KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (3 page)

During the first postwar years, a wave of memoirs hit Europe and beyond, mostly searing testimonies of individual suffering and survival.
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Some former prisoners also reflected on wider themes, writing important early studies of the camp system and the inmate experience, from a sociological or psychological perspective.
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Others produced first historical
sketches of particular camps, or expressed their pain in poems and fictionalized accounts.
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Most of these early works, including Primo Levi’s own, sank with few ripples, but a number of books made a splash. Celebrated survivor accounts appeared in several European countries. Amid the ruins of Germany, too, mass-market paperbacks and pamphlets were printed, while other accounts were serialized
in major newspapers. Most influential was a general study of the KL system (with Buchenwald at the center) compiled by the former political prisoner Eugen Kogon, which shaped popular conceptions for years to come; first published in 1946, its German print run had reached 135,000 copies a year later, and it soon appeared in translation, as did other early works by survivors.
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By the late 1940s,
however, when it came to a U.S. edition, Kogon’s publisher, Roger Straus, a passionate believer in the book, was concerned about the “apathy on the part of the public to reading about this type of thing.”
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The popular interest in the KL—which had accompanied their liberation, as well as some of the first memoirs and perpetrator trials—was waning on both sides of the Atlantic. In part, this was
a simple case of saturation following the spate of graphic early accounts. More generally, public memory of the camps was being marginalized by postwar reconstruction and diplomacy. With the front line of the Cold War cutting right through Germany, and turning the two new, opposing German states into strategic allies of the USSR and the United States, talk about Nazi crimes seemed impolitic. “Nowadays
it is bad taste to speak of the concentration camps,” Primo Levi wrote in 1955, adding: “silence prevails.” Within ten years of liberation, the camps had been sidelined—a result not of survivors unable to speak, but of a wider audience unwilling to listen. Former prisoners still tried to keep the memory of the camps alive. “If we fall silent, who then will speak?” Levi asked angrily. Another
survivor who persevered in the face of widespread indifference was Edgar Kupfer, who finally saw the German publication of his Dachau book in 1956, albeit in a greatly abridged version. Despite some good reviews, however, it left little impression and no foreign publisher picked it up, “afraid that the public would not buy it,” as the depressed author concluded.
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Popular interest in the concentration
camps was rekindled in the 1960s and 1970s. Major trials of Nazi perpetrators, such as the 1961 Israeli case against Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who had overseen deportations of Jews to Auschwitz, and media sensations like the 1978 U.S. miniseries
Holocaust
, broadcast to a vast audience in West Germany the following year, played an important part in confronting the public with the Nazi regime
and its camps. In turn, some early KL memoirs were rediscovered, among them Primo Levi’s masterpiece about Auschwitz, which has long since entered the canon of modern literature. At the same time, a wave of new survivor testimonies appeared. This wave kept swelling—Edgar Kupfer’s complete Dachau diaries, for example, finally saw publication in 1997—and it is only now subsiding, as the last witnesses
are passing away.
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Survivors also continued to explore the development of individual camps, producing source editions and standard historical surveys.
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And just like in the early postwar period, former inmates went far beyond writing history, creating an extraordinarily rich body of medical, sociological, psychological, and philosophical studies, as well as literary reflections and works of
art.
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In sharp contrast to survivors, the wider academic community was slow to engage with the KL. A few specialist studies appeared in the late 1940s and 1950s, particularly on medical aspects.
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But it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that academic historians published preliminary surveys of some individual Nazi camps and the wider KL complex, based on documentary research. Most influential
were the works of two young German academics, Martin Broszat’s pioneering survey of the camp system’s development and Falk Pingel’s powerful study of life inside.
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Such historical analyses were augmented by works from scholars in other disciplines, on themes like the perpetrator mind and the experience of survival.
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Despite inevitable shortcomings, these early studies made important contributions
to knowledge about the SS concentration camps. But they remained exceptions and could only sketch outlines. To write a comprehensive history of the camps, Broszat himself concluded in 1970, was simply impossible, because of the dearth of detailed research.
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Paradoxically, this void was created, at least in part, by the misguided belief that there was little more to learn about the camps, an assumption
shared by even some otherwise sharp-eyed observers.
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In reality, scholars were only starting to discover the KL.

Historical knowledge advanced rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, above all in Germany itself. With grassroots history on the rise, local activists scrutinized the record of former camps in their neighborhood. Meanwhile, camp memorials moved beyond remembrance and developed into places
of scholarship. The opening of the archives in Eastern Europe, following the end of the Cold War, provided further momentum for research. Meanwhile, a younger generation of academics untainted by the past was discovering the Third Reich as a subject and established the study of its camps as a distinct historiographical field, producing major works like Karin Orth’s account of the KL organization
and structure.
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Having been ignored for so long, the study of the SS concentration camps was now booming, at least in Germany (few studies were translated).
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The boom shows no sign of settling, as historical research continues to expand at a rapid rate. New perspectives have come into view as we learn more about individual perpetrators, prisoner groups, and camps, about the beginning and the
end of the SS system, about the local environment around the camps, about forced labor and extermination policy. While all the important scholarly studies of the KL published before the late 1970s comfortably fit onto a single bookshelf, one needs a small library to gather the works published since then.
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Recent academic research has culminated in two huge encyclopedias—over 1,600 and 4,100
pages long, respectively—that summarize the development of every single main and satellite camp; the entries were penned by well over 150 historians from around the world.
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These two indispensable works demonstrate the breadth of contemporary scholarship. But they also point to its limits. Most important, the wealth of specialist studies has greatly fragmented the picture of the SS concentration
camps. Where it was once impossible to see the camp system as a whole, because so much detail was missing, it is now almost impossible to see how all the different features fit together; looking at recent scholarship is like looking at a giant unassembled puzzle, with additional pieces being added all the time. It comes as no surprise that the conclusions of the new KL histories have generally
failed to connect with a wider public.

