Inside Concentration Camps

Social Life at the Extremes

Maja Suderland

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745663364, 9780745663357
• eBook ISBN: 9780745679556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Terror was central to the Nazi regime, and the Nazi concentration camps were places of horror where prisoners were dehumanized and robbed of their dignity and where millions were murdered. How did prisoners cope with the brutal and degrading conditions of life within the camps?

In this highly original book Maja Suderland takes the reader inside the concentration camps and examines the everyday social life of prisoners - their daily activities and routines, the social relationships and networks they created and the strategies they developed to cope with the harsh conditions and the brutality of the guards. Without overlooking the violence of the camps, the contradictions of camp life or the elusive complexity of the multicultural prisoner society, Suderland explores the hidden social practices that enabled prisoners to preserve their human dignity and create a sense of individuality and community despite the appalling circumstances.

This remarkable account of social life in extreme conditions will be of great interest to students and scholars in history, sociology and the social sciences generally, as well as to a wider readership interested in the Holocaust and the concentration camps.

Part I

Introduction

1

Topic and Research Question

In his book Modernity and the Holocaust, first published in 1989, Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman proposes that the Holocaust should be seen “as a rare, yet significant and reliable, test of the hidden possibilities of modern society” (Bauman 1989: 12, emphasis in original). He claims it is almost imperative to view our society through the “window” of the Holocaust (ibid.: viii), as this can offer a glimpse of things which would otherwise remain invisible. According to Bauman, not only can the social sciences shed a light on the Holocaust, the Holocaust can shed a new light on present-day concerns (ibid.). Picking up on Bauman’s thesis, I propose that insights into our society can be gained by peering critically through the “window” of the Holocaust and examining the social relationships between the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.

Bauman’s viewpoint is rather unusual in today’s Holocaust research. The unspoken mission of Holocaust research is to analyze what is abnormal, monstrous, and “evil” (cf. Safranski 1997: 267ff.), to explore the suffering of the victims and distill the unique aspects of this historical event. Such research is therefore considered absolutely necessary but also highly specialized. Bauman, who naturally questions neither the uniqueness of the Holocaust nor the suffering of its victims, nonetheless concludes that if we want to find out something about our society, the Holocaust must not only be the object of our research, it should also determine the perspective of our research.

He thus opposes a core tenet of many academic studies of life inside the Nazi concentration camps which emphasize one thing above all: that this was not a society in the conventional sense because all of these people were forced to live together in unprecedentedly inhumane conditions and were therefore in a situation which would not normally be described as a society.

The phrase “prisoner society” is certainly used in Holocaust research, but it is often flanked by distancing comments that explain why it is “actually” completely inappropriate (in more recent literature, see Pätzold 2005, for example). In other cases, scholars emphasize that within the body of prisoners as a whole there were distinctions between the better-off prisoner functionaries who formed a kind of prisoner elite and the mass of regular prisoners who had no influence over anything (cf. Abgeleitete Macht 1998; Brzezicki et al. 1987; Orth 2000). Another viewpoint can be found in works dealing with the social characteristics of particular groups of prisoners – but because of their tight focus, such works tend to overlook the complex structure of the totality of prisoners, as this is beyond the scope of their intent (cf. Benz and Distel 2005b; Moller et al. 2002; Quack 2003; Streibel and Schafranek 1996).¹

There is no doubt that the Nazi concentration camps were designed to dehumanize and annihilate their inmates through open and extreme brutality. In light of this overwhelming, crushing violence, it seems logical at first glance that the forced community of prisoners would be shaped solely by the imposed structures of the camps and the wretched and threatening living conditions found there. Historical and sociological studies of the Holocaust therefore frequently argue that concentration camp inmates could not constitute a “prisoner society” because their community was based on direct, open violence and the relations within it were not voluntary.² For example, an introductory essay on “prisoner societies” in the first volume of the series Der Ort des Terrors (Benz and Distel 2005a) states:

The prisoner societies were the product of arbitrariness, violence, and terror. All of the rules and standards still applicable outside of their fences and walls between 1933 and 1945 had been abolished within them. […] The drawback of the term prisoner society is that it does not express the relationship [between the enforcers and the enforced], and it is deceptive in that it makes the prisoners appear to be the active agents and shapers of this society. (Pätzold 2005: 110–11)

This position assumes that the Nazis largely succeeded in annihilating the concentration camp prisoners as social entities. Apparently the only exceptions to this are the exemplary resistance fighters, whose political motivation and strategic planning enabled them to oppose the brutal violence – and who sometimes also resorted to draconian measures against their fellow prisoners in order to achieve their goals (cf. ibid.).

While the term “prisoner society” is not typically found in the memoirs of former concentration camp prisoners, even the testimonies from regular prisoners clearly reveal that the inmates did assert their humanity and sociality in the camps through a hidden and usually symbolic dimension of social life. In their memoirs, former prisoners often mention the commendable and particularly brave “heroic acts” of others, but they frequently place an even greater emphasis on their own efforts to maintain continuity with their prior social experiences in order to distance themselves from the new, terrifying, and alienating experiences in the concentration camps.

