Those who were still able to work were increasingly auctioned off to private industry for use as slave labor, in the many subcamps that began to spring up around the main K. The work was brutally demanding, especially for women who were sick, starved, and exhausted. When a worker reached the end of her usefulness, she was sent back to the camp, most likely to be killed. By the end of the war, the number of people who had died in the concentration camps, from all causes—starvation, sickness, exhaustion, beating, shooting, gassing—was more than eight hundred thousand.
The figure does not include the hundreds of thousands of Jews gassed on arrival at Auschwitz. If the K. But in the camps the Nazis fought against helpless enemies. Considered as prisons, too, the K. And as economic institutions they were utterly counterproductive, wasting huge numbers of lives even as the need for workers in Germany became more and more acute. The concentration camps make sense only if they are understood as products not of reason but of ideology, which is to say, of fantasy.
Nazism taught the Germans to see themselves as a beleaguered nation, constantly set upon by enemies external and internal. Metaphors of infection and disease, of betrayal and stabs in the back, were central to Nazi discourse.
The concentration camp became the place where those metaphorical evils could be rendered concrete and visible. Here, behind barbed wire, were the traitors, Bolsheviks, parasites, and Jews who were intent on destroying the Fatherland.
And if existence was a struggle, a war, then it made no sense to show mercy to the enemy. Like many Nazi institutions, the K. But most fundamental was the impulse to dehumanize the enemy, which ended up confounding and overriding all the others.
Once a prisoner ceased to be human, he could be brutalized, enslaved, experimented on, or gassed at will, because he was no longer a being with a soul or a self but a biological machine.
The impulse to separate some groups of people from the category of the human is, however, a universal one. The enemies we kill in war, the convicted prisoners we lock up for life, even the distant workers who manufacture our clothes and toys—how could any society function if the full humanity of all these were taken into account? In a decent society, there are laws to resist such dehumanization, and institutional and moral forces to protest it. When guards at Rikers Island beat a prisoner to death, or when workers in China making iPhones begin to commit suicide out of despair, we regard these as intolerable evils that must be cured.
It is when a society decides that some people deserve to be treated this way—that it is not just inevitable but right to deprive whole categories of people of their humanity—that a crime on the scale of the K.
It is a crime that has been repeated too many times, in too many places, for us to dismiss it with the simple promise of never again. By Elizabeth Kolbert.
The Nazis tried to destroy their death camps so that there would be no evidence of their atrocities. Fifty years later, Auschwitz and the terrible relics it holds are disintegrating, and historians and survivors are now faced with unprecedented questions about how to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.
Beginning a pattern that became typical after the war began, economic considerations had an increasing impact on the selection of sites for concentration camps after Likewise, concentration camp authorities increasingly diverted prisoners from meaningless, backbreaking labor to still backbreaking and dangerous labor in extractive industries, such as stone quarries and coal mines, and construction labor.
After Nazi Germany unleashed World War II in September , vast new territorial conquests and larger groups of potential prisoners led to the rapid expansion of the concentration camp system to the east. The war did not change the original function of the concentration camps as detention sites for the incarceration of political enemies. The climate of national emergency that the conflict granted to the Nazi leaders, however, permitted the SS to expand the functions of the camps.
The concentration camps increasingly became sites where the SS authorities could kill targeted groups of real or perceived enemies of Nazi Germany. They also came to serve as holding centers for a rapidly growing pool of forced laborers used for SS construction projects, SS-commissioned extractive industrial sites, and, by , the production of armaments, weapons, and related goods for the German war effort.
Despite the need for forced labor, the SS authorities continued to deliberately undernourish and mistreat prisoners incarcerated in the concentration camps. Prisoners were used ruthlessly and without regard to safety at forced labor, resulting in high mortality rates.
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Wise — International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. About This Site. Glossary : Full Glossary. Concentration Camps, —39 During the first six years of the Nazi regime, thousands of Germans were detained or confined extra-legally. Key Facts. The understandable response when confronted with injustice is to look for someone to blame. But particularly in liberal democracies, the chains of responsibility can be complex.
Who, for instance, is responsible for the arbitrary imprisonment, torture and slave-labour conditions that migrants and refugees in Libya are subjected to? The immediate answer seems fairly simple: the state officials and local militias, some linked to trafficking networks, who run the detention centres. Thousands of people, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, are imprisoned in a network of these centres where they are regularly subjected to starvation, disease, torture, rape, and forced labour.
