Concentration Camps

5 Key excerpts on "Concentration Camps"

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  eBook - ePub

  Enacting History

  A Practical Guide to Teaching the Holocaust through Theater

  • Mira Hirsch, Janet E. Rubin, Arnold Mittelman(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 Concentration and extermination camps Context Concentration and extermination camps were a cornerstone of the Nazis’ attempt to rid the Reich of perceived enemies and inferiors. A concentration camp is defined as “a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy” (“Concentration Camps, 1933–39”). What many may not realize, however, is that the term does not define all the types of camps and internment locations established by the Nazis. The purposes of these facilities varied, as did the length of time that they were in existence. The number of camps and ghettos established from 1933 to 1945 exceeded 42,000. People were deported to the camps because of race, religion, nationality or politics. Imprisoned were intellectuals, political prisoners, criminals, Social Democrats, Communists, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah’s Witnesses, those the Nazis considered social misfits or inferiors, such as gays, beggars, tramps and alcoholics, and of course, Jews. The camps were run by the SS, led by Heinrich Himmler, and were differentiated by function. Similar to a prison, the Nazis saw camps as a way to separate certain groups seen as undesirable by the rest of society. Unlike a prison, those confined had not been convicted of crimes nor given a release date. For millions, the only way out was death. Lagersystem was the term used for the system of camps created by the Nazis. These included camps for forced laborers and prisoners of war as well as transit camps, Concentration Camps and sub-camps, and death camps. Some had explicit reasons for being; others served multiple purposes. Labor camps, for example, were used as places where prisoners worked within the camp or in factories or stone quarries, on farms, or wherever else they might be needed

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  After Liberation

  Toward a Sociology of the Shoah<br/>Selected Essays

  • H.G. Adler, Jeremy Adler(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Berghahn Books

    (Publisher)

  In the form primarily developed by National Socialism and Bolshevism, the concentration camp is the latest institution of oppression reserved for our day and time. In the long run, and in its most extreme form, it can be maintained only under a totalitarian regime. The term “concentration camp,” although new, is semantically revealing. Its very primary meaning designates so novel a way of setting people off for special captivity that it hardly suggests earlier institutions of imprisonment such as penal servitude or other forms of legally based custody or exclusion from the society of free men.

  However, the institution as such does exhibit the characteristics of older methods of arbitrary deprivation of freedom, while adapting them to new tasks and needs. Actual or merely potential opponents of the existing order, even suspected or actual members of ideologically stigmatized groups, are taken into custody and concentrated in a camp without legal procedure. An example is the type of internment camp established in Cuba toward the end of the last century and, later, by the English in the Boer War, who called them “Concentration Camps” for the first time. They were planned as emergency measures only for the duration of the war. Similar camps were known during World War I, especially in Russia; these were internment camps for alien civilians. Under international law the legality of such procedures to prevent escape, espionage, and undesirable political activity, where there is no reason to suspect any given individual, is at best questionable. Similar internments occurred during the wars of the nineteenth century (e.g., in 1870–71), although certain humanitarian principles were respected. As protective custody in the interest of the state or the rulers, this institution is very old and has been preserved in the tradition of taking hostages.

  During the European wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, civil prisoners were usually treated gently; they were protected, if possible, from any excesses among their guards and, by and large, were subject to regulations that ap plied to prisoners of war. There was no obligation to work, a principle still upheld by many countries during World War II. But the situation of these detained aliens grew steadily worse during the twentieth century. During World War I, Russia arrested even its own citizens as a preventive measure and exposed them to inhuman treatment. France dealt harshly with the German civilian prisoners in Africa but still called it an “emergency measure against aliens.” Russia went one step further—deportation—a practice she has never abandoned. This not only was a punitive measure, as it was, for instance, in France even in the twentieth century, but was linked to the security aspect of preventive arrest. National Socialism reestablished this form of captivity as “honorary custody” for distinguished citizens or aliens who were sent to Concentration Camps.

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  Fascism, Nazism and the Holocaust

  Challenging Histories

  • Dan Stone(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 If all of these sites are Concentration Camps, then we rapidly come to the conclusion that there is no archetypal camp, that a camp need not look like Dachau in order to qualify as a concentration camp, and that the concept of the concentration camp needs to be historicized, for what it designates changes over time.

