Extermination through labour

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Extermination through labor (Template:Lang-de) is a principle that guided the operation of the Nazi concentration camp system, defined as the willful or accepted killing of forced laborers or prisoners through excessive heavy labor and inadequate care.

In Nazism

According to Nazi ideology, the "Germanic peoples," i.e. the Germans, Flemish, Dutch, English, and Scandinavians, were considered "Aryans" and constituted the "master race." "German blood" and the "Aryans" had to be "kept pure" from the "foreign races." Southern Europeans, the Slavic peoples, and especially Jews and gypsies were all considered "foreign races."

While the Nazis persecuted many individuals because of their race, political affiliation, disability, religion or sexual orientation, only two groups were specifically singled out for complete destruction; these groups were Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses. While others could possibly redeem themselves in the eyes of the Nazis, there was no room in Hitler's world-view for these people. Because of their size and perceived threat, eliminating world Jewery was the Nazi's paramount concern. As such, the Nazi leadership gathered to discuss what had come to be called "the final solution to the Jewish question" at a conference in Wannsee, Germany. The transcript of this gathering on January 20, 1942 gives historians insight into the thought-process of the Nazi Leadership, as they devised the salient details of their future destruction, including using extermination through labor as one component of their so-called "Final Solution":

Under proper leadership, the Jews shall now in the course of the Final Solution be suitably brought to their work assignments in the East. Able-bodied Jews are to be lead to these areas to build roads in large work columns separated by sex, during which a large part will undoubtedly drop out through a process of natural reduction. As it will undoubtedly represent the most robust portion, the possible final remainder will have to be handled appropriately, as it would constitute a group of naturally-selected individuals, and would form the seed of a new Jewish resistance.

Other groups marginalized by the majority population included welfare-dependent families with many children, vagrants, and transients, as well as members of perceived problem groups such as alcoholics and prostitutes. While these people were considered "German-blooded," they were also categorized as "social misfits," as well as superfluous "ballast-lifes." They were recorded in lists (as were homosexuals) by civil and police authorities and subjected to myriad state restrictions and repressive actions, which included forced sterilization and ultimately imprisonment in concentration camps. Anyone who rebelled openly against the Nazi regime (such as communists, social democrats, democrats, and conscientious objectors) was detained in a prison or a camp. Many of the prisoners did not survive the camps.

In Nazi camps, "extermination through labor" was principally carried out through a slave-based labor organization, which is why, in contrast with the forced labor of foreign work forces, a term from the Nuremberg Trials is used for "slave work" and "slave workers."

Working conditions were characterized by:

no pay
constant surveillance of workers
physically demanding labor (for example, road construction, farm work, and factory work, particularly in the arms industry)
excessive working hours (often 10 to 12 hours per day)
minimal nutrition, food rationing
lack of hygiene
poor medical care and ensuing disease
insufficient clothing (for example, summer clothes even in the winter)
torture and abuse through such methods as Torstehen (forcing victims to stand outside naked with arms raised) or Pfahlhängen (hanging from a stake)

Concentration camps

Gate in the Dachau concentration camp memorial.

Imprisonment in concentration camps was intended not merely to break, but to destroy inmates. The admission and registration of the new prisoners, the forced labor, the prisoner housing, the roll calls—all aspects of camp life were accompanied by humiliation and harassment.

Admission, registration and interrogation of the detainees was accompanied by scornful remarks from SS officials. The prisoners were stepped on and beaten during roll call. Forced labor partly consisted of pointless tasks and heavy labor, which was intended to wear down the prisoners.

At many of the concentration camps, forced labor was channeled for the advancement of the German war machine. In these cases, excessive working hours were also seen as a means to maximizing output. Oswald Pohl, the leader of the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt ("SS Economy and Administration Main Bureau", or SS-WVHA), who oversaw the employment of slave labor at the concentration camps, ordered on April 30, 1942:

The camp commander alone is responsible for the use of man power. This work must be exhausting in the true sense of the word in order to achieve maximum performance. There are no limits to working hours. Time consuming walks and mid-day breaks only for the purpose of eating are prohibited. He must connect clear technical knowledge in military and economic matters with sound and wise leadership of groups of people, which he should bring together to achieve a high performance potential.

Up to 25,000 of the 35,000 prisoners appointed to work for IG Farben in Auschwitz died. The average life expectancy of a Jewish prisoner on a work assignment amounted to less than four months. The emaciated forced laborers died from exhaustion or disease or they were deemed to be incapable of work and killed. About 30 percent of the forced laborers who were assigned to dig tunnels, which were created for weapon factories in the last months of the war, died. In the satellite camps, which were established in the vicinity of mines and industrial firms, death rates were even higher, since accommodations and supplies were often even less adequate there than in the main camps.

