Annihilation through work

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Gate in the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial
Lettering Arbeit macht frei at the entrance to the main camp of Auschwitz

Annihilation through labor is a term that was coined for the National Socialist camp system and describes the deliberate or approvingly accepted killing of forced laborers or prisoners through excessive hard labor and inadequate care.

The concept of annihilation through labor was also applied in the camps of other totalitarian and dictatorial systems. Whether it was the basis for the exploitation of forced labor in the Soviet gulag is controversial.

Period of National Socialism: Work or Destruction?

In the documents found from the time of National Socialism , the expression extermination through work only appears in connection with the extradition of anti-social elements from prison . In a memo from September 14, 1942, Otto Thierack noted about a conversation with Joseph Goebbels :

"With regard to the destruction of anti-social life, Dr. Goebbels on the point of view that Jews and Gypsies par excellence, Poles who would have to serve 3 to 4 years in prison, Czechs and Germans who would be sentenced to death, life imprisonment or preventive detention should be exterminated. The thought of annihilation through work is the best. "

Goebbels wrote about this conversation in his diary:

"If you perish in this work, it is not a shame."

The death of prisoners as a result of the labor was at least accepted with approval. The minutes of the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942 indicate that with "annihilation through work" death was quite intentional:

“Under the appropriate guidance, the Jews are now to come to work in a suitable manner in the East as part of the Final Solution. In large columns of work, with separation of the sexes, the Jews able to work are led into these areas to build roads, although a large part will undoubtedly be lost through natural reduction. Any remaining stock will have to be treated accordingly, since this is undoubtedly the most resilient part, since this, representing a natural selection, is to be addressed as the nucleus of a new Jewish structure when released. "

The high death rate among prisoners who were exploited as work slaves of the SS in the German concentration camps and their satellite camps is often interpreted as the result of an intended “extermination through work”. For example, up to 25,000 of the 35,000 prisoners deployed died while working for IG Farben in the Auschwitz III Monowitz concentration camp . The average life expectancy of a Jewish prisoner on duty was less than four months. The emaciated forced laborers died of exhaustion or illness, or they were selected as unable to work and killed. Around thirty percent of the forced laborers who were employed died during the construction of tunnels that were created for armaments factories in the last months of the war . However, such high death rates were not generally recorded. In Mauthausen / Gusen, for example, around five percent of the prisoners died each year while working in arms production. Given such different mortality rates, it is hardly possible to make a general statement: It remains to be seen whether the inmate work was a “means to the end of annihilation” or whether the annihilation must be viewed as a “calculated, but not previously intended, consequence” of the prisoner's assignment.

The industry desperately needed workers. Oswald Pohl , the head of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA), delivered the necessary work slaves and ordered on April 30, 1942:

“The camp commandant alone is responsible for deploying the workforce. This work effort must be exhaustive in the true sense of the word in order to achieve the highest level of performance. [...] The working hours are not bound by any limits. [...] Time-consuming marches and lunch breaks only for eating are prohibited. [...] He [the camp commandant] has to combine clear technical knowledge in military and economic matters with intelligent and wise leadership of the groups of people, which he is supposed to combine into a high performance potential. "

As a result, numerous external camps were set up near mines and industrial plants. The death rate among the work slaves rose because the accommodation and supplies there were often even more inadequate than in the main camp. Pohl's instruction "can [...] be seen as a license for all concentration camp commanders to use prisoner labor as a means of extermination". However, the final justification for the order highlights economic reasons. The cited point of view is therefore controversial, especially since further regulations are aimed at maintaining the workforce.

On December 26, 1942 Richard Glücks , Head of Office D of the SS-WVHA, wrote:

“In the attachment, a list of the current inflows and outflows in all concentration camps is sent for information. This shows that of 136,000 additions, around 70,000 were lost due to death. With such a high death rate, the number of prisoners can never be brought to the height as ordered by the Reichsführer SS. The first camp doctors have to do everything they can to ensure that the mortality rate in the individual camps goes down significantly. "

In March 1944, Oswald Pohl warned the administration of the SS-Wirtschaftsbetriebe that “the labor of every prisoner is valuable”; it must be made "fully usable for the national community". Ultimately - as the historian Jens-Christian Wagner sums up - the written sources do not prove whether there was an intention to destroy. The murderous use of prisoners, which was economically nonsensical and ineffective in the long term, was pushed - especially in the last months of the war - in favor of a maximum work performance that could be achieved in the short term. The death of the prisoners was consciously accepted and aimed at with certain groups of prisoners.

