At the end of the trip, the victims were stripped of clothes, hair, name, and—sometimes—left for hours in silence to wait for the unknown.
In other transports there were no SS orders or beatings. Prisoners were herded into freight cars, crammed naked against one another, driven back and forth senselessly, sometimes for days, then deposited in extermination centers and turned over to trained torturers, or fed directly into gas chambers.
In the camps, prisoners were starved; food became an obsession; a piece of bread or a spoonful of soup was often the difference between life and death. Prisoners were overworked; they often collapsed on the job; rest became an obsession. Men were forced to stand outdoors for hours, with nothing but rags to protect them from freezing cold. They were covered with filth, lacking the facilities even to wash properly. They were ravaged by disease.
They were followed every moment by the threat of beatings, torture, murder. The threat extended even to the latrines. Men were occasionally pushed from their seats into mounds of excrement; some suffocated to death as the guards watched.
Prisoners did not suffer from sexual frustration. Most did not experience the need for sex at all, even in their dreams. Sex is a celebration of life; it is a form of affirmation incompatible with a concentration camp. “After two or three weeks of the regime at Maidanek,” a survivor reports, describing an all but universal reaction, “sex problems disappeared. Women lost their periods; men lost their urge.”2
The prisoners spent their time building installations, making armaments, or turning out, for the private use of the SS, luxuries of every kind, from greeting cards to living-room furniture. The prisoners’ output, however, was relatively meager; the conditions were the opposite of what production or even productive slave labor would have required, a fact recognized by the SS and accepted by the party leadership. “[E]conomic considerations,” camp officials were told repeatedly, “should fundamentally remain unconsidered. . . .”3
Political considerations did not seem to matter, either. The camp population did include political prisoners, as well as criminals, homosexuals, so-called “asocial” types, and others whose arrest was in some way related to their ideas or behavior. But such men were a minority. The great majority of the inmates—including millions of Jews—were apolitical, law-abiding, normal; they were innocent of any opposition to Hitler’s government and of any specific crime. According to the Nazi ideology the Jews were guilty by nature. Yet it was a guilt unrelated to their actions: most had planned or done nothing forbidden by or harmful to the Nazis, a fact known to the men who arrested, tortured, and murdered them.
Judging by the long-term trend, the Jews were to be only the beginning. Despite his stress on anti-Semitism, Hitler’s agenda of destruction systematically escalated. It soon included the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Russians, and other nationalities. Later, it grew to include even various categories of loyal, racially “pure” Germans, e.g., those with lung or heart disease. (The Soviets, Hannah Arendt points out, have exhibited a similar development in this regard, moving from the destruction of the pre-revolutionary ruling classes, to that of the kulaks, the Russians of Polish origin, and other groups, on through the latest target, Russian Jewry.)4
In essence, the Nazis did not care which races inhabited the concentration camps. They imposed no restrictions on admission. What they wanted was not a group of specifically defined victims, but human material as such and in quantity.
Every aspect of the prisoner’s life in the camps was controlled by the SS men. Everything was forbidden to him except what was ordered or specially authorized. Any form of independent action was punished. A man needed permission to possess even the most insignificant object (such as a scrap of extra cloth to protect him from the cold). He needed permission to eat, to speak, to wash, to defecate.
Prisoners could grasp no reason for the camp rules. “Warum? [Why?],” a parched prisoner at Auschwitz once asked a guard who had forbidden him to touch an icicle. “Hier ist kein warum [There is no why here],” was the answer. 5
In place of why, there was whim, the seemingly causeless, inexplicable whim of the SS.
When the prisoners at Buchenwald awoke, they had to rush frantically, often at the price of ignoring urgent bodily needs, to perform the time-consuming, difficult, and utterly pointless task of making their (straw) beds with absolute precision; the mattresses had to be perfectly flat, the sides perfectly rectangular. In addition, “the whole row of beds and mattresses had to be in perfect alignment. Some SS checked with yardsticks and levels to make sure that the beds were built correctly....” 6
When the prisoners reached the work site, they might be ordered to perform some graspable task, or, without any explanation, to fill a cart with sand without using shovels lying in plain view; or to carry heavy rocks to a certain spot, then back again to the original position; or to build a fence, then destroy it, then rebuild it. When the prisoners lined up for the next in a continual series of roll calls and inspections, they might be inspected, or ignored for hours, or forced to roll through heaps of gravel as “sport,” or whipped on the spot, sometimes to the accompaniment of rollicking songs sung under orders by other prisoners.
No one could know what to expect next. Even when men were admitted to the camp hospital, they could not know—it was a matter of caprice—whether their fate was to be medical treatment or drawn-out vivisection or immediate murder. Nothing was certain but inexplicable pain.
The unpredictability was a torture by itself even apart from all the rest. A group of Czechs at one camp were given special privileges and comforts, then thrown into quarries and subjected to the worst living conditions, “then back again into good quarters and easy work, and after a few months back into the quarries with little food, etc. Soon they all died.”7
The caprice of the Nazis was senseless; it served no existential objective; but it was the law of the realm. Paraphrasing Tertullian, it was the law because it was senseless.
