Forced Labour and Genocide: The Nazi Concentration Camp System during the War Jens-Christian Wagner In December 1943, the Hygiene Institute of the of a crematorium as soon as possible” (“in this Armed SS in Berlin sent the SS physician Dr Karl connection, sufficient incineration capacity is to Gross to inspect “Dora”, a Buchenwald subcamp be taken into consideration from the start”), and established a few months previously near the finally “the establishment of an alternative camp town of Nordhausen. The authorities in Berlin for inmates unable to work”. 2 were evidently alarmed by the unusually high death rate in the camp, whose inmates, in addi- Here the SS physician essentially summed up tion to performing forced labour underground, what had become decisive for the concentration also had their lodgings underground for the most camp system after its “economization” began part at that point in time. Gross had been as- in 1942: selection and segregation were key signed to get to the bottom of the problem. After interfaces between the two poles of labour and his visit, he wrote a detailed and presumably annihilation. Apart from positioning the inmates quite realistic report. “The severely and fatally on the racist ladder dictated by the SS, factors ill as well as the dying at their workplaces are of crucial importance in this context were the conspicuous”, Gross wrote, and on the whole inmates’ physical constitution and professional described the conditions in the underground con- qualifications as well as the nature of the work centration camp in the darkest colours. 1 they were assigned. One might think the SS doctor’s report express- The National Socialists’ most massive crime was es sympathy. Actually, however, it manifests a the genocide of the European Jews and the Sinti viewpoint based purely on economic-utilitarian and Roma gypsies. Even if the majority of the considerations and ideologically rooted in the Jews, Sinti and Roma were murdered outside the Nazi-specific distinction between “useful” and concentration camp system, from 1942 onward “worthless” life. This is mirrored clearly in the the camps were built on two pillars: forced labour “proposals for the ‘Dora’ camp” Gross made at and genocide. Between 1933 and 1945, the SS and the end of his report. Here his chief concern was the Gestapo deported some 1.65 million persons not with reducing the high death rate, but mere- to the concentration camps. Nearly one million ly with controlling the mortality or, to be exact, concentration camp inmates did not survive. 3 The exploiting the dying inmates more efficiently. For great majority of the concentration camp victims example, he demanded, among other things, that died in the second half of the war, i.e. between “at least the valuable skilled workers among the 1942 and 1945, the phase in which forced la- inmates be furnished with warm articles of cloth- bour in the armaments industry had become the ing (sweaters, wool socks, etc.) and, with regard decisive attribute of concentration camp impris- to accommodations, that the same be separated onment. from the other inmates”. He also called for “regu- lar health roll-calls for the purpose of registering Formally speaking – that is, in terms of their seriously ill inmates” and “accordingly rigorous subordination to the concentration camp inspec- selection … so as to avoid putting an unnecessary torate, or Bureau D, of the Central SS Economic burden on the operations with physically deficient and Administrative Office – there were two types human material”, as well as the “construction of concentration camps: the kind whose inmates 1 See letter from Dr. Karl Gross, Hygiene Institute of the Armed SS, to the Central SS Economic and Administrative Office, Bureau D III, 23 Dec. 1943, Directie- generaal Oorlogslachtoffers, Brussels, 1546/Ding-Schuler, n.p. 2 Ibid. 3 Numbers according to Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz. Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und Häftlinge im Deutschen Reich und im besetzten Europa 1939–1945 (Stuttgart, 2001), pp. 108 and 229, and Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Eine politische Organisationsgeschichte (Hamburg, 1999), pp. 345f. This does not include the nearly 1.1 million Jewish concentration camp inmates killed in the gas chambers of the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps. E S SAYS were forced to perform labour for the armaments 1. The initial years of Nazi rule were still char- industry, and the extermination camps serving acterized by mass unemployment. Within this primarily to murder the European Jews: Majdanek context, concentration camp labour had little and Auschwitz. This means that, within the same chance of fulfilling a productive purpose; after institution, people were exploited as forced all, it was to serve as a means of punishment and labourers in keeping with economic objectives, education. As a result of these political-ideologi- while on the other hand many other persons were cal