The Nazi Camp System

Henri Alleg and Colonialism in Algeria

excerpted from the book

The Politics of Cruelty

an essay on the literature of political imprisonment

by Kate Millett

WW Norton, 1994, paper

The Nazi Camp System
p45
... the administrative procedure for routing trains and ticketing passengers billing was handled in the same manner and by the same official travel agency: "Mittel Europaisch Reiseburo would ship people to the gas chambers or they will ship vacationers to their favorite resort, and that was basically the same office and the same operation, the same procedures, the same billing."

p48
This transformation of humanity into "pieces" and "merchandise" does not come about without considerable effort. It is necessary to create an ideology which will transcend customary law altogether and substitute for it a higher cause and greater necessity.

p49
Mussolini himself describes this rationale in the New ltalian Encyclopedia of 1932: "Man is nothing. Fascism raises itself up against the individual abstraction which is based upon materialistic foundations and utopias. Beyond the state, nothing that is human or spiritual has any value whatsoever." Under Italian fascism the state and nation were merged, and the state now proclaimed itself the agent of a larger and greater force, the people. It remained only to merge the state with the law.

There was resistance to such claims by the judiciary, as well as objections to the changes in legal procedure which followed in their train. But once in power, Fascist Party functionaries wielded extraordinary authority; after 1929, Peters observes, "the secret political police used torture regularly upon suspected enemies of state, party and people."

In Germany after 1932 this notion was carried even further: the German state became simply the vehicle of the Nazi Party, whose leader, Adolf Hitler, "personified" according to party literature the will of the people or Volk, itself construed as a national historical community. The party itself was unique in Hitler's view since political parties are generally inclined to compromise whereas "philosophical doctrines," such his own, never do so. "Political parties," Hitler declared scornfully, "arrive at agreement even with their enemies, philosophical doctrines proclaim themselves infallible." The National Socialist Party was not a political party at all in the conventional sense, but instead the active embodiment of an infallible "philosophy" of a people, the Volk, to which state and law were themselves both necessarily subordinated. Just as Lenin or Stalin, the Cheka or the Soviet public prosecutor, could divine both counterrevolutionary activity and the revolutionary path, in defining the will of the Volk, Hitler too could arrive at a j mystical and absolute power.

p50
[Edward] Peters traces the effect of this subordination of law to political ideology: "the judicial consequences of National Socialist theory and practice included the creation of special tribunals, the widening definition of political crimes, and the intensification of methods of interrogation and punishment." After 1933, special courts or Sondergerichte were set up for matters which the party regarded as too important to be left to the surviving judicial system, whose judges could not be trusted to find a politically acceptable verdict. The next year, the Volksgerichtshof was instituted to deal with cases of treason: panels of professional jurists were now augmented by party members of no legal experience. From this court there was no appeal, and "only rarely was any favor shown to the accused."

In 1942, Himmler issued an order authorizing the use of what he specified as "the Third Degree" in interrogations, in Peters's view "clearly intending by that term to indicate torture." The Third Degree was used to extract confessions from prisoners. Himmler gave a blanket permission for its use without further authorization against "communists, Marxists, Jehovah's Witnesses, saboteurs, terrorists, members of resistance movements, antisocial elements, refractory elements," and a group of unfortunates referred to as Polish or Soviet "vagabonds."

In the methods of the Third Degree lie the essential elements of all torture technique. E ward Peters and his predecessor, the great French legalist Alec Mellors, designate this system as the basis for the modern practice of torture. It is as follows: close confinement, starvation diet, hidden cells, extraordinary exercise or labor, sleep deprivation, and beatings. Moreover, physicians were to be at hand to prevent prisoners from being killed under torture, that is, to preserve them for further interrogation. In this way the Third Reich not only brought back a systematic torture but transformed it into a medical specialty, a transformation which was to have great consequences throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

The practice of torture is assisted always by certain legal and legislative preconditions. Historians of Nazism and the Holocaust describe the creation of a web of legislation which, piece by piece, sealed the fate of the various "enemies" of the Third Reich, most particularly of the Jews. In many ways, as Hilberg, Martin Gilbert, and Lucy Dawidowicz, among others, point out, German practice only restored and intensified prejudicial law and custom that reached far back in European history. Now a groundwork of enabling legislation was carefully laid through strictures against Jews practicing the professions. Then they were forbidden to engage in one form after another of employment or business. Then came extortionary taxation. Next the Nuremberg laws on citizenship and racial purity, the punishments for intermarriage. Finally the apartheid of ghettos, finishing a network of legislation and directive of an increasingly malign character like the parts of a cruel machine. So that when the projects for "resettlement" through confinement in camps were put into place, they were moves against groups of persons (beginning with political dissidents, gypsies, and homosexuals, and ending with Jews) who were no longer recognized as citizens or persons, beings without any civil protection whatsoever.

