‘I saw in Africa what the Germans are capable of’: representing genocide in Anouar Benmalek’s Fils du Shéol (2015)

During World War II, Maria Stromberger (Figure 1) was employed, by her own choice, as the Oberschwester (head nurse) in the SS (Schutzstaffel, Nazi security Staff) infirmary of Auschwitz, one of Nazi Germany's most infamous concentration camps. While there, she risked her life numerous times to save Polish inmates from torture and death. For this, she was made an honorary member of the Austrian Union of Former Prisoners of Concentration Camps,1 but she has otherwise received little recognition for her bravery. Auschwitz has come to symbolize the extermination camps of Nazi Germany. It was both the largest concentration camp and the largest killing center.2 It is located on the outskirts of Oswiecim, Poland, 50 kilometers (km) southwest of Krakow and 286 km from Warsaw.3 The idea to build camp in Poland began in 1940 by the SS and the district police because there was no facility adequate to hold the large number of Polish resistance prisoners. The first buildings of what was to become the Auschwitz concentration camp were fourteen one-story army barracks and eight two-story buildings built during World War I as a seasonal emigrant workers' station for the national employment bureau.4 When the decision was made to enlarge this complex to concentration camp, 300 Jewish residents of the town of Oswiecim were brought to the site to prepare the foundations for additional buildings.5 In May 1940, thirty German political prisoners were brought to Auschwitz to become functionaries (minor officials) in the camp hierarchy. These men received the first Auschwitz prisoners' serial numbers. The first transport of 728 Polish prisoners arrived on 14 June 1940. Auschwitz became the main concentration camp in Poland and eventually covered 40 square km. By March 1941, there were 10,900 prisoners, most of them Poles. Construction continued with the idea of eventually housing 30,000 prisoners in the main camp and establishing second camp (Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II) 3 km away for 100,000 more prisoners. By 1943, the main camp, Auschwitz I, held 30,000 prisoners. Construction began on Birkenau in October 1941, with much of the work done by women who were going to be imprisoned there.6 Portions of Birkenau consisted of long wooden buildings originally designed as stables. With the addition of Birkenau, the prisoner population of Auschwitz was 80,839 in January 1944.7 Auschwitz eventually was comprised of three separate camps-Auschwitz I, Birkenau (Auschwitz II), and Monowitz (Auschwitz HI)-and became the largest extermination center for the implementation of the final solution,8 the Nazi plan to kill all Jews. The SS Revier Eventually there were several hospital blocks for prisoners in Auschwitz I and Birkenau, and the Revier (infirmary) for SS personnel located directly across from Crematorium I in Auschwitz I. The SS Revier was well-equipped field hospital, staffed by SS physicians, orderlies, and, beginning in 1942, Red Cross nurses.1' From the SS Revier, one was able to look through the windows and see the gas chamber and Crematorium I (three furnaces capable of burning 340 bodies per day10). The nursing personnel of the Revier were able to see the trucks bringing the prisoners to the gas chamber and the SS men climbing on the roof to drop the Zyclon B (hydrogen cyanide) that was released into the gas chamber to kill all those inside.11 A former prisoner who was assigned to work in the gas chamber described the scene from hell on earth: Two of the SS men took up positions on either side of the entrance door. Shouting and wielding their truncheons, like beaters at hunt, the remaining SS men chased the naked men, women and children into the large room inside the crematorium. All that was left in the yard were the pathetic heaps of clothing which we had to gather together to clear the yard for the second half of the transport. We removed suit-cases, rucksacks, clothes and shoes and piled them higgledy-piggledy in great heap in corner. …

