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one hand there arose the plan to
exterminate the Jews, Slavs and other so-called “inferior” peoples,
and on the other the plan to take advantage of all the slave labour which the
occupied territories could afford. By 1942 this development was very marked,
and the immediate result was a huge increase in the number of camps, the
setting up of extermination camps for the purpose of destroying the Jews and
others, and the siting of camps alongside industrial centres where the slave
labour could be conveniently employed.
These two plans were
inconsistent because a Jew consigned to the gas chamber was a worker lost and
because the conditions in which slave workers were forced to live ensured that
they would not be fit to work for very long. The practical result of this
interplay in policies was that internees were forced to live and work in
intolerable conditions until their health was such that they could work no
longer, whereupon they were destroyed. The organization of these camps was
never a very rigid one, and conditions and the purpose behind them varied from
time to time, and from place to place; but for the most part these policies, of
work and of extermination, seem to have been the inspiration of the system.
The whole cannot be better summarized than in the words of greeting
addressed by the S.S. guard to Maurice Lampe and others on their arrival, in
March, 1944, at Mauthausen Concentration Camp: |
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“Germany needs your arms.
You are, therefore, going to work; but I want to tell you that never again will
you see your families. Who enters this camp, will leave it only by the chimney
of the crematorium.”¹ |
The control and organization of the
concentration camps was in the hands of the dreaded S.S. This body had as its
object the personal protection of the Führer and the internal security of
the Reich. It was recruited from “volunteered political soldiers,”
who were carefully treated and trained to make certain that they were
ideologically sound. In the later days of the war the voluntary principle was
somewhat relaxed. And a number of recruits were obtained by conscription,
particularly from amongst the “Volksdeutsch” coming from the occupied
territories. Thus, the fact that a man was a member of the S.S. in 1944 or 1945
does not necessarily mean that he was a volunteer.
Before the war the
concentration camp guards were drawn from the ranks of the
Totenkopfverbände (Death’s Head Units) of the S.S.; but during the
war these units were withdrawn from guard duty and were absorbed by the Waffen
S.S., who were mostly fighting troops. Thereafter, so far as the S.S. were
concerned, the guards were provided by the Allgemeine S.S. (General S.S.). From
the middle of the war |
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¹ See The Trial of
Major War Criminals held at Nuremberg, published by H.M. Stationery
office. |
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