Hitler's First Victims Read online

  Steinbrenner returned the next day for another tour, this time with the SS man who had scuffled with Dressel. He gave the man an opportunity to view Dressel and ask, “Are you going to spit at me again?” The guard was then given free rein with Dressel. Steinbrenner trooped down to Beimler’s cell. When Beimler leaped to attention as Vogel had instructed, Steinbrenner kicked him in the stomach and hurled him into the corner, pointing his pistol at him. Beimler stared coldly into the barrel, unflinching. “Turn around!” Steinbrenner ordered. Beimler turned to the wall. Steinbrenner placed the barrel against the back of his head, then said, “You pig, you are not worth a single bullet. But you will be hanged tomorrow morning at seven. You can still pray and write a letter.” Steinbrenner returned that evening for another round of beatings. “He has five days and should get twenty-five [lashes] every day,” Steinbrenner instructed a guard outside Dressel’s door. The men had to break at some point. They had managed with Hunglinger; they would manage with these.

  Wäckerle arrived at the Arrest Bunker on the morning of the fifth day in the company of Steinbrenner. He let his attack dog loose on Dressel. The Arrest Bunker was shrill with Dressel’s screams as the dog set upon him. “An hour later Dressel was brought into the sick bay, covered in blood and unconscious,” Friedrich Schaper, a detainee in the sick bay, recalled. “Dressel was laid on a straw sack about five meters from my cot. Dr. Katz bandaged his lower arm. Steinbrenner entered and explained: ‘He cut open his arm with a knife.’ ” Katz wanted to give him an injection for his heart. “In that same moment Steinbrenner came back into the sick bay and said, ‘He’s not getting any treatment, let him die straightaway, he spit at an SS man in Ettstrasse.’ ”

  Steinbrenner had Dressel returned to his cell later that day in the company of two SS orderlies who were instructed to “take care of” the wounded man. Around two o’clock the next afternoon, Wäckerle appeared in the Arrest Bunker in the company of Steinbrenner. “Hey, Beimler, how long are you thinking of continuing to pester mankind with your existence?” Wäckerle asked casually as he entered the cell. “I already told you once before that you need to realize that you are superfluous in today’s society, in National Socialist Germany.” Wäckerle pointed to the knife on the table. “We didn’t give you that knife to cut bread,” he said. “That’s for something else.” Beimler replied that he had been a member of the German Communist Party for fourteen years and was not about to give up now. He told Wäckerle that if he thought he was “superfluous” he should simply give the order to have him shot.

  “Will you look at that! Now the swine is getting cheeky,” Wäckerle said, smiling. “Shoot you? No, you swine, you aren’t worth a bullet. We’re going to just let you starve.” Beimler said he had been incarcerated for four weeks and was three-quarters starved and would survive the final quarter. Steinbrenner then punched him in the chest with full force. Beimler lurched back against the wall so hard, he cried out in pain. “Look at that,” Wäckerle said. “He can still scream.” Leaning against the door, he turned to Steinbrenner. “Screaming doesn’t help much.” He smiled knowingly. “Around here things are quick and silent.” The door was slammed shut.

  Two minutes later, Wäckerle was back to fetch Beimler. He led him down the corridor to Cell 4. Dressel lay dead on the cold, bare floor, his bandage ripped off, a puddle of blood beneath his opened wounds. “So! Now you see how to do it,” Wäckerle told Beimler, back in his cell. “No need to think that we took you in there to see your friend one last time in order to say goodbye to him. You are just supposed to see how to do it, and that he wasn’t as much of a coward as you. He had much more character than you, you spineless pig.”

  Wäckerle and Steinbrenner then went to Götz and repeated the same procedure. When they were finished, Wäckerle returned yet again to Beimler’s cell. He asked him whether he had thought it through. Beimler said he had not changed his opinion. “Let me tell you something,” Wäckerle said. “I’ll give you until five o’clock. It’s three now, and if you haven’t done it by five, then we’ll finish you.”

  That afternoon an investigation team accompanied by Emil Schuler entered the camp. “Both [Dressel’s] arteries were opened,” Schuler recalled, “and it occurred to me at the time that the arteries had not been opened in a way that one normally finds in suicides.” The slashes did not run across the wrist but instead followed the artery up the arm. “It was said that such wounds could only be made by a doctor or someone with training,” Schuler observed. Despite suspicions of foul play, the SS account could not be refuted.