In many ways these mechanisms repeat the steps to the Gulag. Mass confinement, extermination, and torture require an entire series of special enabling legislation, the creation of special state powers, all of which nullify and usurp the entire historical development of the rule of law as well as that of constitutional democracy, thereby undoing centuries of libertarian effort. After a pattern is set, however, and precedents are created, the destruction of traditional guarantees can be put in place with one simple piece of legislation which suspends all that came before; an overall "Emergencies" or "Special Powers" act has become a standard practice repeated over the decades, invoked routinely in the Southern American hemisphere, for example, or by any state where the military has \ taken precedent over civilian legal agency.

p58
The great inventiveness, the miracle of efficiency ... was not created at one blow; it was improvised, improved upon. Its authors themselves were later appalled at its early clumsiness. At Treblinka during its first phase, technical process was only slightly advanced over Chelmno: this time gas chambers were built, but the gas used was still only engine gas. Since there were as yet no crematoria, bodies were buried rather than burned. Methods were still very inadequate. Franz Suchomel, SS Unterscharfuhrer, testifying unwillingly in Shoah, remembers the system at this time as "catastrophic." "That was the period of the old gas chambers. Because there were so many dead that couldn't be gotten rid of, the bodies piled up around the gas chambers and stayed there for days. Under this pile of bodies there was a cesspool three inches deep, full of blood, worms and shit. No one wanted to clean it out. The Jews preferred to be shot rather than work there." Technological means are as yet incapable of serving the demands put upon them by ideology: "More people kept coming, always more, whom we hadn't the facilities to kill. The brass was in a rush to clean out the Warsaw ghetto. The gas chambers couldn't handle the load. The small gas chambers."

Under such conditions victims are left waiting, beginning to understand their fate. Suchomel observed it all: "The Jews had to wait their turn for a day, two days, three days. They foresaw what was coming." This was very undesirable; some cheated their fate with suicide; there was the possibility of revolt. "Because of the delay, Eberl, the camp commandant, phoned Lublin and said, "We can't go on this way.... Overnight, Wirth arrived. He inspected everything and then left. He returned with people from Belzec, experts."

The new gas chambers at Treblinka were built in September 1942. The victims themselves were enlisted to perform the labor. Wirth is given credit for having arrived at a successful design and for having built the death camp "by assigning a detail of Jewish workers to do it. The detail had a fixed number in it, around two hundred people, who worked only in the death camp." Prisoners laid the bricks, Ukrainian carpenters built the door frames, "the gas-chamber doors themselves were armored bunker doors," Suchomel reminisces, booty from the Eastern Front: "I think they were brought from Bialystok, from some Russian bunkers."

Now, at Treblinka, "a primitive but efficient production line of death" had been achieved, a fortified structure where two hundred could be killed at once, the room refilled over and over. Nothing like Auschwitz yet of course, "Auschwitz was a factory!" Suchomel is ready to grant that. Nevertheless, he still respects and insists upon the efficacy of the earlier Treblinka model: "Primitive, yes. But it worked well, that production line of death."

There is through all this a stupid wonder at numbers, a boastfulness over scale and size, production figures, that obsession with quantity and methodology, with administrative and bureaucratic achievement which Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil.

p62
They all, mainly the Polish Jews, had misgivings [at Auschwitz]. They knew something was seriously amiss, but none of them had the faintest of notions that in three of four hours they'd be reduced to ashes.

Even though the newcomers "saw everything," "the whole violent scene" of dogs and guns, they were still innocent as to what would become of them. Lest they discover their fate, deception was necessary. Muller describes the technique by which victims were duped as they arrived:

A sudden silence fell over those gathered in the crematorium courtyard. All eyes converged on the flat roof of the crematorium. Who was standing there? Aumeyer, the SS man, Grabner, the head of the political section, and Hossler, the SS officer. Aumeyer addressed the crowd: "You're here to work for our soldiers fighting at the front. Those who can work will be all right." It was obvious that hope flared in those people. The executioners had gotten past the first obstacle . . . it was succeeding. Then Grabner spoke up: "We need masons, electricians, all the trades." Next Hossler took over. He pointed to a short man in the crowd. I can still see him. "What's your trade?" The man said: "Mr. Officer, I'm a tailor." "A tailor? What kind of a tailor?" "A man's . . . No, for both men and women." "Wonderful: We need people like you in our workshops." Then he questioned a woman: "What's your trade?" "Nurse," she replied. "Splendid! we need nurses in our hospitals, for our soldiers. We need all of you! But first, undress. You must be disinfected. We want you healthy." I could see the people were calmer, reassured by what they'd heard, and they began to undress. Even if they had their doubts, if you want to live, you must hope. Their clothing remained in the courtyard, scattered everywhere. Aumeyer was beaming, very proud of how he'd handled things. He turned to some of the SS men and told them: "You see? That's the way to do it!" By this device a great leap forward had been made! Now the clothing could be used.

The deception reached elaborate proportions as the method was perfected month after month:

When they reached the "undressing room," they saw that it looked like an International Information Center! On the walls were hooks, and each hook had a number. Beneath the hooks were wooden benches. So people could undress "more comfortably," it was said. And on the numerous pillars that held up this underground "undressing room," there were signs with slogans in several languages: "Clean is good!" "Lice can kill!" "Wash yourself!" "To the disinfection area." All those signs were only there to lure people into the gas chambers already undressed. And to the left, at a right angle, was the gas chamber with its massive door.

