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by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  Understanding camp systems’ overall purpose, character, and trajectory is only the larger part of their place as integral tools of eliminationist politics. The other part is their actual functioning. Except for the rare instances of single-purpose killing installations, such as the Germans’ camps of Chelmno, Treblinka, and Sobibór, on the one hand, and temporary warehousing, such as the Americans’ camps for Japanese-Americans, on the other, camps and camp systems are internally complex institutions riven by contradictory purposes.

  They kill and create deadly conditions producing high, often mass-murderous mortality rates, yet they pursue ideological dictates, including punishment and some reeducation, requiring victims to remain alive. They make varying attempts to be economically productive, yet according to any rational understanding of economic organization, they are thoroughly irrational—they intrinsically produce harsh, debilitating conditions for the inmates, because they are, as a rule, underfunded and undersupplied in every respect, especially food. (Because they are economically unviable, an additional economic calculus victimizes their inmates—why should scarce economic resources be allocated to these economic black holes?—leading to an even greater undersupply of food and other things.) Within camps themselves, regimes and their followers treat different prisoners differently: They immediately slaughter some, incarcerate others indefinitely, warehouse others temporarily. Camps are run by low-quality staff, often by people who before coming to the camps already dehumanized or demonized victims. Day to day, camps and their personnel often operate relatively autonomously from the regime, aside from its broad ideological dictates, governed less by rules and more by personalistic and arbitrary whim. The perpetrators staffing camps exercise virtually unrestrained power over victims, inherently producing great abuses. In light of these features, it is no wonder that camp worlds, while coherent as general places of elimination, domination, and destruction, are incoherent in their actual running, including the multiple ways that camps’ various aspects systematically conflict.

  The most obvious and acute contradictions are camps’ destructive and productive uses. Perpetrators employ many camp systems or individual camps as vehicles of death, often through massive expected or calculated attrition owing to the inhuman conditions and treatment. Almost all camp systems also compel their victims to work, seeking to produce some economic value. Yet, at most, victims’ work defrays a (usually small) portion of the huge economic loss of wresting productive workers from the normal economy (which also is not always governed by rational economic principles). Putting the victims to work is but a natural corollary of the eliminationist project and what every eliminationist project is at heart: a massive, economically destructive initiative. American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau appealed to economic rationality to deter Mehmet Talât from completing his exterminationist program against the Armenians: “If you are not influenced by humane considerations,” Morgenthau reasoned, “think of the material loss. These people are your business men. They control many of your industries. They are very large tax-payers. What would become of you commercially without them?” Talât replied that they had already calculated all this and that it did not matter: “We care nothing about the commercial loss.” Without disputing Morgenthau’s warning that in killing the Armenians they were “ruining the country economically”—or in the words of American Consul Leslie Davis, “by one stroke, the country was to be set back a century”—Ismail Enver reiterated this point, definitively declaring that “economic considerations are of no importance at this time.”47

  The Germans similarly did not care that by destroying the Jews they enormously damaged their economy, and even their chances of winning the war. So economically irrational was their ideologically driven treatment of the Jews that, in the face of a massive labor shortage of more than 2.5 million workers, according to their own report about the part of occupied Poland called the Generalgouvernement, they employed full time only 450,000 out of 1.4 million Jewish workers. The rest, totaling almost one million, “were employed for a short period.”48 Of course, under their total annihilation program, the Germans killed almost all these Jewish workers in the next months anyway. This accorded exactly with the German leadership’s understanding of their exterminationist priorities’ colossal economic destructiveness. Reinhard Heydrich explained at the Wannsee Conference, “The Jews will be conscripted for labor . . . and undoubtedly a large number of them will drop out through natural wastage.” The rest they would kill.49 Such was the relationship between annihilation and work, the annihilation’s primacy, and how an eliminationist program is the sine qua non for the creation of the derivative phenomenon of camps.

  The Soviet gulag is the camp system most clearly intended for something approximating rational economic exploitation, with production goals assigned to the camps and, by individual camp administrations, to the individual inmates. Moreover, the gulag’s administration and the Soviet regime devoted considerable energy to using the camps economically and more productively. Yet the gulag could not overcome its many contradictions inhibiting production, including its fundamental noneconomic eliminationist reason for being. This made it utterly irrational economically, unprofitable, and far less productive than free labor—as the Soviet regime’s members themselves knew from the beginning. The regime’s own records demonstrate this, as early as July 1919 and in the 1920s. In 1938, in response to the camps’ massive production shortfalls, the Communist Party leaders responsible for the gulag held candid meetings about their ongoing economic catastrophe. “Chaos and disorder,” “our camps are organized unsystematically,” a “particularly difficult situation with food supplies,” which led to “an enormous percentage of weak workers, an enormous percentage of prisoners who couldn’t work at all, and a high death rate and illness rate” were among their many withering economic criticisms. This continued throughout. Fifteen years later, in 1953, an inspection the Communist Party’s Central Committee ordered determined that camps were enormously unprofitable, costing more to maintain than their laborers produced.50 Not only did camp labor not produce more than the general economy’s labor, but it was negatively productive, running a deficit, soaking up badly needed capital from genuine economic enterprises in a capital-starved economy.

