Eicke served as the second commandant of the Dachau concentration camp from June 1933 to July 1934, and together with his adjutant Michael Lippert, was one of the executioners of SA Chief Ernst Röhm during the Night of the Long Knives purge of 1934.

Theodor Eicke was born on 17 October 1892, in Hampont (renamed Hudingen in 1915) near Château-Salins, then in the German Reichsland (province) of Elsass-Lothringen, the youngest of 11 children of a lower middle-class family.

[3] Late in 1914, Eicke's commander had approved his request to temporarily return home on leave to marry Bertha Schwebel of Ilmenau on 26 December 1914, with whom he had two children: a daughter, Irma, on 5 April 1916 and a son, Hermann, on 4 May 1920.

[4] Following the end of the First World War, Eicke remained as an army paymaster now in service of the Reichswehr of the Weimar Republic, until resigning from the position in 1919.

[6] Eicke's police career was ended in 1923 due to his open hatred for the Weimar Republic and his repeated participation in violent political demonstrations.

"[10] On 28 October 1932, he officially met with Italian Fascists in the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome, at the newly erected Bolzano Victory Monument.

[17] He established new guarding provisions, which included rigid discipline, total obedience to orders, and tightening disciplinary and punishment regulations for detainees.

[18] Uniforms were issued for prisoners and guards alike, and it was Eicke who introduced the infamous blue and white striped pyjamas that came to symbolize the Nazi concentration camps across Europe.

While Eicke's reforms ended the haphazard brutality that had characterized the original camps, the new regulations were very far from humane: heavy-handed discipline, including death in some cases, was instituted for even trivial offenses.

[8][21] Historian Nikolaus Wachsmann asserts that while it was Himmler who established the "general direction for the later SS camp system," it was Eicke who "became its powerful motor.

Eicke entered the cell and placed a revolver on Röhm's prison-cell table and informed him that he had "ten minutes to make good on Hitler's offer.

[32] This earned him the enmity of Reinhard Heydrich, who had already unsuccessfully attempted to take control of the Dachau concentration camp in his position as chief of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), but Eicke prevailed due to his support from Heinrich Himmler.

[36] Nonetheless, Eicke's role as the person designated to inspect concentration camps placed him within the framework of Heydrich's SD secret state police; whereas his command of the Death's Head units, made him accountable to the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) of the SS.

[17] At the beginning of World War II in 1939, the success of the Totenkopf's sister formations, the SS-Infanterie-Regiment (mot) Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler and the three Standarten of the SS-Verfügungstruppe (SS-VT) led to the creation of three additional Waffen-SS divisions by October 1939.

The CCI and later Amt D were subordinate to the SD and Gestapo only in regards to who was admitted to the camps and who was released, and what happened inside the camps was under the command of Amt D.[43] The SS Division Totenkopf, also known as the Totenkopf Division, went on to become one of the most effective German formations on the Eastern Front, fighting during invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, as well as the summer offensive in 1942, the capture of Kharkov, in the Demyansk Pocket, during the Vistula–Oder Offensive, and the Battle of Budapest in 1945.

[49] When the Germans were forced to retreat as the Red Army counter-attacked, Himmler had Eicke's body moved to a cemetery in Hegewald south of Zhitomir in Ukraine.