The phrase "Arbeit macht frei" ("work shall set you free"), which could be found in various places in some Nazi concentration camps, e.g. on the entrance gates, seems particularly cynical in this context. (The Buchenwald concentration camp was the only concentration camp with the motto "Jedem das Seine" ("To each his own") on the entrance gate).

Victims

Victims of Extermination through labor were principally Jews from nearly every state in Europe, gypsies, Slavs, political dissidents, homosexuals and so-called "asocials".

Approximately six million Jews, 80,000 sick and handicapped people of German origin, 500,000 Sinti, Romanies, and members of other persecuted "gypsy" groups as well as seven million Soviet prisoners of war and civilians in concentration camps were killed altogether. It is impossible to ensure that these numbers are exact, as the Nazis often kept no records of their victims.

Background

Nazi Ideology demanded the "purification" of the "Aryan race" and the "German blood" from "foreign-blooded people." These "foreign-blooded people" were principally Slavs, blacks, Jews, and parts of the gypsy population. Old people, sick people, "work refusers," so-called "asocials" and disabled people were considered "useless people." Regime opponents, such as communists, democrats and social democrats, were also persecuted, since they opposed the "decampment" and the "national awakening."

In Communism

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Main article: GULAG

The use of prison labor on a large scale (and often with disastrous consequences for the prisoners) also occurred in some communist states, including the Soviet Union under Stalin, who expanded the camps built by his predecessor, Lenin. Under Stalin's rule, an extensive forced labor camp system was built that differed considerably from the concentration camps and prisons that existed during the civil war and in the 1920s.

There were also forced labor camps in Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu, in communist North Korea, and in the People's Republic of China (see Laogai).

It is generally agreed that the use of prison labor in these cases had a dual purpose of the extermination of political opponents and other dissidents through exhausting work and poor prison conditions, as well as achievement of productive goals.

In a 2000 survey of the recent international research on Stalin's camp system, Dietrich Beyrau, professor of eastern European history at Tübingen University, stated: "A good camp leader was distinguished by an optimal use of manpower in spite of an acknowledged shortage of provisions, clothing, and food, and especially by exceeding of the plan's expectations."

Gunnar Heinsohn, sociologist and professor in Bremen, expressed the view that "extermination through labor in the twentieth century was a critical method of extermination for Marxist-Leninist regimes." Leon Trotsky had already ensured the introduction of this kind of killing in Russia in June 1918. By 1928, Stalin had established extermination through labor in the Gulag.

Joel Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot offer the following assessment: "In view of the circumstances under which the prisoners worked, it seems all the more designed for their punishment and destruction, especially given all the pressures for them to maximize their performance." In his book Gulag Archipelago, Ralf Stetner writes that the character of the Gulag was, "in view of the millions of prisoners who were executed, starved, frozen, and worked to death, clearly that of extermination machinery."

Roy Medvedev comments: "The penal system in the Kolyma and in the camps in the north was deliberately designed for the extermination of people." Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev expands upon this, claiming that Stalin was the "architect of the gulag system for totally destroying human life."

Stalinism didn't exterminate opponents with poison gas, but rather let them work as prisoners on big building sites (for example the White Sea-Baltic Canal, quarries, railroads, and urban development projects) under inhumane conditions. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the soviet camps as "extermination camps" (Gulag Archipelago II). Prison conditions were generally characterized by:

very long working hours and high quotas (for example, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, daily working quotas on the White Sea-Baltic Canal required prisoners to "break up two cubic meters of granite and transport by wheelbarrow over a distance of one hundred meters"; in the Burepolom forced-labor camp, inmates had to cut as many as 7 cords of wood per day and drag them to the shipping point; in the Kolyma camps, a typical quota was 800 poods/12.8 metric tonnes of ore mined underground, often in freezing conditions)

starvation rations (300 grams of bread was a typical daily ration), which were further reduced if quotas were not met

icy cold, often with completely inadequate clothing (inmates often had to make their own "shoes" from discarded rubber tires or pieces of old winter coats)

disease (e.g. typhoid fever, scurvy, pellagra, kwashiorkor, dystrophy, and many other deadly diseases), with inadequate medical care

filth, vermin, insufficient hygienic supplies, particularly in the women's camps

drastic punishments for even the slightest infraction, harassment, insults, and abuse.

arbitrary executions and mass murder of prisoners

Similar in its cynicism to the motto "Arbeit macht frei," which was affixed to the entrance of various Nazi concentration camps (Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz, among others), the phrase "let us drive mankind to happiness with an iron hand," was already prominently displayed over the first large Soviet forced labor camp in the year 1923.

