Prisoner mail (concentration camp)

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During the time of National Socialism , prisoners ' mail allowed concentration camp prisoners to have limited mail with their relatives. Parcel shipments were not formally permitted until October 1942; Jews and Soviet prisoners of war were excluded from this. With the controlled mail traffic, the camp management controlled the passing on of information and at the same time had a disciplinary means of pressure through the withdrawal of mail and writing bans.

Prisoner letter from Auschwitz concentration camp from 1942

Regulations

Cards and folded letters were produced for the prisoner's mail, on which the regulations for correspondence were printed. As a rule, it was only allowed to write to one and the same related person; it was not allowed to correspond with other acquaintances. In practice, inmates were entitled to a maximum of one document every fortnight. A card and a folded letter, each with limited writing space, could be used alternately. The prisoners were able to purchase these and the necessary stamps in the so-called canteen. They received money for this in the mail; relatives were also allowed to enclose postage stamps. The sums allowed varied, but often only a small amount (30 to 40 Reichsmarks ) was paid out to the inmates , the remainder of the money sent was withheld by the SS and often withheld personally.

According to the postal regulations on the letter forms, it was not permitted to receive parcels. In their letters, however, prisoners repeatedly thanked them for such parcels, and parcels were actually subject to far less strict rules than correspondence. Even more so than with the sending of money, the SS guards took hold of them and in some cases drove lively black trafficking in the stolen goods. This practice went so far that the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA) was forced to issue a circular to all camp commanders on October 30, 1942 , prohibiting SS members from taking things from parcels under the penalty of death . Otherwise, however, the decree emphasized that all prisoners (except Jews and Soviet prisoners of war) were now allowed to receive unlimited parcels. Little changed in the practice of stealing even after the decree. However, it shows that the problem was so extensive that it could no longer be ignored even by the SS leadership.

From Christmas 1943 onwards, the International Red Cross (IRK) sent parcels to various camps, which mainly contained food and provided a small part of the prisoners' supplies. By the end of the war, the IRK had sent a total of 751,000 parcels containing around 2,600 tons of relief supplies to the Nazi concentration camps.

The post supply was subordinated to the " Site Administration " department, which, in addition to supplying the camp personnel, also took care of the prisoners.

censorship

So that the letters between the camp and the outside world did not contain any information that was undesirable for the SS, all incoming and outgoing mail was completely censored. Outgoing mail was censored either directly by the block leaders or in the camp's post office. Therefore the prisoners had to write legibly for the censors.

The practice of censorship was generally arbitrary. Letters complained of were destroyed or mutilated in such a way by paper cutting that the recipients in the camp were often only sent single scraps of paper. Correspondingly, the writers tried for their part to use coding or secret language to convey content that escaped the controls or to smuggle letters out of and into the camp through bribery and personal relationships with the guards.

Role of prisoner mail

In the calculation of the camp administration, the connection between camp inmates and their families played a special role. The mail supply in the concentration camp system did not follow any humanistic guidelines. It was an instrument of domination directed inwards and outwards.

Internally, the postal service had a negative effect, that is, due to the constant threat of withdrawal. If one compares the statements of former prisoners, one finds a comprehensive agreement about the great importance that letters had for them in everyday camp life. Post bans, personal or generally imposed, represented effective practices in the exercise of power. It is not for nothing that “writing bans and withdrawal of mail” are mentioned in the same breath as arrest, detention or corporal punishment. The mail supply , which was arbitrarily handled or handled very differently according to group or prisoner category, had a corresponding effect. As a rule, German or so-called ethnic German prisoners were allowed to write letters twice a month, Jews also ranked at the bottom of the scale and were not allowed to write or receive mail for months.

Outwardly, the supply of prisoner mail to family members acted as a well-controlled sedative. With the "drop by drop" transmission of the prisoners' signs of life, the wild rumors were at least partially counteracted, since news, even if censored, was better than no news.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Eugen Kogon : Der SS-Staat . The system of the National Socialist concentration camps, 31st edition, Munich 1995, p. 149.
  2. ↑ Ulrich Herbert , Karin Orth , Christoph Dieckmann (eds.): The National Socialist Concentration Camps , Volume 2, Göttingen 1998, p. 845; Robert Steegmann: The Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp and its external commandos on the Rhine and Neckar 1941–1945 , Strasbourg 2005, p. 396.
  3. ↑ Cf. Jens-Christian Wagner : The production of death. The Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp , 2nd edition, Göttingen 2004, p. 465; Kogon, p. 146 ff.
  4. ↑ Kogon, Ibid .; Bollard p. 221.
  5. ↑ Kogon, Ibid .; Poller, p. 222.
  6. ↑ See u. a .: Walter Poller : doctor's clerk in Buchenwald. Report by inmate 996 from Block 36, Hamburg 1946, p. 221 ff .; Leopold Arthofer: As a priest in a concentration camp. My experiences in Dachau , Graz a. a. 1947, p. 90 ff .; Salesius Hess : Dachau: A world without God , Nuremberg 1946, p. 75 f.
  7. ↑ Hans Buchheim u. a. (Ed.): Anatomie des SS-Staates , 7th edition, Munich 1999, p. 366.
  8. ↑ See Eugen Kogon : Der SS-Staat. The system of the National Socialist concentration camps , 31st edition, Munich 1995, p. 148 ff .; Robert Steegmann: The Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp and its external commandos on the Rhine and Neckar 1941–1945 , Strasbourg 2005, p. 395.