Nikolaus Wachsmann

Himmler après avoir rassuré ses auditeurs sur les conditions de vie décentes dans les KL "stricys mais justes",leur parla de leur fonction:"la devise inscrite au-dessus de ces camps est:il y a une voie vers la liberté.Ses jalons sont l'obéissance,la diligence,l'hônneteté,l'ordre,la propreté,la tempérance,la vérité,l'esprit de sacrifice et l'amour de la patrie."

Tout pouvait être résistance puisque tout est interdit.Cependant une définition aussi extensive brouille les frontières entre des actes forts différents.
Devrions-nous employer le même terme pour décrire un prisonnier qui rabotait les munitions allemandes et un autre qui luttait pour sa propre vie,si nécessaire aux dépens des autres?Et même une définition plus étroite de la résistance peut être problématique lorsqu'elle s'applique aux camps car les prisonniers n'avaient aucun espoir d'œuvrer à renverser le régime.

A Sachsenhausen,les prisonniers forgèrent une chansonnette qui tournait en dérision le fameux slogan de Himmler:"il est une voie vers les SS.Ses jalons sont:stupidité,impudence,fausseté,vantardise,dérobade,cruauté,injustice,hypocrisie et alcoolisme."

But these sentences cannot obscure the serious shortcomings of the Allied trials, as basic legal standards were sacrificed in the search for swift sentences. The hasty preparation caused procedural nightmares, including wrongful prosecutions and convictions, while numerous confessions were extracted through improper means. Few of the accused could mount a meaningful defense, either, with some trials lasting no more than a day. Then there was the haphazard selection of defendants, especially among lower-ranking SS captives. Some were quickly sentenced, others waited for trials that never came — not to mention the Nazi doctors and engineers who were whisked away as technical experts by the Allies, despite their implication in KL abuses. 

There were also major inequities in sentencing. Several senior WVHA and IG Farben managers received far milder sentences than ordinary guards and sentries, even though they bore a greater share of the overall responsibility. The timing of trials was crucial here. Initially, Allied judges aimed at strict deterrence and retribution, reflecting the clamor back home for the harsh punishment of KL perpetrators. But by 1947–48, when the former managers were tried, the early outrage had dissipated. As the Cold War turned divided Germany into a strategic ally of both East and West, sentencing for Nazi crimes became more lenient and more defendants were cleared altogether. 

The most troubling aspect of Allied trials was their failure to distinguish between SS officials and prisoner functionaries. From the beginning, the two were often tried together. Unfamiliar with the basic organizational structures of the camps, or unwilling to grasp the many “gray zones” inside, Allied jurists saw Kapos as part of the wider criminal conspiracy (and occasionally as SS members), helping to cement the caricature of Kapos that has endured to this day. This approach led to some extraordinary scenes. In the first Belsen trial, for instance, a Jewish survivor, who had acted for two days as a lowly block elder, was forced to sit in the dock with career SS men like Commandant Kramer. 

Even if one comes to a more positive conclusion about the Allied trials, there is the sobering fact that the great majority of KL perpetrators went unpunished.94 Many cases dealt solely with crimes committed against Allied (or non-German) nationals between 1942 and 1945, letting off a large number of Camp SS officials.

The extralegal detention of social outsiders grew during the mid-1930s. In Prussia, the police arrested more men as professional criminals, focusing on “usual suspects” like burglars and thieves with many previous convictions. In 1935, the police authorities concentrated them in Esterwegen, prompting Inspector Eicke to describe that KL as the most difficult to rule ; by October 1935, it held 476 so-called professional criminals, forming the largest prisoner group. Meanwhile, several other German states adopted the radical Prussian policy and placed criminals into preventive police custody in concentration camps, too. Parallel to the pursuit of criminals, the detention of so-called asocials also continued in the mid-1930s. As before, Nazi officials mainly targeted the destitute. In Bavaria, for example, the political police arrested more than three hundred “beggars and vagabonds” in summer 1936 and sent them to Dachau, in a cynical attempt to smarten up the streets before the Olympics. In addition, the authorities trained their sights on “indecent” individuals (prostitutes).

