Political Prisoners - The Holocaust Today

Political prisoners were among the first inmates of the Nazi concentration camp system and remained a substantial proportion of the camp population throughout its existence. The category covered Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, members of the Catholic and Confessional Protestant resistance, and a wide variety of other dissenters, foreign nationals from occupied countries, and individuals deemed politically suspect. They wore the red triangle. The total number of political prisoners who passed through the camps cannot be calculated precisely, but it was in the hundreds of thousands. The proportion who died varied with the camp, the period, and the political category, but a figure of around half is the consensus estimate for the longest-held political prisoners.

The first inmates

The Nazi concentration camp system began in March 1933 with Dachau, established by Heinrich Himmler in his capacity as acting police president of Munich. Its initial population was Communists, Social Democrats and trade unionists arrested in the wave of repression that followed the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933. Within weeks similar camps had been established at Esterwegen, Sachsenburg, Oranienburg, Sonnenburg and elsewhere; by the end of 1933 the SA and SS together had created an improvised system holding around 26,000 prisoners. Almost all were political detainees.

The early camps were chaotic and often murderous. Prisoners were beaten on arrival, set to humiliating manual work, and frequently shot or beaten to death by individual guards. The murder of Hans Litten, a Berlin defence lawyer who had cross-examined Hitler in court in 1931, was one of many. Litten was held in successive camps from 1933 until his death by hanging in Dachau in 1938; he had been so persistently tortured that suicide was treated by the historians as an act of his own choosing rather than a contested cause of death. Cases like Litten’s were the rule rather than the exception in the early phase.

By 1934 the camp system had been consolidated under Himmler’s SS and the Theodor Eicke camp model imposed across all of them. Eicke’s regulations institutionalised what had previously been improvised: prisoner categories marked by coloured triangles, the daily roll-call, the Kapo system, the standardised punishments. The political prisoner category, marked by the red triangle, was the largest category in the camps for most of the 1930s.

The categories within the red triangle

The “political” category was broad. Communists were the largest sub-group through the 1930s, although their numbers in the camps fluctuated as the regime alternately released and re-arrested them. Social Democrats, including former Reichstag deputies and trade union officials, were a smaller but consistent presence. Members of the small Catholic resistance, including individual priests and lay activists, were held under the political category, sometimes with a “P” overlaid on the red triangle to indicate Catholicism. Members of the Confessing Church, the Protestant minority that resisted Nazi infiltration of the German Evangelical Church, were similarly held; Martin Niemöller, the Confessional Church pastor and former U-boat commander, was Hitler’s personal prisoner from 1937 to 1945 and was held at Sachsenhausen and Dachau under that category.

From 1939 the category expanded enormously to include foreign political prisoners from occupied countries: French resistance fighters, Polish underground operatives, Soviet political commissars (although Soviet commissars were more often shot under the Commissar Order than sent to camps), Belgian, Dutch, Czech and Norwegian resisters. By 1944 the camp system held political prisoners from twenty or more nationalities. The largest national groups were Polish and Soviet, with the Polish prisoners often categorised separately under their own designation and the Soviet ones often categorised as Eastern Workers under a different colour.

Treatment and survival

The treatment of political prisoners varied considerably with category, nationality and period. German Communist prisoners held since the 1930s, the so-called alte Politische, often rose to positions of relative authority within the camp prisoner hierarchy as Kapos and block elders. Some used the position to protect their fellow Communists at the expense of other prisoner groups. Others used it to organise underground resistance networks across multiple camps. The Buchenwald International Camp Committee, established in 1942 by German Communist prisoners, became one of the most effective camp underground organisations and played a central role in the camp’s self-liberation in April 1945.

The treatment of foreign political prisoners was systematically harsher than that of German politicals. Polish and Soviet prisoners in particular suffered death rates approaching those of Jewish prisoners, although they were not subjected to the gas chambers as a category. Members of national resistance movements held under the Night and Fog (Nacht und Nebel) decree of December 1941 were deliberately disappeared into the camp system, with relatives told nothing of their whereabouts; most did not survive. The total Night and Fog prisoner population was around 7,000; perhaps a third returned.

Liberation and afterwards

Political prisoners formed the core of the camp self-liberation movements at several camps in April 1945. At Buchenwald, Communist prisoners armed themselves with weapons hidden in the camp arsenal and seized control on 11 April 1945, hours before the arrival of American troops; they hoisted the red flag over the main gate. At Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen, smaller-scale prisoner takeovers occurred in the closing days. The post-war reputation of the political-prisoner category was shaped substantially by these moments.

The political prisoner category was, alongside Soviet POWs and resistance fighters, one of the two or three categories that the post-war public most readily recognised as victims of the camps. Their political activities had been documented before the war; many had relatives, comrades and political organisations to advocate for them; many had survived to give their own testimony. The first major prisoner-led memorialisation initiatives at the camps, particularly at Buchenwald and Dachau, were the work of former political prisoners.

The post-war reckoning with the political prisoner experience was complicated by the Cold War. East Germany made the Communist political prisoners the centrepiece of its anti-fascist memorial culture, sometimes at the expense of acknowledging Jewish or other victim groups. West Germany was slower to memorialise the political prisoners, particularly the Communist ones; some former Communist prisoners were re-imprisoned in the 1950s under post-war anti-communist legislation. The full picture of who the political prisoners were, what they had done, and what had been done to them was not assembled until the 1980s and 1990s.

See also

Sources

Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Little Brown, 2015 (the standard one-volume history)
Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, Hamburger Edition, 1999
Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager, Verlag der Frankfurter Hefte, 1946 (English translation: The Theory and Practice of Hell, the foundational survivor history of the camps, written by a Buchenwald political prisoner)
Hermann Langbein, Menschen in Auschwitz, Europa Verlag, 1972 (Langbein was a Buchenwald and Auschwitz political prisoner and a major figure in post-war camp historiography)
Stanislav Zámečník, Das war Dachau, Fischer Taschenbuch, 2007
Catrin Ellmer, Gabriele Hammermann and others (eds), Konzentrationslager Dachau 1933-1945, KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau, 2005
Benjamin Carter Hett, Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand, Oxford University Press, 2008 (the biography of Hans Litten)
Buchenwald Memorial Foundation, https://www.buchenwald.de
Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de