Konzentrationslager April 1945
Warning —this blog contains graphic images and disturbing information.
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In April 1945, 80 years ago this month, Hitler’s Third Reich was finally collapsing. The Russians, approaching from the east, surrounded Berlin. The Americans, British and Canadians, approaching from the west, had crossed the Rhine and were advancing eastward. The remnants of the once-mighty German armed forces were being crushed between them and would soon surrender.
It was a moment of triumph, but it was also a moment of profound shock, because, as the allies advanced, they overran and liberated Hitler’s Konzentrationslager, concentration camps, and discovered the full horror of the Nazi slave labor economy and the Holocaust.
While nothing can, or should, detract from or diminish the supreme evil of the Holocaust, it is important to note from a historical perspective that the concentration camp system had many other purposes and victims and there were many, many other camps beyond Auschwitz and the other extermination camps.
In general, the concentration camp system had three purposes:
• Detention and interment of political prisoners and others whom Himmler, the head of the SS, termed ‘organized elements of sub-humanity’ such as communists, socialists, the mentally impaired, undesirable ethnicities such as the Roma, etc.
• Institutionalization of slave labor, particularly for foreigners.
• Explicit extermination, particularly of Jewish people.
The paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, the Schutzstaffel (‘protection squadron’) universally known as the SS, was responsible for the overall camp system. Its commander was Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. Within the SS, the camps were administered and staffed by the SS-Totenkopfverbände (literally, ‘Death’s-head Units.)
Final Solution
Systematic oppression of Jewish people was always a plank in Nazi doctrine and evolved into an explicit commitment to extermination after January 30th, 1939, when Hitler gave his ‘prophesy’ to the Reichstag (parliament) of ‘vernichtung der Judischen rasse,’ ‘the extermination of the Jewish race.’
Millions of Jewish people were murdered in thousands of incidents long before the establishment of the notorious Endlösung der Judenfrage, ‘the final solution to the Jewish question,’ by Reinhard Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference on January 20th 1942, which led to mass industrial-scale killings at Auschwitz and other extermination camps.
Slaughter of Lesser Humans
Jewish people were only one of many categories of those that Himmler considered to be sub-human Untermenschen.
The SS carefully categorized the various branches of sub-humanity and prisoners were required to wear appropriate triangular badges. Propaganda pamphlets explained who the sub-humans were and why they needed to be exterminated.
Der Untermenschen
‘The sub-human’
In the chart on the left, the badge at column 5 row 4, for example, identified gay Jews. Curiously, Jehovah’s Witnesses were given their own color. The pamphlet on the right reads: “60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People’s community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too. Read the Neues Volk, the monthly magazine of the Office of Racial Policy of the NSDAP.”
The money-saving solution was the Aktion T4 medical program under which at least a quarter of a million involuntary euthanasia operations were conducted.
Vernichtung durch Arbeit — Extermination through Labor
The wartime Nazi German economy was critically short of manpower. An important part of the solution was to imprison very large numbers of Untermenschen and use them as expendable labor. Prisoners worked and lived under very harsh conditions until they died. It is estimated that seven in ten of the slave laborers in the system died, primarily of disease and starvation, not far short of the nine in ten of the prisoners in extermination camps. This was known as “extermination through labor” (Vernichtung durch Arbeit.)
This slave program was integral to the economy. The massive fortifications along the Atlantic coast and the Seigfried Line were built by slave labor, as were the massive reinforced concrete U Boat pens. There were 1,500 camps in all. Himmler wrote that they sprang up like ‘mushrooms after rain.’ Many were makeshift, keeping their slave workers locked in storage rooms and cellars.
They were photographed in Europe 80 years ago.
German industry and the slave labor programs were closely integrated. The conglomerate IG Farben, then the largest company in Europe, had a major manufacturing plant at Auschwitz, for example. Two government construction enterprises, Organisation Todt, and the German Equipment Works (Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke, DAW) made extensive use of slave labor.
Slave laborers worked the mines and quarries, but they also built Messerschmitt fighters and V2 rockets. Organisation Todt was headed by Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer.
Organisation Todt at work
In April 1945, 80 years ago, the full extent of the horror was laid bare.
The aftermath — Liberation in April 1945
inspect charred corpses at Ohrdruf.
at Bergen-Belsen.
Justice at last
Konzentrationslager Bergen-Belsen
I remember going to see the site of the large camp at Bergen-Belsen in the 1960s, 25 years after the camp was liberated. Most of the buildings had been demolished and all that remained was a large open field where the prisoners’ huts had once stood. At the far end of the field was a memorial.
As I walked slowly toward the memorial, I saw that the ground on either side of the pathway was undulating. I was walking between rows of gentle mounds. These, I realized, were burial mounds covering the long open pits into which the prisoners’ bodies had been bulldozed in 1945. I was surrounded by hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of those whom Himmler had deemed subhuman.
It was a morning in late winter. The sky was steel grey and crows were clattering in the trees beside the field. The wind was remarkably chill. Patches of snow lay in the gullies between the long burial mounds. I shivered, but not from the cold. I shivered for the place in which I stood.
The dead made no comment.
