The first Nazi concentration camp opened on 22 March 1933, on the outskirts of the town of Dachau. Between 1890 and 1914 this small, picturesque, Bavarian town had been a thriving artists’ community.
This situation was disrupted as many of its artistic residents responded to Germany’s call to arms prior to the First World War; some enlisted, some moved away and the town never returned to its former glory. These demographic changes meant that the town felt an economic pinch in the period leading up to the First World War, and the town’s patriarchs began to think of other ways to attract wealth and business to the area now that the artists and poets had left.
The answer to the void and its inherent impact on the local economy was the foundation of a gunpowder and munitions factory.1 This new factory was known locally as the ‘Pumf’, and provided the German army with munitions for the battlefields of the First World War. However, defeat on the battlefield and the terms of the Treaty of Versailles meant that the ‘Pumf’ was closed down at the end of the war.
The town of Dachau struggled in the 1920s; thousands of workers were laid off from the ‘Pumf’ or German Works as it was later called, meaning that the town suffered from unenviable unemployment figures compared with the rest of Germany. In later years the Great Depression compounded this problem.
By early 1933, the town’s elders were becoming extremely concerned and increasingly vocal in their requests to the government of Bavaria to make some use of the site formerly occupied by the German Works. Initially, ideas such as a militia or conscription camp were floated for the site, but it was eventually earmarked as a concentration camp for political enemies of the newly installed Nazi regime.2
The origins of Dachau, the first Third Reich concentration camp, and the use of Schützhaft or protective custody, originated from an act of arson by a 24-year-old Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe.3 The burning of the Reichstag in Berlin on 27 February 1933 presented Adolf Hitler, the newly installed Chancellor of National Socialist Germany, with a golden opportunity; it allowed him to present the arson as the signal that the Communists were preparing an armed mutiny against the state. In the wake of the Reichstag fire, measures were announced by Hitler and signed by President Paul von Hindenburg the following day. On 28 February 1933 these measures formed the decree ‘Order of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and the State’. At a stroke of the ageing president’s pen, the most significant law in the history of the Third Reich was implemented.
The huge implications of what Hitler had achieved with the Reichstag ‘Fire Decree’ were that this emergency measure abolished constitutional government. Germany was now governed under a permanent state of emergency, which was to last twelve years. It was a quasi-legal trick that underpinned the basis of the Nazi terror regime.4