The concept of "correction through labor" ("correctional labor camps") was employed by Soviet rulers. In the 1920s, this concept was employed on all the inmates in the prisons run by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which at that time formed the main part of the Soviet penal system. "Corrective labor" was also considered a form of punishment, in which people who were charged with lesser crimes were forced to continue working at their current jobs for a set period of time for reduced pay. Those charged with (explicitly) political crimes, on the other hand, were interned in so-called "political isolators" and "concentration camps", which were run by the State Political Directorate (GPU). In June, 1929, the name "correctional labor camp" was introduced for all of the GPU's current and future camps. From then on, all Soviet prisoners, whether "common criminals" or "counter-revolutionaries," who had been sentenced to forced labor, were to operate under the official interpretation of "correctional labor." From this it is clear that communist terminology and propaganda to had to be met with skepticism.

R. Stettner notes that there was a difference between corrective labor for working class prisoners on the one hand, and "counter-revolutionaries" and "class enemies" on the other, in terms of humiliation, punishment, and destruction. In his view, the principle of "correction and reeducation" did not hold for political prisoners, either. Stettner considers it wrong "to follow communist terminology and propaganda and to concentrate… on the examination of correctional labor." Rather, one should "focus on the fact that, from the first weeks of Bolsheviks' rule on, forced prison labor was common for political dissidents."

Victims

According to formerly secret internal Gulag documents, some 1.6 million people must have died in the period between 1930 and 1956 in Soviet forced labor camps and colonies (excluding prisoner of war camps), though these figures only include the deaths in the colonies beginning in 1935. Some 900,000 of these deaths therefore fall between 1941 and 1945.

These figures are consistent with the archived documents that Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk presents and analyzes in his study The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, according to which some 500,000 people died in the camps and colonies from 1930 to 1941. Khlevniuk points out that these figures don't take into account any deaths that occurred during transport. Also excluded are those who died shortly after their release due to the harsh treatment in the camps, who, according to both archives and memoirs, were numerous.

Before the opening of many former Soviet archives, many historians assumed that the numbers of prisoners and deaths in the Soviet camps were much higher. Mortality data was estimated to be on the order 20 million or more. After large numbers of archived Gulag documents were made available and widely published, questions about the completeness of the information and whether they report the totality of the deaths were extensively debated in international research. Since then, a wider consensus has formed among Russian and Eastern European historians regarding the necessity of viewing archived Soviet sources containing numbers of prisoners and deaths, which were much lower than the highest earlier estimates, critically.

On the other hand, political scientist and specialist in the area of genocide research Rudolph Joseph Rummel estimates that 39 million people were killed by the Gulag during the entire Marxist-Leninist period of the Soviet Union (1918–1991), including the period of Lenin's rule with his secret police, the Cheka.

Among the prisoners were members of indigenous peoples of the Soviet Union, the newly incorporated peoples of the Soviet Union (Poles, Balts, Germans, and many others), people from member states of the Warsaw Pact (German Democratic Republic/Soviet Occupation Zone, West Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslovia, and many others), members of the bourgeoisie, Cossacks, Kulaks, real and alleged political opponents, nuns and monks, clergy, and criminals. Teenagers were interned in special colonies, though they were also often placed in adult camps due to a lack of space, and children (such as those who were born in the camps) in their own facilities, which were likewise operated by the Ministry of the Interior. The minimum age for arrest was lowered to 12 in 1935.

The notorious Article 58 criminalized "counter-revolutionary" activities and "anti-Soviet agitation," and these terms were interpreted very broadly. These sections of the penal code also declared spoken utterances critical of the Communist Party or its policies and "hopes for a restoration of the capitalist system" illegal. Millions of formerly apolitical people were arrested under such pretexts.