As a result, popular images of the Nazi concentration camps remain rather one-dimensional. Instead of the intricate detail and subtle shades of historical scholarship, we see broad brushstrokes and vivid colors. Above all, popular conceptions are dominated by the stark images of Auschwitz and the Holocaust, which have made this camp a “global site of memory,”
as the historian Peter Reichel put it.
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It was not always like this. In the early decades after the war, anti-Jewish terror was largely subsumed under the general destruction wreaked by Nazism, with Auschwitz as one place of suffering among many. The awareness of the singularity and enormity of the Nazi war against the Jews has grown sharply since then, and the Third Reich is now largely viewed
through the lens of the Holocaust.
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The SS concentration camps, in turn, have become closely identified with Auschwitz and its Jewish victims, obscuring other camps and other inmates. A German poll found that Auschwitz is by far the most recognized KL and that the vast majority of respondents associate the camps with the persecution of Jews; by contrast, less than ten percent named Communists,
criminals, or homosexuals as victims.
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In popular memory, then, the concentration camps, Auschwitz, and the Holocaust have merged into one.

But Auschwitz was never synonymous with the Nazi concentration camps. True, as the largest and most lethal camp by far, it occupied a special place in the KL system. But there was always more to this system. Auschwitz was closely integrated into the wider
KL network, and it was preceded and shaped by other camps. Dachau, for example, was more than seven years old when Auschwitz was established, and clearly influenced it. Also, despite its unprecedented size, most registered KL prisoners—that is, those forced into barracks and slave labor—were detained elsewhere; even at its biggest, Auschwitz held no more than around one-third of all regular KL inmates.
The great majority of them died elsewhere, too, with an estimated three-quarters of registered KL inmates perishing in camps other than Auschwitz. It is important, then, to demystify Auschwitz in the popular conception of the camps, while still emphasizing its uniquely destructive role.
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Nor were concentration camps synonymous with the Holocaust, although their histories are intertwined. First,
anti-Jewish terror largely unfolded outside the KL; it was not until the final year of World War II that most of the surviving Jews found themselves inside a concentration camp. The significant majority of the up to six million Jews murdered under the Nazi regime perished in other places, shot in ditches and fields across eastern Europe, or gassed in distinct death camps like Treblinka, which
operated separately from the KL. Second, the concentration camps always targeted various victim groups, and except for a few weeks in late 1938, Jews did not make up a majority among registered prisoners. For most of the Third Reich, in fact, they formed a relatively small part, and even after numbers rose sharply in the second half of the war, Jews did not constitute more than perhaps thirty percent
of the registered inmate population. Third, the concentration camps used many different weapons, in addition to mass extermination. They had multiple purposes, constantly evolving and overlapping. During the prewar years, the SS used them as boot camps, deterrent threats, reformatories, forced labor reservoirs, and torture chambers, only to add further functions during the war, promoting them
as centers for armaments production, executions, and human experiments. The camps were defined by their multifaceted nature, a crucial aspect absent from most popular memories.
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More philosophical meditations on the concentration camps have often been reductive, too. Ever since the end of the Nazi regime, prominent thinkers have looked for hidden truths, investing the camps with profound meaning,
either to validate their own moral, political, or religious beliefs, or to grasp something essential about the human condition.
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This search for meaning is understandable, of course, as the shock the KL dealt to faith in progress and civilization made them emblems of humanity’s capacity for inhumanity. “Every philosophy based on the inherent goodness of man will forever be shaken to its foundations
because of them,” warned the French novelist François Mauriac in the late 1950s. Some writers have since endowed the camps with an almost mysterious quality. Others have reached more concrete conclusions, describing the KL as products of a peculiar German mind-set or of the dark side of modernity.
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One of the most influential contributions has come from the sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky, who depicts
the concentration camp as a manifestation of “absolute power,” beyond rationality or ideology.
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However, his stimulating study suffers the same limitations as some other general reflections on the camps. In its quest for universal answers, it turns the camps into timeless and abstract entities; Sofsky’s archetypal camp is a wholly ahistoric construct that obscures the core characteristic of the
KL system—its dynamic nature.
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All this leads to a surprising conclusion. More than eighty years after the foundation of Dachau, there is no single, panoptic account of the KL. Despite the enormous literature—by survivors, historians, and other scholars—there is no comprehensive history charting the development of the concentration camps and the changing experiences of those inside. What is
needed is a study that captures the complexity of the camps without fragmenting, and sets them into their wider political and cultural context without becoming reductive. But how to write such a history of the KL?

Approaches

To forget the present, SS prisoners often talked about the future, and for several days in 1944 the discussion among a small group of Jewish women, deported from Hungary
to Auschwitz, turned around a fundamental question: if they were to survive, how could they convey their fate to outsiders? Was there any medium that would allow them to express what Auschwitz meant? Maybe music? Or speeches, books, artworks? Or perhaps a film about a prisoner’s passage to the crematorium, with the audience forced to stand to attention outside cinemas before the screening, without
warm clothes, food, and drink, just like the prisoners during roll call? But even this, the women feared, would not give any insight into what their life was really like.
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Inmates in other SS concentration camps came to similar conclusions. Prisoners who kept secret diaries, for example, frequently agonized over the limits of testimony. “The language is exhausted,” the Norwegian Odd Nansen wrote
on February 12, 1945. “There are no words left to describe the horrors I’ve seen with my own eyes.” And yet, Nansen kept writing, almost every day.
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This dilemma—the urge to speak about the unspeakable—became ever more acute after liberation, as many more survivors struggled to describe crimes which seemed to defeat language and defy reason.
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