The Order of Terror

The Concentration Camp

Wolfgang Sofsky, William Templer

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780691006857, 9780691043548
• eBook ISBN: 9781400822188
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

During the twelve years from 1933 until 1945, the concentration camp operated as a terror society. In this pioneering book, the renowned German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky looks at the concentration camp from the inside as a laboratory of cruelty and a system of absolute power built on extreme violence, starvation, "terror labor," and the business-like extermination of human beings.


Based on historical documents and the reports of survivors, the book details how the resistance of prisoners was broken down. Arbitrary terror and routine violence destroyed personal identity and social solidarity, disrupted the very ideas of time and space, perverted human work into torture, and unleashed innumerable atrocities. As a result, daily life was reduced to a permanent struggle for survival, even as the meaning of self-preservation was extinguished. Sofsky takes us from the searing, unforgettable image of the Muselmann--Auschwitz jargon for the "walking dead"--to chronicles of epidemics, terror punishments, selections, and torture.


The society of the camp was dominated by the S.S. and a system of graduated and forced collaboration which turned selected victims into accomplices of terror. Sofsky shows that the S.S. was not a rigid bureaucracy, but a system with ample room for autonomy. The S.S. demanded individual initiative of its members. Consequently, although they were not required to torment or murder prisoners, officers and guards often exploited their freedom to do so--in passing or on a whim, with cause, or without.


The order of terror described by Sofsky culminated in the organized murder of millions of European Jews and Gypsies in the death-factories of Auschwitz and Treblinka. By the end of this book, Sofsky shows that the German concentration camp system cannot be seen as a temporary lapse into barbarism. Instead, it must be conceived as a product of modern civilization, where institutionalized, state-run human cruelty became possible with or without the mobilizing feelings of hatred.

Part I ______________________________________________

INTRODUCTION

1 ______________________________________________

Entry

MARCH 22, 1933. The first prisoners arrive in Dachau.¹ The abandoned powder factory looks dreary and depressing: more than twenty flat stone buildings, half-dilapidated, dot the grounds. The only structure that appears usable is the former administration building. It has just been fenced in with a triple barrier of barbed wire. Down in the basement, the police officers, newly arrived for work the evening before, prepare a list, recording the names of the inmates. There is no set uniform for the prisoners. The procedure is orderly: no hitches, no shouting, no one is mistreated. No one thinks of shaving the heads of the newcomers. That evening, the first meal is distributed: tea, bread, a chunk of liverwurst for every inmate. In the rush of the moment, that is all the food that can be put together. Afterward, the prisoners are led upstairs to makeshift sleeping quarters on the first floor. Because there are no cots and there is no straw, they have to bed down on the concrete floor. The thin blanket each prisoner is given from police stocks is meager protection against the cold.

The next day, the prisoners search through the empty buildings and factory halls, rummaging for material. From scattered boards they piece together the first beds. A joiner is given permission to set up a workshop. The inmates fend for themselves; they make do. No one is forced to work against his or her will. But there are few tools, and there is not enough barbed wire to close off the grounds. The hoes and spades that are gradually amassed are kept in a storeroom administered by an inmate together with a camp official. Surveillance is correct and proper. Guards and prisoners converse; they even discuss the political situation. Some inmates are slipped cigarettes on the sly; rations are adequate and tasty. Prisoners get the same meals as the security personnel.

But this lasts only for a few days. One night, the sleeping inmates are awakened by the thud of marching feet, the clang of weapons. An SS unit, militiamen in brown shirts and black caps, has formed up in front of the administration building. Its commander gives the men a pep talk that terrifies the prisoners:

Comrades of the SS! You all know what the Führer has called upon us to do. We haven’t come here to treat those swine inside like human beings. In our eyes, they’re not like us, they’re something second-class. For years, they’ve been able to pursue their criminal devices. But now we’ve got the power. If these swine had taken over, they’d have made sure our heads rolled in the dust. So we too know no sentimentality. Any man in our ranks who can’t stand the sight of blood doesn’t belong here, he should get out. The more of these bastards we shoot, the fewer we’ll have to feed.²

