Sunday, the 29th of April 1945, one week before the end of World War II in Europe. The U.S.
Seventh Army’s 45th Infantry Division liberates Dachau - the first regular concentration camp
built by the Nazi government. The soldiers smell not only human excrement but also decaying bodies
causing many of them to cry or vomit as they find piles of impossibly malnourished corpses,
more than 30 railroad cars filled with thousands of dead bodies, and 30 thousand survivors,
most of them severely emaciated, who look like walking skeletons. Thousands of them are sick
and will die from typhus epidemics and starvation during the months following the camp’s liberation.
One of the key figures in the development of Dachau and other Nazi concentration camps,
where prisoners were exposed to dehumanization and unspeakable atrocities, was Theodor Eicke.
Theodor Eicke was born on the 17th of October 1892 in Hampont, then part of German Empire.
He was the youngest of 11 children and his father was a station master by profession.
Eicke was not a good student; at the agent of 17 he dropped out of school and in 1909
he joined the German Imperial Army as a volunteer. The First World War began on the 28th of July 1914
and Eicke served as a clerk and paymaster on the western front. In late 1914 he returned home on
leave to marry Bertha Schwebel, with whom he had 2 children. He then fought at both the First Battle
of Ypres in 1914, the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915 and at the Battle of Verdun in 1916.
The Battle of Verdun was one of the longest and deadliest battles of the war. The German Army
attempted an offensive near the French city of Verdun that quickly devolved into a stalemate.
German forces were subsequently diverted from Verdun when the British launched the Battle of the
Somme, and the Battle of Verdun ended in December when the French recaptured the initial German
gains. About 300,000 soldiers were killed and many more were wounded. The First World War ended on
the 11th of November 1918 and although Eicke spent most of the time behind the lines, he was awarded
the Iron Cross Second Class for his bravery. To Eike, just like to many other Germans, defeat
in the WWI was hard to swallow. He considered the Treaty of Versailles as humiliating and an insult
to the German population and his disgust of the Weimar Republic, which was the name given to the
German government from 1918 and 1933, would have a profound impact on Eicke’s future life and career.
In 1919 he resigned from the army and began studying at a technical school in Ilmenau
but due to lack of funds and his radical political views he was forced to drop out.
He then decided to embark on a career in the police and although he passed a police force exam,
he found it difficult to find and keep a job mainly because of his political activities.
His career in the police ended in 1923 when he was fired because of his involvement
in violent demonstrations against the Weimar Republic which he openly hated.
Theodor Eicke joined the Nazi Party on 01 December 1928 and around the same time he also joined the
SA, which was a paramilitary organization led by Ernst Röhm. Eicke left the SA by August 1930 and
joined the SS, where his talent and qualities as a leader were soon noticed by Heinrich Himmler.
In early 1932, his political activities caught the attention of his employer IG Farben,
who subsequently terminated his employment. At the same time, he was caught preparing bomb attacks
on political enemies in Bavaria for which he received a two-year prison sentence in July
1932. Eicke was able to avoid his sentence and on orders from Heinrich Himmler he fled to Italy.
Italy at the time was already a fascist state under the rule of Benito Mussolini, and Eicke
was entrusted by Himmler with running a "terrorist training camp for Austrian Nazis" at Lake Garda,
and once even had the privilege of showing Italian dictator Benito Mussolini around.
After Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power in January 1933, the
Nazis worked to dismantle democratic institutions, suspended civil liberties, curtailed the freedom
of the press, and quickly implemented a series of discriminatory policies, primarily targeting Jews.
The Nazi regime ruthlessly suppressed any form of dissent or opposition. Political opponents,
including communists, socialists, and members of other parties, were arrested,
imprisoned, or sent to concentration camps. Eicke had a difficult personality and after
his return from Italy in March 1933, he had a fall-out with Joseph Bürckel, a Nazi politician,
who had him arrested and detained at the mental asylum in Würzburg. The same month the
first concentration camp, Dachau, was opened and Himmler needed someone to effectively run the camp
because there were many complaints and criminal proceedings against the camp’s first commandant,
Hilmar Wäckerle. When a director of the mental asylum told Himmler that Eicke
was not mentally unstable, Himmler in June 1933 decided to replace Wäckerle with Eicke.