Scholarly analyses of the Holocaust focus on the violence, atrocities, and abnormalities in order to highlight the inhuman aspects of the world in the camps – and for good reason. But this focus has a startling effect: If we follow the reasoning behind Pierre Bourdieu’s³ concept of “symbolic violence” (cf. Bourdieu 1991a, 1993b; Bourdieu and Passeron 1990), then by rejecting the term “prisoner society,” the scholarly perspective described above unwittingly commits a type of “symbolic violence” itself. By denying the prisoners’ fundamental sociality on the basis of the violence of the SS, we limit our perception, thus obscuring the hidden social dimensions of the prisoner society and making it practically impossible to discuss them without simultaneously turning a blind eye to the unbridled violence. Using Bourdieu’s tools, however, we can reveal the multifaceted nuances of this symbolic dimension of a social life under compulsion and adversity and demonstrate that not “all of the rules and standards […] had been abolished” (see above; Pätzold 2005: 110). This approach also portrays the prisoners as “the active agents and shapers of this society” (ibid.: 111) – though ones with extremely restricted freedom of action – and thus restores their human dignity (cf. Suderland 2008).

While the memoirs of former prisoners frequently stress the shocking discrepancy between life in the camps and “normal society,” they also describe a multitude of complex and sometimes contradictory social relations. These had a lasting impact on the prisoners, but this impact can be easily overlooked in the face of the brutal violence that dominated the camps. In their recollections, former concentration camp prisoners depict these multifaceted interpersonal relationships in their own words, which they themselves often feel are inadequate. But by illustrating the social context for us and describing what they felt, thought, and did, they explain which aspects of society were particularly important to them under the extraordinary conditions of camp life. The authors of these texts seem to feel the need to convey that the world in the camps was “topsy-turvy” (Klüger 2001) and that they used any available means in their steadfast attempts to restore a certain degree of “rightness” within it. On the one hand, they vividly describe the traumatic violence of the Nazis and the powerlessness and helplessness they felt in the face of it. But this powerlessness is precisely what compels them to present themselves as actively engaged individuals who, at least on a small scale, tried to restore the familiar and necessary social order – even if only by deliberately holding on to familiar patterns of perception and evaluation. Each personal account reconstructs an individual viewpoint which is nuanced by virtue of its integration in various social contexts and which gives the author a recognizable identity. These reconstructed viewpoints can thus also be viewed as individual conceptions of society. The abnormality in the concentration camps is described as an alternative world in which everything the prisoners themselves felt to be right was not allowed to exist and therefore had to be reconstructed – as much as possible – in secret and using whatever means were available.

The leitmotif in this polyphonic and by no means always harmonious choir of memories appears to be the need for differences and similarities. These were apparently essential to the prisoners as individuals and were based on just a few principles of differentiation, even under these extraordinary conditions. Paul Martin Neurath, who was imprisoned in Dachau and Buchenwald in 1938 and 1939 and later became a sociologist, observed this phenomenon himself and made a sharp sociological analysis of it early on (Neurath 2005: 261). However, his exceptional dissertation entitled “Social Life in the German Concentration Camps Dachau and Buchenwald,” which he completed in 1943 after emigrating to the USA, was of no immediate interest to anyone and was therefore not published until 2004 (as The Society of Terror).⁴

In this book, I have adopted Zygmunt Bauman’s research perspective and directed my sociological gaze through the “window” of the Holocaust to examine the prisoner society within the concentration camps⁵ in order to learn something about both the prisoners and their view of the world from the former inmates themselves. The main goal of my study is to understand the points of view of the concentration camp prisoners (cf. Bourdieu 1994, 1999) and to reconstruct and describe them with the help of sociological theories focusing on the social practices of real social agents.

To express this goal another way, allow me to draw on a metaphor used at various times by Bourdieu: I want to make the polyphonic lament of the people who were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps at least partially audible once again and, in doing so, identify both the unwritten musical score of the whole and the improvised melodies of the individuals (cf. Bourdieu 1993a: 56). This will involve examining the recurring leitmotifs and elucidating the sharps and clefs that fundamentally modify all of the determining factors (cf. Bourdieu 1997b: 222), thereby revealing the structures created by the social agents themselves that form the basis of both the unwritten musical score and the improvised melodies of everyone who participates in it.