Prisoners with the green triangle could expect little support from other inmates, whose hostility toward the “BVer,” as they were often called (short for Berufsverbrecher, or professional criminal), sometimes matched that of the SS men. Just like Soviet political prisoners in the faraway Gulag, many political inmates in the KL despised so-called criminals as coarse, cruel, and corrupt — “the dregs of society,” as one of them put it. Such loathing grew from social prejudices against men thought to have been arrested as brutal thugs and from the daily encounters inside the KL, with political prisoners claiming that the new arrivals used their criminal energies against fellow inmates and collaborated with the SS.

The picture of the “criminal greens” has long been shaped by these testimonies of political prisoners. But it requires correction. Even in the late 1930s, the vast majority of so-called professional criminals were property offenders, not violent felons. Also, the “greens” forged no united front against other KL inmates. Of course, some formed friendships and cliques inside, since they often worked together and slept in the same barrack. These bonds appear to have been looser than those among political prisoners, however, since so-called criminals could rarely build upon a shared past or ideological beliefs.Finally, although the tensions between some “red” and “green” prisoners were real, they did not always arise from the latter group’s alleged brutality, but simply from competition for scarce resources, a struggle that would escalate during the war. 

Contrary to the convictions of so many political prisoners, only a few "greens" had been sent to the KL as violent criminals. Even an observer as astute as Primo Levi was wrong to believe that the Nazis had specially selected hardened criminals in prisons to deploy them as Kapos. In fact, most of those detained in the prewar KL had committed minor property crimes, as we have seen, not brutal excesses. And this did not change during the war. Convicted rapists and murderers did not normally end up in concentration camps, but in state prisons, either locked in dark cells, or led to the gallows or guillotine. The mass of “green” KL inmates were still small-time offenders, if they were guilty of any crimes at all. The reputation of these men and women as savage convicts owed less to their criminal record than the dark fantasies of their fellow inmates, in whose imagination petty criminals mutated into serial murderers. Wild rumors became fact, as the violence of some Kapos was explained by their imagined homicidal past. 

The companies, in turn, were in charge of technical supervision during work, and paid for the construction and maintenance of the compound, which had to conform to strict SS standards. Firms also paid daily rates for prisoner labor, revised in October 1942. In Germany, the daily price for each qualified male prisoner now stood at six Reichsmark, and four Reichsmark for an unskilled one. In occupied eastern Europe, including Auschwitz, the daily rate was reduced to four and three Reichsmark respectively, presumably because less output was expected from the even more ravaged prisoners. There was no such distinction between skilled and unskilled labor in the case of female prisoners, who were regarded as less able workers ; instead, there was a flat rate similar to the one for unskilled men. Contrary to the claims of some historians, the SS benefited from most payments only in a roundabout way. Since the prisoners were regarded as the property of the state, most of the income from their labor — perhaps around two hundred million Reichsmark in 1943, rising to around four to five hundred million the following year —
officially went into the coffers of the Reich (though this helped to finance the state-sponsored KL system).

If there was little immediate financial gain for the Camp SS, why did it lease inmates to the war industry ? For a start, the SS remained subject to outside influence, and as the demand for labor grew, so did the pressure (above all from Speer) to surrender prisoners for war production. But the SS also expected advantages from its collaboration with industry. In addition to tangible benefits, such as the preferential allocation of weapons for SS troops, Himmler, who never quite abandoned his dream of an SS arms complex, hoped that working with industry would enhance the expertise of his own managers. And then there was power and prestige. With labor becoming an increasingly precious resource, the SS could present the KL as vital cogs in the Nazi war economy ; the larger the SS army of forced workers, the greater its potential influence. This was one reason, no doubt, behind the strenuous efforts by Pohl and his WVHA managers in 1942–43 to extend the overall number of prisoners in the concentration camps, as well as their output. 