National Socialism

Memorial plaque in Hamburg-Neugraben

The ideology of National Socialism regarded the "Germanic peoples" of the Germans, Flemings, Dutch, English and Scandinavians as " Aryan race " and " master people ". The “German blood” and the “Aryans” had to be “kept pure” by “foreign races”. The Slavic peoples and especially the Jews and the “ Gypsies ” were considered “foreign races ”.

Marginal groups of the majority population such as large families in deprived areas, vagrants or rural travelers as well as problem groups such as alcoholics or prostitutes were regarded as “ German-blooded ” “anti-socials” and also as superfluous “ ballast existences ”. Like homosexuals, they were recorded by official and police authorities and subjected to a variety of government restrictions and repression measures, including forced sterilization and ultimately imprisonment in concentration camps. Anyone who openly rebelled against the National Socialist regime (such as communists , social democrats , bourgeois democrats or conscientious objectors ) was imprisoned in prisons and camps. Many of the prisoners did not survive the camps.

In the National Socialist camps, “extermination through work” took place primarily through a slave-like organization of work, which is why, in distinction to the forced labor of foreign workers, a term used in the Nuremberg Trials is used here to refer to “slave labor” and “slave labor”.

The working conditions were characterized by:

  • heavy physical work (for example, road construction, earthworks or in the factory, especially in the armaments industry )
  • Constant excessively long working hours (often ten to twelve hours a day, in the sense of biological stress , depletion of strength)
  • malnutrition leading to hunger and malnutrition ,
  • poor hygiene
  • No or inadequate medical care and the resulting diseases
  • no reward
  • Hunger rations used for a long time, not just as a punishment
  • Insufficient clothing (e.g. summer clothing even in winter)
  • Injuries from missing or inadequate footwear
  • constant guarding of workers in the event of various arbitrary acts by the guard
  • Torture and ill-treatment such as standing in a gate or hanging on stakes

concentration camp

The imprisonment in the concentration camp should at least break the prisoners. The admission and registration of the newly admitted prisoners, the forced labor , the accommodation of the prisoners, the roll calls - the whole life in the camp was accompanied by humiliation and harassment.

The admission, registration and interrogation of the arrested were accompanied by scornful remarks by the SS . During the roll calls, the prisoners were kicked and beaten. The forced labor consisted partly of pointless activities and hard labor that was supposed to wear down the prisoners.

Particularly cynical in this context appears to be the words “ Arbeit macht frei ” in some concentration camps in the German Reich . B. at the entrance gates of the camps (the Buchenwald concentration camp was the only concentration camp with the slogan "Each his own" at the entrance gate).

The victims

The victims of the extermination through labor were mainly Jews from almost every country in Europe, " gypsies ", members of Slavic peoples, political opponents, homosexuals, so-called "anti-social" (especially prisoners sentenced to long prison terms), Jehovah's Witnesses and other determined Christians.

It is estimated that a total of six million Jews, 500,000 Sinti , Roma and members of other groups persecuted as "Gypsies" as well as seven million Soviet prisoners of war and civilians perished in the concentration camps. Exact calculations are not possible because the National Socialists did not always keep complete lists of their victims.

Background; Consequences after 1945

The National Socialist ideology called for the “ Aryan race ” and the “ German blood ” of “foreign races ” to be “kept clean ”. These "foreign races" included above all the Slavic peoples, the colored, the Jews and parts of the "gypsies". The elderly, the sick, “those who refuse to work”, the so-called “anti-social” and the disabled were considered “useless eaters”. Even opponents of the regime, such as communists , bourgeois democrats, social democrats and determined Christians, were persecuted because they opposed the “awakening” and the “national awakening”.

On September 18, 1942, Thierack had noted that Jews and Gypsies were simply ... being exterminated . The NS ministerial bureaucracy then took an active part in the extradition of persons who had already been arrested and who had been declared by the judiciary to be "anti-social" from German prisons to the extermination camps . This was officially called a "surrender". Several thousand people were deported to concentration camps with the help of the ministry , most of them subsequently murdered. A few of the senior officials of the Reich Ministry of Justice involved were indicted and brought to justice in 1951/1952. In the dock sat Rudolf Marx, Albert Hupperschwiller, Friedrich-Wilhelm Meyer and Otto Gündner from the still living leading officials involved, as well as Kurt Giese , the former head of the Reich Main Office for the grace office . Some of these previous officials of the Reich Ministry of Justice had already admitted before the Wiesbaden Regional Court that they already knew at that time that many of the transferred prisoners were killed in the camps and that the Ministry also received massive death reports. But they nevertheless maintained their ignorance in court. The defendants were eventually all acquitted. The justification consisted of an idiosyncratic linguistic reinterpretation: Although the surviving written documents, in the files with paraphs, expressly referred to "destruction", the judges gave the defendants credit:

"The 'perception of the word annihilation alone' does not provide a sufficient basis for establishing the knowledge or foreboding of the accused about the killings."

