CONCENTRATION CAMPS.

Concentration camps are sites for the forcible detention and isolation of large numbers of people outside judicial control or international conventions. They tend to be set up in periods of war or internal turmoil and, in contrast to prisoner-of-war camps, are used to confine civilians, usually people regarded by those in power as (potential) opponents or as a threat, and often with a view to their eventual removal. The establishment of concentration camps is linked to the modern bureaucratic-militaristic state and its attempts to maintain the dominance of the ruling elites and to create some homogeneity. The term is often used synonymously for the camps set up by the Nazis first in Germany and later in the occupied territories of Europe. In fact, the origins of concentrations camps go back much further, and conversely, not all the camps established by the Nazis were of the concentration camp type.

EARLY CONCENTRATION CAMPS

The military internment camps used in 1838 by the U.S. Army mostly in Tennessee to detain several thousand Cherokee Indians before their forced resettlement under the Indian Removal Act can be seen as early examples of the kind of detention centers that later became known as concentration camps. The term itself was first coined in the Third Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898), when the Spanish governor, General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, ordered the Cuban rural populations to relocate to "campos de concentración" to avoid being treated as insurgents. The British army used the same term for the camps they set up during the Second Boer War (1899–1902) for Boer women and children as well as their black workers to cut off civilian support for the Boer forces.

Common features of all these camps were that people were detained there as members of a specific group rather than as individuals, that this was done on the basis of an administrative act rather than as the result of a judicial process, and that there was usually no procedure to challenge the internment. The human rights of those internees were ignored and violated. Treatment was harsh and often arbitrary, and most camps were characterized by overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, malnourishment, and, as a consequence, diseases and a high mortality rate.

War and upheaval in the early twentieth century brought internment camps of this type also to Europe. During World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire used them in its Balkan border regions to confine Serbs and other (pro-Serbian) Slavs who were regarded as potentially disloyal and destabilizing. The largest of these camps was at Doboj in northern Bosnia, which held some forty-five thousand people between 1915 und 1917. In Finland, after the Civil War of 1918, the victorious "Whites" (nonsocialists) set up camps to confine tens of thousands of people who were suspected of belonging to the "Reds" and seeking a Soviet-style revolution. Two camps run by the Prussian state government in Germany between 1921 and 1923 to detain "unwanted" foreigners until their deportation were officially called "concentration camps." Many of those detained there were Jews from eastern Europe.

CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN NAZI GERMANY

It was the Nazis who gave the concept concentration camp its definitive and most notorious shape. Under their regime, concentration camps became a central element of the repressive system and the racial state. The Nazi concentration camps imparted to the twentieth century some of its defining images that achieved almost iconic character, such as the gate and ramp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, or the skeletal survivors behind the barbed-wire fences of Bergen-Belsen.

The system of Nazi concentration camps started out in an ad hoc and widely improvised way. An emergency presidential decree of 28 February 1933 following the burning of the Reichstag laid the foundations for imprisonment without trial outside the regular penal system. Subsequently, thousands of political opponents of the Nazis, most of them communists, social democrats, and trade unionists, were taken into so-called protective custody (Schutzhaft). Camps to hold them were set up and run, often in administrative rivalry, by the SS (Schutzstaffel), the SA (Sturmabteilung), the political police, and other local and regional state agencies. The first SS camp was established on the order of the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945), on 21 March 1933 at Dachau near Munich, but it was only in 1934 that all "protective custody" camps came under the control of the SS. Himmler appointed Theodor Eicke (1892–1943), the commandant of Dachau, as head of the inspectorate of concentration camps and SS guard units (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager und SS-Wachverbände) and ordered him to reorganize and standardize the concentration camp system. Apart from Dachau, all the other camps were disbanded in the mid-1930s and new purpose-built concentration camps, modeled on Dachau, were set up to take their place.

With the consolidation of their rule, the Nazi regime placed not only political opponents in concentration camps but also social outsiders whose nonstandard behavior was seen as unacceptable in the racially pure and socially regulated "national community" (Volksgemeinschaft). They included beggars, vagrants, the so-called work-shy, alcoholics, people with a string of criminal convictions, pimps, prostitutes, homosexuals, Jehovah's witnesses, and Sinti and Roma. From 1938, especially following the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) pogroms of 9–10 November 1938, Jews, too, were incarcerated in concentration camps.

After the outbreak of war, the number of concentration camp prisoners soared. The largest intake were now Jews and political prisoners, most of the latter suspected members of the national resistance movements against the Nazi occupation. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union, tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war also ended up in concentration camps. In January 1945, the SS registered almost 715,000 concentration camp prisoners, the highest total number at any one time; less than 10 percent of them were Germans.