  The official Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification, established with the mandate to investigate and report on the Guatemalan government’s eliminationist assault upon leftists and Maya, calculated that in the ten-year period from 1980 to 1989 alone “the total direct quantifiable costs were equivalent to zero production in Guatemala for almost 15 months, equal to 121% of the 1990 Gross Domestic Product (GDP).” That is an astonishing amount of economic loss. Moreover, the total losses were considerably greater, because the eliminationist onslaught and destruction lasted many more years and this calculation included only five of the seven most destructive years (1978-1985). The report further detailed the losses:The majority of the costs, equivalent to 90% of the 1990 GDP, resulted from the loss of production potential due to the death, disappearance or forced displacement of individuals who had to abandon their daily activities, or from recruitment into the PAC, the Army or the guerrillas. The destruction of physical assets, including private and community property, and the loss of infrastructure, such as bridges and electrical towers, also represented considerable losses, over 6% of the 1990 GDP. These material losses frequently involved the total destruction of family capital, especially among Mayan families, particularly in the west and north-west of Guatemala.51

  Exterminationist and eliminationist assaults are economically utterly irrational. The Guatemalan assault highlights the critical issue: The economic loss owing to just the lost productivity of the victims was 90 percent of the overall economic loss, which was equivalent to shutting down the country’s entire economy for a year and a quarter. Had the Guatemalan perpetrators, instead of slaughtering and driving Maya from the country, deposited them in camps, grossly underfed them, subjected them to most camp systems’
brutal work and living conditions, producing extremely high mortality rates, and then worked them as slaves in irrationally organized and outfitted sites, the lost economic productivity, perhaps somewhat less, would still have been catastrophic. It is simply bizarre to think that such standard camp conditions are a recipe for greater economic output than what the Guatemalan economy lost owing to the regime’s elimination of Maya, or for that matter than what any other economy lost with its eliminationist program. Soviet camp commanders particularly interested in economic production recognized this and therefore chose to undermine the gulag’s ordinary regimen. One commander, according to former prisoner Aleksi Pryadilov, “ran the camp like an economic organization, and behaved toward prisoners not as if they were criminals or enemies, whom it was necessary to ‘re-educate,’ but as though they were workers.” Why? “He was convinced that there was no point in trying to get good work out of hungry people.”52

  None of this is surprising, as perpetrators do not create camp systems for economic purposes. The notion that they do is ideological nonsense, serving the perpetrators’ wish to conceal their real motives and purposes, as well as their many interpreters’ and apologists’ desires to justify the perpetrators’ actions, deflect attention from the truth, or ideologically indict a political-economic dispensation. Economic rationality was manifestly not the core conception of regimes—the Germans in South-West Africa, Soviets, Nazis, Croatians, Chinese, Americans, North Koreans, the British in Kenya, Indonesians, Ethiopians, Khmer Rouge, Serbs, and many others—in creating camps to eliminate real or imagined enemies. This aside, only camps’ ideologized supporters or people sympathetic to the camps’ irrational underpinnings can believe that plunging people into inhuman, debilitating conditions and turning productive workers with differentiated skills into weakened and sick slaves laboring at unfamiliar tasks often below their skill levels is a program for rational economic organization and high productivity.

  Any idea that a regime’s economic need brings people into camps, even in camp systems’ most rationally organized part, misconstrues the causal relationship. The perpetrators’ ideological worldview brings camps into being, sustains them, and engenders the image of humanity and society that first creates victims and then mobilizes them as irrationally used workers. The Khmer Rouge turned a country self-sufficient in foodstuffs (rice being the agricultural staple) into an agricultural and economic disaster, so naturally they worked people in the communes growing rice. Ratha Duong (a pen name), then a child, conveys this, as well as her clear understanding that she was, and was to be, a victim of one of the Khmer Rouge’s many interchangeable eliminationist means, of which enslavement was one: “In November and early December 1976 there was no food to eat. I was sick. I asked myself when I was going to die. Would I die by starvation or by torture? I thought that if I died, I would no longer have to work like an animal. I asked my group leader for permission to rest one day. She said no. So I worked in the field planting rice. My legs were weak from standing in the mud. The rain fell hard and my body shook with chills. My eyes couldn’t see. I felt dizzy and then I collapsed into the mud. I heard the group leader tell girls to carry me out under the tree. I was unconscious.”53 Virtually everything the Khmer Rouge had people do and how they had them live, including how they prepared the young for adult life, violated any notion of economic rationality. One eleven-year-old boy describes how the Khmer Rouge reared him and other teenage boys, having, as they had with most children in Cambodia, separated them from their families. The boys were “not taught to read or write or to sing any songs; we were never shown any radios, books or magazines.” Instead they were compelled to build a road that was supposed to cross hundreds of kilometers of uninhabited forest. How did these “workers” do it? “We all worked at the rate of two or three metres of road per day, using locally-made buckets to shift the earth; some boys threw up the soil while others packed it down into a road surface. By the time I left this site five months later, no vehicles had yet been seen on the road.”54 At that rate, these young boys would have taken a year to complete just one kilometer. The Khmer Rouge’s worldview, producing Cambodia’s total economic catastrophe, was but the extreme variant of our age’s economically irrational and self-destructive ideologies creating camps and governing their work.

