When German forces invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, marking the advent of World War II in Europe, the Dachau concentration camp had been in operation for six-and-a-half years. Already thousands of inmates had been incarcerated there.
With the start of the conflict, however, wartime necessities reshaped life and death in the Dachau concentration camp in fundamental ways. In virtually every case, these measures dramatically increased the already shocking level of brutality and degradation in place. Dachau remained the inception point, model, and fixture of an immense, interlocking system of concentration camps, even as the Nazi regime designed new types of camps that far surpassed what was conceivable in Theodor Eicke’s military-style “Maintenance of Discipline and Order.”
Indeed it was the execrable Eicke who went back and transformed Dachau right after the conquest of Poland had been completed. In early October 1939, Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, secured Adolf Hitler’s approval for the creation of three new SS divisions that would be utilized for the coming offensive against France and the Low Countries. Himmler then entrusted the dependable Eicke with command of the SS Totenkopf (Death’s Head) Division, one of these new units classified as Waffen SS (Combat SS or Armed SS). Eicke had led three SS Death’s Head regiments in the fighting in Poland and was responsible already for numerous war crimes against Poles. His consistent ruthlessness and fanaticism, bound up with the supreme wish to be a “political soldier,” made him the ideal—for Himmler—choice (Richard Glücks succeeded Eicke as Inspector of Concentration Camps).
The assignment necessitated Eicke’s return to Dachau to undertake all the organizational work for the division to be ready. All 4,700 inmates were transferred to Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, and Mauthausen. For the next two months, Dachau was the site of frenetic and frightful martial activity as Eicke and his newly assembled staff prepared the men for combat. Three of the division’s infantry regiments were drawn directly from the concentration camp guards Eicke had so carefully groomed during the previous half-decade.
In mid-December 1939, Eicke moved the Death’s Head Division to the Ludwigsburg-Heilbronn area, trained, and waited the order to attack in the West. The unit’s departure allowed for the reopening of Dachau as a Konzentrationslager. During those autumn months, Dachau’s former inmates, dispersed to other camps, struggled to survive. Mauthausen, rightfully feared as the worst destination for prisoners with its granite quarry and, even by SS standards, particularly cruel guard cadre, exacted a heavy toll on them.
After it reopened, Dachau once again served as the “model” for developments in the Nazi camp universe. Starting in early 1940, Dachau became a concentration point for clergy kept in “protective custody.” Several dozen German and Austrian men of the cloth had been imprisoned there in 1938-39. Some of the Austrians held ties to the right-wing Fatherland Front/Christian Social Party that had been ousted when Hitler annexed their country in March 1938 (in fact the Nazis transported several thousand Austrians, such as the rightist politician and journalist, Walter Adam, to Dachau following the Anschluss, but most did not stay there that long). A steady stream of Polish prisoners arrived between March and December 1940, more than 13,000 of them. Nikolaus Wachsmann directs our attention to the fact that among them were hundreds of Catholic priests. By the end of 1940, more than 1,000 clergy were held in Dachau, confined to one of the camp’s 32 barracks. Eventually, the Nazis sent nearly 2,700 clergymen there during World War II. According to Harold Marcuse, 93% of them were Catholic and 64% of them were Poles.
Leftists continued to constitute a major part of the population of political prisoners at Dachau. Hermann Langbein mentions how Austrian Communists, also deported to the camp following the Anschluss, apprised their German comrades of the state of the antifascist struggle in Spain. One of the “Reds” in Dachau was Hans Landauer, an Austrian member of the International Brigades who fought for the Spanish Republic, was captured in Paris following the German victory in France and taken to Dachau in early June 1941 (Landauer was the last surviving Austrian member of the International Brigades and died in July 2014). Contacts between camp and Communist underground organizations in Munich did emerge, an outgrowth of the use of prisoners for work in a porcelain-producing factory.