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Himmler, Heydrich, and Dachau: The Machinery of Terror Takes Shape
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In early 1933, Hitler didn't wait for a political mandate — he built the instruments of absolute control: the SS, the SD, and the first concentration camp at Dachau. This is the chapter where the terror state stopped being a threat and became a reality.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before the death camps. Before the gas chambers.
The SS, the Schutzstaffel, started as almost nothing. In the mid-nineteen twenties it was a small personal bodyguard unit, a few hundred men attached to Hitler's inner circle, subordinate to the larger and noisier SA, the Sturmabteilung, the brown-shirted street fighters who brawled their way through the Weimar years.
Alongside the SS, and directly feeding it, was the SD. The Sicherheitsdienst.
On the twenty-second of March, nineteen thirty-three, less than two months after Hitler became chancellor, the first concentration camp opened outside the town of Dachau in Bavaria. Dachau wasn't improvised.
While the SS and SD were building their institutional foundations, there was a serious internal problem that Hitler had to resolve. The SA, the brown-shirted paramilitary force that had been the muscle of the Nazi street movement, was becoming a liability.
The institutional picture was becoming coherent. The SS controlled the concentration camp system.
By the mid-nineteen thirties, Dachau had company. Sachsenhausen opened in nineteen thirty-six, near Berlin.
Take a step back and look at what existed by the end of the nineteen thirties. In less than seven years, Hitler and Himmler had created a parallel state within the German state.
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