Warehousing “Enemies of the State”: Echoes of Dachau
Totalitarian regimes seek to normalize the abnormal. Over time our senses are dulled and the norms shift. We are at the beginning of that process. What if I told you that proposed ICE detention warehouses in the U.S. echo Nazi Germany of 1933? Hyperbole? The little boy who cried wolf? No. This is a clarion call that now is the moment to intervene and exert our democratic power to stop an escalating process.
Again, we compare things to the past so that we can contrast them to the present and ask questions. We live in a fundamentally different time than the 1930s. However, the echoes cannot be wished away. We need to be aware of how this process escalates and who does the escalating.
Nazi concentration camps The camps began in earnest in 1933. After the Reichstag Fire Decree (that suspended the Constitution) and the Enabling Act (which gave Hitler legal authority), the government gave police and paramilitaries the green light to target whoever they wanted. Many wild and competing camps emerged but it was not coordinated until Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, saw an opportunity. Himmler saw himself in competition for power and favor with other Nazi officials such as Hermann Göring, chief of the Prussian police and Ernst Röhm, head of the paramilitary SA (“Brownshirts”). He knew, as a relatively unknown, micromanaging yet brilliant administrator, that Nazi leaders defined themselves in degrees of loyalty to Hitler. How could he increase his power and influence? What if the emerging camps could be coordinated under him and he could offer something to Hitler that demonstrated his usefulness and loyalty? His opportunity came at Dachau.
“Preventative Arrest” President Hindenburg’s statute of “preventative arrest” after the Reichstag fire gave him his opening. As wild camps sought to imprison "enemies", German states, like Bavaria, were wrestling with Interior Minister Frick and Göring for legal control and oversight. Göring saw himself as Hitler’s fixer and was using the “detention” camps to deal with political enemies. His “Prussian model” rapidly rounded up opponents, without trial, utilized the police and civil service under control of the Interior Ministry, and purged the police of anti-Nazi elements. Concerned with his international reputation and wanting to distance himself from the violence of the SA and the extra-legal torture camps, he began to work more within the system and required SA/SS men to become civil servants.
Dachau Himmler recognized that SA terror sometimes worked against Hitler’s goal of looking like a legitimate leader and not a mafia-type thug. What if he could make terror look and seem more respectable?
On March 11, 1933, Himmler’s SS political guards replaced the Bavarian state police in an abandoned munitions factory and makeshift camp for political prisoners at Dachau, near Munich. If he ran the camp efficiently he knew he could develop his own power base within the internecine fighting of those “working towards the Führer”. He was keen on framing the SS takeover as his way of helping an overburdened prison system facing the sudden influx of political prisoners.
Himmler's March 12, 1933, press release framed it:
On Wednesday the first concentration camp is to be opened in Dachau with an accommodation for 5000 people. All Communists and—where necessary Reichsbanner and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here, as in the long run it is not possible to keep individual functionaries in the state prisons without overburdening these prisons [with protective custody prisoners], and on the other hand these people cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their efforts to agitate and organize as soon as they are released.
And so, the SS would help the existing state prison system “accommodate” political opponents of the regime. The SS even went so far as to argue that these would be “rehabilitation centers” for Germans who had lost their way.
First Murders That afternoon the Bavarian State solicitor's office received a report that four prisoners had died the first day of the SS takeover (shot while “trying to escape”). So much for rehabilitative accommodation!
Indictments At that time, any death in State custody (other than from natural causes) had to be investigated and death was still relatively rare. In April, Bavarian Deputy State Prosecutor Josef Hartinger, together with his medical examiner colleague, Moritz Flamm, investigated Dachau and realized instantly that all four victims were Jews and they had been executed. In June, Hartinger presented his well documented case to his superior, Bavarian State Prosecutor, Karl Wintersberger. Initially supportive of the investigation, Wintersberger was reluctant to take on the SS. He signed indictments for murder for camp commandant Hilmar Wäckerle and others, but only after first notifying Himmler as a courtesy.