References

Often also translated as death through work, extermination through work, annihilation through labor or destruction through labor
IMT (editor): Der Nürnberger Prozess. Volume XXXVIII, page 366 / document 129-R.
Raul Hilberg: Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden. extended edition Frankfurt 1990. ISBN 3-596-24417-X Volume 2 Page 994f
Michael Zimmermann: Kommentierende Bemerkungen - Arbeit und Vernichtung im KZ-Kosmos. In: Ulrich Herbert et al. (Ed.): Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Frankfurt/M 2002, ISBN 3-596-15516-9, Vol. 2, p. 744
^ Joel Kotek / Pierre Rigoulot Gefangenschaft, Zwangsarbeit, Vernichtung, Propyläen 2001
Waleri Alexandrowitsch Wolin Russland rehabilitiert die durch sowjetische Militärtribunale unschuldig Verurteilten, p. 76 and Wolfgang Schuller "Die sowjetische Militärjustiz und ihre Lager als Instrument der kommunistischen Herrschaft in der Sowjetischen Besatzungszone Deutschlands" in Der 17. Juni 1953. Der Anfang vom Ende des sowjetischen Imperiums. Dokumentation, p. 72, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung's 4th Bautzen Forum from June 17–18, 1993
Peter H. Solomon, Jr., "Soviet Penal Policy, 1917-1934: A Reinterpretation" Slavic Review 39, no. 2 (June 1980): 197-201
Dietrich Beyrau "GULAG - Die Lager und das Sowjetsystem" Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen, Vol. 29, Book 3 (2000), p. 166-176, here: p. 169.
Gunnar Heinsohn Lexikon der Völkermorde, Rowohlt rororo 1998, ISBN 3-499-22338-4
^ Ralf Stettner Archipel Gulag. Stalins Zwangslager, Schöningh 1996, ISBN 3-506-78754-3
Roy Medwedew Die Wahrheit ist unsere Stärke. Geschichte und Folgen des Stalinismus (Ed. by David Joravsky and Georges Haupt), Fischer, Frankfurt/M. 1973, ISBN 3-10-050301-5
Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev. A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. Yale University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-300-08760-8 p. 15
Alexander Solzhenitsyn Arkhipelag Gulag, Vol. 2. "Novyy Mir," 1990. P. 63, 131-132
Alexander Solzhenitsyn Arkhipelag Gulag, Vol. 2. "Novyy Mir," 1990. P. 75, 133-134
Alexander Solzhenitsyn Arkhipelag Gulag, Vol. 2. "Novyy Mir," 1990. P. 28, 135-136
Alexander Solzhenitsyn Arkhipelag Gulag, Vol. 2. "Novyy Mir," 1990. P. 37-39, 138-139, 142-144
Alexander Solzhenitsyn Arkhipelag Gulag, Vol. 2. "Novyy Mir," 1990. P. 28-29, 83-84, 90
Alexander Solzhenitsyn Arkhipelag Gulag, Vol. 2. "Novyy Mir," 1990. P. 40, 45-46, 84-86, 134
Source: M. Stark, Frauen im Gulag, Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 2005
A. I. Kokurin / N. V. Petrov (Editor): GULAG (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerej): 1918–1960 (Rossija. XX vek. Dokumenty), Moskva: Materik 2000, ISBN 5-85646-046-4, p. 62
A. I. Kokurin / N. V. Petrov (Ed.): GULAG (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerej): 1918–1960 (Rossija. XX vek. Dokumenty), Moskva: Materik 2000, ISBN 5-85646-046-4, pp. 441-2
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.
ibd., pp. 308-6.
Ellman, Michael. Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments Europe-Asia Studies. Vol 54, No. 7, 2002, 1151-1172
Applebaum, Anne (2003) Gulag: A History. Doubleday. ISBN 0767900561 pg 583
For an overview, see Ralf Stettner Archipel Gulag. Stalins Zwangslager, Schöningh 1996, ISBN 3-506-78754-3, pp. 376-398
cf. Manfred Hildermeier: Geschichte der Sowjetunion 1917-1991 Beck 1998, ISBN 3-406-43588-2, S. 453-6, as well as the commentary by Stephan Merl, professor of Eastern European history at Bielefeld University, in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (Neue Folge), Volume 54, Book 3 (2006), p. 438. The American historian Robert Conquest, who had assumed numbers of prisoners and victims that were generally larger than those reported in the archived documents in his own earlier studies of Stalinist terrorism, and who had sharply attacked the use of statistics derived from archived documents for nearly a year, (cf. the debate in the following editions of Europe-Asia Studies: Vol. 48, Issue 8 (Dec. 1996), Vol. 49, Issue 7 (Dec. 1997), Vol. 51, Issue 2 (March 1999), Vol. 51, Issue 6 (Sep. 1999), Vol. 51, Issue 8 (Dec. 1999), Vol. 52, Issue 6 (Sep. 2000)), has also moved away from this position and has since praised the work of Oleg Khlevniuk, who reflects on these sources in his book. See Conquest's foreword to Khlevniuk's The History of the Gulag, pp. ix-xii.
Rudolph Joseph Rummel Demozid - Der befohlene Tod, LIT 2003, ISBN 3-8258-3469-7
Vilenski, S. S./Kokurin, A. I./Atmaškina, G. V./Novičenko, I. Ju. (Ed.): Deti GULAGa: 1918–1956 (Rossija. XX vek. Dokumenty), Moskva: Materik, 2002.

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