Twelve years later, on the afternoon of April 29, 1945, three jeeps of the Forty-second Rainbow Division, United States Army, roll through the southern entrance into the camp enclosure. In order to open the gate to the prisoners’ barracks, a soldier must shove aside the body of a prisoner who was shot the night before in an attempt to get out to meet the Americans. The rattle of machine-gun fire sounds from the watchtowers. On the north side of the camp, a Forty-fifth Infantry Division patrol is still locked in battle with the last of the SS. But the huge expanse of the Appellplatz (roll-call square), the camp yard, stands empty. The main street of the camp is also deserted. Among the soldiers is a journalist, Marguerite Higgins. Her report appears a few days later in the New York Herald Tribune:

But the minute the two of us entered, a jangled barrage of “Are you Americans?” in about sixteen languages came from the barracks 200 yards from the gate. An affirmative nod caused pandemonium.

Tattered, emaciated men, weeping, yelling and shouting “Long live America!” swept toward the gate in a mob. Those who could not walk limped or crawled. … I happened to be the first through the gate, and the first person to rush up to me turned out to be a Polish Catholic priest, a deputy of August Cardinal Hlond, Primate of Poland, who was not a little startled to discover that the helmeted, uniformed, begoggled individual he had so heartily embraced was not a man. In the excitement, which was not the least dampened by the German artillery and the sounds of battle in the northern part of the camp, some of the prisoners died trying to pass through the electrically charged barbed wire. Some who got out after the wires were decharged joined in the battle, when some ill-advised S.S. men holding out in a tower fired upon them. The prisoners charged toward the tower and threw all six S.S. men out the window. After an hour and a half of cheering, the crowd, which would virtually mob each soldier that dared to venture into the excited milling group, was calmed down enough to make possible a tour of the camp.

The barracks at Dachau, like those at Buchenwald, had the stench of death and sickness. But at Dachau there were six barracks like the infamous No. 61 at Buchenwald, where the starving and dying lay virtually on top of each other in quarters where 1200 men occupied a space intended for 200. The dead—400 died of sickness yesterday—lay on concrete walks outside the quarters and others were being carried out as the reporters went through.

The mark of starvation was on all the emaciated corpses. Many of the living were so frail it seemed impossible they could still be holding on to life. The crematorium and torture chambers lay outside the prisoner inclosures. Situated in a wood close by was a new building that had been built by prisoners under Nazi guards. Inside, in the two rooms used as torture chambers, an estimated 1,200 bodies were piled. In the crematorium itself were hooks on which the S.S. men hung their victims when they wished to flog them or to use any of the other torture instruments. Symbolic of the S.S. was a mural the S.S. men themselves had painted on the wall. It showed a headless man in uniform with the S.S. insigne on the collar. The man was astride a huge inflated pig into which he was digging his spurs. … Below the camp were cattle cars in which prisoners from Buchenwald had been transported to Dachau. Hundreds of dead were still in the cars due to the fact that prisoners in the camp had rejected S.S. orders to remove them. It was mainly the men from these cattle cars that the S.S. leaders had shot before making their escape. Among those who had been left for dead in the cattle cars was one man still alive who managed to lift himself from the heap of corpses on which he lay.³

The liberators found thirty-three thousand inmates still alive in Dachau—a third of them Polish, thousands of them Russian, French, Yugoslav, Italian. Prisoners from thirty-four nations, and about a thousand Germans. In their zebra-striped rags, the survivors looked like creatures from another planet. Liberation had arrived, yet the dying was far from over. During the following month, another 2,226 inmates would perish from exhaustion or typhoid fever. Civilians would loot the nearby SS supply depot, oblivious to the procession of death nearby. Children on bicycles would ride past the corpses, their handlebars slung with clothing picked up along the way.

It began as terror against political adversaries, and it ended with the death of millions. In the beginning, vengeance raged: the lust for revenge of a regime that had just gained power, bent on suppressing any who had stood in its way. But after its opponents had been eliminated, a new species of absolute power was unleashed that shattered all previous conceptions of despotism or dictatorial brutality: systematic destruction by means of violence, starvation, and labor—the businesslike annihilation of human beings. In the span of twelve years, the concentration camp metamorphosed from a locus of terror into a universe of horror.

