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| Prisoners break up clay for the brickworks at Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg camp, in 1939. |
A review by Adam Kirsch
One night in the autumn of 1944, two French women - Loulou
Le Porz, a doctor, and Violette Lecoq, a nurse watched as a truck drove in
through the main gates of Ravensbruck, the Nazi concentration camp for women.
"There, was a lorry," Le Porz recalled, "that suddenly arrives
and it turns around and reverses towards us. And it lifts up arid it tips out a
whole pile of corpses." These were the bodies of Ravensbruck inmates who
had died doing slave labor in the many satellite camps, and they were now being
returned for cremation. Talking, decades later, to the historian and journalist
Sarah Helm, whose new book, "Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler'sConcentration Camp for Women" (Doubleday), recounts the stories of dozens
of the camp's inmates,
Le Porz says that her reaction was simple disbelief. The
sight of a truck full of dead bodies was so outrageous, so out of scale with
ordinary experience, that "if we recount that one day, we said to each
other, nobody would believe us." The only way to make the scene credible
would be to record it: ''If one day someone makes a film they must film this
scene. This night. This moment." Le Porz's remark was prophetic. The true
extent of Nazi barbarity became known to the world in part through the
documentary films made by Allied forces after the liberation of other German
camps. There have been many atrocities committed before and since, yet to this
day, thanks to those images, the Nazi concentration camp stands as the ultimate
symbol of evil. The very names of the camps-Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald,
Auschwitz-have the sound of a malevolent incantation. They have ceased to be
ordinary place names Buchenwald, after all, means simply "beech wood"
- and become portals to a terrible other dimension.
To write the history of such an institution, as Nikolaus
Wachsmann sets out to do in another new book, "KL: A History of the NaziConcentration Camps" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), might seem impossible,
like writing the history of Hell. And, certainly, both his book and Helm's are
full of the kind of details that ordinarily appear only in Dantesque visions. Helm
devotes a chapter to Ravensbruck's Kinderzimmer, or "children's
room," where inmates who came to the camp pregnant were forced to abandon
their babies; the newborns were left to die of starvation or be eaten alive by rats.
Wachsmann quotes a prisoner at Dachau who saw a transport of men afflicted by
dysentery arrive at the camp: "We saw dozens ... with excrement running
out of their trousers. Their hands, too, were full of excrement and they
screamed and rubbed their dirty hands across their faces."
These sights, like the truck full of bodies, are not beyond
belief - we know that they were true-but they are, in some sense, beyond
imagination. It is very hard, maybe impossible, to imagine being one of those
men, still less one of those infants. And such sights raise the question of why,
exactly, we read about the camps. If it is merely to revel in the grotesque,
then learning about this evil is itself a species of evil, a further
exploitation of the dead. If it is to exercise sympathy or pay a debt to
memory, then it quickly becomes clear that the exercise is hopeless, the debt
overwhelming: there is no way to feel as much, remember as much, imagine as
much as the dead justly demand. What remains as a justification is the future:
the determination never again to allow something like the Nazi camps to
exist.
And for that purpose it is necessary not to think of the
camps simply as a hellscape. Reading Wachsmann's deeply researched,
groundbreaking history of the entire camp system makes clear that Dachau and
Buchenwald were the products of institutional and ideological forces that we
can understand, perhaps all too well-indeed, it's possible to think of the
camps as what happens when you cross three disciplinary institutions that all
societies possess-the prison, the ·army, and the factory. Over the several
phases of their existence, the Nazi camps took on the aspects of all of these,
so that prisoners were treated simultaneously as inmates to be corrected,
enemies to be combated, and workers to be exploited. When these forms of dehumanization
were combined, and amplified to the maximum by ideology and war, the result was
the Konzentrationlager, or K.L.
Though we tend to think of Hitler's Germany as a highly
regimented dictatorship, in practice Nazi rule was chaotic and improvisatory.
