Bearing Witness by John Carpenter

Author:John Carpenter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2017-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

5

Germany: Factories of Destruction

In the course of six years the camps that were used took many different forms. They did not have a single model or prototype. The most important feature of the many camps is that a majority were intended for civilians. Other major features were secrecy, militarization, and frequent location at a great distance from the home population or in a foreign conquered country. The Soviet camp system was probably the most varied. The Japanese camps went through several different stages, transformed by events on the ground and by improvised decisions in Tokyo.

The camps in Germany were developed at an early date, in 1933. What was called “preventive detention” was used as a device against the Nazi regime’s political opponents, and in the following years German camps took on a bewildering variety of forms. In the areas of German conquest, camps multiplied quickly with different functions. Between 1939 and 1944 they became what has been called “an SS-owned arsenal of compulsory labor.”51 Some became factory-like extermination camps. A historian has argued that these were not “camps” in a literal sense at all because there was no intent to accommodate prisoners for any length of time.52 Some camps were hybrids of the two.

In the areas of occupation, German camps had competing purposes.53 Among civilians in the conquered countries, awareness of danger developed gradually. As in the Soviet areas of occupation, large professional groups—judges, senators, professors, civil servants, lawyers, and political figures—were exposed to great risk. An accurate assessment of personal danger required observation, trial and error, multiple experiences, informed speculation, and luck.

In 1941, Jews began to realize they were in particular danger, but the awareness was never uniform. Michael Marrus referred to the German “procrastination” of the period 1939–41; Christopher Browning has written of the “thirty-month stay of execution” for Jews after Hitler’s invasion of Western Poland in September 1939.54 The creation of ghettoes had an improvised character, proceeding in fits and starts, making accurate estimates of danger extremely difficult. When a conference was held at Wannsee in January 1942 deciding the “Final Solution,” it was a tightly held secret.

Observers like Emanuel Ringelblum and Chaim Kaplan were among the first writers to be alarmed that Jews were singled out for especially harsh treatment.55 The historian Sebastian Haffner wrote, “Hitler’s mass murders were committed during the war, but they were not acts of war. On the contrary, (they) impeded the war. He used the war as a pretext.”56 The war was cover or Tarnung for other intentions; at the time it was difficult to think the war might be subordinated to other aims.

In December 1941, during a savage German raid on the ghetto in Riga and a massacre in the nearby Rumbuli Forest, the historian Simon Dubnov exhorted witnesses to “Write and Record!” (Schreibt un farschreibt!). His imperative was a call to write, to “write at once, and to write definitively.” The directive applied to all observers irrespective of profession.57 Like Ringelblum, Dubnov was a professional historian. If it was

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