Camps in the National Socialist Era: Life, Work, Education, Degradation, Murder

The ideology and hegemony of National Socialism were based on the creation of a "racially specific" (arteigen) fellowship. This was enacted in a world of camps that defined many areas of life in the "national community" (Volksgemeinschaft). In the camps, the state and the Nazi Party had a direct influence on the individual. Integration into the national community was achieved through (work-based) "education" in the camp. This took place in the Hitler Youth organisation and the League of German Girls, in the Reich Labour Service (RAD) and in the Party’s "order castles" (Ordensburgen), where punishments were included in the programme. Residential paramilitary camps were located at large construction sites and were used to accommodate workers from the military engineering operation Organisation Todt: here forced labourers were compelled to live like prisoners of war in a controlled community. As in Prora, the "seaside resort for twenty thousand people", the leisure time of these labourers was also organised as part of camp life. Concentration camps were a means of segregation, excluding people from the national community. Political opponents of the regime (communists and democrats), staunch Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, and religious minorities (Jehovah’s Witnesses) were interned and suffered abuse there. Jews, Sinti and Roma and other undesirables were subjected to a racist agenda that caused them to be persecuted, exploited and ultimately murdered. Ghettos and "gypsy camps" served a special function as a prelude to deportation. At the top of the scale were the extermination camps on Polish soil: Kulmhof (Chelmno), Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. People did not stay in these camps, their sole purpose being to immediately the new arrivals. The Nazi regime’s forced labour camps were genuinely degrading places set up without any legal basis. Camps endorsed the community of people who belonged and excluded others – foreigners and undesirables – with a severity that was taken to its logical extreme. The concentration camps, extermination sites and ghettos were not modelled on the British internment camps established in the Boer War or the Tsarist and Soviet penal camps in Siberia – they were elements of the state apparatus defined by Nazi ideology and given pseudo-legitimacy under the guise of sanctioned preventive custody.

Compiled by Wolfgang Benz with Angelika Königseder, using the research findings of Christopher Kopper; Mario Wenzel

Translated from the German by Simon Cowper