A Camaraderie of Crime.

• Author: Rosen, James
• Position: Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps - Book review

Kim Wunschmann, Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2015), 376 pp., $45.00.

In the predawn hours of April 12, 1933, not three months into Adolf Hitler's tenure as chancellor of Germany, a group of drunken SS officers barged into the "Jewish block" of the Dachau concentration camp, an abandoned munitions factory site located in a wooded area two miles from the Bavarian town of that name, and awakened the prisoners by firing pistols into the air. The SS officers had restlessly anticipated the event, with one of them, Robert Erspenmuller, the camp's deputy commander, having earlier boasted to a policeman he knew that "in the next [few] days he would kill some Jews" as a "trial of strength."

Later that morning, at roll call, four prisoners were called by name to step forward for special work duty. Rudolf Benario and Ernst Goldmann were prominent young Communists in their native Furth. Arthur Kahn held no Communist affiliation, but had been swept up in the recent wave of Nazi arrests grouped under the misleading label "protective custody." The fourth, a Communist named Wilhelm Gesell, joined the other three in repeatedly loading debris onto a wheelbarrow and pushing it to the camp's gravel pit. SS guards, who had assumed control of the camp from the Bavarian State Police the day before, beat the men as they worked.

At noon, the men's ordeal ended--or so they thought. Within a few hours, Gesell was replaced in the "punitive labor" detail by Erwin Kahn, a Jewish businessman who had no Communist or labor-movement affiliation (and no relation to Arthur). Unlike the other three men, who had all arrived on site the day before, he had spent three weeks interned at Dachau, writing to his wife that his treatment under the custody of the Bavarian State Police had given him "nothing to complain about." He looked forward to sorting out the reason for his detention, which had not been provided when a Nazi storm trooper arrested him on the streets of Munich in mid-March.

Finally, when the prisoners had been assembled for the purpose of receiving their mail--an amenity still observed at that early stage of things--an SS officer named Hans Steinbrenner, known for his brutality, interrupted the proceedings to demand that Benario, Goldmann, and Arthur and Erwin Kahn report for more work in the gravel pit. A contingent of SS men marched the four outside the camp's walls, to the woods nearby, and shot them. All died instantly, except for Erwin Kahn, who was taken to a nearby hospital and died from his injuries four days later. Though postwar investigation of the incident was compromised by incomplete evidence and self-serving testimony, it was established that Erspenmuller and two other SS guards, Hans Burner and Max Schmidt, committed the murders. The next morning, Dachau's...