  Camps’ simple logic is that the people consigned to them are putative subhumans or demons, dangerous or criminal, certainly enemies of the regime, the future, and goodness, so an eliminationist regime might as well benefit from the victims before killing or otherwise disposing of them. The gulag’s murderous nature and conditions were so great already in 1926, long before the gulag became its most deadly in the late 1930s, that S. A. Malsagoff, in a camp on an island in the Arctic Sea, reported: “I gathered from the candid statements of the Tchekists that the Gpu has now no need to make a regular practice of mass shootings, because more humane measures—slow murder from starvation, work beyond the prisoners’ strength, and ‘medical help’—are perfectly adequate substitutes.”55 If you are going to kill those people designated as enemies, as subhumans or demons, why not get them to work in the meantime? Mao revealed this logic to be explicitly guiding him in an order from May 1951. The victims, according to Mao, had “committed crimes that deserve to be punished by death,” but if they were immediately executed, “we would lose a large labour force.”56 So Mao sent them to a system of labor camps designed to house them under hellish conditions to temporarily produce some surplus.

  The perpetrators’ knowledge that the camps’ victims enjoy a momentary reprieve before execution, or their belief that the inmates are socially dead and can or must be eliminated, allows them to temporarily use the victims brutally and irrationally as workers. The Khmer Rouge, having caught Moly Ly leaving his slave labor village, where they had already reduced him to “a worn-out, skeletal figure craving food,” sent him to a worse facility.

  Once there, I was stunned to see only four women and a man. Without observing the clothes they wore, it was difficult to tell the difference between the man and the women. They had extremely fragile figures. Bones were popping out from everywhere in their bodies. At night our feet were cuffed with a special kind of wood to prevent us from escaping. At dawn we were dragged to work near the jail, plucking the soil.

  The next day, one of the women died in her sleep. Her ankles had been cuffed. I now realized that this was a death camp to cruelly torture people by starving and overworking them. Sometimes they threw food scraps at our faces and laughed. Other times we were beaten for being so exhausted from the hard work. I could no longer function like a human being. I knew in my heart that my spirit was going to die.57

  If the people slated for elimination end up producing something useful, all the better. Mey Komphot conveys the thoughts he had about Cambodians’ situation around the time the Khmer Rouge had been in power for a month. He was in one of the hellish cooperatives with a pound of rice per day, the ration for an adult—no other food whatsoever—so five hundred calories a day, minimal protein, virtually no vitamins and minerals. Children received nothing. The new Cambodian reality dawned on him: “I realized we were expendable. All the analyses we had done during the war, all of our ideas about what Cambodia would be like, were so wrong I had no room in my imagination for what was happening. I finally understood what it meant to be called [by the Khmer Rouge cadres] to ‘study’—those people were murdered. Those of us who were spared were to become work animals. We were barely surviving.”58 Even if in some camp systems attempts are made to enhance camps’ productivity, many perpetrators’ prevailing attitude has been that the prisoners should work for working’s sake, the economic outcome be damned.

  Given camps’ multiple economic irrationalities, it is no surprise that regimes putting people to work in camp systems rarely conceive of the work in any conventional sense and force people to work for various reasons having nothing to do with rational economics. The most obvious reason is by now clear: The perpetrators readily
and variously exploit people they want to eliminate, including for labor. For many regimes, compelling the hated enemies to work also satisfies ideological dictates and is emotionally satisfying. Germans, beholden to antisemitic lore (deeply grounded in Christian accounts about Jews, including centrally in Martin Luther’s writings), which held that Jews do not labor honestly, conceived of the simple act of labor to be punishment for Jews. Throughout their camp system, the Germans worked Jews just for the sake of working them. The harder the better. This can be seen both in the work’s abysmal organization and productivity, and in the Germans’ frequent resort to productiveless labor, such as compelling Jews to run with big rocks or full sacks from one place to a second and then back to the first, under the Germans’ hail of blows, taunts, and laughter. According to one non-Jewish survivor from Buchenwald, “Some of the work in camp was useful but some of it was utterly senseless, intended only as a form of torture, a diversion engaged in by the SS ‘for fun.’ The Jews especially, often had to build walls, only to tear them down the next day, rebuild them again, and so on.”59 Communist regimes deemed the bourgeoisie and, in the case of Asian communisms, urban dwellers to be class enemies—parasites living off workers’ or peasants’ sweat. In the Soviet Union’s early years it was dangerous to have uncallused hands, which indicated that a person had not labored honestly and so was a member of the bourgeoisie. As an act of retribution and justice, communist regimes put these “enemies” to work.