Dachau concentration camp served throughout the pre-war period of the Third Reich as the national 'school of violence' for S.S. concentration camp personnel.Yet, typically of the pre-war Nazi camps, its history has been written by former prisoners rather than historians and offers little analysis of the S.S. personnel. This article focuses on these personnel by considering the contribution of the entangled concepts of militarism and masculinity to the 'Dachau School' and to the particularly violent culture of Dachau. It concludes that any attempt to account for the conduct of the guards must incorporate these cultural ideals and their influence on social relationships in the camp.The National Socialist concentration camps stand as the symbolic nadir of a violent century. Images of starved prisoners at their liberation, staring uncomprehendingly through barbed wire amid other-worldly scenes of suffering and death, are seared into the historical consciousness. These wartime concentration camps have become synonymous with Nazi policies of extermination and continue to generate outstanding scholarship. 1 The pre-war camps of the Third Reich, however, are far less studied and an important topic in their own right. During the Nazi takeover of power, concentration camp confinement played a decisive and highly visible role in the erosion of the rule of law by arbitrary terror. Early camps like Dachau and Oranienburg were murderous sites of violence against opponents, real and imagined, of the regime and became international symbols of Nazi depredation. The ensuing institutionalization and expansion of the concentration camps was closely linked to the rise of the S.S. (Schutzstaffel) and its Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. With Bavaria and Dachau as his 'springboard', by 1936 Himmler had secured control of both the German police and the entire camp system: the foundation, in turn, for the S.S. pursuit of a eugenic, racial Utopia. 2 Vast citadels of terror were constructed at Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen and Ravensbrück to detain an increasingly heterogeneous and internationalized inmate population. Political prisoners were soon outnumbered by so-called 'professional criminals', social outsiders, male homosexuals, Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses, all marked and grouped under an intricate taxonomy of
Dachau was the most enduring and important of the early nazi concentration camps. Its initial personnel, trained in the Dachau ‘school of violence’, were soon widely distributed throughout the SS camp network but have received very little historiographical attention. This article sets the camp and the early Dachau SS in their Bavarian context and explores how the memory of civil war in Munich in 1919 was at the fore in 1933: the camp’s location was highly symbolic in this regard. The article argues that these events left a direct and atmospheric mark on the early violence in the camp and on the pioneering group of perpetrators who set an operational tone known admiringly in the SS as the ‘Dachau spirit’.
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