- District Court Wiesbaden 1952

Stalinism

The exploitation of prisoner labor on a large scale and with often catastrophic consequences for the forced laborers also occurred in socialist states such as in the Soviet Union under Stalin , who further expanded the forced labor camp system of his predecessor Lenin . A comprehensive forced labor camp system was established under Stalin's rule, which differed significantly from the concentration camps and detention centers that existed during the civil war and in the 1920s.

Forced labor camps, in which extermination by labor of the prisoners on a larger scale was definitely part of the plan, also existed after the Second World War in several Soviet-Communist satellite states of the Eastern Bloc, such as in Stalinist Hungary between 1950 and 1953 and in Romania , in particular from the 1960s under Nicolae Ceaușescu . Today there are comparable camps in communist North Korea .

The extent to which productive goals or the destruction of political opponents and other unpopular people through work and prison conditions were the main purposes of exploiting prisoner work in the cases in question is the subject of debate.

In an overview of recent international research on the Stalinist camp system, Dietrich Beyrau , Professor of Eastern European History at the University of Tübingen, summed up in 2000:

"A good warehouse manager is characterized by an optimal use [emphasis in the original] of the workforce despite undeniable deficiencies in equipment, clothing and nutrition and, above all, by over-fulfilling the plan."

Gunnar Heinsohn , sociologist and professor in Bremen, takes the view that "extermination through work in the 20th century became the primary means of killing the Marxist-Leninist regimes". Trotsky had already laid the foundation stone for the introduction of this type of killing in Russia in June 1918. Stalin then built up the annihilation by working in the Gulag from 1928.

Joël Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot come to the following assessment: "In view of the circumstances under which the prisoners worked, it seems to have been more about punishing and eliminating them, even if everything was done to get the maximum work performance out of them."

In his book Archipelago Gulag. Stalin's forced camp writes Ralf Stettner that the character of the gulag is "evident as a machine of extermination in view of the millions of executed, starved, frozen and worked to death prisoners".

Roy Medvedev : "The penitentiary system in Kolyma and the camps in the north was consciously geared towards the physical extermination of people."

During Soviet rule, especially under Stalinism , many (real and perceived) political opponents were shot. In addition, political opponents as well as criminals were forced to work as prisoners on large construction sites (e.g. the White Sea-Baltic Canal , stone quarries, railway lines, urban development) under inhumane conditions. Solzhenitsyn described some Soviet camps as "extermination camps" ( Gulag II archipelago ). The conditions of detention were characterized by

  • very high working hours and standards
  • Hunger rations , which were further reduced if the work norm was not met
  • icy cold in winter, often with inadequate clothing
  • dangerous working conditions ,
  • Illnesses (such as typhoid and scurvy ), with inadequate medical care
  • Dirt, vermin, inadequate hygienic conditions and sanitary facilities
  • Harassment, insults, mistreatment, drastic punishments for the slightest violation of rules.

As cynical as the slogan “Arbeit macht frei”, which was affixed at the entrance of various National Socialist concentration camps (including Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz), the slogan “Let us die with an iron hand” was already emblazoned over the first larger forced labor camp in 1923 Driving humanity towards their happiness ”.

The term “betterment through work” (“corrective labor camp”) was used by the Soviet rulers. In the 1920s this term was used to refer to all prisoners in the detention centers of the Republican People's Commissariats of the Interior, which at that time formed the main part of the Soviet system of serving sentences. "Correctional work" was also called a form of punishment, according to which those convicted of offenses assessed as less serious had to work at their previous workplace for a certain period of time with reduced wages. In contrast, those imprisoned for (explicit) political reasons were interned in so-called "political isolators" or in "concentration camps", which were subject to the OGPU . In June 1929, the designation "corrective labor camp" was introduced for the existing camps as well as for the newly established camps of the OGPU. Since then, all prisoners under Stalinism, whether “ordinary criminals” or “counter-revolutionaries” who had been sentenced to forced labor, had to do “reform work” according to the official interpretation. It is therefore advisable to view communist terminology and propaganda with skepticism.

R. Stettner notes that a distinction was made between corrective work for prisoners from the working class and, on the other hand, forced labor for "counter-revolutionaries" and "class enemies" for humiliation, punishment and extermination. The principle of "reform and re-education" also did not apply to political prisoners. Stettner describes it as wrong to "follow communist terminology and propaganda and concentrate the consideration ... on improvement work." Rather, "it should be noted that from the first weeks of the Bolshevik rule on prison labor of the politically unpopular was common".

