The Nazis did not inaugurate the systematic killing of Jews until 1941, but from the beginning they were building concentration camps and sending Jews to them—and sometimes murdering them. The first such murder, Kim Wünschmann relates in Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps, occurred as early as 1933 in Dachau. James Rosen writes in his review:
[W]hen 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 [four of the prisoners] 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. . . . The next morning, Dachau’s remaining prisoners, alarmed by the sound of the shots and fearful of what they portended, were informed that the four had been killed while trying to escape. . . .
The circumstances surrounding these murders—the unprecedented appearance of the SS guards in the prisoners’ barracks before dawn, the singling out of the eventual victims for punitive work and their removal from the grounds immediately prior to their deaths—strongly suggest that the killings were premeditated. Thus did Dachau become, in the words of German historian Jürgen Matthäus, “the first institution in which the Nazi slogan ‘Jews, perish!’ was officially put into action.”
Read more on National Interest: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/dachau-the-first-days-the-holocaust-12682?page=show