But the reason those detention centres exist is because a range of European governments have been trying to get Libya to act as a block on unwanted migration across the Mediterranean for almost 20 years. The system was built with European support, both from national governments and at EU level — first through agreements with the government of Muammar Gaddafi, then, as the country collapsed after he was overthrown by a Nato-backed uprising , a patchwork of arrangements with state officials and local militias.
There is no shortage of information about what happens in Libyan detention centres — and European governments frequently profess their horror at the atrocities committed there. The political consensus in most European countries, including the UK, is that limiting unwanted migration is a reasonable and desirable aim, and large numbers of their citizens have voted in support of it.
When Zygmunt Bauman turned his attention to camps in the 90s, he argued that what characterises violence in our age is distance — not just the physical or geographical distance that technology allows, but the social and psychological distance produced by complex systems in which it seems everybody and nobody is complicit. This, for Bauman, works on three levels. Second, everybody involved has a specific, focused job to perform.
And third, the people affected hardly ever appear fully human to those within the system. W hen something today is described as a concentration camp, it almost always provokes an angry dispute. But condemnation can be a way for governments to shield themselves from criticism of their decisions, and from criticism of the legitimacy of state power itself. Reports of overcrowding, filthy conditions and the denial of due process for asylum claims soon followed, accompanied by measures that seemed intended to make a symbolic display of cruelty, such as the separation of young children from their parents.
Some pointed out, for instance, that Trump was only making modifications to a system built by his predecessors: deportations of undocumented immigrants, for instance, reached their peak under Barack Obama. In , when the British empire went to war against two breakaway Afrikaner republics in South Africa, it set up a network of camps that quickly expanded to detain several hundred thousand people.
Due to poor sanitation, meagre food rations and overcrowding, diseases such as typhoid and measles frequently ripped through the camps; at least 28, white people and 20, black people were killed by this system in just a few years.
But the grounds on which they did so were radically different, as the author Vron Ware has recently argued. But for Hobhouse, who was the first prominent activist to visit South Africa and expose conditions in the camps, British military values and the nationalism that underpinned them were the fundamental problem. She was challenging the legitimacy of state power itself.
The point of historical comparisons should not be to find identical situations — no two events in history are identical — but to alert us to potential dangers in the way states exercise power. The movement calls itself Never Again Action , explicitly drawing on a collective memory of persecution. In his final book, The Drowned and the Saved, the Auschwitz survivor and author Primo Levi reflected on the conditions that had made the Nazi camps possible, and wondered what lessons, if any, could be applied to a world that had moved on.
The unique combination of factors that had unleashed the horror of Nazism was unlikely to return, he thought, but that should not obscure the danger of violence in our own time, or the politicians who seek to wield it. Auschwitz originally was conceived as a concentration camp, to be used as a detention center for the many Polish citizens arrested after Germany annexed the country in These detainees included anti-Nazi activists, politicians, resistance members and luminaries from the cultural and scientific communities.
For one thing, it was situated near the center of all German-occupied countries on the European continent. For another, it was in close proximity to the string of rail lines used to transport detainees to the network of Nazi camps. However, not all those arriving at Auschwitz were immediately exterminated. At its peak of operation, Auschwitz consisted of several divisions. The original camp, known as Auschwitz I, housed between 15, and 20, political prisoners.
Birkenau, the biggest of the Auschwitz facilities, could hold some 90, prisoners. It also housed a group of bathhouses where countless people were gassed to death, and crematory ovens where bodies were burned. The majority of Auschwitz victims died at Birkenau. More than 40 smaller facilities, called subcamps, dotted the landscape and served as slave-labor camps. The largest of these subcamps, Monowitz, also known as Auschwitz III, began operating in and housed some 10, prisoners.
By mid, the majority of those being sent by the Nazis to Auschwitz were Jews. Upon arriving at the camp, detainees were examined by Nazi doctors. Those detainees considered unfit for work, including young children, the elderly, pregnant women and the infirm, were immediately ordered to take showers. However, the bathhouses to which they marched were disguised gas chambers.
Once inside, the prisoners were exposed to Zyklon-B poison gas.
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