The essay offers a chronological account of my introduction to Holocaust reality, beginning with visits to Dachau in 1955, Mauthausen in 1963 and the main camp at Auschwitz and Auschwitz/Birkenau in 1964, at a time when little was known about the concentration camps and the gassing procedures in the deathcamps. The sites would not become tourist destinations for many years, and in fact at Dachau there were only two other visitors present and at Mauthausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau none. Such a sense of desolation is unrecapturable today, and I was forced to deal with the knowledge that I was standing alone on some of the largest cemeteries in Europe. I focus on how I slowly learned to absorb the magnitude of the catastrophe we call the Holocaust, especially the murder of European Jewry. Viewing the crematorium and small (unused) gas chamber at Dachau, standing inside the used one at Mauthausen, and contemplating the ruins of crematoria and gas chambers at Birkenau quickly teaches one the value and the limitations of the imagination in trying to conjure up the fate of the victims and the cruelty of their killers. I was helped in this endeavor by attending the war crimes trials in the summer of 1964 of SS General Karl Wolff in Munich and an array of Auschwitz personnel at their prolonged trial in Frankfurt. Listening to testimony from shattered survivors while sitting no more than fifty feet away from their tormentors, remorseless creatures like Oswald Kaduk and Wilhelm Boger, left me much to reflect on, and these comprise a large part of the essay. History was made more personal for me by these experiences, and they became an unforgettable foundation for what would eventually become a lifelong effort to find ways of challenging the validity of what still today is often referred to as an unimaginable experience.

Despite its unalterable march into past history, the Holocaust remains an object of fascination to contemporary novelists and filmmakers as well as to the public. Along with works that are recognized as enduring masterpieces (Lanzmann's Sboah, David Grossman's See Under: Love, Kertesz's Fatelessness), this fascination has produced dozens, if not hundreds, of films and novels that deserve to be forgotten quickly. In the wide terrain between these two extremes, one finds a small number of works that have enjoyed worldwide success even while provoking passionate critical debates: what some viewers or readers consider as an important artistic achievement, others consider as a piece of commercial marketing with no artistic merit, or maybe even as an insult to civilized values. Jonathan Littell's 2006 novel, Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), featuring a former Nazi as first-person narrator, was extolled by some extremely distinguished critics and received two major literary prizes in France before becoming an international publishing phenomenon, but it was also trashed by other, equally distinguished readers. Similarly divided opinions greeted Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1994), Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1997), and most recently Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009). Such contested works--we could call them crisis works or weathervanes--point to unresolved ethical and aesthetic issues concerning representations of the Holocaust. can or should be shown or told in a work of art dealing with a historic event that has been called unrepresentable? Even more importantly, what can or should not be shown or told? When Schindler's List first came out, a number of commentators--foremost among them Claude Lanzmann--expressed outrage at the sequence where a group of women deported to Auschwitz are shown naked, entering a room that looks as if it could be a gas chamber. Such a representation is, according to Lanzmann, positively obscene--not to be shown. (1) By showing it, Lanzmann contended, Spielberg had committed both an artistic sin of bad taste and a grave ethical lapse, even if the room in question turned out to be an actual shower room, not a gas chamber. If the question raised by Schindler's List was What can be shown? then the question raised by Benigni's Life Is Beautiful was How should it be shown? Negative criticisms of that film emphasized its unrealistic way of depicting the concentration camp where Guido and his son are imprisoned: the camp looked too manicured, not at all like the real thing. And whoever heard of a Jewish inmate who succeeded in keeping his young child hidden for weeks or months in a Nazi concentration camp? Such criticisms focused on the criterion of historical authenticity--and once again, the issue was both ethical and aesthetic. Those who criticized this aspect of the film maintained that it is ethically reprehensible to go against historical facts in representing the Holocaust. The other, related theoretical issue concerned humor: Was humor, and the comic in general, an acceptable mode for treating this most serious subject? Those who defended Benigni's film declared not only that the artistic imagination must brook no limits, including that of factuality, but that comedy could be a powerful means of expression, even about the Holocaust. The eminent specialist of Holocaust literature Sidra Ezrahi argued that since Benigni presented the film from the start as a fable, it should be interpreted as a comic counterfactual story, a kind of Purimspiel that presented a meliorative version of history and that should not be interpreted with dead-minded literalism. Ezrahi saw in Benigni's film--as well as in several other comic representations of the Shoah, such as Radu Mihaileanu's film Train of Life (also from 1997) or Jurek Becker's novel Jakob the Liar (1969)--a continuation of the tradition of Jewish humor that one finds in the stories of Sholem Aleichem, for example. …