Rival power bases in the Party and the German state competed to carry out what
they believed to be Hitler's wishes. This system of "working towards the
Fuhrer," as it was called by Hitler's biographer Ian Kershaw, was clearly
in evidence when it came to the concentration camps. The K.L. system, during
its twelve years of existence, included twenty-seven main camps and more than a
thousand subcamps. At its peak, in early 1945, it housed more than seven
hundred thousand inmates. In addition to being a major penal and economic
institution, it was a central symbol of Hitler's rule. Yet Hitler plays almost
no role in Wachsmann's book, and Wachsmann writes that Hitler was never seen to
visit a camp. It was Heinrich Himmler, the head of the S.S., who was in charge
of the camp system, and its growth was due in part to his ambition to make the
S.S. the most powerful force in Germany.
Long before the Nazis took power, concentration camps had
featured in their imagination. Wachsmann finds Hitler threatening to put Jews
in camps as early as 1921. But there were no detailed plans for building such
camps when Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany, in January, 1933. A few
weeks later, on February 27th, he seized on the burning of the Reichstag-by Communists,
he alleged - to launch a full-scale crackdown on his political opponents. The
next day, he implemented a decree, "For the Protection of People and
State," that authorized the government to place just about anyone in
"protective custody," a euphemism for indefinite detention.
(Euphemism, too, was to be a durable feature of the K.L. universe: the: killing
of prisoners was referred to as Sonderbehandung, "special
treatment.")
During the next two months, some fifty thousand people were
arrested on this basis, in what turned into a "frenzy" of political
purges and score-settling. In the legal murk of the early Nazi regime, it was
unclear who had the power to make such arrests, and so it was claimed by
everyone: national, state, and local officials, police and civilians, Party
leaders. "Everybody is arresting everybody," a Nazi official
complained in the summer of 1933. "Everybody threatens everybody with
Dachau." As this suggests, it was already clear that the most notorious
and frightening destination for political detainees was the concentration camp
built by Himmler at Dachau, in Bavaria. The prisoners were originally housed in
an old munitions factory, but soon Himmler constructed a "model
camp," the architecture and organization of which provided the pattern for
most of the later K.L. The camp was guarded not by police but by members of the
S.S. - a Nazi Party entity rather than a state force.
These guards were the core of what became, a few years
later, the much feared Death's-Head S.S. The name, along with the
skull-and-crossbones insignia was meant to reinforce the idea that the men who
bore it were not mere prison guards but front-line soldiers in the Nazi war
against enemies of the people. Himmler declared, "No other service is more
devastating and strenuous for the troops than just that of guarding villains
and criminals." The ideology of combat had been part of the DNA of Nazism
from its origin, as a movement of First World War veterans, through the years
of street battles against Communists, which established the Party's reputation
for violence. Now, in the year before actual war came, the K.L. was imagined as
the site of virtual combat-against Communists, criminals, dissidents,
homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Jews, all forces working to undermine the
German nation.
The metaphor of war encouraged the inhumanity of the S.S.
officers, which they called toughness; licensed physical violence against
prisoners; and accounted for the military discipline that made everyday life in
the K.L. unbearable. Particularly hated was the roll call, or Appell, which
forced inmates to wake before dawn and stand outside, in all weather, to be
counted and recounted. The process could go on for hours, Wachsmann writes,
during which the S.S. guard were constantly on the move, punishing "infractions
such as poor posture and dirty shoes."
The K.L. was defined from the beginning by its legal
ambiguity. The camps were outside ordinary law, answerable not to judges and
courts but to the S.S. and Himmler. At the same time, they were governed by an
extensive set of regulations, which covered everything from their layout
(including decorative flower beds) to the whipping of prisoners, which in
theory had to be approved on a case-by-case basis by Himmler personally. Yet
these regulations were often ignored by the camp S.S. - physical violence, for
instance, was endemic, and the idea that a guard would have to ask permission
before beating or even killing a prisoner was laughable. Strangely, however, it
was possible, in the prewar years, at least, for a guard to be prosecuted for
such a killing. In 1937, Paul Zeidler was among a group of guards who strangled
a prisoner who had been a prominent churchman and judge; when the case
attracted publicity, the S.S. allowed Zeidler to be charged and convicted. (He
was sentenced to a year in jail.)
In "Ravensbruck," Helm gives a further example of the
erratic way the Nazis treated their own regulations, even late in the war. In
1943, Himmler agreed to allow the Red Cross to deliver food parcels-to some
prisoners in the camps. To send a parcel, however, the Red Cross had to mark it
with the name, number, and camp location of the recipient; requests for these
details were always refused, so that there was no way to get desperately needed
supplies into the camps. Yet when Wanda Hjort, a young Norwegian woman living
in Germany, got hold of some prisoners' names and numbers - thanks to inmates
who smuggled the information to her when she visited the camp at
Sachsenhausenshe was able to pass them on to the Norwegian Red Cross, whose
packages were duly delivered. This game of hide-and-seek with the rules, this
combination of hyper-regimentation and anarchy, is what makes Kafka's "The
Trial" seem to foretell the Nazi regime.
Even the distinction between guard and prisoner could become
blurred. From early on, the S.S. delegated much of the, day-to-day control of
camp life to chosen prisoners known as Kapos. This system spared the S.S. the
need to interact too closely with prisoners, whom they regarded as bearers of
filth and disease, and also helped to divide the inmate population against
itself. Helm shows that, in Ravensbruck, where the term "Blockova"
was used, rather than Kapo, power struggles took place among prisoner factions
over who would occupy the Blockova position in each barrack. Political
prisoners favored fellow-activists over criminals and "a socials" - a
category that included the homeless, the mentally ill, and prostitutes - whom
they regarded as practically subhuman. In some cases, Kapos became almost as
privileged, as violent, and as hated as the S.S. officers. In Ravensbruck, the
most feared Blockova was the Swiss ex-spy Carmen Mory, who was known as the
Black Angel. She was in charge of the infirmary, where, Hehn writes, she
"would lash out at the sick with the whip or her fists." After the
war, she was one of the defendants tried for crimes at Ravensbriick, along with
S.S. leaders and doctors. Mory was sentenced to death but managed to commit
suicide first.
At the bottom of the K.L. hierarchy, even below the
criminals, were the Jews. Today, the words "concentration camp"
immediately summon up the idea of the Holocaust, the genocide of European Jews
by the Nazis; and we tend to think of the camps as the primary sites of that
genocide. In fact, as Wachsmann writes, as late as 1942 "Jews made up
fewer than five thousand of the eighty thousand KL inmates." There had
been a temporary spike in the Jewish inmate population in November, 1938, after
Kristallnacht, when the Nazis rounded up tens of thousands of Jewish men. But,
for most of the camps' first decade, Jewish prisoners had usually been sent
there not for their religion, per se, but for specific offenses, such as
political dissent or illicit sexual relations with an Aryan. Once there,
however, they found themselves subject to special torments, ranging from
running a gantlet of truncheons to heavy labor, like rock-breaking. As the chief
enemies in the Nazi imagination, Jews were also the natural targets for
spontaneous S.S. violence blows, kicks, attacks by savage dogs.
The systematic extermination of Jews, however, took place
largely outside the concentration camps: The death camps, in which more than
one and a half million Jews were gassed - at Belzec, Sobibar, and Treblinka
were never officially part of the K.L. system. They had almost no inmates,
since the Jews sent there seldom lived longer than a few hours. By contrast,
Auschwitz, - whose name has become practically a synonym for the Holocaust, was
an official K.L., setup in June, 1940, to house Polish prisoners. The first
people to be gassed there, in September, 1941, were invalids and Soviet
prisoners of war. It became the central site for, the deportation and murder of
European Jews in 1943, after other camps closed. The vast majority of Jews
brought to Auschwitz never experienced the camp as prisoners; more than eight
hundred thousand of them were gassed upon arrival, in the vast extension of the
original camp known as Birkenau. Only those picked as capable of slave labor
lived long enough to see Auschwitz from the inside.