When Eicke came to Dachau he first fired half of the 120 guards and introduced the so-called
‘Dachau model, a set of regulations which served as model for future SS-run concentration camps
during the Nazi regime. He established new guarding provisions, which included
rigid discipline, total obedience to orders, and tightening disciplinary and punishment regulations
for detainees. Eicke introduced the concept of "Kapos," prisoners who were selected and given
limited authority to enforce discipline among fellow prisoners. This system fostered a climate
of fear and ensured prisoner compliance. Uniforms were issued for prisoners and guards alike,
and it was Eicke who introduced the infamous blue and white striped pyjamas that came to symbolize
the Nazi concentration camps across Europe. In the camp, Eicke was soon known as Papa
Eicke and his guards as Papa Eicke’s boys and under the slogan ‘Tolerance means weakness’ he
advised his men that any SS man with a soft heart should retire at once to a monastery.
Eicke was a fanatical Nazi, who demanded absolute obedience from inmates and one of the regulations
he introduced proves his cruelty: "He who talks about politics with rebellious intent,
assembles with others or distributes horror propaganda of the enemy will be hanged,
according to revolutionary law; he who attacks a guard, disobeys an order or
incriminates himself in any other way will be executed on the spot or hanged later."
Dachau served as a training ground for SS personnel who would later be assigned to
other concentration camps including Rudolph Höss, who would later become a commandant
of Auschwitz or Max Kögel, who would oversee Majdanek concentration camp.
In early 1934, Hitler and other Nazi leaders became concerned that Ernst Röhm, the SA
Chief of Staff, was planning a coup d'état. As early as April 1934, Heinrich Himmler and
Reinhard Heydrich began to conspire with Göring to persuade Hitler to eliminate Röhm.
In June 1934, in preparation for the purge known as the Night of the Long Knives,
both Himmler and Heydrich, chief of the SS Security Service, assembled a dossier
of manufactured evidence to suggest that Röhm had been paid 12 million Reichs Marks by the
government of France to overthrow Hitler. Leading officers in the SS were shown falsified evidence
on 24 June that Röhm planned to use the SA to launch a plot against the government.
At Hitler's direction, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich drew up lists of
people in and outside the SA to be killed. Meanwhile, President von Hindenburg,
the leadership of the Reichswehr – the German armed forces, and Hitler’s conservative coalition
partners, including Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, issued warnings about the increasingly
radical Nazi regime. If the “revolutionary elements” of the Nazi regime were not brought
under control, the army leaders threatened to overthrow the Hitler government and
place the country under martial law. Despite radical rhetoric, neither Röhm
nor his top commanders ever planned to seize power in Germany. Hitler considered Röhm one
of his few friends and procrastinated over the decision. Tension, meanwhile,
increased towards the end of spring 1934. The plot against Röhm took on a more defined shape.
Hitler tasked Himmler and the SS with carrying out the purge. On June 28, Hitler ordered Röhm
to assemble the top SA leaders at a Bavarian spa in Bad Wiessee. SS units, commanded by Dachau
concentration camp commandant Theodor Eicke, surprised the SA leaders on the morning of
June 30. They then transported them to Munich’s Stadelheim prison. There, SS men shot most of
the SA leaders. Hitler remained indecisive about Röhm’s fate until July 1. On that day, Hitler gave
him the choice to commit suicide and in doing so, he would admit to the German people he had made a
mistake by planning a Putch. Eicke and his deputy SS-Sturmführer Michael Lippert were ordered to go
to Stadelheim prison. Eicke entered the cell and placed a revolver on Röhm's prison-cell table and
informed him that he had "ten minutes to make good on Hitler's offer’’. After 10 minutes they
heard no shot, so they returned and found Röhm standing in the middle of the cell:
“If Adolf Hitler wants to kill me,” he said, “let him do the dirty work.” Eicke and Lippert fired
several bullets into Röhm’s chest and the last one after he had slumped to the floor.