Victim

According to internal, previously secret documents of the GULAG, around 1.6 million people are said to have died in the Soviet forced labor camps and colonies (excluding POW camps) between 1930 and 1956, although this figure only includes deaths in colonies from 1935 . Around 900,000 of these deaths therefore occur in the years 1941–45.

These numbers are consistent with archival documents presented and evaluated by the Russian historian Oleg Chlewnjuk in his study The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror , and according to which there were around 500,000 people in the camps and colonies in the years 1930 to early 1941 died. Khlvnyuk points out that these numbers do not take into account deaths that occurred during transports.

Before the opening of many of the former Soviet archives, many historians assumed that the number of prisoners and deaths in the Soviet camps would be far higher. Estimates cited mortality data in the order of magnitude of up to 20 million and more. After archival documents on the Gulag were widely accessible and widely published, questions about the completeness of these data and whether they realistically reflect the total number of deaths were debated in international research. There is now a broad consensus among Russian and Eastern European historians about the need to use them critically with regard to archive sources from the time of the Soviet dictatorship, which contain prisoner and death rates that are well below the maximum values ​​of earlier estimates.

In contrast, the political scientist and specialist in the field of genocide research Rudolph Joseph Rummel gives the number of 39 million Gulag deaths for the entire period of the communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union (1918–1991), including the time of Lenin and his secret police Cheka .

Among the camp inmates were members of ancestral peoples of the Soviet Union, of peoples of newly incorporated territories of the Soviet Union (Poles, Balts, Germans, etc.), of member states of the Warsaw Pact (Soviet Zone / GDR, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, etc.) and of other socialist states ( Yugoslavia), members of the bourgeoisie , Cossacks , kulaks , actual and alleged political opponents, nuns and monks, clergymen, criminals. Young people were interned in special colonies, but often also in adult camps due to lack of space, children (such as those who were born in camps) in corresponding institutions that were also subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior. In 1935 the age limit for arrest was lowered to twelve years.

The notorious § 58 criminalized “counter-revolutionary” activities and “anti-Soviet agitation”, which was interpreted very broadly. Critical statements against politics or the Communist Party or "hopes for a restoration of the capitalist system " also fell under these criminal paragraphs . Millions of rather apolitical people were arrested under such pretexts.

Many other communist governments used similar concepts in their countries, for example in the People's Republic of China , in Vietnam , in North Korea and in Cambodia .