Some survivors reported on the camps and their ordeal immediately after liberation, others only after decades had elapsed. The justice authorities amassed a large corpus of documents, affidavits, and testimony. But trials were late in coming and few in number. Some of the verdicts smack of astounding leniency, although they also attest to the discomfort felt by the judges, their perplexity in applying juridical norms to the exceptional “emergency” conditions of the camps. Educators, officially charged with the task of “mastering the past,” have tried laboriously to impart a kind of historical conscience to the generations born later—as if the mass death were a morality play from which coming generations might learn a lesson. Historiographers have been able to establish sequences of events and interconnections, and have documented the history of several camps. In recent years, younger researchers in local history have been combing the archives, collecting oral testimony from witnesses of the time, and unearthing evidence of the many unknown camps that existed back then in the neighborhoods—just around the corner, across the street or down the block. Yet although numerous facts are now familiar, our understanding lags behind. The reality of the camps appears to burst the bounds of imagination, the precincts of conceivability. It still triggers diverse forms of defense meant to exculpate conscience, to extinguish memory.

When it comes to defensive maneuvers, people are far from finicky. The spectrum ranges from bald denial of the camps to comparisons that downplay their gravity to intellectually more subtle techniques of reinterpretation and rationalization. Much energy is expended on defensive parrying; the snarl of diverse methods employed is often difficult to disentangle. Thus, the very existence of the death camps is still categorically denied by some. Then there is “everyday revisionism,” a grim accountancy that tallies up a balance sheet of atrocities: Auschwitz set against Dresden, Dachau weighed against Katyn or the “special camps” of the Soviet occupiers, genocide on one side of the scales and the expulsion of the German population on the other—the obscene numbers game of a fallacious arithmetic that seeks to defuse the past, to dispose of it by balancing the ledger. There are those who claim they knew nothing, although the regime had instrumentalized the concentration camps, using them to intimidate the German people. Many who fervidly celebrated the regime looked idly on as their neighbors suddenly vanished. When a column of prisoners was marched through town, onlookers stood watching—indifferent, maybe frightened, perhaps even gloating. This gives rise to a double denial: a disavowal today of what the watchers had even then already refused to acknowledge.

When that method fails, people take refuge in euphemism. Many Germans (and not only Germans) are quite willing to incorporate the title of an American television series into their vocabulary in order to be able to delete the term “genocide.” In the meanwhile, the word “holocaust” has been drained of meaning, reduced to a token that permits rapid concord, sparing one the need to confront the facts. In the language of the Hebrew psalms, however, “holocaust” signifies a “complete burnt offering.”⁴ It designates the ritual martyrdom that Jews took upon themselves because they refused to renounce their faith. The expression thus forges a link, totally inadmissible, between the genocidal murder of the Jews and the fate of Jewish martyrs, although the Jews were not murdered because they had refused to renounce their religious convictions, but simply because they were Jews. By distortion of the term’s core meaning, the impression is generated that the mass murder of the Jews had some deeper religious import—as if the victims had, in a sense, offered themselves up for the slaughter.

Another example of such discursive disburdenment is the redesignation of the numerous concentration camps that existed on German soil, the external work Kommandos (Außenkommandos) of the main camps. The list of such camps reads like a directory of Central European place-names. Yet abruptly, conveniently, they have been retermed “work camps” (Arbeitslager) or “external stations” (Außenstationen). These concentration camps were located right next door, along busy transportation arteries, in the nearby municipal forest preserves, in requisitioned school buildings, or on the grounds of private firms. Now that regional researchers, often underfunded, have uncovered evidence of many a forgotten local camp, concerned city fathers want to have the public believe that these camps were not such a terrible thing after all. A truly fastidious distinction is made between the supposedly innocuous “work camps” inside Germany and the “death camps” (Todeslager) in the distant East—a basic difference that no one had contested. Yet talk of such “work camps” masks the truth: that labor itself also led to death; that the exhausted and emaciated inmates who toiled in such camps were removed and sent back to die in a main camp or a so-called Sterbelager (“camp for dying”); that there were gas chambers in Germany as well. Such discursive maneuvering attempts to block out the crimes from the field of vision; it tries to exterritorialize their reality.

