Inside Concentration Camps E-Book

Maja Suderland

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 792

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Terror was central to the Nazi regime, and the Nazi concentration camps were places of horror where prisoners were dehumanized and robbed of their dignity and where millions were murdered. How did prisoners cope with the brutal and degrading conditions of life within the camps? In this highly original book Maja Suderland takes the reader inside the concentration camps and examines the everyday social life of prisoners - their daily activities and routines, the social relationships and networks they created and the strategies they developed to cope with the harsh conditions and the brutality of the guards. Without overlooking the violence of the camps, the contradictions of camp life or the elusive complexity of the multicultural prisoner society, Suderland explores the hidden social practices that enabled prisoners to preserve their human dignity and create a sense of individuality and community despite the appalling circumstances. This remarkable account of social life in extreme conditions will be of great interest to students and scholars in history, sociology and the social sciences generally, as well as to a wider readership interested in the Holocaust and the concentration camps.

Leseprobe

Inside Concentration Camps

Inside Concentration Camps

Social Life at the Extremes

Maja Suderland

Translated by Jessica Spengler

polity

First published in German as Ein Extremfall des Sozialen © Campus Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt/Main, 2009

This English edition © Polity Press, 2013

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ISBN: 978-0-7456-7955-6

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

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Contents

Foreword by Beate Krais

Preface

Translator’s Note

Acknowledgments

Part I  Introduction

1    Topic and Research Question

2    The “Third Reich” and the Nazi Concentration Camps

2.1  The establishment of the Nazi concentration camps: Historical, social, and legal background

2.2  Germany and its forcible detention camps

2.3  The organizational structure of the concentration camps

2.4  The concentration camp SS and guards

2.5.  Summary: A complex interrelationship

Part II  Sociological Avenues of Inquiry

3    Introductory Comments on the Disciplinary Context and Methods

3.1  Empirical material and methodological approach

3.2  The impossibility of representing reality and the special characteristics of Holocaust literature

3.3  The relationship between historical scholarship and sociology

4    Sociological Orientations

4.1  Preliminary remarks: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and the use of other central theoretical ideas

4.2  The “basic concepts” of society

4.2.1  Individuals and society: Views of a complex relationship

4.2.2  Classes and ways of life: Social differentiation

4.2.3  Gender: Physical characteristics and their symbolic significance for social differentiation

4.2.4  “Ethnic group” and caste: The belief in genetic ab kinship and the notion of social inescapability

4.2.5  Summary: Habitus and society

4.3  Concentration camps

4.3.1  The significance of physical torture: Michel Foucault’s restoration of sovereignty through “the vengeance of the sovereign” and the “dissymmetry of forces”

4.3.2  “Total institutions” and the possibility of surviving one: Erving Goffman’s “secondary adjustments”

4.3.3  Suppressing the “odors” of death: Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of culture

4.4  A theoretical perspective: The complex society of the “Third Reich” and social reality in the forcible detention camps

Part III  The Social World of the Nazi Concentration Camps

5    Camp Life

5.1  Arrival and registration of the prisoners at the camp or: How the “practical logic” of the camp gradually revealed itself to the prisoners

5.2  Prisoner life: Recurring processes

5.3  Three levels of sociality

5.4   Summary: A micro-sociological view of the intricacies of complex camp life or: How many realities were there?

6    Prisoner Society

6.1  Fragmentation, dissociation, community-building: Social processes

6.2  Regular prisoners, armband wearers, camp aristocracy: The mass and the elite

6.3  Men, women, children or: What’s still normal here?

6.4.  Summary: An examination of the structure of the prisoner society or: The significance of similarity and difference

Part IV  Social Libido

7    The Constitution of Social Identity in the Concentration Camps: The Concepts of Individuality and the Importance of Social Structures in a “Topsy-Turvy World”

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

This book addresses a central issue in sociology, namely, the question of humanity’s fundamental sociality and how it can be precisely defined. Sociology has taken different approaches to answering this question. The idea of the social contract, the twentieth-century concept of acting in social roles, and rational choice theory all assume the existence of a pre-societal individual who enters into relationships with other individuals at various opportunities and thus constitutes “the social” – in other words, society. Another line of sociological thinking, which stretches from Karl Marx through Norbert Elias to Pierre Bourdieu, holds that individuals are social creatures from the outset. Following this argument, “concepts such as ‘individual’ and ‘society’ do not relate to two objects existing separately but to different yet inseparable aspects of the same human beings,” as Norbert Elias puts it in his criticism of Talcott Parsons, the leading proponent of role theory (Elias 2000: 455).

