Hitler's First Victims by Timothy W. Ryback

Author:Timothy W. Ryback [Ryback, Timothy W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-35292-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

PART III

GUILTY

13

Presidential Powers

A PLEASANT WEEK at the end of May with summerlike temperatures brought Dachau residents the cheering news that their town was considered the “most famous place in Germany.”

“Dachau has been known and talked about for many reasons,” the Dachauer Zeitung reported on May 23. “Dachau residents are simple peasant people who fiercely hold to their traditions; the distinctive farmer’s garb and the women’s embroidered dresses are well known.” And then, of course, there were “all the luminaries in the firmament of art.” The Dachauer counted among their number the German impressionist Max Liebermann, the early expressionist Lovis Corinth, and the pioneering modernist Emil Nolde. Most famous was Carl Spitzweg, the legendary nineteenth-century master of the quaint and cozy. Copies of his painting The Bookworm, depicting a befuddled old man on a wooden stepladder in the Dachau palace library, graced the walls of bibliophiles the world over. And then there was the munitions factory that in its day was “one of the largest enterprises” in Bavaria.

The front-page article heralded Dachau’s sudden and dramatic rise to both national and international prominence through the conversion of its abandoned munitions factory. “Dachau has recently received a new distinction in that it now has become a center for the concentration of political prisoners,” the Dachauer Zeitung wrote. “Representatives from the foreign press have already visited the camp and will be reporting on this to the entire world. It is there that communists and other enemies of the people are made to do useful work.”

The newspaper went on to note that for a time Dachau registered some of the highest unemployment figures in Germany. The camp proved to be a boon to the local economy. Off-duty SS men flocked to Café Bestler for its jazz and supply of local girls. Initially there had been scuffles with Bestler regulars, but the SS ultimately prevailed. The Teufelhart Bakery, which had been providing bread to generations of Dachau residents, secured a contract with the new facility. The butcher Wülfert delivered not only meat but also dried ox penises that were used as pizzles. The eighteen-inch-long strips were soaked in a large cauldron of water in the camp kitchen to keep them pliant and were fetched by the SS guards as needed. “These pizzles were always brought along with the meat deliveries by car to the camp,” Paul Hans Barfuss, a detainee assigned to the kitchen, recalled. “The shop owner himself was said to have delivered them in person.”

The Dachauer Zeitung credited Heinrich Himmler in particular for the town’s revived fortunes. “Dachau has attained its most recent fame through an action by the police headquarters in Munich, and that pleases us greatly,” the paper noted. More than a hundred “dangerous” shopkeepers had been taken into protective custody, their establishments shuttered and affixed with a warning pasted across the door: “Business closed under police orders. Store owner in protective custody in Dachau. The political police commander of Bavaria. Himmler.” The newspaper trumpeted its gratitude: “Bravo, Herr Police Commander!”

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