Already in the fall of 1940, Hans Frank, the German governor of Poland, clearly outlined this vision of Europe while speaking specifically of Poland. “We think here in imperial terms, in the most grandiose style of all times. The imperialism that we develop is incomparable with those miserable attempts that previous weak German governments have undertaken in Africa.” Frank reported to his audience that “the Führer has further said explicitly” that Poland is (in Frank’s paraphrase) “destined” to be a “gigantic work camp, where everything that means power and independence is in the hands of the Germans.” No Pole would receive higher education, and “none may rise to a rank higher than foreman.” In Hitler and Frank’s view, the Polish state would never be restored. The Poles would be permanently “subjugated” to the master race. Frank’s elaboration upon this vision of the concentration camp as the model for Poland was not secret but expressed in two speeches to his administration’s department heads as the governing ethos to the people governing Poland. Hitler’s and his political blueprint is what the Germans were actually implementing in Poland and elsewhere east of Germany. As Himmler, the principal operational architect of the Germans’ eliminationist policies and practices, is reported to have communicated to one of the SS and police forces’ leaders in charge of an occupied area of the Soviet Union, “The Ukrainians should become a people of Helots that work only for us.”37
As tools in their eliminationist politics, the Germans erected twenty thousand camps, mainly in Germany and conquered eastern territories, the formal extermination camps for Jews being the most infamous. (Some Germans’ allied and puppet regimes set up parallel camps, most notably the Croats’ camps, where they victimized and slaughtered Serbs, Jews, Sinti, and Roma.) The Germans established camps in 1933, and once established, particularly with the military conquests after 1939, the system expanded easily and, according to the Nazis’ logic, naturally. It became a permanent system of German society and of the Germans’ empire of suffering and exploitation they were creating in Europe. It was the theoretical and de facto model for much of Europe, not just Poland, that the Germans were creating.38 A demythologized Waffen-SS man, Otto-Ernst Duscheleit, who saw firsthand his countrymen’s transformation in the East, when asked what the world would have looked like had they won the war, explains: “It would have been terrible. I am not capable of imagining how bad this would have been. Hitler wanted not only Germany, he wanted to defeat the whole world, and everything would have been transformed into a huge concentration camp.”39
The Germans’ camp world contained many gradations depending on the principal incarcerated groups’ racial, political, and sexual definition, the camps’ formal functions, and their staffs. In all cases, the camps were integrated into their regions’ politics, society, and economy. In Eastern Europe, they were the foundation of Germans’ politics. In Germany itself, camps, fully integrated into the German economy and society, were an unavoidable part of the urban and rural landscape. In them, the Germans incarcerated an ever-growing slave population, mainly of Slavic peoples. In the small state of Hesse, at least 606 camps—one for every five-by-seven-mile area—apocalyptically shaped the physical and social landscape. Berlin, the country’s capital and showpiece, housed 645 camps just for slave laborers. It would be interesting to ascertain how small the mean physical distance was between Germans and a camp, how many camps each German on average encountered during a week, and how little removed the most distant spot in Germany was from a camp.40
The Soviets’ gulag was a sprawling camp world of more than 470 individual camp systems, each having hundreds or thousands of individual camps. The Soviets used this vast eliminationist infrastructure to help govern their empire of domination and communist fantasy and transformation, consuming millions of real, designated, and fantasized enemies. Like the German camp system, the gulag was a multifunctional lethal, exploitative, and penal system where the Soviets warehoused, enslaved, and killed their designated enemies. Kolyma, the most infamous Soviet camp complex, in the Arctic’s frozen tundra, rivaled the most lethal German camps in overall murderousness (though not in annual death toll), consuming from 1937 to 1953 hundreds of thousands of lives. Like the Germans’ camp world, the Soviets’ camps, starting small and easily expanding into the vast gulag archipelago, were employed to house and coordinate a slave population, with perhaps eighteen million people passing through them, which the Soviets, as in Kolyma, often used as production factors, often working them quickly or slowly to death.