  Steinbrenner returned to Beimler’s cell sometime later. “I’ve heard you want to hang yourself,” he said. “I don’t care how you do it, if you’re too much of a coward to use the knife. Do you know how to do it?” Steinbrenner tore a strip from Beimler’s sheets and fashioned it into a noose. He put his head into it to demonstrate. “So now I’ve done everything that I can to help you, I can’t do any more,” he said. “So, all you need to do now is stick your head inside it, and hang the other end onto the window, and it’s all done. In two minutes it’s all over. There is nothing to it. And in any event you’re not getting out of this cell alive anymore.” Steinbrenner paused, then barked, “The commandant’s orders are to be obeyed!”

  Beimler looked at Steinbrenner and said he would prefer to wait. He explained that it was his son’s birthday and that the twelve-year-old was celebrating the event with his grandparents, since both his parents were in prison. He asked for a one-day reprieve. “I don’t want my son always to be reminded on his birthday that it was the day on which his father committed suicide,” he said. Steinbrenner mused for a moment, then told Beimler that his was a “plausible reason” for a delay. He would discuss the matter. He was certain that Wäckerle would grant a “grace period” under the circumstances, but asked Beimler to give him his word of honor. Beimler looked at Steinbrenner and reminded him that for the last four weeks he had been denounced as a traitor to his country, to the workers, a traitor plain and simple. “I wouldn’t ask a man, if I am convinced he is a traitor,” he said, “to give his word of honor.” Steinbrenner paused. “All right then,” he said. “Then just give me your word!”

  Steinbrenner departed to consult with Wäckerle and returned a short while later. “So I told the commandant about it,” he reported. “And he is giving you, because of your son, for his birthday, until tomorrow morning. But I’m telling you now, don’t you dare greet me alive tomorrow morning when I unlock the door.” That night Beimler alerted Hirsch of his intentions. “Beimler was in the cell next to me and I knew of his plan to escape that night,” Hirsch recalled, “since I had been communicating with him through tapping signals.”

  The next morning, Steinbrenner entered the barrack with his usual command when making the rounds, “Get the hell out here!” Hirsch responded instantly, rushing outside to relieve himself, knowing full well what would follow. He was returning as Götz was just emerging from his cell, when Steinbrenner discovered Beimler was missing. When Hirsch and Götz feigned ignorance, Steinbrenner flew into a rage, lashing and kicking them. “Just wait, you are dead dogs,” he said as he locked them in their cells. “You’ll talk soon enough.” A short while later, the camp siren sounded and the detainees began assembling outside the barracks. Steinbrenner returned with Erspenmüller, who ordered Hirsch to bring his straw mattress into the corridor. Erspenmüller had his pistol drawn. Hirsch recognized the danger immediately. The SS could use the excuse of shooting a detainee “trying to escape,” Hirsch knew, but would not risk shooting a man in his cell. Hirsch refused to leave it. Steinbrenner lashed him, then kicked him with his jackboots, but Hirsch would not budge. Erspenmüller walked down the corridor to Götz, where he was joined by Steinbrenner and Karl Wicklmayr. Hirsch recalled that after four weeks of relentless beating, Götz was “no longer mentally normal.” “Sometimes he would simply not respond to questions or would give confusing answers,” Hirsch remembered. He had grown “slow and clumsy.” An
other detainee, Rudolf Wiblishauser, recalled seeing Steinbrenner with two other SS men force Götz into the toilet stall, where they beat him bloody. “Afterward I had to clean the stall,” Wiblishauser recalled. “There were large patches of blood on the walls as well as scraps of skin and flesh and tufts of hair.” Wiblishauser was certain the hair was from Götz because it was blond, the same color as Götz’s. Steinbrenner later gave Götz strips of the Völkischer Beobachter to use as bandages to stop the bleeding. Battered and listless, Götz lifted his straw mattress into his arms as instructed and stepped into the hallway. An instant later, a gunshot was fired.