The prisoner in the concentration camps soon learned that his function was not compliance with delimited, goal-directed orders, however harsh or brutal. He learned that what his torturers demanded of him was not his achievement of specific objectives, or his understanding, or any kind of initiative, but a single trait: unconditional obedience.
The best theoretical interpreter of the concentration camps is Hannah Arendt. The camps, she states, are the culmination of the central totalitarian motive. Fundamentally, she holds, the camps are “laboratories,” laboratories in “total domination.”
The camps, Miss Arendt writes,
serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into something that even animals are not....
Under normal circumstances this can never be accomplished, because spontaneity can never be entirely eliminated insofar as it is connected not only with human freedom but with life itself, in the sense of simply keeping alive. It is only in the concentration camps that such an experiment is at all possible....
The end result of the experiment, she writes, is “ghastly marionettes with human faces, which all behave like the dog in Pavlov’s experiments. . . .”8
The camps, writes Bettelheim, drawing the same kind of conclusion from his own experience, are an “experimental laboratory,” designed to “learn the most effective ways of breaking resistance in a defenseless civilian population....” “One major goal was to break the prisoners as individuals, and to change them into a docile mass from which no individual or group act of resistance could arise.”
“The camps,” a recent study sums up in an apt comparison,
have so far been the closest thing on earth to a perfect Skinner Box. They were a closed, completely regulated environment, a ‘total’ world in the strict sense. Pain and death were the ‘negative reinforcers,’ food and life the ‘positive reinforcers,’ and all these forces we
re pulling and shoving twenty-four hours a day at the deepest stratum of human need. 9
In many of the camps, prisoners were interned for lengthy periods; death was put off, perhaps indefinitely. In the special “extermination camps,” a brief, violent trauma was inflicted on the prisoners, after which they were slaughtered immediately in vast groups. In either case, the essential goal of the camp system was not death as such; it was not the physical destruction of the victim that the Nazis primarily sought, but his psychological destruction, i.e., the collapse of his capacity to function independently. A man might be allowed to keep his life (for a while), his sanity, and even his physical strength (enough to carry out orders). What he had to give up—what he was methodically “reinforced,” processed, conditioned to give up—was that within him which made him an autonomous, self-directed entity.
The young SS men on duty in the camps also received a certain kind of “reinforcement” or processing. They, too, though in somewhat different form, had to be trained to give up their independence and autonomy. They had to be turned into creatures who would question nothing and carry out anything, i.e., into the unflinchingly obedient elite corps on which the whole Hitlerite system relied. The camp personnel learned obedience by doing—by doing the kinds of things normal men did not do and could not have conceived.
The prisoners were helpless. The SS had a choice: they could try to escape or at least seek duty outside the camps. Those—the great majority—who did not try it, but merely went along with their assignments, could not be called victims; they were accessories, morally responsible for what they became.
For about a year the camps were run by the thugs of the SA, a group which included many freewheeling sadists, perverts, and psychopaths eager for an orgy of hatred and torture. The SS, who took over the camps after the Röhm purge and the fall of the SA, were a different breed. For the most part the new guards and administrators were ordinary men, at least at the beginning. They did not particularly hate the prisoners or lust after blood; as a rule, they were more interested in time off than in another chance to inflict torture. When the SS took over, writes Miss Arendt,
the old spontaneous bestiality gave way to an absolutely cold and systematic destruction of human bodies, calculated to destroy human dignity; death was avoided or postponed indefinitely. The camps were no longer amusement parks for beasts in human form, that is, for men who really belonged in mental institutions and prisons; the reverse became true: they were turned into ‘drill grounds,’ on which perfectly normal men were trained to be full-fledged members of the SS.10
Ideological indoctrination alone, it was found, could not create a corps of full-fledged Nazis; but the daily practice of concentration-camp-scale unreason could, and did.
The camps, and all their seemingly inexplicable horrors, were aimed not only at the victims, but also at the killers. The victims had to become robots, slavishly obedient to the guards; the guards had to become robots, slavishly obedient to the Führer. In both cases, some fundamental element in men had to be destroyed by the camp experience, an element unidentified but taken for granted by most people; it is the element which, in a normal man, underlies and makes possible such attributes as independence, autonomy, self-direction, “spontaneity.”
What is this element and by what method did the camps undertake to eradicate it? What specifically did the camp rulers wage war on and seek to destroy in man?
The process began at the beginning, with the selection of prisoners who had done nothing wrong and who could not understand why they had been arrested.
Hannah Arendt was the first to identify the camps’ need of innocent inmates. She explains the policy in sociopolitical terms, as part of a deliberate Nazi (and Soviet) attempt “to kill the juridical person in man,” i.e., to destroy the concept of man’s rights.