Galician Kalinnikovich, imprisoned for fifteen years in the gulag, began working in the Kalamar mines early in his imprisonment in Oc-tober 1938, when the gulag was at its worst. He describes how the prisoners worked and died in the arctic Siberian wasteland, from the “inhuman conditions . . . from hunger, from hunger. It was 70 degrees below. They worked twelve hours [a day]. The barracks were freezing cold. And people perished in these conditions. Sometimes you’d walk to work and on the way, people would freeze to death there who couldn’t make it to camp. That’s the kind of conditions they had. It was before the war. By 1941 it got a little better. And in 1941, the war started, the workday became sixteen hours. Imagine, working sixteen hours in the freezing cold, rain, snow, no matter, we worked.” Of 1,500 in his group, 450, about one-third, died within the first three months, which Kalinnikovich says was a “quite usual” death rate for the various Kalamar camps.41
Gulag prisoners at work
Whatever the Soviet gulag’s formal and sometimes substantive similarities to the Germans’ camp world, the differences were profound and fundamental, so much so that equating them is a mistake. Ukhnalev Ilyich, when wanting to convey the character of work in the arctic Vorkuta camps during his imprisonment starting in 1948, spontaneously, without any prompting, brought up the German camps. “You see,” he explains, “it wasn’t the same kind of camps as the German concentration camps. . . . People who had been arrested and brought there [to the gulag] were there in order to work and not for extermination. In other words, the goal to annihilate wasn’t there.”42 The sprawling gulag was an enormously variable system, which the German camps were not for Jews, and were much less so even for other prisoner groups. The gulag’s camps had widely varying death rates, and conditions and treatment of its prisoners, which depended on the camps’ locations, their work, and the orientation of individual camps’ commanders and staffs. Although camp staff often treated political prisoners and criminals differently (regularly pitting the two groups against each other), a hierarchy of treatment and cruelty toward different victim groups akin to the Germans’ (discussed below) did not exist. The gulag’s character also changed enormously over time, including in the treatment of prisoners, in a manner the German camp world did not once it expanded into its mature form. (The German camps existed more briefly but because they used them to execute well-articulated and long-term eliminationist plans, mainly to destroy or eliminate people considered demons or subhumans, it is hard to see how that camp world would have been tempered significantly.) The gulag was its most brutal and lethal in the late 1930s, and by the late 1940s, owing to various causes, including a relaxation from the top, had become, though still an abominable if not hellish place, far less deadly and punitive toward its denizens. Kalinnikovich freely describes the gulag’s inhumanity and enormous death rates during its worst years, including especially in the Arctic Kolyma camp Berlag. “The situation there was one thousand times worse than usually in a camp. First of all, they were taken to work shackled. That’s one. Second, once they finish their work, they’d be locked up and [the guards] put a bucket there. And can you imagine. You say . . . why people died? People got emaciated very quickly.” Kalinnikovich also conveys the gulag’s changes and how it differed fundamentally from the German camps:There were parcels. They were allowed. Letters were allowed. But everything was checked, so . . . Well, I, of course, sent [letters] via “the free people” [those in Kolyma who were not prisoners]. I had friends among the free people and I would send
my wife money and prior to being released, I had already an outfit. . . . the clothes my wife had sent me. I had everything in Kolyma. That was doable. I have to say that towards the end, in the years beginning after the war, the regime softened. There was less tyranny. . . . Before, we were the prisoner swine and besides we were the enemy of the people. That put a certain imprint on us as well as the way “the free people dealt with us.” But during this whole time, during the war time, the free people understood what kind of enemy of the people we were. And that’s why . . . during my stay in Kolyma, fifteen years, the view was turned upside-down.43
The gulag, unlike the Nazi camps, allowed cultural lives for the prisoners, including orchestras in some. There was a “cultural educational division,” Ilyich explains, “there were actors there, musicians, and among them the camp artists.”44 The camp had workshops for the prisoners to make things to use, sell, and barter. It had medical facilities with doctors or nurses. Prisoners were allowed contact with the outside world by mail. Many prisoners received monthly packages from their families containing food and tobacco. And many prisoners were released, when their sentences were served, back into Soviet society. Because the Soviet leadership and the camps’ personnel (and even some prisoners!) conceived of the gulag as necessary to bring about the communist paradise, the guards often had a paradoxical attitude toward the prisoners. Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident and prisoner, explains: “In our camps, you were expected not only to be a slave laborer, but to sing and smile while you worked as well. They didn’t just want to oppress us: they wanted us to thank them for it.”45 And, as time went on, they, like the gulag itself, often softened up. All this was unthinkable for the German camps, which for most of its inhabitants were utterly and only places of damnation, torture, and death, which was exactly the Germans’ intention. In many ways, the gulag was a highly exacerbated eliminationist version or extension of Soviet society itself, with all its pathologies. That is why people could enter the gulag and then be released and why free people could live nearby and have humane relations with the prisoners. The Germans, by contrast, created a camp world unto itself, inhabited by putative subhumans and demons, which was nothing like the life of the self-conceived master race.
Gulag camp nursery
As in the Soviet Union, the communist Chinese had a range of institutions that functionally were camps, starting with their formal camp system, the Laogai, which they constructed upon taking power, and in which they incarcerated and put to work real and imagined enemies. As the Soviets had, the Chinese communists eliminated tens of millions by placing them in forced-labor camps, so that at any given moment for at least two decades, each communist system housed in their camps more than ten million people, who also suffered enormous mortality rates.46 From 1949 to 1953, when the Chinese communists were consolidating power and laying the groundwork for their vast country’s social and economic transformation to communism, the regime killed on the order of ten million people, mainly in their camps.