But even the most high-profile projects launched with SS involvement made little difference to the progress of the war. Despite the investment of hundreds of millions of Reichsmark and the abuse of tens of thousands of slave laborers, the huge IG Farben complex under construction in Auschwitz was never completed and failed to produce any synthetic rubber or fuel. Similarly, few projects of the Geilenberg Staff went past the initial stage. The first factories of project “Desert,” provisionally operational from early spring 1945, turned out an oily sludge that was useless for the remaining German tanks. And Dora never became the high-tech underground factory of Himmler’s dreams, either. The number of the much vaunted V2s manufactured, around six thousand by spring 1945, remained well behind schedule. And although the rockets killed thousands of civilians abroad and proved a potent propaganda tool inside Germany, their strategic impact was negligible. The uniqueness of the weapon lay elsewhere, as the historian Michael J. Neufeld has pointed out : “More people died producing it than died from being hit by it.” This verdict sums up the SS involvement in the war economy as a whole. Its main output was not fuel or planes or guns, but the misery and death of its prisoners.

The fact that many of the hardened SS killers were anti-Semites, and many of their victims Jews, has led some historians to describe the spring 1945 death transports as the last stage of the Holocaust : with the gas chambers closed, Jewish prisoners were now exterminated by other methods. There is no doubt that Jews made up a large proportion of KL prisoners on these death marches — somewhere between one-third and half — and a large proportion of the dead. And yet, the SS made no attempt to systematically kill all Jews during evacuations. This time, there were no genocidal orders from above ; on the contrary, Himmler talked about Jews as hostages, which was one reason why they were more likely than most prisoners to be moved out of camps as the Allies approached. During the ensuing death transports, Jews were not treated fundamentally differently from the other prisoners. They often marched together and shared a similar fate. In fact, with prisoner numbers and uniforms mixed up or missing, and many Jews using the confusion of the final weeks — when files were lost or destroyed — to conceal their identities, it was often impossible to tell them apart from other prisoner groups anyway. In the end, survival depended primarily on luck and strength.

Even when the SS specifically selected Jews for separate transports, it was not necessarily as a prelude to mass extermination. Many escorts of the train of “exchange Jews” that departed from Bergen-Belsen on April 10, 1945 were demoralized elderly ex-soldiers, and they largely left the prisoners in peace. Some shared food and cigarettes with them, while the transport leader tried to find additional supplies along the way. At times, the guards even allowed prisoners to leave the train and wander alone through the countryside to search for something edible — utterly unthinkable during earlier KL evacuations.

All this leads to a crucial conclusion : the main purpose of the KL evacuations was not the murder of Jews or other prisoners. Although mass death through exhaustion, hunger, disease, and bullets was an inevitable result, it was not the end itself. When it came to mass extermination, the SS still had more effective means at its disposal, as it demonstrated to devastating effect during occasional last-minute massacres.

The international committees were dominated by former political prisoners, who would shape the memory of the camps for years to come ; most stood on the left of the political spectrum, leading to enthusiastic celebrations of the Day of Labor (May 1) inside the liberated camps. By contrast, social outsiders had no voice at all, and Jews were marginalized, too. Neither Allied commanders nor inmate leaders acknowledged them as a distinct group, at least not initially. In Dachau and Buchenwald, Jewish survivors had to fight for a place on the international committees. “We demand that Jewish affairs are dealt with by Jewish representatives,” a young Pole wrote in his Buchenwald diary on April 16, 1945. 

