2070547 Punishment Essay PDF

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Punishment, Internment and Containment: The History and Archaeology of Prisons and Camps Essay
"5: Compare the Nazi death camps to other forms of incarceration and analyse the fundamental aspects that characterise a death camp"...

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Punishment, Internment and Containment: The History and Archaeology of Prisons and Camps Essay 5: Compare the Nazi death camps to other forms of incarceration and analyse the fundamental aspects that characterise a death camp 2070547 11th November 2016 2419 words

The Nazi death camps of 1941-45 were places of such savagery and brutality the world had not seen before and has not seen since.1 These places of horror were designed and built as part of the Nazi regime to deliberately and systematically kill millions of Slavs, Jews and other races they deemed inferior. These extermination camps were part of the Final Solution and were the Nazis attempt at “murdering every last Jew in the German grasp”.2 There are key differences between the death camps and other forms of incarceration during World War II. Extermination camps were places of true horror and it was unlikely following admittance to these camps that you would be leaving alive. Other camps existed during the period, and although death was common, their sole purpose was not to kill. This essay will compare the Nazi death camps to other forms of incarceration within Germany; in particular ghettos, transit, concentration, and labour camps, before focusing on the fundamental aspects that characterise a death camp.

The Third Reich was dominated by camps. The Nazis were drawn to them as an “instrument of discipline and control- and not just for the opponents of the regime”.3 There were camps that contained those who followed the Nazis, those for the labour service, the military and Hitler youth. However there were camps throughout Germany, Poland and other areas that served a more sinister purpose; for incarcerating individuals who opposed the Nazi regime. These individuals included political prisoners, enemy soldiers, civilians, racial inferiors, and in particular the Jews. All the camps were united in their common purpose of terrorizing their inmates and intimidating the wider population.4

One form of incarceration was the forced residence of the Jews into ghettos following the occupation of Poland in 1939, their purpose being to exploit and humiliate.5 They served as relay stations for huge numbers of the Jewish population and from 1942 the Jews inhabiting these ghettos started being shipped out en masse to the extermination centres.6 The Waffen-SS (Schutzstaffel) controlled these ghettos and they were typically surrounded by high fences or walls. In addition to appalling and overcrowded conditions there were frequent

1 The Stench of Human Flesh. (1979). Asian Affairs, 6(3), p.200. 2 Sean Sheehan, The Death Camps, (London: Hodder Wayland, 2000), p.4 3 Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann, Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, the New Histories, (London, New York: Routledge, 2010), p.1 4 Caplan and Wachsmann, Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, p.2 5 Benz Wolfgang, The Holocaust: A German Historian Examines the Genocide, (London: Profile, 2000), p.44 6 Martin Gilbert, Never Again, A History of the Holocaust, (Harper Collins, 2000), p.78

attempts by the SS to control the population by means of starvation or shootings.7 Yet ghettos merely represented a “stepping stone on the road to the Holocaust” yet are distinct from death camps since despite the suffering within them, their purpose was not the extermination of a population, merely containment and deprivation8.

At the start of the Holocaust, ghettos and other strategic areas were turned into transit camps. Here Jews were held for indefinite periods before being shipped out to either concentration or death camps.9 Following the preparations of the construction of a new death camp at Belzec on the 21st October 1941, Hitler issued a new prohibition against the creation of new ghettos. The idea was that individuals would begin to be transferred in huge numbers to the extermination centres to progress the Final Solution. He wanted all the Jews removed from Germany and directed to the East, mainly into Poland.10 PoW camps and Illags were German camps which held Allied prisoners and Allied civilians respectively. Due to the fear of reciprocity, Germany generally adhered to the 1929 Geneva Convention in treatment of these prisoners.11 As a result the conditions within these camps were considerably better than in concentration and death camps. If they had mistreated Allied prisoners in the same way they treated Jews and Soviet prisoners for example, Germany would have met severe repercussions.12 Bar a few infarctions regarding employment of prisoners and treatment, death typically only occurred as a result of disease or old age.