Academic studies of the Nazi concentration camps and autobiographical accounts from former prisoners leave no doubt that the camps were places of horror where their victims were robbed of their dignity, dehumanized, and ultimately murdered. This physical destruction was usually preceded by psychological destruction; neither the body nor the mind, neither individuality nor community was tolerated in the camps. In his dissertation submitted to Columbia University in New York in 1943, Neurath writes of his experiences and observations in Dachau and Buchenwald:

A man is thrown into a concentration camp as a means of cutting him out of human society like a rotten piece of flesh out of the living body. He shall have nobody to speak or listen to. […] His life, as long as it is left to him, shall be only a physical vegetating, with no memories about the past, no meaning to the present, and no goals for the future. He shall be only a cog in the huge mechanism of Nazi terror, pressed by other cogs and the weight of the whole machinery, seldom repaired, but used until worn out, when finally the late individual, now a number, will be written off the inventory. (Neurath 2005: 132–3)

There were no limits to the harassment and torment meted out to this end by the Nazi bureaucrats and guard squads. The situation was made all the worse by the prisoners’ strict isolation from the world outside. The Nazis wanted the rules of normal life to hold no sway over life in the concentration camps.

Since one of the main tasks of a concentration camp is to break the prisoner as a human being, two of the first prerogatives of a human being are withdrawn from him: the right to expect that there shall be some reason in the way he is treated, and the right to influence his own fate by reasonable behavior. Instead he is subject to completely arbitrary treatment. (Neurath 2005: 86)

This arbitrary treatment plainly corresponded to the values of the Nazis, but the prisoners felt it to be a reversal of their concept of humanity and of all conventional values. It is no coincidence that former prisoners often speak of a “topsy-turvy world” (e.g., Klüger 2001). The Nazis’ enormous experiment to dehumanize their opponents and all other undesirables seemed, to the prisoners, to be an attempt to turn them into wild animals who would fight and tear each other apart in their desperation.

Though it may seem cynical under the circumstances, a closer look reveals that even in the concentration camps there was a social life that corresponded to that of a normal society in many respects, although the opportunities to express differences and nuances were drastically restricted. Regarding the “social status” (Neurath 2005: 261) of the prisoners and their respective sense of honor, Neurath writes: “The difference between the two societies, that outside and that inside the camp, seems […] one of rules of behavior rather than basic concepts” (Neurath 2005: 261; emphasis added). Inherent in this realization is the minimal scope the prisoners had to continue to feel like human beings, that is, to feel like individuals and members of a human society in which the “basic concepts” still applied, while adhering to the relevant “rules of behavior.” In light of the transparent desires of the SS regime, this was existentially important to the prisoners if they wanted to resist being dehumanized.

This raises the following questions: What ideas can be considered “basic concepts” of society, and which measures were necessary in the Nazi concentration camps to express these ideas in a way appropriate to the situation?

I suggest that the “basic concepts” of society must include those ideas that:

• first, pertain to the characteristics considered typical of individual members of a society or of social groups and their relations with one another;

• and, second, were so important to the prisoners, even in the extremely restricted and oppressive conditions in the concentration camps, that former inmates continually addressed them in various ways in their accounts of their imprisonment.

If these concepts were inessential trivialities, they would have lost their significance under the enormous pressure of the situation and given way in the prisoners’ memoirs to other subjects which were more important in this context.

With regard to the subject of the work at hand, we must look for the distinctions made by the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps – distinctions made not solely on account of the particular situation in these camps, but because they represented the last thread of continuity with the inmates’ former lives.

I am most interested in the hidden social practices of the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps which sometimes made it possible for them to preserve their human dignity by striving to realize certain aspects of their social identity. On the basis of autobiographical material and memoirs as well as academic literature, I will explore the conditions and opportunities for such social situations in the camps and their significance to the prisoners. I intend to look at both the concepts that served as templates for social identity and the means employed to manifest and maintain this social identity in the camps. My theory is that the “basic concepts” of society are hidden behind these notions of social identity, and that the means of putting these concepts into practice reveal something about the special “rules of behavior” in the camps.

How could concentration camp prisoners create a sense of individuality and social position, and what role did their bodies and minds play – despite their physical and psychological destruction? What value was placed in the social structural characteristics of class and gender – characteristics considered to be fundamental in sociological theory – and how did other criteria such as “ethnic” affiliation influence the prisoners’ interactions with one another?

Human sociality appears to be a trait extinguished only in death and one which is a driving force in life, even under the most adverse conditions. Bourdieu refers to this type of social urge as “social libido.”⁶ Following Bourdieu’s arguments, my study reveals that even in the concentration camps, people were driven by “socially constituted interests which only exist in relation to a social space in which certain things are important and others don’t matter and for socialized agents who are constituted in such a way as to make distinctions corresponding to the objective differences in that space” (Bourdieu 1998: 79; emphasis added). In connection with this, I view the concentration camps as outposts of the social space in which the prisoners must also be considered agents who – though their scope for action was extremely restricted – continued to make socially relevant distinctions that were important to them. But how is this “social libido,” this “impulse” toward the social, expressed in a realm in which all connection to the outside world and to your own individual, social past appears to have been cut off? And what remains of the various types of social differentiation when you are as fundamentally r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• TitlePage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Beate Krais
• Preface
• Translator’s Note
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Sociological Avenues of Inquiry
• Part III The Social World of the Nazi Concentration Camps
• Part IV Social Libido
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index