HISTORY/Hitler's Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany: Shortly after the end of the second World War, Allied prosecutors preparing for the Nuremberg trial of war criminals hauled in Rudolf Marx, the Nazi prisons chief, for interrogation. His initial tactic was to stonewall. Then, when confronted by overwhelming evidence about his transfer of thousands of "asocial" prisoners to death camps, he claimed "a serious loss of memory".
Finally conceding he might remember, Marx fell back on the lame protest that "I couldn't even hurt a fly".
This turned out to be good enough for the (German) judges at the Wiesbaden trial of Nazi prison officials in 1951-2. They ruled that the transfer of prisoners, including Jews, was legal, and accepted defence arguments that the accused had not known what fate awaited those sent to the camps. Even an admission by officials to having read letters by Martin Bormann about the extermination of prisoners was not enough to secure a conviction. "The observation of the word 'extermination' alone", ruled one judge, "does not represent a sufficient basis for determining the defendant's knowledge or presentiment about the killings." No prison or police officials then or afterwards were sentenced for their part in the deportations.
Hitler's Prisons tells the fascinating story of "the last forgotten victims of the Third Reich". Most historians of Nazi terror have focused their attentions on the SS death camps. Nikolaus Wachsmann delves instead into the largely unexplored lives of the men and women, more numerous than in concentration camps, kept under judicial confinement in prisons and penitentiaries between 1933 and 1945.
A promise to crack down on crime was central to Nazi electoral appeal in 1933. The middle classes in particular viewed the Weimar regime as having been soft on the issue. While millions suffered hardship on the outside, prisoners were popularly believed to be living a life of comfort. "Now everything in the penitentiary is complete," ran a popular poem, "Only afternoon dance and ballet would make it more neat! We outside? We're made gloomy about the hardship that has arisen, Until we perhaps end up in prison." Many of those who came to power with the Nazis had seen the relaxed atmosphere of Weimar prisons firsthand. As a prisoner in Bavaria in 1922, Hitler had worn his own clothes and cooked his own food. The door to his spacious cell was left unlocked. He had no obligation to work, or even clean his own cell. From there he dictated parts of Mein Kampf to fellow inmate Rudolf Hess. Only Hohenzollern furniture could possibly have made life more comfortable.
These were not privileges extended to prisoners of the Third Reich, whose numbers exploded during the first year of Nazi rule. Prussian institutions alone saw a rise of 50% on the previous year to 57,000. Sentencing became stricter for petty criminals, especially those who were also vagrants or mentally ill. Particular example was made of sex offenders who, in a move welcomed by public opinion, were immediately castrated. The legal apparatus also rallied against political dissidents, racial and social outsiders, and homosexuals. After the outbreak of war, there was a sharp increase in the imprisonment of "racial aliens". Poles, in particular, suffered savage discrimination, and found it almost impossible to get a fair trial. "In view of the unfathomable malice, deceit and cruelty of the Pole," wrote one judge in 1940, "one cannot crack down hard enough".
Conditions in Nazi prisons were predictably bleak. Disease and starvation were rampant. Prison officials did much to make life as harsh as possible through arduous forced labour, deliberate neglect, overcrowding, random violence and sadistic torture. Many local prison officials were drunk on their own power. "I think if a prisoner dreams of me at night," wrote one "little Hitler" at Ichtershausen prison, "then he stands to attention in bed."
Many prison officials enthusiastically participated in the wartime "annihilation through labour" programme that saw thousands of inmates relocated to death camps. "Most supported the transfer," writes Wachsmann, refuting the findings of the judges at Wiesbaden, "even though they often knew exactly what happened to the transferred prisoners in the concentration camps, as did their superiors in Berlin." In a sinister display of bureaucratic efficiency, officials at death camps always notified the originating prison when inmates died. These included prisoners such as "Richard F". Sentenced in 1940 to 15 years in prison for stealing a rabbit, he was sent to Mauthausen concentration camp in November 1942 for "annihilation through labour", and died six weeks later. Such affecting individual stories make Hitler's Prisons a bleak and unremitting read, but one that forces us to think anew about the nature of cruelty and punishment. The horrified American reaction to prisoner abuses in Iraq shows that more than half a century later it remains the mark of a civilized society that crimes against criminals are still thought crimes.
Richard Aldous teaches history at UCD. His life of Malcolm Sargent is published by Pimlico
Hitler's Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi GermanyBy Nikolaus Wachsmann Yale University Press, 537pp. £30