Maja Suderland tackles this controversy by exploring an extreme case of social life, namely, relations in the Nazi concentration camps – the “societal” nature of which has been debated by sociologists and historians alike. She focuses in particular – though by no means exclusively – on the hidden social practices of the inmates, that is, the social activities that existed beneath and beyond the official rules dictated by the SS. The data she draws on consist primarily of literature of memory – autobiographies, diaries, and the reflections of former prisoners and those close to them who recorded what they had been told; this material is supplemented with scholarly research.

The study at hand follows up on the work of Paul Martin Neurath, who documented his experiences in German concentration camps as early as 1943 in the form of a dissertation submitted to Columbia University. Neurath spoke of a camp society – a “society of terror” – in which he recognized the “basic concepts” that characterized society outside the camp. With the help of a broad conceptual horizon encompassing Bourdieu’s praxeology, Foucault’s theory of power, Goffman’s idea of the total institution, Bauman’s concept of culture, Weber’s thoughts on notions such as ethnicity and caste, and Dumont’s theories on modern individualism, Suderland assembles a set of analytical tools which she applies to her empirical material to distill these “basic concepts” of society. The theoretical connections that she reveals and her critical reflections on concepts of ethnicity and caste, for example, are new, stimulating, and provocative.

Ultimately, Suderland is able to demonstrate that the social world of the concentration camps was an outpost of the social space of the surrounding society, an outpost which shared that society’s lines of conflict, but in a cruelly distorted way: In a “normal” society, lines of differentiation are associated with greater or lesser disadvantages and discrimination for certain individuals and groups of individuals, but in the camps they always represented “a simple and terrible alternative between survival and death” (p. 205). Maja Suderland also shows that human beings possess a fundamental sociality, a type of social libido which spawns social order (i.e., society) even under the most extreme conditions and which therefore also spawns individuals – at least in the modern age, and her findings indicate that the social world of the concentration camps is a modern one. This social libido manifests itself in the general notions associated with concepts such as human dignity, individuality, and reason, but also in the distinctions that individuals make to identify similarities and establish boundaries in their everyday lives. These include distinctions in social position based on gender, on social class, on apparent ethnic background, and on new classification principles unique to the social world of the concentration camps.

It is tremendously challenging to approach the question of humanity’s fundamental sociality as a question which can (also) be answered empirically. When the “case study” used to answer this question documents the most violent, destructive, and dehumanizing events in human history, there is an added complication: By turning the cool and, in its own way, merciless analytical gaze of the sociologist upon these oppressed, tortured, and murdered people, do you not run the risk of debasing them all over again? Avoiding this risk demands a high degree of reflection – and self-reflection – as well as great sensitivity to the material, which consists by and large of personal documents that were not created for the purposes of empirical social research. The meticulous examination of the complex reality of the concentration camps which forms the backdrop to the prisoners’ testimonies, the balanced analysis and careful reading that enable the finest nuances to be detected, and, finally, the clear, precise, and differentiated language make Suderland’s study an outstanding sociological work that sets new standards. This book impressively demonstrates that it is possible to carry out a concise sociological analysis of life and death in the Nazi concentration camps and simultaneously, as stated in the opening chapter, “make the polyphonic lament of the people […] audible once again and, in doing so, identify both the unwritten musical score of the whole and the improvised melodies of the individuals” (p. 6).

I hope Suderland’s work finds attentive readers – her study will help them better understand the social world of the modern age.