  Histories

  Concentration Camps did not appear out of nowhere. There is a long history of incarceration that includes workshops, POW camps, asylums, quarantine islands, slavery plantations and prisons. The idea of isolating unwanted population groups precedes the modern age. The most important precedent is to be found in the European overseas colonies, ‘spaces of exception from European law’, places in which, as Hannah Arendt argued, anything was possible.4 The consistent forced relocation of American Indians, the forcing off the land of Aborigines in Australia and the wiping out of whole populations such as San Bushmen or Caribs were all justified on the grounds that the ‘natives’ were not able to follow the laws of civilized warfare. Specific cases such as Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania or Shark Island off the Namibian coast are very close approximations of Concentration Camps, except that they were ‘ready-made’ rather than constructed. Indeed, the first wave of camps to be known as ‘Concentration Camps’ were located in the European colonies: Cuba, South Africa, the Philippines, German Southwest Africa. In the first three of these places, Concentration Camps were established primarily as a military solution to guerrilla warfare. By removing the displaced rural population, guerrilla fighters would lose their source of food, shelter and morale, and the civilian authorities could engage in social engineering. German Southwest Africa is somewhat different; here the camps were established after the war, more as a means of pacifying and humiliating a defeated enemy and forcing them into slave labour than a counter-guerrilla strategy. Revealingly, though, given that the term Konzentrationslager had been used in German, up to that point, to refer to the British camps in South Africa, it is clear that the British experience in their guerrilla war was regarded as some kind of guide by the Germans.5

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  Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (Vol. I)

  • United States. Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  Chapter XI Concentration Camps The Concentration Camp, used against the people of Germany and allied nationals, was one of the fundamental institutions of the Nazi regime. It was a pillar of the system of terror by which the Nazis consolidated their power over Germany. It was a primary weapon in the battle against the Jews, against the Christian church, against labor, against those who wanted peace, against opposition or non-conformity of any kind. It involved the systematic use of terror to achieve the cohesion within Germany which was necessary for the execution of the conspirators’ plans for aggression. It was the final link in a chain of terror and repression which involved the SS and the Gestapo and which resulted in the apprehension of victims and their confinement without trial, often without charges, generally with no indication of the length of their detention. The SS through its espionage system tracked down the victims; the criminal police and the Gestapo seized them and brought them to the Concentration Camps; and the Concentration Camps were administered by the SS. No attempt will be made to present a complete catalogue of individual brutalities. The emphasis will rather be upon the fundamental purposes for which these camps were used, the techniques of terror which were employed, the large number of their victims, and the death and anguish which they caused. 1. THE BEGINNING OF “PROTECTIVE CUSTODY” The Nazis realized early that without the most drastic repression of actual and potential opposition they could not consolidate their power over the German people. Immediately after Hitler became Chancellor, the conspirators promptly destroyed civil liberties by issuing the Presidential Emergency Decree of 28 February 1933 (1390-PS). It was this decree which was the basis for “Schutzhaft”, that is, “protective custody”—the power of the Gestapo to imprison people without judicial proceedings

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  Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Total Domination

  The Holocaust, Plurality, and Resistance

  • Michal Aharony(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Lastly, according to the Nazi “idealism,” the Concentration Camps were used “for large-scale scientific experimentation, supposedly for the benefit of mankind.” 55 Kogon emphasizes the fact that the Concentration Camps kept increasing in number even after the Nazis repressed all opposition and before the outbreak of the Second World War. In fact, as time went by, the subsidiary purposes of the camps—deterring the population, exploiting slave labor, and maintaining the training and experimental facilities for the SS—came more and more to the fore. By the time the war erupted, the concentration camp system had grown to horrifying proportions. 56 The inmates of the Concentration Camps belonged to four main groups in the eyes of the Gestapo: political opponents; members of “inferior races”; criminals; and “shiftless elements” (called “asocial” by the Germans). Prisoners of all categories had to wear prescribed marking sewn to their clothing—a serial number and a color-coded triangle badge (Winkel). The majority of the prisoners of the first group—political prisoners (red triangle)—consisted of members of anti-Nazi parties: Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, liberals, Freemasons, and anarchists. 57 However, it also included former Nazi party members accused of different offenses. Opposition to the Nazi regime for moral and especially religious motives (for example, Jehovah’s Witnesses, who wore the purple triangle) was regarded by the SS as political opposition. The non-Germans who arrived at the Concentration Camps after the outbreak of the war were almost always classified as political prisoners

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