Internment camps were other camps where individuals were held and were used by both sides to accommodate civilians. Various types of internment camps existed in several countries including Britain and the USA. In Britain, Germans were held in these camps as they were viewed as potential security threats and in America; those of Japanese descent were interned purely because of their ancestry.13 In all these camps conditions tended to be poor 7 Clive A. Lawton, Auschwitz, The Story of the Nazi Death Camp, (London: Franklin Watts, 2002), pp.8-10 8 Wolfgang, The Holocaust, p.60 9 Lawton, Auschwitz, p.9 10 Golz Aly, ‘Final Solution’, Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews, (London, New York: Hodder, 1999), pp.231-232 11 Arieh Kochavi, Confronting Captivity, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), p2 12 Anna Wickiewics, ‘In the Distorted Mirror’, in Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War , : Creativity Behind Barbed Wire, ed. by Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum, (New York: Routledge, 2012), p.104 13 Alan Taylor, ‘World War II: Internment of Japanese Americans, [accessed 8th November 2016]

and overcrowded, food was in short supply and buildings were not suited to weather conditions. Internment of civilians has rarely had positive outcomes and as a result there was much resentment to their captors. Arguably the term internment camp just replaced the negative connotations surrounding concentration camps, yet neither Britain nor America was as harsh in their treatment as the Germans in concentration camps, and especially the Nazi death camps.14

At first the Nazis were extremely unsure with how to deal with the millions of Jews. So instead of shooting or poisoning them they decided to put them to work in labour camps throughout Poland.15 As with the ghettos their aim was to exploit and torture these people, as well as gaining advantage from their work. Labour camps were first established in December 1939 to aid in Germany’s wartime production.16 Here prisoners of war and Jewish people were treated as a form of slave labour doing tasks directly aiding the German war effort.17 They were often attached onto larger camps like concentration camps forming other forms of internment or satellite camps. Auschwitz had 38 of these camps and prisoners were basically worked to death.18 The extent of the camp system was massive; the majority were small scale labour camps with at least 10,000 camps at its height, mostly in Eastern Europe. Although it was not systematic killing like in death camps, it was effectively death by labour.

Another type of internment camp was concentration camps that had existed in conflicts before the war and that were not just featured in Germany, but other belligerents, like Britain and America. Their official purpose was to re-educate those who were politically opposed to the aims of the state and posed a potential security threat.19 For the Nazis this was extremely advantageous as they could incarcerate suspects without trial. There were around 50 German concentration camps, examples including Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen where the Germans imprisoned labour union leaders, communists, socialists

14 Koji Steven, ‘The Difference between Internment Camps and Concentration Camps’,

[accessed 6th November 2016] 15 Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Understanding the Holocaust, An Introduction, (London, New York: Cassell, 1999), p.120 16 Gilbert, Never Again, p.78 17 Jens-Christian Wagner, ‘Work and extermination in the concentration camps’, in Caplan and Wachsmann, Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, p.127 18 Franciszek Piper, ‘Auschwitz Concentration Camp’, in The Holocaust and History, ed. by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, (Bloomington, Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), p.371 19 Sheehan, The Death Camps, p.4

and pacifists.20 However Jews still claimed the majority of those housed there.21 Over time they effectively became large prisons where the Germans held anyone they felt was inferior or dangerous. Political persecution, economic manipulation and ideological extermination were all factors in what collectively became known as the “concentration camp universe”.22

The prisoners were forced to work; effectively becoming a form of slave labour and receiving no benefit from their work.23 Work was exhausting and hard, and combined with the lack of food, long working hours and general hardship it drove them to despair and death. Jews in particular were treated as subhuman and prisoners have been described as becoming musselmanner or the “living dead” as they gradually became nothing more than walking skeletons from the constant brutality and degradation.24 Public executions were also used to set examples to others in the camp for attempted escapes, rebellion and other misdemeanours. Disease, roll calls, punishments, never-ending rules and psychological terror were all features of Nazi concentration camps.25 At least two million people are thought to have lost their lives in the concentration camps. So, although not using techniques like those in the death camps, the concentration camps were arguably just as brutal and devastating for the victims, often just lengthening the process of death. As a result, many historians have referred to the living and working conditions within the concentration camps as “annihilation through labour”.26

The main difference between concentration camps and extermination camps was who was incarcerated there. In concentration camps there were various nationalities there whereas the majority of victims in death camps were Jews with the final goal there being the physical elimination of an entire population. Concentration camps used hunger and physical exhaustion as the main method of death whereas death camps had specific gas chambers for the victims to enter almost upon arrival.27 There was also chance you could emerge from a concentration camp alive, whilst in death camps there have been very few survivors, as the chances of survival were almost none.

