The Theory and Practice of Hell (9 page)

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served for a fourth group—the broad masses of the German people, until they too were permitted to move up into the role of domesticated overlords of subjected enemy peoples. The last group consisted of the millions of resisters and “ inferior races.” For them there was death—swift death, or painful, lingering liquidation. Above the whole structure loomed Hitler, remote and beyond reach, the personification of the race myth some day to be actually worshiped.

Chapter Two THE PURPOSE,

CHARACTER AND NUMBER OF

THE GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS

The SS, as contemplated and created by Himmler, had a dual aspect. On the one hand it was to train the new ruling class, on the other eliminate all opposition. Like the Roman tyrants, Himmler was prepared to be the object of universal hatred—so long as he was also the object of universal fear. Love—well underlaid by fear—he expected only of his elite, the SS. His system of terror, unparalleled in the history of civilized nations, enveloped the whole land. The con centration camps were merely the extreme and most effective expression of this system which embraced in its toils every aspect of public and private life.

Himmler did not invent the concentration camps, though it was Heydrich who reorganized them along uniform lines. It was the SS that gave them their ultimate character as the most fiendish chapter in Germany’s history.
Their main purpose was the elimination o f every trace o f actual or potential op position to Nazi rule
. Segregation, debasement, humiliation, extermination—these were the effective forms of the terror. Any concept of justice was put aside. Better to put ten inno cents behind barbed wire than to let one real enemy escape.

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This policy, of course, resulted in the desired deterrent effect on the ninety per cent who were innocent. Opposition could be nipped in the bud, deprived of any chance to organize and spread.

The guiding spirits of the SD, Heydrich and Best in the lead, tackled and accomplished their task with truly German thoroughness. Their motives were not simply sadistic in character. They were in keeping with a certain universal Ger man predilection—to justify the most abysmal barbarism by recourse to certain “ idealistic” principles.

Heydrich was assassinated in Prague; but before he died, he lingered in fearful agony, his spinal cord severed. It is said that during this period he was tormented by his conscience, in cessantly pleading for divine forgiveness for the unspeakable sufferings he had brought on hundreds of thousands. If this story is true, it fits into the picture perfectly. These members of the “ master class” were embodiments of man’s most primitive instincts, dressed up in an aura of heroism and nationalism. Guided by Teutonic concepts of power and vir tue, they arrogated unto themselves the right to treat others exactly as they pleased. Every method was acceptable. Enemies had to be rendered innocuous. That meant they had to be exterminated—worked, beaten, flayed, garroted, shot, gassed to death. The choice of method was entirely subor dinate to the main goal—total extirpation.

There were, of course, a number of subsidiary aims served by the institution of the concentration camps.

In the first place, they served as the training ground where the SS Death-Head Units were inured to brutality. To this end every base instinct was kindled and fanned to white heat in the concentration camps, by precept and practice. What Himmler needed, not only to keep the German people in check but to get the better of the rest of the world with its “ inferior races,” were experts in brutality, men no longer capable of any human stirrings, fanatical dervishes blindly marching behind their prophet’s flag, while to the right and left their victims fell by the thousands.

Most of the young men scheduled for concentration-camp guard service and for the so-called concentration-camp station complements were first of all given basic training along the lines of extreme Prussian drill—until “ the juice

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boiled in their tails,” as the soldiers’ jargon goes. Once they had learned at first hand what drillground discipline can mean, they were let loose on the prisoners to vent their fury twice over—once for their own rigorous training which already seemed to them the model of how men should live; and again for any trace of opposition to the Nazi regime. Those who distinguished themselves in this toughening-up process were quickly promoted. Those who showed softness, “ sentimentality,” or human sympathy were either kicked out or—if it was proved that they had made common cause with the prisoners in any way—stripped of their rank before their assembled fellows. Their heads were shorn, they were treated to twenty-five lashes and then they were themselves consigned to the company of the “ sub-humans.” This happened more than once, especially in the early years of the concentration camps. Most of the upper grades in the station complements owed their rapid advancement solely to their sadism. Before being entrusted with real responsibility, they had to complete a special course, always at Dachau, at Heydrich’s specific order. In later years all the concentration-camp commandants were trained there too.

A second subsidiary purpose of the concentration camps, more mundane in character, was the collection and ex ploitation of SS labor slaves. So long as these slaves were per mitted to live at all, they lived only to serve their masters. The degree and the methods of this unrestrained exploitation will be set forth further on in this book. It far transcended similar systems known from history. The ancients at least believed that slaves and beasts of burden had to be properly fed, but Germany’s master class could afford simply to draft new slave contingents when the old ones had been used up or had grown too small. Here too the already dulled German con science was put to sleep with moral pretexts. The program was masked as “ labor discipline” for “ loafers,” as “ productive work” for “ harmful elements.”

Finally, in another access of “ idealism,” Himmler and the SD used the concentration camps for large-scale scientific ex perimentation, supposedly for the benefit of mankind. Why should not creatures, doomed in any event, first be utilized for scientific knowledge? How often has not the desire been voiced that the harmful or healing effects of drugs be tested

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on large numbers of criminals? Here “ criminals” were available by the tens of thousands. And working conditions were ideal. “ Humanitarian sentimentality” was rigorously excluded. No jealous rival scientists could interfere. There was no problem about the consent of the subjects. What more could the SS physician, prototype of the medical overlord of the millennium, desire?

The satisfaction of the SS in its concentration camps grew steadily and the camps kept increasing in number, even before Nazism spread all over Europe. Together with other repressive measures, they fully accomplished their main mission. Resistance to the regime by disaffected elements grew feebler and feebler. Had the Gestapo, in its arrests, proceeded purely on the basis of opposition, the camps should have become deserted. But the subsidiary purposes—the deterrent effect on the population, the exploitation of slave labor, the maintenance of training and experimental facilities for the SS—came more and more to the fore in keeping the camps filled, until they experienced their greatest growth in the European war unleashed by Hitler and always con templated and prepared for by the SS. In the end the camps grew to such monstrous proportions that the regime was no longer equal to the task it had set itself. The SS and all its camps drifted toward the abyss in a state of virtual paralysis.

The first concentration camps to be created in Germany were not of the type later to be developed by the SS. Some fifty of them were organized in 1933, mainly by the SA. Most of them were in the vicinity of Berlin, a smaller number in central Germany, especially Saxony and Thuringia—in places such as Lichtenburg, Sachsenburg, Hohenstein, Bad Suiza. There were also a few elsewhere in Germany.