Criminals, Miss Arendt observes, are not proper subjects for a concentration camp. However brutally he is treated by the camp guards, the criminal knows why he is there; he is able to grasp a causal relationship between his actions and his fate. To that extent he retains a certain human dignity. He remains within the normal, pre-totalitarian framework of crime and punishment; he remains within the realm where justice (by some definition) is relevant and where a man’s rights are a reality to be respected or at least considered.
If, however, one deliberately arrests men who have done nothing and tortures them methodically for no reason at all, then the normal framework is thrown out, and even the pretense at justice (in any definition) disappears. The contemptuous, sweeping rejection of man’s rights becomes a principle of the system, and the victim is effectively stripped of human status. Thus the camps’ need of innocent inmates. Thus also the fact that those criminals picked for the camps were sent there as a rule only after they had completed their term in prison and were legally free.
“Under no circumstances,” Miss Arendt summarizes, “must the concentration camp become a calculable punishment for definite offenses.” If internment were made dependent on any definition of crime or heresy, no matter how perverse or tyrannical, the camps would become superfluous: “it would make for a new system of justice, which, given any stability at all, could not fail to produce a new juridical person in man, that would elude the totalitarian domination.”11
The actual results of the camps’ policy in this matter support Miss Arendt’s viewpoint. The criminals were the prisoners least devastated by their arrest; they found their internment easiest to endure and became the camp aristocracy everywhere. Conversely, according to Bettelheim, those worst hit psychologically were the law-abiding, apolitical members of the German middle class; these men, many of whom had sympathized with the Hitler regime, had no inkling of any reason (legal, political, or philosophical) to explain their fate, and this was a fact which they could not deal with or bear. “The prisoner,” noted the commandant of Auschwitz in his autobiography, “can cope with stern but impartial severity, however harsh it may be, but tyranny and manifestly unjust treatment affect his soul like a blow with a club.”12
The concept of rights (or of justice) is not a philosophic primary, though Miss Arendt often seems to treat it as such. What she identifies only as the attack on the “juridical person” is, in fact, part of a wider, all-embracing assault. To give a man’s soul this kind of blow is one step in the process of plunging him into a certain kind of world. All the other steps continued the process.
The salient feature of the camp world was not merely injustice, or even horror, but horror which was unintelligible to the victim.
When they arrived at the camps, many of the prisoners, dazed by their arrest and nightmare transport, did not know what was happening to them or even where they were. As a rule the Nazis told them nothing and answered no questions. The guards’ manner was that of a response to the self-evident: they behaved as if the prisoners were creatures with no faculty of intelligence, or as if the prisoners had now entered a realm in which such a faculty was irrelevant.
In the larger society, the Nazis counted heavily on the power of ideology: there is no other way to rule an entire country. The dissemination of ideology, however—any ideology, even the Nazi one—implicitly underscores the importance of ideas, of individual choice and judgment, of the listener’s mind. In the camps no such implication was to be permitted.
No attempt was made to present the Nazi viewpoint to the prisoners. There were no self-justifying speeches, no summaries of Mein Kampf, no propaganda, no proselytizing. “Education [in the camps],” declared Himmler, “consists of discipline, never of any kind of instruction on an ideological basis.”13
The SS did not want the prisoners’ intellectual acceptance of Nazism and rebuffed any overtures from would-be converts. When certain prisoners sought to make their peace with the Gestapo, Bettelheim reports, the Gestapo’s response was to insist that prisoners refrain from expressing any of their feelings, even pro-Nazi ones. “Free consent,” observes Miss Arendt, “is as much an obstacle to total domination a
s free opposition.”14
The camp rulers would not tolerate a prisoner’s concerning himself with ideas of any kind, whether Nazi or otherwise. Ideas are irrelevant to an inmate—this was the guiding idea; in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, thought has no place.
Neither, the inmates soon learned, did individuality have any place. When a prisoner entered the camp, he brought with him the knowledge achieved by civilized Western man: it was self-evident to him that he (like all men) was a separate entity with a unique identity. The camps proceeded methodically to flout this self-evidency.
Characteristically, the guards did not know or seek to know anything about any particular inmate beyond his group membership. Often they failed or deliberately refused to recognize any difference at all between one prisoner and another. An eerie egalitarianism prevailed: to the SS the things being manipulated by screams, kicks, and guns were not separate human entities, each with his own appearance, character, life; they were indistinguishable cells of an undifferentiated mass, faceless units made of agony, filth, and groveling, each equal to and interchangeable with hundreds or millions of other such units.
Personal responsibility was not recognized in the camps. If a prisoner took an action regarded as punishable, he was not treated as the culprit. Instead, so far as possible, every member of the group to which he belonged (including himself) was punished for the action, regardless of any member’s own behavior or knowledge of the incident; all were punished equally, ruthlessly, and as a group. (Outside the camps a variant of this method was practiced: the police would intimidate some dissatisfied group—e.g., doctors or lawyers—by arresting a random cross section of its members, without reference to any individual’s action, guilt, or innocence.)
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