‘We’ll Meet Again in Dachau’: The Early Dachau SS and the Narrative of Civil War

Abstract

Dachau was the most enduring and important of the early nazi concentration camps. Its initial personnel, trained in the Dachau ‘school of violence’, were soon widely distributed throughout the SS camp network but have received very little historiographical attention. This article sets the camp and the early Dachau SS in their Bavarian context and explores how the memory of civil war in Munich in 1919 was at the fore in 1933: the camp’s location was highly symbolic in this regard. The article argues that these events left a direct and atmospheric mark on the early violence in the camp and on the pioneering group of perpetrators who set an operational tone known admiringly in the SS as the ‘Dachau spirit’.