deliberations, the SS usually had the inmates being murdered for ideological reasons – even carry out senseless and physically heavy labour, though they were desperately needed as workers for example cultivating the moor in the Ester- because of the fact that, over the course of the wegen concentration camp, for the most part war, the shortage of manpower in the German without the aid of machines. Nevertheless, the war economy became ever more severe. contradiction persisted between labour as a form of punishment for inmates the Nazis classified as Does this mean that the economic objectives “inferior” on the one hand, and the mythical ex- conflicted with the ideological project of mass altation of the term “labour” in keeping with Nazi murder? Was there – to quote the British eco- ideology on the other. Nor did the SS succeed in nomic historian Adam Tooze – “an unresolvable resolving this contradiction by distinguishing be- contradiction between its genocidal racial tween “corrigible” and “hardly educable” inmates ideology and the practical imperatives of pro- (a concept that had been en vogue in criminology duction”? 4 What were the consequences of this since the late nineteenth century). 5 for other inmate groups ranking higher within the SS racial hierarchy and not subject to any 2. The transition to the phase of war preparations pronounced threat of ideologically motivated went hand in hand with a change in the general extermination? How did the SS, the state and economic framework and in the circumstances private enterprise organize forced labour in the on the labour market. The latter underwent concentration camps? What role did the war play increasing militarization, for example through the in this context? These are the central issues to be introduction of compulsory service in 1938. What addressed by the following deliberations on the also changed in this context was the purpose history of forced labour and annihilation in the of inmate labour, which now took on economic concentration camps. significance in view of the increasing shortage of manpower. At the same time, the SS began es- tablishing their own industrial operations. A large From punishment to exploitation: proportion of these efforts were devoted to the The development of forced labour in the production of building materials for the construc- concentration camps until 1942 tion projects pursued in the immediate pre-war years by Albert Speer and others. It is no coinci- The development of forced labour in the con- dence that the concentration camps established centration camps was shaped primarily by the from 1937/38 onward were located in the vicinity political and economic developments during of high-quality rock deposits, and that the major- the Nazi era – that is, by conditions outside the ity of the inmate labour was to be performed in camps. Within this context, the war, as the chief quarries. This is true of Buchenwald to an extent, orientation for National Socialist politics from the but above all of the Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, beginning, played the most decisive role. It was Gross-Rosen and Natzweiler concentration because of the war that the forced labour per- camps, all founded between 1938 and 1940. 6 formed by concentration camp inmates departed from its initial conception as a form of punish- Initially, however, the growing economic signif- ment, humiliation and education, and increasingly icance of the concentration camps, and with served the purpose of economic exploitation it the incipient economization of inmate forced instead. The development of forced labour in the labour, did not lead to a change in the working concentration camps until 1942 can be divided conditions. Labour in the concentration camps roughly into two phases: was still strongly characterized by harassment and terror, to which was added physical ex- haustion, for example in connection with quar- 260 | 261 ry labour. The latter was carried out without persons. In addition to the ideologically motivated the slightest technical aid; after all, it was still intention of killing disabled persons and Jews, intended to serve the purpose of “educating the the SS employed “Special Treatment” in pursuit of educable”, as Heinrich Himmler expressed it in a their aim to get rid of the incapacitated inmates letter of May 1942 to Oswald Pohl, the chief of the in the overcrowded camps, whom they consid- Central SS Economic and Administrative Office, 7 ered nothing more than “useless eaters”. In the or even as a means of murder. In this phase in years that followed, this practice of selecting the development of the concentration camp inmates no longer fit for work – also mirrored, for system, thousands of new committals, above all example, in the aforementioned proposals of SS “asocials” and “criminals”, and the expansion of physician Karl Gross for the Dora subcamp – was forced labour led to a dramatic worsening of the to become the chief organizational principle of living conditions in the camps.