“Mein führer, mein führer,” Röhm gasped. “You should have thought of that earlier,”
Eicke replied, dismissing Röhm’s dying pledge of loyalty. “It’s too late now.”
Shortly after Röhm’s execution Eike was officially named chief of the concentration camp inspection,
where he worked under Himmler’s direct supervision but had exclusive authority over the organization
within the camps. Under his watch new camps were opened including Sachsenhausen concentration camp
in the summer of 1936, Buchenwald in the summer of 1937 and Ravensbrück in May 1939. Eike introduced
various punishments, which were implemented across the whole concentration camp system including
penal exercises, beatings by cudgel, withholding mail, withholding food or a hard wooden bunk.
In 1934, Eicke unified all camp guards in a special unit within the SS known as the
Totenkopfverbände or Death’s Head Units. Death's Head Units were an independent
unit within the SS responsible for administering the Nazi concentration and extermination camps
throughout Germany and later in occupied Europe. The units were trained to conduct themselves with
strict discipline and cruelty, and to view the prisoners under their guard as enemies of the
state who should be destroyed if possible. They were responsible for facilitating what the Nazis
called the Final Solution, known since the war as the Holocaust which was the genocide of Jews
in Europe. In 1938 Hitler announced that they were to become military units. Some groups were
then discharged from guarding the camps for combat duty, serving in Poland and the Soviet
Union. Just as Eicke had trained the units to be barbaric in their treatment of the camp prisoners,
so did they act on the field of combat. Death's Head Units were known to be cruel and ferocious
warriors. While at the beginning of World War II, they had 24,000 members, including reservists; by
January 1945 that number had increased to 40,000. World War II began on 1 September 1939,
with the German invasion of Poland. The German invasion of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the
Netherlands started on the 10th of May 1940 and became known as the Battle of France. Initially,
British and French commanders had believed that German forces would attack through central Belgium
as they had in World War I and rushed forces to the Franco-Belgian border to meet the German
attack. The main German attack, however, went through the Ardennes Forest in southeastern
Belgium and northern Luxembourg. German tanks and infantry quickly broke through the French
defensive lines and advanced to the coast. Belgium and the Netherlands surrendered in May. More than
300,000 French and British troops were evacuated from the beaches near Dunkirk across the English
Channel to Great Britain. Paris, the French capital, fell to the Germans on June 14, 1940.
From 1939 onwards, members of the SS Death's Head Division, of which Eicke was a commander, were
also deployed at the front and the cruelty the men had been taught in the camps also emerged here.
The division was responsible for various war crimes and in May 1940 Eicke himself
was responsible for the murder of 97 British prisoners of war in Le Paradis,
France, in 1940, while serving on the Western Front . The men, a majority of whom were wounded,
were disarmed and marched to a barn and were fired upon by the two German machine gunners.
The SS Death's Head Division, went on to become one of the most effective German formations on
the Eastern Front, fighting during the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and became infamous
for murdering Jews, Soviet soldiers and pillaging Soviet villages. On April 20, 1942 Eicke received
his last promotion and became SS-Obergruppenführer - equivalent to a lieutenant general, and the
General of the Waffen-SS. The Waffen-SS was the military branch of the SS and units of the
Waffen-SS took part in most of the major military campaigns of World War II and were heavily
involved in the commission of the Holocaust through their participation in mass shootings,
anti-partisan warfare, and in supplying guards for Nazi concentration camps. They were also
responsible for many other war crimes. But Eicke was never tried for his crimes.
He was 50 years old when he was killed on 26 February 1943, during the opening stages of the
Third Battle of Kharkov, when his aircraft was shot down 65 miles south of Kharkov by Red Army
anti-aircraft artillery. Several attempts were made by reinforced assault squads to
recover the remains of their commander. They finally succeeded, after losing several men.
Eicke was given an elaborate funeral at one of the cemeteries of the Division near Orelka in Russia.
In a manner reminiscent of the funeral rites performed by the ancient Germans
upon the death of their tribesmen or kings, Theodor Eicke, or "Papa Eicke",
as his troops called him, was laid to rest. There were no tears shed for Theodor Eicke.
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