20 Dieter Pohl, ‘The Holocaust and the Concentration Camps’, in Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, p.149 21 Cohn-Sherbok, Understanding the Holocaust, p.166 22 Walter Laqueur and Judith Tydor Baumel, The Holocaust Encyclopaedia, (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2001), p.135 23 Wagner, ‘Work and extermination in the concentration camps’, p.131 24 Cohn-Sherbok, Understanding the Holocaust, p.170 25 Wachsmann, ‘The Dynamics of Destruction’ in Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, p.28 26 Wagner, ‘Work and extermination in the concentration camps’, p.139 27 Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust, (New York: Franklin Watts, 2001), pp.227-9

There were several fundamental aspects that characterised death camps. They were mass extermination centres where the only purpose was the systematic annihilation of an inferior population. Hitler in his proclamation to the Nazi Party in 1942 stated that every last Jew would be exterminated and that the “elimination of these parasites” would be their final outcome, no matter how hard the struggle.28 Intent on eliminating undesirable people from the Third Reich they did not only exterminate Jews, but also asocial people, homosexuals and gypsies in order to create a “racial utopia”. So to aid in the Final Solution, six fixed killing centres were established at Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka where Jews and other racial inferiors could be worked to death and systematically murdered.29 What went on in these camps was shrouded in secrecy, yet there was much suspicion as to the horrors which happened there.

Industrialised mass murder in death camps began from 1942 until 1944. Auschwitz, in Poland, was originally designed to be a transit camp but during its use it developed into one of the largest extermination camps of the Nazi regime30. It was also a concentration camp, where prisoners were exploited as slave labour to aid the German industry. There were three parts to Auschwitz. Auschwitz I and III were mostly used as sources of slave labour and prisoners from there aided work in a chemical and munitions factory called IG Farben. Auschwitz II or Auschwitz-Birkenau was the killing centre where millions of Jews, Soviet prisoners and others perished. It has been described as “the greatest machine of murder that has ever been conceived”.31 Men, women and children were all to be killed in order to create the Aryan race and eradicate all generations of the pollution that were the Jews.32 Death camps were noticeably easily accessible by rail, to facilitate in the daily influx of victims to the extermination centres.33 Auschwitz-Birkenau for example, was where prisoners arrived by rail and were immediately processed; the healthier individuals being selected for jobs or work, while the majority were sent straight to the gas chambers.34

28 Aly, ‘Final Solution’, p.265 29 Cohn-Sherbok, Understanding the Holocaust, p.155 30 Lawton, Auschwitz, pp.11-13 31 Piper, ‘Auschwitz Concentration Camp’, pp.377-378 32 Cohn-Sherbok, Understanding the Holocaust, p.177 33 Jules Schelvis, Sobibor, A History of a Nazi Death Camp, (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2007), p.45 34 Donald Bloxham and Tony Kushner, The Holocaust, Critical Historical Approaches, (Manchester, New York, Manchester Univerity Press, 2005), p.69

The only other camp that can be compared to the scale of Auschwitz was Majdanek. Similarly it was a death camp that emerged from a concentration camp and it pursued a dual function of both exploitation and extermination. These camps, in addition to other concentration camps played an important role in the ‘Final Solution’.35 Around two hundred thousand people lost their lives in that camp, sixty thousand of whom were Jews.36 It had similar features to Auschwitz, typical of a death camp, with crematoriums and gas chambers employing Zyklon B and carbon monoxide. At times prisoners arrived in greater numbers than the gas chambers and crematoriums could cope with, so mass shootings were common followed by dumping bodies in mass graves or quicklime pits.37 In summarising the horrors at the death camps, it is said that “humans were being processed and destroyed as if on a production line at a factory”.38

There was much experimentation into effective methods of killing the victims. In Belzec camp there was extensive efforts to camouflage the intentions of the camp and deceive the victims. Various methods were employed, like SS members wearing white coats to imitate doctors and rooms where individuals were to neatly leave clothes and valuables before they went through a process of “decontamination”.39 However many individuals saw through this facade and responded by either panicking or merely accepting their inevitable fate. Any form of resistance was dealt with quickly and severely and the idea was to have as little time between arriving at the centre and disposing of the bodies.40 Another difference between death camps and other camps was they were not equipped to accommodate large numbers of prisoners, in addition to the fact the SS didn’t want to keep them alive.41 This meant processing upon arrival had to be highly efficient to get the maximum number into the gas chambers as possible.