Many of the horrors associated with Auschwitz - gas
chambers, medical experiments, working prisoners to death had been pioneered in
earlier concentration camps. In the late thirties, driven largely by Himmler's
ambition to make the S.S. an independent economic and military power within the
state, the KL. began a transformation from a site of punishment to a site of
production. The two missions were connected: the "work shy" and other
unproductive elements were seen as "useless mouths, "and forced labor
was a way of making them contribute to the community. Oswald Pohl, the S.S.
bureaucrat in charge of economic affairs, had gained control of the camps by
1938, and began a series of grandiose building projects. The most ambitious was
the construction of a brick factory near Sachsenhausen, which was intended to
produce a hundred and fifty million bricks a year, using cutting- edge
equipment and camp labor.
The failure of the factory, as Wachsmann describes" it,
was indicative of the incompetence of the S.S. and the inconsistency of its
vision for the camps. To turn prisoners into effective laborers would have required
giving them adequate food and rest, not to mention training and equipment. It
would have meant treating them like employees rather than like enemies. But the
ideological momentum of the camps made this inconceivable. Labor was seen as a
punishment and a weapon, which meant that it had to be extorted under the worst
possible circumstances. Prisoners were made to build the factory in the depths
of winter, with no coats or gloves, and no tools. "Inmates carried piles
of sand in their uniforms," Wachsmann writes, while others "moved
large mounds of earth on rickety wooden stretchers or shifted sacks of cement
on their shoulders." Four hundred and twenty-nine prisoners died and
countless more were injured, yet in the end not a single brick was
produced.
This debacle did not discourage Himmler and Pohl. On the
contrary; with the coming of war, in 1939, S.S. ambitions for the camps grew
rapidly, along with their prisoner population. On the eve of the war, the
entire K.L. sys tern contained only about twenty-one thousand prisoners; three
years later, the number had grown to a hundred and ten thousand, and by
January, 1945, it was more than seven hundred thousand. New camps were built to
accommodate the influx of prisoners from conquered countries and then the tens
of thousands of Red Army soldiers taken prisoner in the first months after
Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the U.S.S.R.
The enormous expansion of the camps resulted in an
exponential increase in the misery of the prisoners. Food rations, always meager, were cut to less than minimal: a bowl of rutabaga soup and some ersatz
bread would have to sustain a prisoner doing heavy labor. The result was
desperate black marketing and theft. Wachsmann writes, "In Sachsenhausen,
a young French prisoner was battered to death in 1941 by an S.S. block leader
for taking two carrots from a sheep pen." Starvation was endemic and
rendered prisoners easy prey for typhus and dysentery. At the same time, the
need to keep control of so many prisoners made the S.S., even more brutal, and
sadistic new punishments were invented. The "standing commando"
forced prisoners to stand absolutely still for eight hours at a time; any
movement or noise was punished by beatings. The murder of prisoners by guards, formerly
an "exceptional event in the camps, now became unremarkable.
But individual deaths, by sickness or violence, were not
enough to keep the number of prisoners within manageable limits. Accordingly,
in early 1941 Himmler decided to begin the mass murder of prisoners in gas
chambers, building on a program that the Nazis had developed earlier for
euthanizing the disabled. Here, again, the camps' sinister combination of bureaucratic
rationalism and anarchic violence - was on display. During the following
months, teams of S.S. doctors visited the major camps in turn, inspecting
prisoners in order to select the "infirm" for gassing. Everything was
done with an appearance of medical rigor. The doctors filled out a form for
each inmate, with headings for "Diagnosis" and "Incurable
Physical Ailments." But it was all mere theatre. Helm's description of the
visit of Dr. Friedrich Mennecke to Ravensbriick, in November, 1941, shows that
inspections of prisoners - whom he referred to in letters home - as
"forms" or "portions" - were cursory at best, with the
victims parading naked in front of the doctors at a distance of twenty feet.
(Jewish prisoners were automatically "selected," without an
examination.) In one letter, Mennecke brags of having disposed of fifty-six
"forms" before noon. Those selected were taken to an undisclosed
location for gassing; their fate became clear to the remaining Ravensbriick
prisoners when the dead women's clothes and personal effects arrived back at the
camp by truck.