When I first visited Auschwitz, I visited it as an analyst, a cultural anthropologist accompanying a group of mostly Turkish, Turkish-German, Palestinian, and Palestinian-German youth participating in a federally and locally sponsored program meant to teach them about German history and to address their own antisemitism.1 I was there as an observer who could not help but be dislodged from my professional role and deeply moved by flakes of bone on the ground, and sites of intimate, state-sponsored murder: a shooting wall where guards killed at close range; the collection and smell of the human hair of the murdered a wheelbarrow used to carry human ashes produced after the gas chamber in crematoria. I was moved also by the tears and horror of these same youth, also traumatized by the remains of state-sponsored mass murder. Although the program that led them to Auschwitz was meant to teach them democracy, I wondered about the extent to which actually existing democracy, using its tool of democratization, has the adequate means, humility, or desire to transform itself or to start anew from the position of the mass murdered, the slave, or the noncitizen. What unexpected lessons would it then learn?

The Special Case of Four Auschwitz Photographs Susan A. Crane (bio) Review of: Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Paris, 2001: an exhibition that commemorates the Nazi concentration and extermination camps of the Holocaust stirs up a vehement public debate. Georges Didi-Huberman, a critic and unconventional art historian of Jewish descent who has written on European painting and the depiction of hysteria in photography, contributes an essay to the exhibition catalog highlighting four particular photographs from the exhibit, which prompts further outrage.1 More outrage, one might wearily note, than information about the camps had caused at the time the photographs were made; but less, perhaps, than was caused when the first atrocity images of the liberated concentration camps appeared in Western newspapers and news reels in 1945. What is it about these photographs, after all these years of exposure and all our familiar outrage regarding their subject, that still prompts intense polemics? Didi-Huberman's contributions to this debate have now been translated into English. The translation includes the original exhibition catalog essay (Part 1: "Images in Spite of All") and Didi-Huberman's response to critics (Part 2: "In Spite of the All Image"; originally Images malgré tout, 2003). The oddly old-fashioned, elaborately detailed table of contents will make no sense to anyone who hasn't already read the book; this questionable editorial choice appears to indulge the author, as does the decision not to present the other side of the debate, which appeared in the pages of Les temps moderns (March-May 2001), in columns by Gérard Wajcman and Elisabeth Pagnoux. The book would have benefitted from a translation of these articles, since Didi-Huberman engages in frequent exegesis with them. Clearly, without these provocations, the second half of this volume would not exist. But the choice to translate Didi-Huberman is timely. While the debate has distinctively French concerns, the larger problematic of the (limits of) representation of the Holocaust remains a fraught subject for Western scholars, and Didi-Huberman's polemic takes the discussion in a new and productive direction. The controversy over the Parisian exhibition focused on four famous photographs from Auschwitz, taken at the height of the Final Solution in 1944. The photographs were taken by members of the so-called "Sonderkommandos," Jewish victims who were forced to participate in the genocide of their own people by removing the Nazis' victims from the gas chambers and destroying the corpses through fire or mass burial (sometimes, in response to wartime stringencies, both). The identity of the photographer/s is uncertain; surviving records left by members of the Sonderkommandos indicate the names of those involved in making the images. These records also show that they were able to smuggle the camera into the camp and the film out again, in a toothpaste tube, with the assistance of the Polish Underground (10-11). These are the only surviving images that show any aspect of the gas chamber operations, and because they represent an act of resistance by victims of genocide, they have retained an exceptional status among Holocaust sources. However, their exhibition in Paris was considered by some to be a provocation-either to Holocaust deniers, who would challenge the veracity of these admittedly poor images, or to more sophisticated viewers who expressed affinities with Claude Lanzmann, the filmmaker, whose remarkable documentary "Shoah" (1985) proscribed the use of archival images in favor of eyewitness testimony and film shot at the scenes of the crimes in the 1970s-80s. Holocaust deniers, of course, have never depended on actual evidence to promulgate their delusions. On ethical and aesthetic grounds, the second set of criticisms is more substantial and reflects a peculiarly French concern with a kind of Bilderverbot (prohibition of religious images). Wajcman accused Didi-Huberman of fetishizing these images in a perversely Christian fashion ("the passion of the image" 52). The exceptional status of the Sonderkommando photographs thus opens up debate about the memory and visual representation of the Holocaust in a nation which has not yet come to terms with its "Vichy syndrome," to apply Henry...

