Citation de Sodapop_Curtis
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.
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.