Himmler knew that this could ruin him and his plan to use Dachau as a model camp to expand into an empire of camps. The SS had no right to kill under German law in 1933. Himmler likely ordered the killings stopped and had Wäckerle transferred. It seemed that justice had won and the SS had been reigned in. But Himmler had merely adjusted. He knew of Hitler’s contempt for legal constraints and norms and used this to complained to him about the unfair treatment the SS was receiving. He pledged his loyalty to Hitler and Hitler promised that no SS would end up in jail. The Hartinger file disappeared into a desk drawer where it was discovered twelve years later and used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials.
The SS Adjusts Himmler appointed the bizarre Theodore Eicke as new commandant and ordered Eicke to re-organize the concentration camp system. Civilian directors (Göring’s “Prussian model”) were replaced and the first massacres at Dachau began. Eicke introduced forced labor as a way to make money for the SS and SS Death’s Head units begin to run the camps. By July the SS became independent and took over state political police forces (except in Prussia). Many early camps closed and the SS took over other camps by force, like the SA-run Oranienberg in Berlin.
To summarize: Hitler loved Himmler’s praise, loyalty, and initiative and protected him from state prosecution. The SS had incentive to expand the camp system by created its own fund-raising capability and received funds from government coffers. Himmler’s ambition encouraged him to expand the camp system by seeking out other “enemies of the state”. The more that could be rounded up, the better for Himmler and the SS.
ICE We are not Nazi Germany, nor do we seek to mass murder people. However, those loyal to the president are working with an organization that is charged with detaining "enemies from within" and is heavily funded by the government. Concerningly, ICE has apparently already committed murder (Renée Good and Alex Pretti) and has been shielded by the government.
In July 2025, a Republican Congress passed the “Big Beautiful Bill” which allocated approximately $75 billion in new funding to ICE over four years. This surge included $45 billion for detentions and $30 billion for operations. In 2025, ICE plans to spend 38.3 billion to boost detention facilities capacity to 92,000. Across the nation, cities and towns are discovering secret deals being made to buy warehouses as detention and transportation centers. There is shock, fear, but unlike Nazi Germany, widespread public resistance.
Unlike 1933, we still have power to push back. Prisons (and this administration is promoting privately-run, incentive-laden prisons) are difficult to operate. Despite the huge consignment of taxpayer money, large internment facilities will overwhelm ICE’s ability to provide basic human needs to those incarcerated without trial. This will dehumanize inmates more and encourage radicalization against them – especially when sanctioned by the government. The outcomes of warehousing people deemed as state enemies, in poorly equipped spaces that dehumanizes, is easily predictable. The horror will escalate.
New Hampshire ICE plans to spend $158 million this year to convert an empty 324,000-square-foot industrial warehouse in Merrimack, NH into a 400-to-600 bed processing facility. Detainees would spend three to seven days before being transferred for deportation to much larger facilities being constructed. The echoes are disturbing and yet Governor Ayotte has been coy about her knowledge of ICE’s plan and has yet to publicly oppose it.
My Turn We are at the beginning of an antidemocratic process that will escalate its agenda of internal terror unless we stop it.
Dismissal of Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino from Minneapolis is a good start but not the end game. ICE will learn how to appear to work within the system. We cannot normalize their hidden identity, blind-eye recruited, extra-legal terror.
We have significant power to keep the pressure on and hold our elected officials accountable. There were large protests in Merrimack, NH this week in opposition to the ICE warehouse purchase. The opposition will continue to grow as Americans know that this violates the basic values and norms of our Republic. Politicians, forced out of the darkness, will react to their constituents. The justice system, although showing cracks, will hold.
Some main differences between 1933 and now is that we have more than a handful of state prosecutors trying to stop extra-legal concentration camps. The leader is old and less able to hide his bizarre behavior and self-serving beliefs. The courts have begun to check his excesses. Many Americans are being directly impacted by his absurd economic policies. Most importantly, democratic loving citizens are saying “not in my name”. The momentum is on the side of democracy because tyranny is unacceptable.