65
There is a certain cunning in these methods, a derisive deception, a loutish trickery-but ingenuity is the lesser part of its brutality; force is the real foundation of the process. The victims have been long in the trains, their numbers are diminished by deliberate starvation, exposure, and thirst; the corpses of those who have already expired from these causes are first removed by trucks; children and the infirm have been led away to be shot under the fraud of the "infirmary." It remains only to dispose of the majority who must be persuaded they are fortunate in being considered useful. The promise of work, even if it is only as slave labor, is a promise of survival. A haircut points toward the future, so does the prospect of cleanliness after a thousand indignities.

The heart of the lie is that once naked and cold, hungry and thirsty, one will finally, after all one's sufferings and patience, enjoy a shower of hot water-be clean, warm, welcomed and made at home even in hell. The induction ritual of all prisons, the moment when the regime washes you and hands back your clothes, stops making you wait and begins feeding you and giving you a place to commence even this dreadful new existence just here there has been the cruelest of substitutions. It is gas that comes through the showerhead, death, not the water of life.

p68
[Franz Suchomel of the SS] They saw the dead in the pit. They were forced to strip, to sit on a sandbank, and were killed with a shot in the neck. They fell into the pit. There was always a fire in the pit." Suchomel still sounds satisfied with the arrangements: "With rubbish, paper and gasoline, people burn very well."

One hears Suchomel as one hears a maniac.

p69
Referring to the creatures burning in the "infirmary" pits, Suchomel fails to register them as human beings at all. Though he well remembers driving them naked into the gas chambers, naked even in winter, he remembers even more clearly that "It was cold as hell for us too. We didn't have suitable uniforms." His victims were "undesirables"; they remains so, "the Jews," beings utterly remote from his own humanity, the permanent achievement of racial ideology, ethnic indoctrination, the trained habits of militaristic culture.

... So radically different is the point of view between the torturer and the tortured, or even between the tortured and the objective historian of that torture, that the reader can actually experience the gap in him- or herself, an insight we are generally spared. While hearing the Nazi state narratives, even hearing the Nazi voice, one participates unconsciously, perhaps even necessarily, in its mentality, succumbing however slightly or momentarily to its point of view, and then one is aghast: experiencing revulsion with Suchomel one feels revulsion with the self. Conversely, when hearing the accounts of Nazi victims, one's usual placid compassion for them changes, becoming anger. The violence done to them is now done against oneself. In time the very futility of the prisoner's situation brings on a certain despair in the reader.

***

Henri Alleg and Colonialism in Algeria
p75
Through this century fear [of the state] has spread and generalized; it is part of our age. It permeates society today, no matter what form of government is at issue as all government swells now and encroaches upon its citizens with increasing force. At this moment it is probably strongest J in the authoritarian regimes of the Near East and South America, where state brutality has a new lack of shame and often does not even truck with ideological rationale or justification.

The terror of the individual before the state is a modern condition. A literature has come into being whose subject is this aspect of twentieth-century experience. Not only a rich and vital literary record, it constitutes a kind of history and psychology of our time as well. Kafka may be its greatest master, but there are many. Its two great themes are power and fear: the state's physical force put in the service of its own ideology carried now into dogma, and the attack this represents upon the citizen and individual. The great pitted against the small and isolated, the state omniscient, omnipotent; its victim, single and powerless.

Dizzy and overcome by a labyrinthine terror, the individual watches as official authority, not familiar community or even organized society, but a new creation responsible only to itself and its own continuation and consolidation in power, defines and codifies reality. At times it merely crushes all before it.

p76
This modern relationship to state authority [torture] has come upon us so slowly we have not quite noticed. Yet it has been forming all along, has proliferated through the century, has increased with each decade, keeping pace with the speed of new inventions, their swiftness in communication and transport. Awareness is only partial and intermittent; most of us still maintain a certain illusion of safety, innocence.

p81
The character of clandestine detention, the practice bringing victims to undisclosed locations, is central to torture - both to its secret and illegal character and to its terror and force. One is in limbo, one disappears. Reappearance now requires something like a miracle. One is surprised to realize the actual safety of conventional state custody. It crosses the mind as one vanishes that one is now utterly vulnerable: no assistance can be given by associates; all the succor of the law is withheld. Under these circumstances, one is not so much arrested as kidnapped. You are not in the hands of the law, but in the power of persons who have put themselves above the law while still using its authority. The state itself has become ' a criminal force ...

p85
The paratroopers begin to boast in a demented way that they are the Gestapo, a treasonous statement but indicative: torturers tend to have a particular admiration for the Nazi regime, recall it respectfully in many corners of the world. Especially in South America, where many Nazis fled and took refuge in military establishments perpetuating a politics of cruelty. An impression takes form that fascism was by no means put to rest with Hitler's death but is a living idea, a political vision still striven for and only temporarily eclipsed.

Politics of Cruelty

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