Stolen Child Matevž Podvinšek The article presents the fate of the Slovenian children included in 1942 in the Nazi Lebensborn program, implemented with the purpose of increasing the number of children born of the Aryan race. As the plan did not completely succeed, the Nazis started to steal children on the occupied territory. In the article, a particular focus is given to the fate of Matevž Podvinšek from Gaberke in the Municipality of Šoštanj, who was taken from his parents as a 10-month-old baby and placed in the children’s shelter Kohren-Sahlis. He was one of the thirty babies taken from their parents by the Nazis. In 1943, Matevž was chosen by a married couple by the name of Uebe, who were supposedly unaware that he had been stolen. They raised him until the year 1947, when his biological father, who survived Auschwitz, managed to get him back with the help of different organizations. His mother did not live to see his return as she died in the gas chamber six months after arriving in the concentration camp. Matevž Podvinšek is the father of Matevž Podvinšek, teacher of vocational courses at the School of Mechanical, Geotechnical and Environmental Engineering in Velenje. In literature class on the Second World War, the third-year students enrolled in the secondary vocational education reflect, through his story, on the past and its cruelty, on the arrogance of people who believed they were allowed everything. Through his story, they realize that war brings suffering and that, in order to prevent it, there has to be empathy in our lives, necessary for a human to remain human.

