Frick and the Reichsstatthalter (national executor) for Bavaria, Ritter von Epp, pushed Himmler to reduce the number of costly protective custody prisoners, which was disproportionately high in Bavaria. In Dachau, their numbers had increased from about 2000 in June 1933 to 2600 in December, then fallen gradually to about 1300 by November 1934. In a crucial meeting with Hitler in February 1935, Himmler gained the Führer's approval to maintain the camps at the current level, and in June Hitler approved Himmler's plan to increase the size of the guard detachments. Additionally, Hitler decided that, beginning in April 1936, the camps and their guard detachments would be financed out of the national budget.
  The reasoning behind that decision reveals the Nazis' longer-range preparations for war, and it exemplifies the ad hoc process by which their strategies developed. Himmler's argumentation was two-pronged. On the one hand he showed Hitler how the camps helped to fulfill the Nazis' goal of improving the German people-he produced the laudatory letter quoted above as evidence of this. On the other hand, in the spring of 1935 Himmler also expounded the concentration camps' usefulness against potential civilian unrest. This argument hinged on plans that were being drawn up for what was code-named "Situation A": war. At that time several events under consideration might have triggered Situation A: the illegal reoccupation of the demilitarized zone between Germany and Belgium and France by German troops (March 1936), the annexation of Austria (March 1938), the occupation of Czechoslovakia (March 1939), and the invasion of Poland (September 1939). Hitler's skillful diplomacy postponed the actual outbreak of Situation A until 1939, but the concentration camps proved their utility in the Austrian and Czechoslovakian takeovers, albeit more along the lines of their original function in 1933-"neutralizing" opponents during the period of consolidation. "
• Dachau camp rebuilt in 1937-38: annexation of Austria; Kristallnacht
• Emptied for troop training in summer 1939
• (Mass killings carried out in occupied territories)
• 1943: "branch camps"
  Dec. 1942: 29 near Dachau; 82 in Reich
  Jan. 1945: over 100 near D; 662 in Reich (Krautergarten; 12 in city)

• 1940: central camp for clergy (1,000 priests)
• 1942 shooting of Soviet POWs
• Chaos as end point of evacuation marches
• Evacuation marches from Dachau itself

• Film Wednesday, 5pm: USHMM
• Final exam sign-up/choice on Thursday
• 2-hour in-class: IDs + essay
• Take-home w/ limit on number of words (same: IDs + essay)
• Oral: groups of 3 students meet w/ prof. for 10 mins.

• SINGULAR: Nazi, Nazi's; PLURAL: Nazis, Nazis'
• Collective singular vs. plural: The Jew; some/many Jews
• The elusive +
  MAKE AN ARGUMENT, and address arguments to the contrary

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