After Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933, the National Socialists used an array of terror measures to establish a dictatorship in the German Reich.
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The persecution and elimination of all political opposition plays a pivotal role. Concentration camps are opened across the Reich to facilitate the mass imprisonment of political opponents. The Dachau concentration camp is one of these early sites. On March 22, 1933, the first prisoner transports arrive at the camp set up on the grounds of a disused gunpowder and ammunition factory.
The camp commandant, Theodor Eicke, introduces a system in October 1933 that includes brutal punishment rules for the prisoners and duty orders for the camp SS. The regulations institutionalize SS rule over the prisoners that are characterized by tyranny and terror.
Under the pretext that the SA (Sturmabteilung) is planning a coup (the “Röhm Putsch”), Adolf Hitler orders the SS to murder high-level SA officials and other political opponents throughout the Reich; 21 murders are committed in the Dachau concentration camp. The role of the SS in this massacre contributes decisively to its rise in power. SS units take charge of other concentration camps up until now guarded by the SA. Theodor Eicke, meanwhile appointed “Inspector of the Concentration Camps”, imposes the “Dachau model” he has personally developed as the standard to be followed in all other concentration camps.
In 1935 Adolf Hitler decides to use the concentration camp system as a permanent instrument of political terror and extend its scope. This paves the way for promulgating a permanent state of emergency and installing despotic rule by the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) and SS under Heinrich Himmler.