After rising to power in January 1933, the Nazi regime moved quickly to suppress the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) and other political opponents. German police1 arrested thousands of people throughout Germany that spring and summer, including a regional Communist leader in Bavaria named Friedrich “Fritz” Dressel. Dressel was imprisoned in the newly-opened Dachau concentration camp on May 3, 1933.
Dachau and the other early Nazi concentration camps removed many of the Nazis’ political opponents from German society and showed Germans what could happen if they opposed the regime.2 The Nazis and their supporters regarded Socialism and Communism as major threats to their vision for a German “national community” (“Volksgemeinschaft”).3 Nazi authorities ordered German police to imprison Communists like Dressel under what they misleadingly called “protective custody” (German: "Schutzhaft"). Thousands were arrested without charges.4 Many so-called “protective custody prisoners” were held in concentration camps indefinitely.
SS guards abused and tortured camp prisoners—especially those who were Jewish or were well-known Communists or Socialists. Fritz Dressel was one of several suspicious prisoner deaths that were reported at Dachau in spring and summer 1933. Over the course of several days, Dachau guards repeatedly beat Dressel and set an attack dog on him. He died in Dachau on May 7, 1933. His murder was covered up by camp authorities, who claimed Dressel had died by suicide.
A fellow Communist prisoner named Hans Beimler reported that the SS used Dressel’s staged suicide to try to drive other prisoners to kill themselves.5 Eleven other Dachau prisoners were dead by the end of May 1933. An official investigation into this wave of suspicious deaths pressured SS leaders into replacing Dachau’s first camp commandant with SS officer Theodor Eicke. Eicke established strict new regulations for camp discipline, organization, and punishments for prisoners. Under his direction, the Dachau concentration camp became a model for future Nazi camps.6
The featured document is Fritz Dressel’s death certificate. It identifies him as the sixth prisoner death at Dachau. The death certificate lists his occupation as “carpenter, construction laborer, most recently party secretary.” No cause of death is named, but SS documents and German newspapers reported Dressel’s death as suicide. On May 11, Dressel’s parents wrote a letter to his wife, Dorothea, asking if the newspaper reports about Dressel’s death were true.7 Others also questioned the statements and official reporting around Dressel’s death.8 For example, Munich resident Johann Schilling was arrested because he criticized the SS treatment of prisoners in Dachau and called Dressel’s death “unnatural.”9
Dressel’s arrest and murder show some of the ways that terror and violence functioned in the earliest Nazi concentration camps. What does Dressel’s death suggest about the role of these early camps in German society? How did the families of prisoners react to news of violence and death in the concentration camps?