Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka by Ann Byers

Author:Ann Byers [Byers, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780766062146
Publisher: Enslow Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2015-08-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

INSIDE THE LABOR CAMPS

The SS rarely murdered anyone.”1 This bitter comment was made by a Dachau survivor about life inside the prison/labor camp. He was right. In the labor camps, the SS themselves did little of the actual killing. The rulers of the concentration camp empire exercised their authority through an ingenious system of indirect control. They made the rules and determined the penalties for breaking them, but they used the most ruthless of the prisoners to enforce the rules and mete out punishment.

The camp commandant was, of course, an SS officer. But he appointed the most hardened criminal interned there as the camp senior, who was responsible for the day-to-day operation of the camp. Under the camp senior was a carefully organized ladder of foremen, block leaders, cell leaders, secretaries, and other administrative functionaries—all prisoners. These were the people who had direct and immediate control over the lives of their fellow internees. In the camps in Germany, the internal organization was usually staffed by German criminal inmates; in Poland and Russia, these positions were often held by Ukrainian (southwest Russian) prisoners of war. Jews were never given such authority. The principal qualifications seem to have been a capacity—or, better, a lust—for brutality and a total disregard for the value of human life. Many professors, lawyers, doctors, priests, ministers, and rabbis were under the unrelenting thumb of thieves, rapists, and murderers.

Every camp had a chief of police and guards who belonged to the SS, but most of their work was done through the camp police. The camp was divided into blocks and cells, and each one was headed by a prisoner who had already demonstrated a willingness and an ability to treat others savagely. The work details were placed under equally corrupt inmate foremen known as kapos, probably from capo, the Italian word for “chief.” (Some Italians were among the early prisoners in Dachau and may have introduced the word.)

The SS officer in charge of prison labor and of transports out of the camp—to the ghettos or extermination camps of Poland—worked through the Labor Allocation Office. This essential department was under the complete direction of prison staff. The SS officer decided how many people were needed for each work detail, and the Labor Allocation Office made the assignments. The SS command relayed the orders, stating how many were to be loaded on the next “invalid transport” or “resettlement” train, and the prisoners running the Labor Allocation Office chose the deportees.

The inmates who rose—or sank—to the coveted positions in this office had the power of life and death over their fellow prisoners. They decided not only who would be transported, eventually to the gas chambers, but also where individuals would work, which often determined their chances for survival. Some—usually other criminal prisoners—toiled in the upkeep of the camp, a fairly light task. Others marched to mines, stone quarries, armaments factories, and other places of hard labor, where life expectancy was seldom more than three months. Still others worked in agricultural

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.