Beate Krais Darmstadt, November 2008

Preface

Though it is certainly not critical to the reader’s understanding to explain the personal motivations for addressing a research question, I would like to do so in this case anyway. There are two main reasons for this: First, I am often asked why I have dedicated myself to this kind of topic. Although the subject in question is undoubtedly of great concern to many different academic disciplines, I also have personal reasons for wanting to explore it, and in the interest of transparency I feel I should reveal these factors. Second, I am just as often asked how I can bear to “voluntarily” plunge into the dark chasm of this subject and examine it in detail instead of shying away from it in horror.

The answer to both questions is essentially the same: I have been regularly confronted with the Holocaust since I was a child – in the words of Gustave Flaubert, “one does not choose one’s subjects, they force themselves on one” (cited in Pfäfflin 1996: 265). There is hardly anyone on either side of my family whose life – and very often death – was not affected by this historic event. As a result, the terrible and the incomprehensible have always been within touching distance for me. Like so many people of my generation, I heard my parents and grandparents speak frequently of war, destruction, loss, and displacement. Of the surviving protagonists in my family’s stories, most had managed to emigrate to Argentina, the USA, or Australia just in time. Some – the minority – were concentration camp survivors. But the names of many other family members were mentioned in conjunction with failed attempts to hide, to emigrate, or to escape in some other way. Horrifying stories were told of deportations to places known and unknown, of a relative’s last signs of life or exact circumstances of death. Until just a few years ago, I still used the monogrammed damask table napkins belonging to my great-aunt Irene, who had stashed them away together with her dishes, cutlery, and other things prior to being deported as a sign of her hope that she would return.

In other words, while my friends had family members who could celebrate birthdays and other occasions together with them in person, my family gatherings were populated largely by absentees – relatives who either lived on the other side of the world or who had been murdered long before I was born. And from a very early age, I knew that I wanted to find out what exactly had happened.

After so many years of dealing with this terrible subject I had become fairly accustomed to it, so it was a key moment for me when I discovered, through Zygmunt Bauman (1989), a very special way of looking at this topic (see chapter 1), one which would become the basis of my own scholarly research. While I was initially interested primarily in the importance of education and culture to the action strategies of concentration camp inmates (cf. Suderland 2003, 2004, 2005), I found myself being drawn more and more to the nuanced descriptions of diverse aspects of the prisoner society which are given a considerable amount of attention – alongside depictions of the horrors – in the memoirs and reports of survivors. Although it is frequently claimed that the mass of prisoners did not constitute a society in the true sense, former prisoners themselves place great value in explaining the finest social distinctions in their accounts. I therefore felt compelled as a sociologist to address this apparent contradiction, to reconstruct the inmates’ perspectives and study the descriptions of former concentration camp prisoners to find an explanation as to why, even in the face of starvation, disease, misery, and death, it was so important to portray the social diversity within the prisoner society. I discovered the answers in references made by former prisoners to the “hidden social world of the Nazi concentration camps” which is the focus of this work.

When dealing with the events of the “Third Reich,” you are forced to engage with the world-view of the Nazis and, in order to explain their goals and the resulting conflicts, make use of terminology you fundamentally reject. For me, this extreme discomfort regularly goes hand in hand with the need to distance myself from the interpretations of meaning lurking behind these terms. For this reason, I have put distancing quotation marks around any such terms whose meaning I view skeptically (even if these terms did not originate with the Nazis, such as “ethnicity”; see below).

In closing, I would like to thank some of the people who, through their support, have made it possible for me to complete this work. First, I must thank Beate Krais for encouraging me to pursue this topic, for giving me the space in which to do so, and for asking the critical questions that continually spurred me on in my thinking and research. My friend and colleague Ragna Schümann (1969–2010), who passed away far too young, not only cast a critical eye over parts of the manuscript and gave me useful feedback, she also valiantly tackled many of the day-to-day workings of the Institute and therefore was a tremendous help to me. I owe her my thanks for this. Very special thanks go to Jakob, David, and Detlev for always supporting my decision without a grumble. The patience they have shown me over the years helped me find the strength I needed to stick with this subject. Finally, I want to thank Hartmut Gante for his helpful publishing advice and Jessica Spengler for her excellent translation.