The communists’ transformative programs’ intensity reached two additional peaks: during the Great Leap Forward, from 1958 to 1961, and the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976. The Great Leap Forward was intended to hasten the creation of the ideal economic order and powerhouse promised by Marxist theory. The Cultural Revolution was to bring about the ideological purity the communist transformative project required, by purging society, especially the Communist Party itself, of those deemed impediments either ideologically or by deed. As is typical of vast camp systems, the regime and its perpetrators turned the prisoners into slaves, using them brutally for economic production, although, typical for such systems, highly irrationally from an economic point of view.
Once camp systems are created, perpetrators tend to expand and use them increasingly liberally as they do with mass murder. Eliminationist institutions’ existence, including camps, forecloses or makes other kinds of politics—from accommodation and compromise to conventional, if brutal, repression—less used, less practiced, less available, and less normative. Camps’ existence alters the perpetrators’ cost-benefit calculus, rendering the camp system’s use and expansion ever more instrumentally rational compared to alternatives for perpetrators to act upon their hatreds, solve the perceived human, social, and political problems, and consolidate and further their power.
Still, these systems are not mindless omnivores. Anthropomorphizing accounts holding camp systems or the systems creating them as some sort of autonomous, hungry, and insatiable consumers of lives are not grounded in reality. Camp systems are measured tools of eliminationist political regimes bent upon refashioning or purifying societies according to thoroughgoing transformative visions—the Nazi German, the imperial Japanese, the communisms of the Soviets, Chinese, North Koreans, and Khmer Rouge. The more we learn about camp systems, the clearer they systematically express their regimes’ and staffs’ ideological underpinnings. The perpetrators treat these systems’ victims, those perishing and those suffering other horrible fates, according to their conceptions of the threats they and their country or ethnic group face, which is grounded in the particular character of their prejudices and hatreds (discussed below). Camp systems afford perpetrators the constant opportunity to include new, real, or imagined enemies in their eliminationist project, which changes as its implementation unfolds. It is striking how camp systems’ expansions vary enormously from one eliminationist system to the next, in the range of victims, their functions, and their transformation’s pace and size.
The Nazis started with a few so-called wild camps, improvised detention places serving principally as chambers to torture their political enemies. Later, with public announcement and fanfare, they institutionalized these wild camps into a formal camp system, which quickly grew so that many tens of thousands passed through, although the regime released most of them. By 1939 the camp system had been reduced to twenty-five thousand inmates. The Germans began expanding the camp population explosively only upon acquiring their empire and the opportunity to begin implementing their preconceived eliminationist and exterminationist projects. The Soviets established the gulag’s rudiments early on, systematically expanding it along with their destructive grip on Soviet society, mainly for putative domestic enemies. In the first phase, they incarcerated mainly the regime’s real enemies, who had fought them or resisted their assumption and consolidation of power. In the 1930s, the camps became depositories for those seen as impediments to the Soviets’ transformation of their country’s agricultural and industrial systems. In the 1940s and 1950s, the camps gobbled up the victims of Stalin’s growing paranoia. The Chinese communists created a colossal and fully mature camp system soon after taking power. The Americans’ camp system for the Japanese, the most rationally organized and least brutal, had a specific warehousing purpose. It did not expand, and was closed down when that purpose—ill-conceived and criminal as it was—became unnecessary, upon Japan’s defeat. The British camp system in Kenya grew in stages, in a manner unplanned and unforeseen, as their assault’s intensity on the Kikuyu increased. That the Khmer Rouge sent most Cambodians on their way into camps within a few days of seizing power precluded the need to expand the system dramatically.
Whatever particular camp systems’ trajectories, regimes establishing such systems are usually engaged in long processes of murderous domination or eschatological transformation, processes that the camp systems’ existence and availability further strengthen.
The Soviets were trying to bring about the impossible, a modern industrialized society based on a social theory, Marxism, denying a functioning modernity’s certain fundamentals: free markets and free labor. When the millennial zeal died along with the paranoid tyrant Stalin, Khrushchev and those around him dismantled the camp system. The Germans, by contrast, were trying to bring about the possible: a European and eventually a world empire that, as Himmler and Frank indicated with their policy statements and instructions and as ordinary German perpetrators understood, was to be a
huge concentration camp, organized according to racial-biological domination, exploitation, and extermination principles. The Japanese were intent upon something similar in Asia. The Khmer Rouge succeeded in bringing about their idiosyncratic version of Marxist transformation because they sought not a modern but a primitive totalitarian society wedded to a backward-looking nationalist agenda. Theirs was a workable, easily constructable model predicated on unfreedom, both economic and human. Seeking only to purify the Khmer people and enforce their ideological dictates, they made their camps into places of total atomization and premodern primitivism. Given the more limited aspirations of the Americans to warehouse Japanese-Americans and the British to eliminate the Kikuyu’s threat to their colonial rule, the Americans succeeded partly because their aspirations were temporary and the British succeeded only temporarily because, short of still vaster mass murder, their colonial racial domination, historically passé, was doomed.
B002QX43GQ EBOK Page 49