Download The Round Tablette - Dr. Harold C. Deutsch WWII History Roundtable

The Round Tablette
February 2007
Volume 15 Number 6
Published by WW II History Roundtable
Edited by Jim Gerber
Welcome to the February meeting of
the Dr. Harold C. Deutsch World War II
History Roundtable. Tonight’s program is on
the Nazis Concentration Camps, the victims
and the liberators. Our presenter is author
and Roundtable board member Steve
Chicoine.
The Nazis Camp System
Originally, the Nazis Camp System
began as a system of repression mainly
against political opponents of the Nazis State.
In the early years of the Third Reich, the
Nazis imprisoned primarily Communists and
Socialists. About 1935, the regime also began
to imprison those whom it designated as
racially or biologically inferior, especially
Jews. As WW II progressed, the organization
and scale of the Nazi camp system expanded
rapidly and the purpose of the camps went
beyond imprisonment toward forced labor
and outright murder.
Throughout German occupied
Europe, the Germans arrested those who
resisted their domination and those they
judged to be racially inferior or politically
unacceptable. People arrested for resisting
German rule were sent mostly to forced
labor or concentration camps. The
populations of the camps came to include
prisoners from almost every European
nation. Prisoners in all the concentration
camps were literally worked to death.
According to SS reports, there were more
than 700,000 prisoners registered n the
concentration camps in January 1945.
Concentration Camps 1933 – 1939
The term concentration camp refers
to a camp in which people are detained or
confined, usually under harsh conditions and
without regard to legal norms of arrest and
imprisonment. The first concentration camps
in Germany were established soon after
Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in
January 1933. The SA and the police
organized camps beginning in February
1933. Camps were set up by local authorities
as needed to handle the masses of people
arrested as alleged political opponents of the
regime throughout Germany. Gradually, the
Nazis disbanded most of these early camps
and replaced them with centrally organized
concentration camps under the exclusive
jurisdiction of the SS. Dachau, the only
concentration camp opened in 1933 that
remained in operation until 1945, was the
model for the Nazi concentration camp
system that replaced the earlier camps. By
1939, six large camps had been established.
Besides Dachau, they were Sachenhausen,
Buchenward, Flossenbuerg, Mauthausen and
Ravensbrueck. After 1939, the concentration
camp system expanded to the east due to new
territorial conquests and larger groups of
potential prisoners. With the beginning of
the war, the camps, increasingly, became
sites where targeted groups of real or
perceived enemies of the Nazis were either
murdered outright or put to hard,
meaningless labor. They were annihilated by
labor.
Concentration Camps, 1939 – 1942
The years 1939 – 1942 saw a marked
expansion in the camp system. In 1938, the
SS began to exploit the labor of the camp
prisoners for economic profit. The war
provided a convenient excuse to ban releases
from the camps, thus providing the SS with a
readily available labor force. The SS
established new camps in the vicinity of
factories or sites of extraction of raw
materials. The goods extracted or produced
by prisoner labor were sold to the German
Reich through SS-owned firms such as the
German Earth and Stone Works. As
Germany continued to conquer more of
Europe, the SS established a number of new
concentration camps to incarcerate increased
numbers of political prisoners, resistance
groups and groups considered racially
inferior such as Jews and Gypsies. Among
these new camps were: Gusen, Neuengamme,
Gross-Rosen, Auschwitz, Natzweiler, Stuttfof
and Majdanek. The camps became sites of
mass murder of targeted groups deemed
dangerous for political or racial reasons.
Captured members of national resistance
movements were sent to concentration camps
to be murdered upon arrival.
Concentration Camps, 1942 – 1945
After the defeat of the German Army
in its attempt to take Moscow and the entry
of the US into the War, the Germans
understood that Germany would have to
fight a long war. Responding to the
increasingly acute labor shortages and the
need to produce more implements of war, the
SS established more SS-owned firms. It also
signed contracts with state and private firms
to produce goods and provide labor for the
German armaments and related industries.
A famous example of cooperation between
the SS and private industry was the I.G.
Farben company’s establishment of a
synthetic rubber plant in 1942 at Auschwitz
III(Monowitz). The incarceration of
increasing numbers of people in the
concentration camps assured at least the
quantity of the labor supply even as the
brutality of the regimen inside the camps
depleted the number of available laborers.
The SS used gas chambers and other means
to “weed out” prisoners who were no longer
able to work. During the last year of the war
the camp population suffered catastrophic
losses due to starvation, exposure, disease
and mistreatment. The SS also evacuated the
prisoners because the Nazis did not want the
prisoners to be liberated. During this period,
the camps were also sites of hideous and
perverted medical experiments conducted on
prisoners against their will and often with
lethal results. In 1944 – 1945, the Allied
armies liberated the concentration camps.
Tragically, deaths in the camps continued for
several weeks after liberation. Some
prisoners had already become too weak to
survive. It is estimated that more than half of
total number of concentration camp deaths
between 1933 and 1945 occurred during the
last year of the war.
More reading on tonight’s topic:
An Unbroken Chain
By Henry A. Oertelt
Lerner Publications
Minneapolis, Mn. 2000
On sale tonight
Witnesses to the Holocaust
By Rhoda G. Lewin
Twain Publishers
Boston, Mass. 1990
Witness to Barbarism
By Horace R. Hansen
Thousand Pinetree Press
St. Paul, Mn 2002
On Sale Tonight
Auschwitz
By Laurence Rees
Public Affairs Press
New York, New York 2005
Walking With The Damned
By Ted Schwarz
Paragon House
New York, New York 1992
When the Warflowers Bloomed
By Calvin Vraa
Authorhouse
Minneapolis, MN 2004
Historical novel on sale tonight;
Author is available for signing