Concentration camps were only those camps that came under the Inspektion der Konzentrationslager. The Nazis still established a multitude of special detention camps where conditions were similar but which were outside this administrative and organizational system, such as labor education camps, forced labor camps, forced ghettos, police imprisonment camps, transit camps, and civil internment camps. Some of these were open to inspection by representatives of international organizations such as the Red Cross. Special cases were the extermination camps Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, which were set up to implement the "Final Solution." They were not part of the regular concentration camp system either, but there was considerable overlap, as two concentration camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek-Lublin, also had gas chambers installed.

Labor deployment

Hard work was an important element of concentration camp imprisonment from the very beginning and was intended to discipline and drill the inmates. In the early years most of the work that they were forced to do served no meaningful purpose, but from the mid-1930s economic considerations gained greater prominence among the higher echelons of the SS. The concentration camp prisoners were increasingly recognized as an asset that the SS could exploit to their own advantage by deploying them for menial tasks in the the ambitious civil and military construction projects that the regime embarked on.

During the war, deployment shifted from construction to the armaments industries, and concentration camp prisoners became part of the reservoir workforce used to replace the German workers drafted into the Wehrmacht. Most were hired out to state and private firms in need of manpower, which in the last years of the war comprised nearly all prominent German firms. The concentration camp system was now an important element of the huge economic empire of the SS. In order to coordinate their economic interests more effectively, the SS Business Administration Main Office (Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt, WVHA) was established in early 1942, and the inspectorate for concentration camps became part of it as its Section (Amtsgruppe) D. Subcamps of the existing concentration camps were established near those plants that employed large numbers of prisoners, and as a result the concentration camp system became a vast network spanning much of Europe. In 1945 there were some 1,200 satellite camps (Außenlager) and work commandos (Außenkommandos), which together held more prisoners than the 25 main concentration camps (Hauptlager), whose main task had become one of distributing prisoners to where they were needed.

However, despite their economic importance especially in the final years of the war, the deployment of concentration camp prisoners was not ruled by rational considerations of productivity or cost-efficiency, but work always remained primarily a means to humiliate, terrorize, and ultimately annihilate the prisoners. Apart from few exceptions, they were put to work under horrific conditions and driven until their strength was totally depleted in a system perhaps best described as "terror work" (Sofsky). In the last stage, most of those deployed in underground factories such as the one producing the V2 weapons, did not last longer than a few weeks.

Treatment of concentration camp prisoners

In the early years of Nazi rule, conditions were not unlike those in the pre-Nazi concentration camps. Many prisoners were released after a period of detention, and there were no systematic killings. Deaths that did occur were usually the result of abuse and maltreatment of individual prisoners by their SS guards.

However, from the beginning, imprisonment in concentration camps was meant to break the inmates as individuals. Various measures were used to achieve this, and they became more brutal as time went on. Prisoners had to give up all personal possessions, had their hair shaved off, were made to wear a special outfit that identified them as concentration camp prisoners (the "zebra uniform"), and had their names replaced by identification numbers (which were later tattooed onto their arms). Daily roll calls, often lasting for hours, and severe punishment for even the slightest violation of the camp rules set by the SS added to the rule of terror and unpredictability that characterized these camps.

Rising prisoner numbers meant that conditions in the camps deteriorated markedly and death rates rose sharply. With the outbreak of war, concentration camps were not just sites of mass-scale confinement but became also sites of murder—not as individual acts of arbitrary violence but as deliberate policy. This included the execution of prisoners without trial and the killing of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) in Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Auschwitz concentration camps. A number of prisoners were subjected to medical experimentation before they were killed. In addition, there was what has been called "indirect mass annihilation," the deliberate policy of induced starvation, brutal treatment, and total physical exhaustion through "terror work" eventually leading to death. This policy reached its climax when the camps in the east were hurriedly vacated before the advancing Red Army and the prisoners herded to camps in the Reich where those who had not died during these transports or marches were left to perish. The best known of these receiving camps is Bergen-Belsen near Hannover, which became an enduring symbol of the final phase of the Nazi concentration camps because of the photographs and film footage taken by the British when they liberated the camp in April 1945.

Prisoners were classified according to why they had been sent to the camps, and from 1936 they were given different colored badges, mostly triangles, which they had to wear on their clothes; for Jews it was the yellow Star of David. The treatment of the prisoners varied considerably according to their category. German criminal and political prisoners generally held the highest social position and had the best chances of getting preferential work assignments or positions of supervising or even commanding other inmates. The Jews were at the lowest rung of the concentration camp hierarchy, and the treatment that they received was worse than that of any other group. After the outbreak of war, their chances of survival were by far the lowest. Located only marginally higher on the social scale were homosexuals, Sinti and Roma, and Russians. Some of the prisoner-functionaries in the camps executed their task with brutality similar to the SS, whereas others tried to use their positions to help their fellow prisoners. The dividing line between perpetrators and victims often became blurred: "a grey zone, with ill-defined outlines which both separate and join the two camps" (Levi, p. 27).

