KL: Une histoire des camps de concentration nazis

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.

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.

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."

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.