The Intergenerational Taboo of Nazism: A Response and Elaboration of Volker Friedrich’s Paper, “Internalization of Nazism and its Effects on German Psychoanalysts and their Patients” Harold P. Blum I’m very glad to participate in this important exchange with German colleagues and to comment and add to the ideas in the valuable, provocative, and evocative paper by Dr. Volker Friedrich. His paper is important to the history of German psychoanalysis and to the theoretical and technical issues imposed by the Holocaust. It is historically appropriate that this Goethe House Symposium was held at the New School which gathered so many refugee intellectuals and provided a forum for psychoanalysts as a “university in exile” during the Nazi era. The title of the Symposium: “Psychoanalysis and Power” was indicative of the fateful consequences for psychoanalysis in Germany through accommodation to Nazi authority and assimilation of Nazi ideology. The influence of external and internal authoritarian or dictatorial power on psychoanalytic organizations, training, and treatment is a subject of vast importance, but the organizational involvement with Nazism elicited formidable resistance to psychoanalytic investigation. The taboo of Nazism was to have an influence on clinical work with survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust and their progeny, and on psychoanalytic education and the development of psychoanalysis in Germany and in Austria. These exchanges may be understood as part of an analytic process of working through of unconscious conflicts and identifications, which far transcends the ability to mourn and to remember. One of the greatest problems analysts face has been with a disowned and disavowed horrifying past with which they are identified. Analytic confrontation with previously unimaginable [End Page 281] Nazi atrocities led to massive defensive structures and “The Taboo of Nazism” which Dr. Friedrich has so well and so movingly described. The lifting of this taboo was a developmental “return of the repressed.” It led to very painful confrontation with the conformity and collaboration of psychoanalysts, however motivated and rationalized, with Nazi aims and goals. Dr. Friedrich’s paper begins with a fascinating clinical vignette. One and one-half years after completing a supervised analysis of a young woman, he had a chance meeting with a patient. As many patients have the “fantasy of doing,” she returned to the place where she had come for analysis for more than two and one-half years with strong feelings about her analytic experience. In this post-analytic encounter and “follow-up interview,” she tells her analyst the equivalent of an affectless nightmare. The analyst is a guard at a gas chamber in a concentration camp, and her analyst is about to shut the door of the chamber tightly behind her. Of course, knowing the analyst’s whereabouts and having an idea of his schedule, she may have hoped and expected to have encountered him so that the ostensibly chance meeting was actually psychologically arranged. The patient apparently experienced termination as expulsion and execution; but we do not know why she manifestly places herself as dying victim and her analyst as perpetrator of Nazi murder. We do know that it had a most powerful effect on Dr. Friedrich; he had a violent, physical reaction to it, and his throat infection seemed to psychologically mirror her inability to speak about it. His training analyst and Dr. Friedrich agreed that they had been overwhelmed with the destructive rage of the concentration camp. But could the inquiry be carried past the closed door of the gas chamber and that supervisory session? There was apparently an implicit group censorship concerning Nazi atrocities. It had been a taboo to discuss the crimes of the Nazi era in psychoanalytic training and clinical work. If the issues could not be entirely evaded, one could only give lip service or participate in superficial discussion, so that the Nazi period and its atrocities remained a cordoned off taboo territory. This widespread conspiracy of silence was particularly true [End Page 282] in Germany, but also pervaded much of the analytic world. It took the passage of time to the generation of the grandchildren of the Nazis before there could be adequate self-scrutiny and exploration of the Nazi era and its crimes. The crimes were of a hitherto...

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Images in PsychiatryFull AccessNazi Euthanasia of the Mentally Ill at HadamarRael D. Strous, M.D.Rael D. StrousSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Jan 2006https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.163.1.27AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail The Nazi euthanasia program, code-named “Operation-T4,” set out to eliminate “life unworthy of life.” It rapidly expanded to include individuals with mental illness, with Hitler’s 1939 decree allowing physicians to decide that certain individuals “be accorded a mercy-death.” These patients included those with schizophrenia, the criminally insane, and the chronically hospitalized. The euthanasia program became the Nazi regime’s first campaign of mass murder against specific populations whom it considered inferior and threatening to the well-being of the Aryan race and the first time in history where psychiatrists sought out to systematically exterminate their patients, with several prominent psychiatrists playing central roles (1–4).By 1940, six killing centers designated as euthanasia institutions were established at Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg, and Hadamar. The Hadamar Psychiatric Institute near Wiesbaden, Germany, code-named “Facility-E,” was refashioned for use as a psychiatry euthanasia facility in November 1940. From mid-January 1941 under Dr. Ernst Baumhard’s direction, with a staff of approximately 100, busloads of patients arrived daily at the killing operation. The patients were offloaded, weighed, photographed, and led to the gas chamber disguised as a shower room in the cellar. At least 10,000 mentally ill adults were gassed and cremated at Hadamar in the first 9 months of 1941. In August 1942, after a short break, the facility again functioned as a euthanasia center, using lethal medication doses or starvation. After removal of various organs for medical research, the bodies were buried in mass graves located on the hospital grounds. The killing center remained operational until its liberation by American troops on March 26, 1945 (4).Operation-T4 claimed approximately 200,000 lives. Psychiatric euthanasia institutions served as training centers for the Schutzstaffel (SS) who used the experience to construct larger killing centers (Auschwitz, Treblinka, etc.). The psychiatrist Dr. Imfried Eberl, Treblinka’s first commandant and the only physician to command a death camp, established the facility following his experience as superintendent of Brandenburg Psychiatry Hospital (2).Address correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. Strous, Beer Yaakov Mental Health Center, P.O. Box 1, Beer Yaakov 70350, Israel; [email protected] (e-mail). Gas chamber at Hadamar. Image courtesy of Prosjekt Felles Framtid. Mass burial site at Hadamar. Image courtesy of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, National Archives and Records Administration.