  In the meantime, Wäckerle, convinced Beimler still had to be in the camp, had the barracks cleared. SS guards marched through the quarters with bayonets, slashing and piercing everything in sight. Crawl spaces were searched. The detainees were assembled outside and forced to conduct repeated roll calls. “Gradually, those in the front rank realized what had happened, and a hot thrill ran through the assembled ranks like a wildfire,” a detainee recalled. “One of those who had been tortured, Hans Beimler from Munich, had escaped his executioners from the Arrest Bunker that night.” When it was clear that Beimler was no longer in the camp, Wäckerle ordered men and dogs into the surrounding woods and fields. But Beimler was nowhere to be found. “As we later learned, he was able to stay in Munich for several weeks while his wounds healed,” the detainee remembered, “and then he escaped abroad as the first crown witness of Dachau.”*

  Accounts of the Beimler escape abounded. One held that he had worn thick socks to scale the electrified fence. Another claimed he had used a blanket to scuttle beneath the wire. Someone said he had strangled a guard, slipped into his uniform, and sauntered through the gate. Max Holy, the “decent communist,” was thought to have engineered the escape. Josef Hirsch claimed it was two SS men who owed Beimler a favor. Beimler later gave his own dramatic account. “I was able to take advantage of a series of lucky breaks,” he recounted. “I succeeded, despite a high risk of death—a risk I had taken into account in preparing my escape—not only to break through the triple layers of barbed wire (the middle one was electrified) but also to climb over the two-meter-high wall.” He claimed to have tottered on the top of the concrete wall for an instant, wondering whether he had been seen, then when miraculously no guard appeared to have noticed him, he leaped to freedom.

  Wäckerle’s humiliation by Beimler and revenge on Götz was compounded by the removal of Hirsch from his custody. “Shortly thereafter, the captain of the state police came and ordered my transfer to Munich,” Hirsch later recalled. “As I was led away, I had to step over Götz’s corpse.” Hirsch later observed that the state police had literally saved his life.

  Wicklmayr took responsibility for the shooting. He told the police that Götz had been passing him in the hall with his pillow and straw mat when suddenly Götz set upon him. Wicklmayr pushed him away, but when Götz lunged a second time, he was forced to shoot. Götz died instantly. Steinbrenner said that he had been in the SS changing room when he heard the scuffle and gunshot. “I opened the door and saw Wicklmayr standing there with a smoking gun in his hand,” he recalled. “Götz was lying on the ground, shot through the head.” The pistol had been fired at such short range that the bullet penetrated Götz’s skull and then went straight through the door of the adjacent cell where a new arrival, Franz Stenzer, was being held. Steinbrenner entered the cell to recover the spent projectile. “You are lucky,” he told Stenzer. “It could have hit you.” Götz’s straw sack was soaked with blood and the walls were splattered. “It looks like a slaughterhouse in here,” Vogel observed. Detainee Friedrich Schaper was ordered to clean the hallway. “I used a rag to wipe up the blood, which was still warm, and wrung it out in a bucket,” he said.

  Kasimir Dittenheber worked with Wicklmayr in the camp office and did not believe the story. Dittenheber knew Wicklmayr was considered a Sonderling, an outsider, among the other SS guards, but he did not believe “the student” was capable of killing a man. Other detainees shared the same opinion. Wicklmayr was a quiet, thoughtful young man who was not assigned to any particular commando and spent most of his time filling out detainee registration cards in the camp office. He liked to chat with the detainees, especially a writer named Arthur Müller with whom he discussed literature. Wicklmayr aspired to be an editor. Dittenheber wondered why such a person had ever joined the SS. “Whenever an SS man like Steinbrenner came and demanded the keys for the arrest bunker,” Dittenheber recalled, the camp manager Vogel gave them a hard time. “These SS men invariably went to the cells and, as we could hear in the office, abused the detainees.” Dittenheber never heard a sound when Wicklmayr asked for the keys.

  The problem for Hartinger, of course, was the absence of credible eyewitness testimony. The SS guards closed ranks and kept their stories straight. The detainees were afraid to speak. Hartinger’s only hope lay in forensics. The following morning, Dr. Flamm arrived to examine Götz’s corpse. He confirmed the cause of death from a bullet wound, but noticed a blood-crusted wound on the left frontal lobe just behind the hairline. Flamm reported this to Hartinger, who decided to keep the investigation open until the cause of the wound had been determined.

