LIFE IN THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS

One often hears the phrase "Man's inhumanity to man". However, there is no more horrific example of that- not the Crusades, not the Inquisition, not the Turkish slaughter of Armenians or Saddam Hussein's disposal of tens of thousands of Kurds in Iraq- than the systematic herding together, then disposing of million s of Jews, Poles, Russians, Gypsies, homosexuals and those physically impaired. The Germans, heirs to Goethe, Schiller, Hegel and Nietzsche, turned into inhuman hordes of men (and women) who delighted in the task of eliminating Europe's Jews from the face of the Third Reich. Volumes have been written, and still no real answer to "why?". Here we will concentrate on the "how".

The conditions in the camps were, of course, unlivable for most. It is interesting to note that, at first, it was not the zyklon gas chambers and crematoriums which were responsible for so many deaths. It was disease. "The great killer in the German camps was of course typhus, spread by lice in the constant traffic with the east. In the rapid expansion of the camps in Poland, in 1941-1942, the Germans were able to anticipate this dangera. However their countermeasures largely failed and typhus epidemics broke out in summer 1942. The figure for the number of recorded male ordinary deaths at Auschwitz, in the period 1 June - 19 August, has survived; it was 11,920' (Butz 2003 1). The facts are that epidemics of communicable diseases ruined the

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the Holocaust and its perpetrators in 1970 used the term "banality of evil". A camp survivor gives some credence to that: "We had to line up in the sun and go up to a table one by one. Behind the table there were two gendarme officers sitting comfortably in the shade under an awning. The women had to take off all their rings, and other jewelry they had on, and put them on the table. The gendarmes then put everything into boxes. The whole thing looked like a regular business proceeding" (Ben Menachem 2005). Ben-Menachem, who survived as a child, returned to a Polish camp, Birkenau, to see a museum there. "The museum was located in the barracks of the old camp. Birkenau, right beside it was the place of THE FINAL SOLUTION. In the museum, there was a whole wall of glass and behind it, children's shoes. In the next display there were suitcases. Display after display. With German precision, everything sorted, inventories, used and stored. The only thing they did not keep was the people" (Ben-Menachem 2005 288). While there have been numerous accounts of daily life in the various camps, very little has been written by (or about) those who put them there. It took a very special kind of immoral person, and the Nazis found them. "Fo

Category: History - L