Standing at the gate at Oranienburg, just north of Berlin, almost every visitor asks the same quiet question. Who were the men in the towers? Were they fanatics, careerists, or ordinary guys who ended up in a uniform and never found the exit?
The simple reply is that it was all three things, and the more detailed answer is even more unpleasant than the stories on both sides. This guide brings together testimony, trial records, and historians’ accounts of the men who worked in the camp system, so you can be present in that yard with a genuine understanding rather than a vague mental image of a cartoonish villain.
The Myth of the Elite Guard
Many visitors believe the SS was a uniformly tough and superior force, but the truth is more complicated. Historians who have looked into the organization note that by 1942 the SS had given up most of its elite attitudes. It wasn’t able to draw on the same group of workers as the army since the Wehrmacht, being the state’s military force, got priority over men of military age, the SS being a Party organization.
So the SS went looking elsewhere. It recruited ethnic Germans from occupied territories, then later brought in Balts, Ukrainians, Dutch, Flemish, French, and others, with the cultural and linguistic ties to the original SS ideal growing weaker each time. Out of 31 Waffen SS divisions, only a handful of the Panzer divisions were truly top tier. The rest ranged from mediocre to dreadful, and the last ones, thrown together in 1945 from training schools and Hitler Youth, were barely divisions at all.
Why does this matter at a camp memorial? Because the “superior elite” image was partly a postwar creation. Former SS generals wanted to separate the fighting Waffen SS from the camp guards and sell it as an honorable pan-European army. The guard battalion and the field divisions shared the same organization, the same oath, and in many cases the same personnel.
Want to learn more about the men responsible for guarding and controlling prisoners at Sachsenhausen? Read Why Sachsenhausen Became a Model Concentration Camp for the SS to explore the role of the SS guard units at the camp.
Ordinary Men, Real Choices
What shocks many people is that many of the guards were not born evil. Some had been taken into the SS, others were too young to join the army, and in some cases they were assigned to it because of where they lived. Nevertheless, the evidence proves that it was possible to leave.
Consider Erna Beilhardt, a guard at Stutthof camp in occupied Poland. By her own trial testimony, she was a committed Nazi who had been in the party since 1933. But she told the court she disliked the work because “they tormented people too much.” She had been told she was taking a post at a new facility for children, since she had worked as a nurse with orphans. She spent a single day at a children’s barracks, moved to another position, and then resigned.
What happened to her? She was not shot. She was not sent to a camp herself. A Polish tribunal sentenced her to five years for membership in the SS and the Nazi Party but acquitted her of crimes against humanity. She was released in 1951, deported to Germany, and lived to age 91. The six guards tried alongside her were publicly hanged near Gdańsk on July 4, 1946.
Holocaust experts learn a direct lesson from this. The regime required willing participants and could not afford to regard refusal as a real danger. There are no recorded instances of a Nazi being executed for refusing to take part in the genocide. This does not imply that withdrawing was easy or without social consequences. It shows that the common argument that ‘it was that or the firing squad’ does not stand up when examined against the evidence.
What Happened When the Gates Opened
Visitors also ask about the liberation, and about the stories of guards being killed by the people who freed the camps. The best documented example is Dachau on April 29, 1945. American soldiers of the 157th Infantry found a train of roughly three dozen boxcars packed with the bodies of prisoners moved from other camps in the war’s final weeks. They found stacks of corpses in other parts of the camp and thousands of survivors who were barely alive.
What followed is still argued over. One account says some guards were lined up and shot, others killed in a boxcar, and some beaten to death with the participation of survivors. A report went up to General Patton, who took no action, and the document stayed secret until it was declassified in 1991. A second account, which the photographs seem to support in part, describes a nervous machine gunner opening fire when he believed SS men were trying to escape, killing perhaps a dozen before being relieved. Look closely at the famous photos, and some of the men lying on the ground are looking at the camera or propped on their hands. They had dropped to the ground to survive.
The honest conclusion is that both were probably true at different points that day. Some killing was chaotic, some was deliberate, and soldiers who had fought for nearly two years were looking at something no training prepared them for. One man whose father flew missions over Germany remembered him saying he was ready to start the whole war over again after seeing the prisoners. Another’s grandfather, who helped liberate the camp, wept late in life and described how the prisoners’ skin hung off them like sheets. Understanding that does not make unlawful killing lawful, and several voices stressed that this is why international law exists in the first place. Armies that treat captives badly invite the same in return.
One more detail worth knowing: not everyone in plain clothes was a guard. In one widely shared photograph, a man being beaten by inmates was identified as a Kapo, a prisoner given supervisory privileges. He wore no uniform, no striped clothing, had a shaved head, and wore standard-issue boots. Genuine SS men were rarely left behind to face the prisoners, so captions that call every victim an SS guard are often wrong.
Want to understand the wider administrative system behind Sachsenhausen? Read Sachsenhausen and the Concentration Camps Inspectorate: Why Oranienburg Became the Center of the Nazi Camp System to see how the camp fit into the broader Nazi concentration camp network.
How to Stand in That Yard Without Flattening It
When you go there, do not accept the two simple explanations. The first is that all the guards were sadists who were born for such a role; certainly some were, and this is shown by the evidence given by survivors and by the guards’ fellow officers. The second is that everyone carried out orders with no other choice; this is contradicted by the record of resignations, transfers, and acquittals.
The most useful frame is that an organization built to make cruelty routine did its work by recruiting thousands of people who each made small choices. No separate species staffed the towers at Sachsenhausen. Men and women staffed them, and their decisions, one after another, added up.
FAQs
- Was it really 36 boxcars full of corpses at Dachau, or a 36-car train with only some cars carrying bodies?
Various accounts mention a train consisting of about thirty cars, the vast majority of which carried the dead prisoners who had died while being transported from other camps in the final weeks of the war. Because sources differ, the National Archives and the Sparks report are the best places to find the exact numbers.
- Could a camp guard actually quit without being punished by the Nazis?
The documented case of Erna Beilhardt at Stutthof says yes. She resigned, was not killed or imprisoned by the regime, and stayed employable. Scholars note there is no known case of a Nazi executed for refusing to participate in the genocide.
- Why were the SS declared a criminal organization but not the Wehrmacht?
The decision rested on the SS’s role in running the camps and carrying out the Holocaust, not on the ethnic makeup of its members. The SS was also a Party organization, whereas the Wehrmacht was the state military and had first claim on conscripts. Many Wehrmacht officers were nonetheless complicit in occupation crimes, which is why historians reject the idea of a clean army.
- Were the Waffen SS really elite compared with the regular German army?
Only a few Panzer divisions earned that reputation. Most of the 31 divisions were average or worse, and the late-war ones were poorly trained and barely armed. The SS partly cultivated the elite image, and former generals reinforced it after 1945.
- Were SS guards executed by American soldiers at Dachau?
Some guards were killed on April 29, 1945, and it was a mix of what looks like deliberate killing and a panicked shooting incident captured in well-known photographs. Many of the men in those images appear to be alive and sheltering on the ground. Captions claiming a mass organized execution of the entire guard force oversimplify a confused and violent day.