Despite all the attempts of the SS to dehumanize the concentration camp prisoners and isolate them, something like a "camp society" did emerge in most camps. This was easiest in the early period of Nazi rule, when the process of developing solidarity was helped by the fact that most of those imprisoned were political opponents of the Nazis, but even during the final stages of the war, when conditions became increasingly unbearable, testimonies of survivors cite many examples of mutual support. There were also attempts of small groups to engage in resistance activities.

It is impossible to give a precise number of the people who perished in the concentration camps; estimates range from 700,000 to as many as 1,100,000 out of a total of some 1.7 million. Most of these deaths were not the result of outright executions but of the conditions of the imprisonment. In addition, up to three million Jews plus tens of thousands of non-Jews were systematically killed in the extermination camps, largely by gas.

The legacy of the Nazi concentration camps

Those who survived the concentration camps kept the scars of their physical and psychological wounds for years, most of them until their death, and even the second generation was affected by this experience. There were also widespread feelings of guilt over having survived while so many others had perished. Many perpetrators never faced prosecution for the crimes they committed. The Allies tried the upper echelons of Nazi and military officials at Nuremberg, but most of the "ordinary" SS men and women returned to normal life after the end of the war. Postwar Germany, west and east, had problems facing up to the Nazi past. There was a general will not to remember too closely, and while cemeteries at the sites of the former concentration camps were cared for, it was a considerable time before proper memorials were set up that provided information on the crimes committed there. It was only after German unification in 1990 that a wider discourse opened up about the place of the Nazi concentration camps in public memory, and how what is basically unrepresentable can be remembered.

CONCENTRATION CAMPS OUTSIDE NAZI GERMANY

Just as the Nazis did not invent concentration camps, they were not the only ones to use them during this period. In the Soviet Union, camps to detain mainly political opponents date back to the 1920s, and this practice still continued after 1945: the so-called gulag system, as it became known after the branch of the Soviet security service NKVD. During World War II, members of ethnic and other minorities whose loyalties were doubted were also subjected to camp imprisonment or relocation to closed settlements.

In the Spanish civil war (1936–1939), the antirepublican forces led by General Francisco Franco set up concentration camps, such as San Pablo de Cardeña near Burgos, to incarcerate members of the prorepublican International Brigades who were not immediately executed after their capture. When prorepublican refugees from Spain entered France in early 1939, they were placed in special internment camps, the largest of which was Gurs at the foothills of the Pyrenees. The Vichy government of unoccupied France retained Gurs after 1940 and used it for the detention of political opponents and, increasingly, Jews, many of whom were handed over to the Germans. While conditions in all these camps were appalling, they were broadly in line with pre-Nazi concentration camps.

This was different from the camps established during World War II in Mussolini's Italy, by the pro-Nazi Ustaša régime in Croatia, and by Romania under Marshal Ion Antonescu, mainly in Transnistria. These were run on lines similar to the Nazi concentration camps, although they never achieved the same kind of murderous "efficiency." One of the most notorious camps was in Jasenovac, Croatia, where tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Sinti and Roma were murdered.

CONCENTRATION CAMPS AFTER 1945

The end of the Nazi regime did not mean the end of large-scale and arbitrary internment in camps established only for this purpose. Soviet military government placed political opponents of the new regime in their zone of occupation in Germany in "special camps" (Sonderlager), often set up, as in Buchenwald, at the recently liberated Nazi concentration camps. In Poland and Czechoslovakia, the ethnic German populations were rounded up after the end of the war, and many of them were confined in camps before their forced resettlement into what remained of Germany. Following their successful coup in 1967, the Greek military junta interned thousands of political opponents whom they suspected of "leftist" sympathies.

All these camps were detention camps where people were confined as members of specific political or ethnic groups and without proper judicial process. However, there has been disagreement over whether they could by right be called concentration camps, not least in the light of the specific connotation that this term obtained during the Nazi period. As a result, more descriptive terms, such as labor or detention camps, have usually been used to avoid an immediate Nazi association. Camps outside Europe were more readily branded as concentration camps, such as the so-called reeducation camps set up in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot seized power in 1976.

In the post–Cold War period, there seems to be a gradual return to the use of the term in the somewhat wider sense of pre-1933. There was broad agreement that the camps set up by all the warring ethnic groups during the collapse of Yugoslavia, and in particular during the Bosnian War of 1992–1995, constituted concentration camps, with the abuses against the internees, the purposeful killings, and the conscious intent of ethnic cleansing. However, it needed film footage from the Bosnian Serb–run Logor Trnopolje camp in northern Bosnia to galvanize the international community into active intervention in this conflict. The pictures were so effective because they showed Muslim and Croat prisoners emaciated and behind barbed wire, which immediately evoked the scenes of Bergen-Belsen after its liberation in April 1945. The fact that they shook the world in a way that other pictures of human suffering in such camps during this war did not showed yet again the long shadow that the Nazi concentration camps cast over the twentieth century and beyond.

See alsoAuschwitz-Birkenau; Buchenwald; Dachau; Forced Labor; Genocide; Gulag; Holocaust; Yugoslavia.

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Rainer Schulze