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Death Certificate for Fritz Dressel

Death certificate for Fritz Dressel
US Holocaust Memorial Museum

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?

In 1933, several thousand members of the Nazi SA and SS were deputized as auxiliary police. To learn more, see the related Experiencing History item, Photograph of Berlin Police Deputizing Members of the SS.

Dutch Communist Marinus van der Lubbe confessed to setting fire to the German parliament building (Reichstag) on February 27, 1933. Hitler and other Nazi leaders claimed that the Reichstag fire proved that Communists were planning a violent uprising against the government. On February 28, an emergency decree issued by German President Paul von Hindenburg suspended many personal liberties and gave the government authority to jail political opponents without charge. Propaganda against the perceived Communist threat intensified in the following months.

For more on Nazi ideals of national unity in the German "national community," see collections in the Experiencing History section, Belonging and Exclusion: Reshaping Society under Nazi Rule.

For more on "protective custody," see the related sources in Experiencing History, "Protective Custody Order" for Herbert Fröhlich and Prisoner Badge Worn by Josef Kohout.

Beimler was able to escape Dachau and published an account of his experiences (Im Mörderlager Dachau). For more about Dressel’s death and the reactions of other prisoners, see Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler's First Victims and One Man's Race for Justice (London: Vintage, 2015), 113–120.

The Bavarian State Police initially guarded Dachau, but the camp was handed over to the SS on April 11, 1933. In May 1934, Eicke helped create the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps to reshape other camps to fit the Dachau model. For more about Dachau, its transformation under Eicke, and SS treatment of prisoners, see Barbara Distel, "Dachau Main Camp," The Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos Vol. I (2009): 441–447; and Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2015), 23–60.

See newspaper clippings and correspondence in the Dorothea Dressel collection.

Nazi propaganda tried to depict the concentration camps as humane sites of political rehabilitation. Many within Germany and internationally did not question this portrayal. Nazi supporters believed it was necessary to suppress political dissent. For more about the image of the camps and "good camp" propaganda, see Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2015), 63–78.

See the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collections, Jonathan Kempner Papers, RG-10.229, Sheet 14. In 1948, former Dachau guard Karl Wicklmayer admitted that he had murdered Dressel and then tried to make it appear to be suicide. See Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler’s First Victims and One Man's Race for Justice (London: Vintage, 2015), 209.

The Dachau camp was first established in the village of Prittlbach, Bavaria, a few miles north of the municipality of Dachau.

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Death Certificate


Death Register Number: 6 

First and last name as well as profession of the deceased: Friedrich Dressel, carpenter and construction technician, most recently party secretary.

Age: born on June 1, 1890

Place of birth: Welsberg Place of residence: Feldmoching

Place of death: Dachau concentration camp Date of death: May 7, 1933

First and last name of spouse: [left blank]

First and last name as well as profession:

a) of father: Friedrich Dressel

b) of mother: Margarete Dressel, née Bühl

Prittlbach,1 May 23, 1933

 

Registrar: Göttler

[Official seal of Prittlbach Registry]

Archival Information for This Item

Source (Credit)
US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Accession Number 1995.A.0186
Date Created
May 23, 1923
Language(s)
German
Location
Prittlbach, Germany
Reference Location
Dachau, Germany
Document Type Official document
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