In this excerpt from the introduction to volume three of Sphären ( Spheres), subtitled Schäume ( foam), Sloterdijk argues that what makes the 20th century uniquely singular and creative is its invention of what he calls here atmosterrorism, the assault not on the body of the enemy, but on his or her environment. This terrorism of the atmosphere is to be understood as a human-made form of quake that turns the enemy's environment into a weapon against them. Living organisms, among them humans, simply cannot not breathe, and it is this double negative that is at the heart of atmoterrorism. Weaving a fascinating narrative that links the development of insecticides and pesticides to the first use of poisonous gas during World War I, to the development of the gas chamber as the tool of supreme punishment in the United States, to the eventual convergence of putative humane killing and disinfection and delousing into the mobile and stationary gas chambers of extermination used in the Nazi concentration camps. Terrorism, argues Sloterdijk, reveals the essence of war, the will to exterminate the enemy, with the difference that the former expands the extermination of the enemy to the very world that enables the enemy to exist. In the 20th century, atmoterrorism leads to the exterminism of total war.

The focus of this research is to understand Edith Stein (1891-1942), an iconic XX century figure, using historical and psychoanalytical perspectives as well as an hermeneutical method. From Jewish origin, Stein was born in Breslau, Prussia, studied with E. Husserl and developed important phenomenological investigations, in education, womanhood, philosophy, theology and mystic. However could not be an academic because of discrimination against both women and Jews. Subsequently she converted to Catholicism and even became a Carmelite monk, neither of which was enough to escape persecution of the Nazis. She flew to Holland, but was arrested by the Gestapo, taken to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942, where her life ended in a gas chamber. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1998. This work examines the roots and influences of her theoretical contributions as well as the way she answered the fundamental human questions that she dealt with during her lifetime as a woman, a philosopher and a Christian-Jew. The main sources are

The unleashing of the war marked the turn to the realization of Nazi plans for imperial conquest and racial population policies, in which the camps were essential. This chapter surveys the transformation of the concentration camps with the invasion of Poland in 1939, relating them to sub-camps, forced labour camps, other camps, and ghettos. It argues that many of these other camps shared with concentration camps the characteristics of extra-legality, coercion, and terror. Exemplifying the myriad forms of camps, Durchgangsstrasse IV, the 1,200-kilometre strategic road to the east constructed by Jewish forced labour, was not even a concentration or labour camp, but a mobile death camp. Forced labour for Jews amounted to a suspended death sentence. That raises the question whether ‘annihilation by labour’ was the general principle. The main purpose of the camps (broadly defined) extending across Europe and North Africa was preventive terror, essential for the empire-building of the Nazi New Order. In Poland and Yugoslavia, transit camps were death camps in all but name. Forced labour for the war economy only gradually became a feature of the SS camps from 1942. The ‘nurseries’ for the babies of forced workers were in effect concentration camps with squalid conditions and high mortality. Before 1942, relatively few Jews were held in concentration camps. Mass murder became an additional function in most SS concentration camps, but only three of the twenty-seven main camps acquired gas chambers by autumn 1942.

This article offers an overview and analysis of the concentration camp writings of Aldo Bizzarri, an Italian political deportee at Mauthausen concentration camp during 1944-1945. Bizzarri had a varied career as a writer, essayist and cultural diplomat before deportation and as a journalist and writer after the war. He wrote two important books about his experiences at Mauthausen and also worked on a film with a concentration camp setting. His experimentation in these different forms, it is argued, is symptomatic of the variety and complexity of early attempts to find an appropriate idiom to represent the Lager phenomenon and the Nazis’ genocidal violence.