Under this extermination program, known to S.S. bureaucrats
by the code' Action 14f13, some sixty-five hundred prisoners were killed in the
course of a year. By early 1942, it had become obsolete, as the scale of death
in the camps increased. Now the killing of weak and sick prisoners was carried
out by guards or camp doctors, sometimes in gas chambers built on site. Those
who were still able to work were increasingly auctioned off to private industry
for use as slave labor, in the many subcamps that began to spring up around the
main K.L. At Ravensbruck, the Siemens corporation established a factory where
six hundred women. worked twelve-hour shifts building electrical components.
The work was brutally demanding, especially for' women who were sick, starved,
and exhausted. Helm writes that "Siemens women suffered severely from
boils, swollen legs, diarrhea and TB, "and also from an epidemic of
nervous twitching. When a worker reached the end of her usefulness, she was
sent back to the camp, most likely to be killed. It was in this phase of the
camp's life that sights like the one Loulou Le Porz saw at Ravensbruck - a
truck full of prisoners' corpses - became commonplace.
By the end of the war, the number of people who had died in
the concentration camps, from all causes -starvation, sickness, exhaustion,
beating, shooting, gassing - was more than eight hundred thousand. The figure
does not include the hundreds of thousands of Jews gassed on arrival at
Auschwitz. If the K.L. were indeed a battlefront, as the Death's-Head S.S.
liked to believe, the deaths, in the course of twelve years, roughly equaled
the casualties sustained by the Axis during the Battle of Stalingrad, among the
deadliest actual engagements of the war. But in the camps the Nazis fought
against helpless enemies. Considered as prisons, too, the K.L. were
paradoxical: it was impossible to correct or rehabilitate people whose very
nature, according to Nazi propaganda, was criminal or sick. And as economic
institutions they were utterly counterproductive, wasting huge numbers of lives
even as the need for workers in Germany became more and more acute.
The concentration camps make· sense only if they are
understood as products not of reason but of ideology, which is to say, of
fantasy. Nazism taught the Germans to see themselves as a beleaguered nation,
constantly set upon by enemies external and internal. Metaphors of infection and
disease, of betrayal and stabs in the back, were central to Nazi discourse. The
concentration camp became the place where those metaphorical evils could be
rendered concrete and visible. Here, behind barbed wire, were the traitors,
Bolsheviks, parasites, .and Jews who were intent on destroying the
Fatherland.
And if existence was a struggle, a war, then it made no
sense to show mercy to the enemy. Like many Nazi institutions, the K.L.
embodied conflicting impulses: to reform the criminal, to extort labor from the
unproductive, to quarantine the contagious. But most fundamental was the
impulse to dehumanize the enemy, which ended up confounding and overriding all
the others. Once a prisoner ceased to be human, he could be brutalized,
enslaved, experimented on, or gassed at will, because he was no longer a being
with a soul or a self but a biological machine. The Muselmanner, the living
dead of the camps, stripped of any capacity to think or feel, were the true
product of the K.L., the ultimate expression of the Nazi world view.
The impulse to separate some groups of people from the
category of the human is, however, a universal one. The enemies we kill in war,
the convicted prisoners we lock up for life, even the distant workers who
manufacture our clothes and toys - how could any society function if the full
humanity of all these were taken into account? In a decent society, there are
laws to resist such dehumanization, and institutional and moral forces to
protest it. When guards at Rikers Island beat a prisoner to death, or when
workers in China making iPhones begin to commit suicide out of despair, we
regard these as intolerable evils that must be cured. It is when a society
decides that some people deserve to be treated this way that it is not just
inevitable but right to deprive whole categories of people of their humanity -
that a crime on the scale of the K.L. becomes a possibility. It is a crime that
has been repeated too many times, in too many places, for us to dismiss it with
the simple promise of never again.
By Adam Kirsch. The New Yorker, 6 April 2015.