It is merely the other side of the coin when public discourse turns evasive and noncommittal, such as in the clichés of hollow Sunday speeches, droning on about tragic guilt and entanglement, forgiveness and reconciliation—though nothing can actually be reconciled. We perpetrators, children and grandchildren of perpetrators, we do not bear any grudge against the victims. … Some invoke the notion of incomprehensible forces of fate that swept over the Germans, speaking of crimes committed “in the name of Germany”—as though there were no flesh-and-blood culprits, no oppressors who could be searched out, found, and arrested. Others speak about “crimes against humanity,” as if the tormenters’ only failing was their lack of humanity. There is a veritable inflationary boom in the spread of expressions such as the “unjust regime,” “contempt for the human being,” the acceptance of “full responsibility”—again, as if all the regime had done was to treat people with “contempt.” As though someone could assume “full responsibility” for the consequences of mass murder. … The ideology of disburdenment, of “safe disposal” (Entsorgung), has penetrated public discourse, leeching the lexicon. It diminishes the significance of facts and takes flight into sanctimonious moralizing, although no form of traditional religious or political morality can adequately grapple with the enormity of the atrocity.

If discursive obfuscation does not achieve the desired effect, defensive maneuvering changes to defiance and self-pity: we have made enough amends, given enough compensation; we have paid our debts, our dues. Depending on the political climate, there are also official statements asserting that the whole matter is finally finished and laid to rest; a new national consciousness is proclaimed. There is the pious claim that necessary lessons have been learned from history. But the very choice of words proves the opposite. Shame gives rise to rage, and that rage is turned against the victims. Now it is the perpetrators and the generations of their innocent descendants who supposedly suffer under the barrage of accusations from the victims. Conversely, the critical opposition is preoccupied with scrupulously avoiding any charge of collective guilt. This is not a question of some banal confusion between collective guilt and historical responsibility for the consequences of actions. Naturally, not all Germans were criminals or trusting supporters of the regime. Yet neither were they the helpless victims of some mode of satanic seduction. They were not guileless, unsuspecting children who had no idea of what was happening. Just as there is no collective guilt, there can be no collective innocence. Admittedly, knowledge of events was less widespread than the victors assumed. But it was far more pervasive than many Germans were willing to admit. The active accomplices numbered in the tens of thousands, the accessories in the millions. Complaints about repression and the call to confront and “work through the past” have long since become hackneyed. Experience suggests that one cannot seriously expect Germans now to have feelings of shame, or any insight into the connections among commission, omission, and toleration.

The patterns of defense are replayed in curious variations within the discourse of the scholarly community. The crude balance sheet commonly tallied up at the local bar, evil against evil, is replaced by questionable comparisons and abstruse causal chains meant to relativize the extent of the German crimes. Critical discourse all too quickly seeks to evade the issue by detouring to weighty questions in the history of philosophy or social theory. Why waste effort analyzing the realities of camp existence? Instead, scholars dwell on the typological features of fascism, thus avoiding the essence of the Nazi regime: organized terror and genocide. All too quickly, researchers turn to the question of how all this could have happened, without having tried to comprehend in detail what in fact occurred. Such tactics of evasion are convenient: they let you tarry in the antechamber of the problem. In another approach, analytical interest is focused on the presumed authoritarian dispositions and biases of the culprits—a perspective that is scandalous in the way it downplays the importance of social factors, affording no insight into the processes of violence and organized terror. One can thus skirt the unpleasant truths that humans can be cruel without feeling resentment, and that to reduce prejudice is not to guarantee that it will never ar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Space and Time
• Part III: Social Structures
• Part IV: Work
• Part V: Violence and Death
• Epilogue
• Selected Glossary and Abbreviations
• Abbreviations Used in Notes and Bibliography
• Notes
• Bibliography