This was not the only clash between inmates under the frayed banner of international solidarity. Unresolved political conflicts poisoned the atmosphere, and would continue to do so in Cold War Europe, with entrenched battles between survivor groups over commemoration. Even more pronounced were the tensions between the national groups, yet another legacy of the KL. Nationality became the main marker of the post-liberation inmate community, with separate barracks, organizations, and newspapers ; during the May 1 celebration, most former prisoners marched under their own country’s flag. Conflicts soon flared up over old resentments and new problems, though they rarely turned as violent as in Ebensee, where Soviet and Polish survivors apparently shot at each other.

Just as there had been prisoner hierarchies in the Nazi period, there were survivor hierarchies after the war. From the start, social outsiders — including homosexuals and Gypsies — were pushed to the bottom, by prevailing prejudices and also by former political prisoners determined to dissociate themselves from more unpopular victim groups. As early as 1946, some “asocial” and “criminal” survivors joined together to protest against their marginalization in a short-lived journal of their own. Suffering in the camps, they announced, should not be measured by the color of a survivor’s triangle. But they were not heard. Social outsiders were widely excluded from compensation and commemoration, and it took decades before they were recognized as KL victims. 

German police leaders also extended the attack on “asocials” to men regarded as racially suspect. In his orders for the June 1938 raids, Reinhard Heydrich specifically targeted “criminal” Jews. In addition, he picked out men described as Gypsies, who had a criminal record or “have shown no liking for regular work.” Because of their often non-normative lifestyle, the small minority of so-called Gypsies (today frequently referred to as Sinti or Roma) had long faced official harassment in Germany. State-sponsored discrimination escalated dramatically in the Third Reich, especially from the late 1930. There was no single driving force behind the all-out assault on “asocials” in 1938. Nazi leaders were attracted to the chilling vision of the police as a doctor that could cleanse Germany of all deviants and degenerates, a vision increasingly inflected with racism. Meanwhile, regional police officials and others involved in the raids — in German welfare offices and labor exchanges — used the mass raids as a pragmatic opportunity to eliminate men long seen as nuisances and threats, including alleged benefit cheats, welfare clients resistant to state control, persistent beggars, and criminal suspects who could not be legally prosecuted. So enthusiastic were regional police officials about rounding up social outsiders that they far exceeded the minimum arrest targets set by Heydrich for the June 1938 raids.

Economic factors were important, too, even more so than before. The charge of “work shyness” had already featured prominently in early campaigns against social outsiders in the Third Reich. Not only were the “work-shy” seen as biologically inferior, as many scholars and scientists insisted at the time, they failed one of the major demands made on national comrades—the performance of productive labor. The Nazi leaders’ desire to force “work-shy” men to work gained added urgency as the German economy was gearing up for war. As Reinhard Heydrich put it, the regime “does not tolerate asocial persons avoiding work and thereby sabotaging the [1936] Four-Year Plan.“

The Third Reich was a racial state and many historians believe that for Nazi leaders, the primacy of racism remained unalloyed to the end. Applying this conclusion to the concentration camps, it has been argued that the rigid prisoner hierarchies, based on Nazi ideology, continued to determine the survival of inmates, even as the regime made a last final frantic bid to win the war. Recent research paints a more complex picture, however, suggesting that economic pressures started to dilute the full impact of Nazi racial policy, at least temporarily, as the mobilization of the KL system for total war gathered pace.

The partial “erosion of the ideological,” as the historian Jens-Christian Wagner calls it, was evident in many satellite camps. But there were limits to the ideological flexibility of the SS : economic pressures did not turn prisoner hierarchies upside down. German inmates stayed near the top of the pecking order, while Jewish prisoners largely remained at the bottom, and for them, forced labor still often meant death. The lethal exploitation of Jews in satellite camps was already well established in occupied Eastern Europe, and from spring 1944, in the wake of the mass deportations to the German heartland, such SS abuse spread westward. In many mixed KL, the authorities singled out Jews for the worst treatment. Also, senior SS officials did not always send Jews to satellites with the worst conditions. The allocation of slave laborers was often more haphazard, driven not by racial thinking but by the need to fill short-term vacancies.