  * * *

  * Beimler escaped across the German-Czechoslovak border to Prague, then to Moscow, where he completed an account of his time in Dachau. The book was published that August under the title Im Mörderlager Dachau, and in English translation as Four Weeks in the Hands of Hitler’s Hell-Hounds: The Nazi Murder Camp of Dachau, providing the first detailed account of atrocity inside a Nazi concentration camp.

  11

  A Realm unto Itself

  “MY FATHER IS on the city council!” Wilhelm Aron screamed. “I will have you reported!” But Hans Steinbrenner did not care. He gripped Aron’s head in an armlock and smothered his protests with camp bedding. The twenty-five-year-old Bamberg junior attorney was in the camp storage room, his lean, athletic body stretched naked on a table, while Johann Kantschuster and Johann Unterhuber lashed him again and again. The two SS guards worked their way from Aron’s calves up his legs toward his buttocks while Aron screamed his muffled threats into the blue-and-white-striped camp bedding.

  But Willy Aron was serious about the recourse. His father, Judicial Counsel Albert Aron, was not only a municipal legal adviser, he was also a member of the Bamberg city council, and one of the district’s most prominent attorneys, one of three Bamberg attorneys with an office on Luitpoldstrasse in the center of town.

  As a junior attorney, Willy was already able to represent clients in court and preparing for his final bar examination, which would elevate him to the full privileges of an attorney-at-law. Were the circumstances different, he could bring these SS brutes to justice on his own. It would not be the first time he had brought a National Socialist into a courtroom.

  Despite his youth, junior attorney Wilhelm Aron had already made headlines in the Bamberg press for three high-profile trials. Aron was a tall, handsome young man, with chiseled features accented by his fair reddish-blond hair, light skin, and penetrating blue eyes, which traced back to his father’s Prussian provenance. He was an active member in a local fencing and private social club, the Wirceburgia. On occasion, he sported monocles in a good-natured gibe at his more conservative club members. He inscribed his name twice in the club registry—once in the distinct Teutonic script of the era called “Stechlin,” and again in Hebrew letters, a nod to his Jewish origins. Aron was proud of his Jewish heritage, confident of his legal capacities, defiantly anti–National Socialist, and a fervent Social Democrat. He had belonged to the socialist youth movement and had flirted with communism, joining torchlight parades and rallies for the poor and indigent. According to a local newspaper account, he had led a socialist song evening that included a German rendition of the Soviet anthem “Tomorrow We and the Sun Will Rise.”

  In January 1932, a year after the first of his two legal examinations, Aron represented five
defendants in a “sensational trial” against a Bamberg criminal ring that included twenty-four men involved in a series of illegal activities. In one incident, four defendants broke into a local warehouse and made off with eight bottles of Prosecco, eight bottles of beer, several jars of preserved fruit, and fifteen bottles of schnapps, all of which they consumed that same night. The conservative Bamberger Volksblatt spoke of “serious crimes against property committed in a gangland manner.” The Freistaat, a local socialist newspaper, struck a more sympathetic tone, describing despairing men “who were led onto the criminal track because of long unemployment.” Aron represented five of the defendants—a worker, two laborers, a plasterer, and a woodworker—and decided to appeal to the court’s sympathies by focusing on the plight of the unemployed men. The strategy worked. While the Bamberg prosecutor argued for a seven-year prison sentence for one of Aron’s defendants, Aron succeeded in having the term reduced to eighteen months.

  That same year, Aron appeared in another high-profile case, this time representing a local saddlemaker accused of providing abortions for local girls. Bamberg was the seat of one of Bavaria’s six bishops, and conservative Catholic sentiments ran strong within the town. Few lawyers risked taking on such a case. Initially, Albert Aron agreed to take the case; in October he transferred it to his son. The case involved a young woman from Nuremberg who had gotten pregnant by a visiting medical student from Egypt. When the man abandoned the girl and returned home, a friend of the pregnant girl recommended the Bamberg saddlemaker as an abortionist. When the police were alerted of the matter through an “anonymous report,” the local prosecutor brought charges against the friend, the girl, and the saddlemaker.