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ This is why there was also the expression extermination of anti-socials through work for the overall action, cf. Kramer, Weblinks, 2010
  2. ↑ Nuremberg Document PS-682, quoted from Jens-Christian Wagner : The satellite camp system ... , in: Ulrich Herbert (Hrsg.): The National Socialist Concentration Camps. Frankfurt 2002 ISBN 3-596-15516-9 , p. 720; see also Doc. 654-PS in: Internationaler Tribunal, IMT, Volume 36, page 201; see. Hermann Kaienburg : Jewish labor camps in the street of the SS. In: "1999. Journal for social history of the 20th and 21st centuries." Vol. 11, 1996, ISSN  0930-9977 , p. 14.
  3. ↑ Elke Fröhlich, Angela Stüber (arrangement): The diaries of Joseph Goebbels. Volume 5 .: July - September 1942. Munich 1995, ISBN 3-598-22136-3 , p. 504 (as of September 15, 1942).
  4. ↑ Protocol (PDF) p. 8.
  5. ^ Raul Hilberg : The annihilation of the European Jews. exp. Aufl. Frankfurt 1990. ISBN 3-596-24417-X , Volume 2, pp. 994 f.
  6. ↑ Michael Zimmermann : Commentary remarks - work and destruction in the concentration camp cosmos. In: Ulrich Herbert et al. (Ed.): The National Socialist Concentration Camps. Frankfurt / M. 2002, ISBN 3-596-15516-9 , Volume 2, p. 744.
  7. ^ Michael Zimmermann: Commentary remarks ... ISBN 3-596-15516-9 , p. 145.
  8. ^ IMT (ed.): The Nuremberg Trial. Volume XXXVIII, page 366 / docu. 129-R.
  9. ↑ Jens-Christian Wagner : The satellite camp system ... , p. 721.
  10. ↑ Ernst Klee : Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. 3. Edition. Frankfurt / M. 2004, ISBN 3-596-14906-1 , p. 45.
  11. ↑ Nuremberg Document NO-516, quoted from Jens-Christian Wagner: The satellite camp system. ... , 'p. 721.
  12. ↑ Jens-Christian Wagner: The satellite camp system ... , p. 722.
  13. ↑ Ministerialdirigent, Head of Departments 5 and 15 in the Reich Ministry of Justice
  14. ^ Ministerial Councilor
  15. ↑ Chief Public Prosecutor
  16. ^ First public prosecutor. - Robert Hecker, President of the Senate, had previously died
  17. ^ A b c Joel Kotek, Pierre Rigoulot: Captivity, Forced Labor, Destruction , Propylaea 2001
  18. ^ Valery Alexandrowitsch Wolin: Russia rehabilitates those innocently convicted by Soviet military tribunals , p. 76 and Wolfgang Schuller: The Soviet military justice and its camps as an instrument of communist rule in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany , p. 72. In: June 17, 1953. The beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. Documentation . (PDF; 730 kB) 4th Bautzen Forum of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung from 17. – 18. June 1993.
  19. ^ Peter H. Solomon, Jr .: Soviet Penal Policy, 1917-1934: A Reinterpretation . In: Slavic Review 39 , no. 2 (June 1980): 197-201.
  20. ^ Dietrich Beyrau: GULAG - The camps and the Soviet system . In: Sozialwissenschaftliche Informations , Vol. 29, Heft 3 (2000), pp. 166–176, here: p. 169.
  21. ↑ Gunnar Heinsohn: Lexicon of Genocides . Rowohlt rororo, Reinbek 1998, ISBN 3-499-22338-4 .
  22. ↑ a b Ralf Stettner: Archipel Gulag. Stalin's forced camp . Schöningh, 1996, ISBN 3-506-78754-3 .
  23. ^ Roy Medvedev: The truth is our strength. History and consequences of Stalinism (edited by David Joravsky and Georges Haupt). Fischer, Frankfurt / M. 1973, ISBN 3-10-050301-5 .
  24. ↑ M. Stark: Women in the Gulag, dtv, 2005
  25. ↑ AI Kokurin, NV Petrov (ed.): GULAG (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerej): 1918-1960 (Rossiia XX VEK Dokumenty..), Moskva: Materik 2000 ISBN 5-85646-046-4 , page 62.
  26. ↑ AI Kokurin / NW Petrow (ed.): GULAG (Glawnoe Uprawlenie Lagerej): 1918-1960 (.. Rossiia XX WEK Dokumenty), Moscow: Materik 2000 ISBN 5-85646-046-4 , p 441-2.
  27. ↑ Oleg V. Khlevniuk: The History of the Gulag: From collectivization to the Great Terror New Haven: Yale University Press 2004, ISBN 0-300-09284-9 , pp 326-7.
  28. ↑ Oleg V. Khlevniuk: The History of the Gulag, pp 308-6.
  29. ↑ For an overview s. Ralf Stettner: Archipelago Gulag. Stalin's forced camp . Schöningh 1996, ISBN 3-506-78754-3 , pp. 376-398.
  30. ↑ Cf. Manfred Hildermeier : History of the Soviet Union 1917-1991 Beck 1998, ISBN 3-406-43588-2 , pp. 453-6, as well as the statement by Stephan Merl , Professor of Eastern European History at Bielefeld University, in History Yearbooks Osteuropas (New Series) , Vol. 54, Heft 3 (2006), p. 438. Also the American historian Robert Conquest , who in his own earlier studies on Stalinist terror had assumed the number of prisoners and victims, which were mostly well above the level of the numbers contained in archival documents and who had initially attacked the use of statistics from archival holdings for years (see the debate in the following editions of Europe-Asia Studies : No. 8, vol. 48 (Dec. 1996), No. 7, Vol. 49 (Dec. 1997), No. 2, Vol. 51 (March 1999), No. 6, Vol. 51 (Sep. 1999), No. 8, Vol. 51 (Dec. 1999), No. . 6, vol. 52 (Sep. 2000)), has meanwhile moved away from this position and expressed himself highly praised for the work of Oleg Khle vniuk, who makes reflected use of these sources in his book. See Conquest's Foreword to Chlewnjuks The History of the Gulag , pp. Ix-xii.
  31. ↑ Rudolph Joseph Rummel : Demozid - The commanded death . LIT, 2003, ISBN 3-8258-3469-7 .
  32. ↑ SS Wilenski, AI Kokurin, GWAtmaschkina, I. Ju. Novitschenko (ed.): Deti GULAGa: 1918–1956 (Rossija. XX wek. Documenty) . Materik, Moskva 2002.