Some people during the selection process were sent to a different location from those destined for the gas chambers; these were the individuals who had been chosen for hard labour.42 This work included grave digging, dealing with the corpses of the dead, sifting through belongings, and occasionally aiding in medically testing prisoners. They were called 35 Pohl, ‘The Holocaust and the Concentration Camps’, p.163 36 Bloxham and Kushner, The Holocaust, p.69 37 Lawton, Auschwitz, p.24 38 Sheehan, The Death Camps, p.24 39 Cohn-Sherbok, Understanding the Holocaust, p.180 40 Laqueur and Baumel, The Holocaust Encyclopaedia, p.176 41 Bauer, A History of the Holocaust, p.242 42 Schelvis, Sobibor, p.14

Sonderkommandos and they performed these horrendous tasks for the sole reason they feared death.43 Yet the hours were gruelling, the work was hard and lack of food all combined in many of these workers dying anyway, in addition to the fact these Sonderkommandos were regularly replaced as the SS didn’t want any witnesses to survive.44

Medical experiments were frequently conducted on prisoners in the concentration and death camps. Doctors such as Dr Josef Mengele used the inmates as human guinea pigs trying to create a master-race for the Nazis. These experiments in camps like Auschwitz were basically torture, often using no anaesthetic or care regarding the patient’s survival.45 As the tide turned against the Germans in the war, it would be assumed that they would halt the annihilation of the Jews. In fact, the opposite occurred as they redoubled efforts to maximise the numbers that could be killed in their determination to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population. It is not understood why this “self-destructive and irrational stubbornness” prevented the Nazis from trying to redeem themselves.46 Following these final efforts the Germans tried to cover their tracks by blowing up gas chambers and crematoriums before evacuating the death camps, leaving behind unburied corpses and remaining prisoners to starve to death.

In conclusion it can be seen that all the types of internment including ghettos, concentration, labour and death camps had basic characteristics and noticeable similarities. They were all institutions to house prisoners on a long-term basis and were not governed by legal regulations. All the camps were a means to an end- carrying out the Final Solution. This was obvious in the case of the death camps, but all the other camps still featured deliberate mistreatment and worked Jewish prisoners to death on a massive scale. In this sense, the distinction between death camps and other forms of internment becomes less clear.47 Death camps do stand out for their sole purpose of mass murder resulting in the systematic annihilation of millions of Jews. These six extermination centres were specialised for largescale murder and under the supervision of Adolf Hitler’s SS and the Nazis, they carried out arguably the greatest crime in history.

43 Laqueur and Baumel, The Holocaust Encyclopaedia, p.176 44 Schelvis, Sobibor, p.14 45 Lawton, Auschwitz, p.32 46 Sheehan, The Death Camps, pp.30-31 47 Sheehan, The Death Camps, p.11

Bibliography Aly, Golz, ‘Final Solution’, Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews, (London, New York: Hodder, 1999) Bauer, Yehuda, A History of the Holocaust, (New York: Franklin Watts, 2001) Bloxham, Donald, and Kushner, Tony, The Holocaust, Critical Historical Approaches, (Manchester, New York, Manchester Univerity Press, 2005) Caplan, Jane and Wachsmann, Nikolaus, Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, the New Histories, (London, New York: Routledge, 2010) Cohn-Sherbok, Dan, Understanding the Holocaust, An Introduction, (London, New York: Cassell, 1999) Gilbert, Martin, Never Again, A History of the Holocaust, (Harper Collins, 2000) Kochavi, Arieh, Confronting Captivity, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) Laqueur, Walter and Baumel, Judith Tydor, The Holocaust Encyclopaedia, (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2001) Lawton, Clive, A., Auschwitz, The Story of the Nazi Death Camp, (London: Franklin Watts, 2002) Piper, Franciszek, ‘Auschwitz Concentration Camp’, in The Holocaust and History, ed. by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck...