![]() ![]() system, during its twelve years of existence, included twenty-seven main camps and more than a thousand subcamps. This system of “working towards the Fuhrer,” as it was called by Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw, was clearly in evidence when it came to the concentration camps. Rival power bases in the Party and the German state competed to carry out what they believed to be Hitler’s wishes. ![]() Though we tend to think of Hitler’s Germany as a highly regimented dictatorship, in practice Nazi rule was chaotic and improvisatory. When these forms of dehumanization were combined, and amplified to the maximum by ideology and war, the result was the Konzentrationlager, or K.L. Over the several phases of their existence, the Nazi camps took on the aspects of all of these, so that prisoners were treated simultaneously as inmates to be corrected, enemies to be combatted, and workers to be exploited. Indeed, it’s possible to think of the camps as what happens when you cross three disciplinary institutions that all societies possess-the prison, the army, and the factory. Reading Wachsmann’s deeply researched, groundbreaking history of the entire camp system makes clear that Dachau and Buchenwald were the products of institutional and ideological forces that we can understand, perhaps all too well. What remains as a justification is the future: the determination never again to allow something like the Nazi camps to exist.Īnd for that purpose it is necessary not to think of the camps simply as a hellscape. If it is to exercise sympathy or pay a debt to memory, then it quickly becomes clear that the exercise is hopeless, the debt overwhelming: there is no way to feel as much, remember as much, imagine as much as the dead justly demand. If it is merely to revel in the grotesque, then learning about this evil is itself a species of evil, a further exploitation of the dead. And such sights raise the question of why, exactly, we read about the camps. It is very hard, maybe impossible, to imagine being one of those men, still less one of those infants. These sights, like the truck full of bodies, are not beyond belief-we know that they were true-but they are, in some sense, beyond imagination. Their hands, too, were full of excrement and they screamed and rubbed their dirty hands across their faces.” with excrement running out of their trousers. Wachsmann quotes a prisoner at Dachau who saw a transport of men afflicted by dysentery arrive at the camp: “We saw dozens . . . Helm devotes a chapter to Ravensbrück’s Kinderzimmer, or “children’s room,” where inmates who came to the camp pregnant were forced to abandon their babies the newborns were left to die of starvation or be eaten alive by rats. And, certainly, both his book and Helm’s are full of the kind of details that ordinarily appear only in Dantesque visions. To write the history of such an institution, as Nikolaus Wachsmann sets out to do in another new book, “KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), might seem impossible, like writing the history of Hell. They have ceased to be ordinary place names- Buchenwald, after all, means simply “beech wood”-and become portals to a terrible other dimension. The very names of the camps-Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz-have the sound of a malevolent incantation. There have been many atrocities committed before and since, yet to this day, thanks to those images, the Nazi concentration camp stands as the ultimate symbol of evil. The true extent of Nazi barbarity became known to the world in part through the documentary films made by Allied forces after the liberation of other German camps. The sight of a truck full of dead bodies was so outrageous, so out of scale with ordinary experience, that “if we recount that one day, we said to each other, nobody would believe us.” The only way to make the scene credible would be to record it: “If one day someone makes a film they must film this scene. Talking, decades later, to the historian and journalist Sarah Helm, whose new book, “Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women” (Doubleday), recounts the stories of dozens of the camp’s inmates, Le Porz says that her reaction was simple disbelief. And it lifts up and it tips out a whole pile of corpses.” These were the bodies of Ravensbrück inmates who had died doing slave labor in the many satellite camps, and they were now being returned for cremation. “There was a lorry,” Le Porz recalled, “that suddenly arrives and it turns around and reverses towards us. One night in the autumn of 1944, two Frenchwomen-Loulou Le Porz, a doctor, and Violette Lecoq, a nurse-watched as a truck drove in through the main gates of Ravensbrück, the Nazi concentration camp for women. Prisoners break up clay for the brickworks at Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, in 1939. ![]()
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