This collection of essays surveys, condenses, and translates into English the important new literature on the Nazi concentration camps. The general message is that the history of the camps was more complex than usually assumed, and that the perspectives and methodologies of the historian must be more subtle and diverse in turn. This is a very important book and deserves to be on the shelf of every scholarly library.
Nikolaus Wachsmann begins the collection by providing an overview of the development of the camps, which changed profoundly over a decade. Indeed change was “built into the system.” Perhaps the most “terrifying strength” was its ability to adapt and reinvent itself (p. 35). The concentration camp personnel, or the “perpetrators,” is the subject of Karin Orth's chapter. These were very heterogeneous: men and women; elderly and very young men; Germans and non-Germans; rank-and-file sentries and SS leaders; Protestants, Catholics, and other religious believers; ideologues and army conscripts; some who served only a few weeks and others who served the full twelve years of National Socialism; sadistic killers and others who treated inmates comparatively humanely. But through their shared duties and professional socialization, these men “turned a group consensus into murderous reality . . . that ‘criminals’ and ‘asocials’ were to be ‘kept safe’ in the concentration camps, that ill and debilitated prisoners were a ‘burden’ to be disposed of, that ‘Russian commissars’ were to be ‘executed,’ that Jews were to be ‘eradicated’” (p. 54). Falk Pringel's chapter focuses on the inmates' “Social life in an unsocial environment” (p. 58), including an overview of the possibilities and chances for inmates to survive their incarceration, what the specific conditions were, and how particular groups of prisoners reacted. A basic tension existed between the solidarity of all camp inmates and rivalry for the resources needed to survive between distinct subsets, defined by race, religion, political ideology, nationality, etc. Pringel pays special attention to the form and function of the “camp language” (p. 70) that developed and the special inmate commandos who were directly involved in the extermination process.
Jane Caplan surveys and supports efforts to integrate the concept of gender into analysis of the camps. This is necessary because, for many, if not most histories, the camps were simply “male”—everything else is treated as an exception. This includes paying more attention to topics such as homosexuality, women, and prostitution, but Caplan argues that historians should go further and reexamine the majority heterosexual male population in a gendered light. The public face of the camps during the Third Reich, that is, what Germans saw and could see about them, is the subject of Karola Fings's chapter. Despite the postwar claims to have known nothing about anything, public knowledge of the camps and of what happened in them was in fact both pervasive and profound. This was deliberate, for the camps could intimidate the general population only if they knew something about them. Fings surveys the literature that demonstrates such public knowledge, but goes further to analyze the concentration camps as a community enterprise—for towns actually competed for new camps in anticipation of economic benefits that would follow. Rather than Germans not seeing the camps, Fings also asks why they looked away. Of course fear played a role here, but also a considerable willingness to accept forced labor as necessary for the war effort and that some people—because of race, religion, or other circumstances—deserved their fate.
Jens-Christian Wagner's chapter examines work and extermination in the camps. For a long time, the literature on this subject was influenced by an apparent contradiction between economic targets and the ideological project of mass murder. As Wagner demonstrates, a detailed and deep understanding of this labor and SS practices reveals that no such contradiction existed. Forced labor evolved from punishment to exploitation. During the second half of the war, when Germany was forced to restructure economic production, forced labor had to increase and become more productive. The relationship between the SS and German industry also changed over time, and not always in the way the SS would have preferred. Initial SS demands that production had to take place within the camps were relaxed as more and more satellite camps were set up throughout Germany. In practice, the apparent contradiction “was limited solely to the question of how quickly a prisoner died” (p. 141). Most prisoners passed through a continuous series of selections in the camps, which, step by step with their declining strength, led them to be sent to the production commandos, the construction commandos, and finally the dying zones of the camps. In this way the SS and the enterprises that worked with it developed a system of forced labor that largely overcame the contradictions between work and extermination.
As Dieter Pohl points out, the respective historiographies of the Holocaust and the camps have developed along two separate paths. Most of the Jewish victims were killed immediately upon arrival in Auschwitz or Majdanek. More than 400,000 Jews were held as prisoners of German concentration camps in the official sense. Thus Jews constituted a minority of the prisoners, but the majority of those murdered in the concentration camps. It is important to recognize that the policy of the Nazi leadership toward Jews changed over time. Until 1939-41, Jews were to be forced to emigrate; between 1939 and 1942, they were deported and forced into ghettos; from the autumn of 1941 onward, Jews were generally meant to be murdered. But as early as 1942 this policy was reconsidered and a minority of Jews was kept alive as a workforce and a “dual system of exploitation and mass murder was established in both camps” (p. 162).
The history of the camps is full of tragedy and horror, but the very last murderous chapter, the death marches, has not been given the attention it deserves. As the camps were evacuated, inmates were forced to march, with any attempt at escape or any inability to continue punished by immediate death. As Daniel Blatman describes it, the death marches must be seen, not only as the final chapter in the history of Nazi genocide, but also as the last chapter in the history of the Nazi concentration camps. No single, explicit, comprehensive order about the murder of camp prisoners in the event that a camp could not be evacuated is known to have been given. Instead, a combination of local instructions from various officials created “an infrastructure for the murder” (p. 175). These “local murder orders” effectively handed off the decision to eliminate prisoners to those who dealt with them directly, the camp guards and staff who escorted them along the evacuation path. The accounts of these camp guards convey the perception that they had been abandoned to their fate together with the groups of exhausted prisoners, who were endangering their ability to retreat quickly from an enemy who was threatening to gain ground on them. But there was another group of murderers, the Volksturm, older people unfit for military service, who were supposed to stop the advance of the Allied armies at the local level. But they saw the concentration camp prisoners who were circulating near their homes as the “real enemy, whom they regarded as a truly existential menace” (p. 177). Thus in the last months of the Third Reich, the extermination process had become completely decentralized and the “ethnic or racial specificity of the victims as objects of the ideology that guided the art of murder also became blurred” (p. 182).
Since the camps have become such a powerful symbol in our culture, it is fitting that the collection ends with an essay by Harold Marcuse on the afterlife of the camps, how they have and have not been commemorated. Immediately after the war the concentration camps were put to different purposes: (1) a “punitive pedagogy” (p. 186), whereby local civilians were forced to view the camps and help to clean up; (2) as a “medical and recuperative facility,” where the survivors were nursed back to health for a period of several weeks to a few months; (3) the victorious allies used the larger camps to imprison large numbers of Germans who fell into the “automatic arrest” categories until their trials or denazification hearings could be held; (4) commemoration of the heroism or the suffering of the victims; and (5) many camps, including the vast majority of satellite camps, were simply abandoned and ignored for decades. As Marcuse describes, there was considerable resistance to commemoration. Only when survivors made a strong effort, and especially when this overlapped with the interests of the state, was this successful.
A debate has raged on and off for decades whether the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust can be “historicized,” whether it can ever be treated like any other period or event in history, or whether it remains in some sense unique. Nothing gets to the heart of this debate more than the concentration camps set up inside and outside Germany during the Third Reich. The essays in this excellent collection demonstrate that historians can and indeed are moving toward this goal of understanding what happened in an objective sense, while not losing sight of the extreme and perhaps unique moral dimensions of it.