How Did They Survive? Mechanisms of Defense in Nazi Concentration Camps* Death in a Nazi concentration camp requires no explanation. Survival does. Detailed knowledge of the techniques of torture and extermination has made us understand the outcome of nine to ten million dead. What bewilders us are the survivors. Through the flogging and the shooting, the cold and the hunger, the sixteen hours working day and the epidemics, through individual tortures and mass murder, thousands of them lived for years, three, five, eight years, and longer. What was it that enabled them to survive? Death reached out for them ever so often. How did their urge to live win over the wish to die? What kept them from suicide and insanity? Some of the survivors have begun to speak. In books and articles they have tried to communicate an experience which impossible to communicate-as one of them put it (Rousset). The following study is based on twelve such autobiographical accounts. (For a complete list see Bibliography). They have been written by authors of greatly different background: among them a German poet (Wiechert), an Austrian economist (Kautsky), a French professor of philosophy (Rousset), a Polish-Jewish businessman (Szalet), a British officer (Burney), two psychologists (Bettelheim and Frankl), two journalists (Karst and Kalmar), a Polish girl student (Szmaglewska). The authors include political and non-political prisoners, Germans and non-Germans, men and one woman; the terms of their imprisonment range from several months to seven years. The character of the books is as different as the background of their authors. There are grim accusations, such as Kalmar's Zeit ohne Gnade (Time without Mercy) and Karst's Beasts of the Earth, there is Wiechert's Forest of the Dead,-a poetic story which is like a stream of never ending sadness; there is Kautsky's Teufel und Verdammte (The Devil and the Damned)-actually a comprehensive sociology of the concentration camp, written in a highly detached and scholarly way; there is, furthermore, Szalet's Experiment E, a detailed and realistic report of facts, and Bettelheim's revealing psychological analysis My Life in a Concentration Camp. Apart from the books on which this study is based, other biographical reports on concentration camps have been written and still more are coming out. They may add to the insight to be gained from our selection; the essence of this insight, however, does not depend on the completeness of the underlying material. The topic of this study is the mental mechanisms of survival, i.e., the mechanisms of defense developed by the ego in order to protect the individual from physical death and mental disintegration. But this prevalence of psychological interest must not make us overlook the great number of other circumstances on which survival in a concentration camp has depended, circumstances which have little to do with mental phenomena of the type mentioned. There was, first of all, the factor of physical stamina: the sick, the old, and the weak were those most likely to perish; there was also the difference in locality and time: in some camps, the food, housing, working, and hygienic conditions were much worse than in others, and it also happened that in the same camp periods of deterioration alternated with periods of improvement. Likewise significant was the kind of work to which the inmate had been assigned: Wiechert, for instance, seems to owe his life to the fact that he was transferred from working in a quarry to mending stockings. Of greatest importance was, furthermore, the official classification of the prisoner. The camp was a rather complicated setup of many divisions and sub-divisions, and every prisoner belonged to several official categories.l As far as living conditions were concerned, it made all the difference, whether the internee was a German or a non-German, an Aryan or a Jew. In general, German Aryans fared best. …

Is there any more potent a symbol for the destructive power of modern state terror than the nazi concentration camp? In the concentration camps, the nazis pioneered new methods of mass detention, abuse and extermination, driven by a lethal mix of extreme nationalism, bio-politics and racial antisemitism. During the short lifespan of the Third Reich little more than 12 years millions of prisoners were taken to concentration camps run by the SS, and subjected to humiliation and degradation, dirt and disease, fear and hunger, ruthless discipline and random violence, forced labour and mass murder. In all, some two million prisoners lost their lives, including around one million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, in Auschwitz, the largest and deadliest of all the concentration camps.1 Long before the regime's final collapse in May 1945, the concentration camp came to be known as the most notorious invention of the Third Reich. To be

“Annihilation through Labor”: The Killing of State Prisoners in the Third Reich