The Holocaust (Pelican Books) by Dan Stone

Author:Dan Stone [Stone, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241388716
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2023-01-25T16:00:00+00:00

Auschwitz, the domain of the ‘cultured demons’, may not have been the site where most of the Jews killed in the Holocaust died but it marked the apogee of the murder process and is rightly remembered as such.

In late 1943 and early 1944 the killing rate slowed at Birkenau, as the Nazis realized that placing ideology above labour made little sense now, given the parlous state of the war economy and the military situation after Stalingrad. The increasingly desperate needs of the war economy drove the Nazi leadership to reconsider its killing programme – a remarkable fact given the drive to murder Jews that was central to Nazism. From 1943 onwards Jews and others were as likely to end up in slave-labour sub-camps attached to the SS’s main camps as they were to be murdered outright. In fact, between 210,000 and 220,000 inmates, the majority of them Jews, were transferred from Auschwitz to other camps, including Auschwitz’s sub-camps.43 The rapid growth in the sub-camp system is something that histories of the Holocaust often fail to explain, but it does not downplay Nazi genocidal plans to show that they were attenuated to a small extent in the final year and a half of the war. Rather, when one considers the ways in which slave labourers were treated, the exact opposite is the case. If one cannot always talk of ‘annihilation through labour’ (this is a term which does not occur very often in the sources), nevertheless the Nazis’ attitude, even when labour needs were acute, was that Jews were expendable and that no effort should be made to ensure that productivity levels could become anything like those for normal labourers.

Even within sites which today appear silent and still, the hubbub of movement on the part of guards, SS, civilians and inmates meant that the camp was ‘always in motion’.44 For the victims, this movement was overwhelmingly bewildering, and sub-camp inmates often did not even know where they were. The fact is, however, that the use of Jews as slave labourers saved the lives of several hundred thousands who would otherwise have simply been killed. Even if their deaths were being deferred, their lives were prolonged as a result of the unexpected flexibility of the Nazis’ racial laws from late 1943 onwards in reaction to the desperate needs of the war economy. ‘These camps’, one historian notes, ‘were among the best options available for Jews; for other inmates they were usually the worst. Jews were worst affected, but it would be incorrect to say that their labour ability played no role in their fate under the Germans.’45

This flexibility should not be overstated; it was a last-ditch measure, and the survivors were simply fortunate that the war did not last even a few days longer, for otherwise their number would have been even smaller. But the use of Jews as slave labourers was, from the Nazis’ ideological point of view, ironic. The vast expansion of the sub-camp system and, especially, the death marches

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