Maja SuderlandDarmstadt, August 2012

Translator’s Note

Wherever possible, English editions of texts have been used as the source for the quotations in this work. If no English edition of a text was available, I translated the respective quotations from the German text myself. In cases where the English edition was a revised or abridged version of a foreign-language text, I have supplemented the available English text with my own translation of any additional passages where necessary; these additional translations are placed in brackets when they occur within quotations. This particularly applies to the works by Tadeusz Borowski (1992, 2006), Ruth Klüger (1999, 2001), Eugen Kogon (1946, 2006), Leon Szalet (1945, 2006), and Krystyna Zywulska (1980, 2004).

Thank you to Georg Felix Harsch for his careful reading of the translation and his invaluable linguistic advice.

Jessica Spengler

Acknowledgments

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the permission granted to reproduce the following copyright material in this book:

From THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED by Primo Levi, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster Inc. Copyright © 1986 by Giulio Einaudi editore S.P.A. English translation © 1988 by Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

From IF THIS IS A MAN (SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ) by Primo Levi, translated by Stuart Woolf, translation copyright © 1959 by Orion Press Inc., © 1958 by Giulio Einaudi editore S.P.A. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

From THIS WAY FOR THE GAS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN by Tadeusz Borowski, translated by Barbara Vedder, translation copyright © 1967 by Penguin Books Ltd. Original text copyright © 1959 by Maria Borowski. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

[There was no] way that you’d ever really become nobody for everybody.

Robert Antelme

Part I

Introduction

1

Topic and Research Question

In his book Modernity and the Holocaust, first published in 1989, Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman proposes that the Holocaust should be seen “as a rare, yet significant and reliable, test of the hidden possibilities of modern society” (Bauman 1989: 12, emphasis in original). He claims it is almost imperative to view our society through the “window” of the Holocaust (ibid.: viii), as this can offer a glimpse of things which would otherwise remain invisible. According to Bauman, not only can the social sciences shed a light on the Holocaust, the Holocaust can shed a new light on present-day concerns (ibid.). Picking up on Bauman’s thesis, I propose that insights into our society can be gained by peering critically through the “window” of the Holocaust and examining the social relationships between the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.

Bauman’s viewpoint is rather unusual in today’s Holocaust research. The unspoken mission of Holocaust research is to analyze what is abnormal, monstrous, and “evil” (cf. Safranski 1997: 267ff.), to explore the suffering of the victims and distill the unique aspects of this historical event. Such research is therefore considered absolutely necessary but also highly specialized. Bauman, who naturally questions neither the uniqueness of the Holocaust nor the suffering of its victims, nonetheless concludes that if we want to find out something about our society, the Holocaust must not only be the object of our research, it should also determine the perspective of our research.

He thus opposes a core tenet of many academic studies of life inside the Nazi concentration camps which emphasize one thing above all: that this was not a society in the conventional sense because all of these people were forced to live together in unprecedentedly inhumane conditions and were therefore in a situation which would not normally be described as a society.

The phrase “prisoner society” is certainly used in Holocaust research, but it is often flanked by distancing comments that explain why it is “actually” completely inappropriate (in more recent literature, see Pätzold 2005, for example). In other cases, scholars emphasize that within the body of prisoners as a whole there were distinctions between the better-off prisoner functionaries who formed a kind of prisoner elite and the mass of regular prisoners who had no influence over anything (cf. Abgeleitete Macht 1998; Brzezicki et al. 1987; Orth 2000). Another viewpoint can be found in works dealing with the social characteristics of particular groups of prisoners – but because of their tight focus, such works tend to overlook the complex structure of the totality of prisoners, as this is beyond the scope of their intent (cf. Benz and Distel 2005b; Moller et al. 2002; Quack 2003; Streibel and Schafranek 1996).1

There is no doubt that the Nazi concentration camps were designed to dehumanize and annihilate their inmates through open and extreme brutality. In light of this overwhelming, crushing violence, it seems logical at first glance that the forced community of prisoners would be shaped solely by the imposed structures of the camps and the wretched and threatening living conditions found there. Historical and sociological studies of the Holocaust therefore frequently argue that concentration camp inmates could not constitute a “prisoner society” because their community was based on direct, open violence and the relations within it were not voluntary.2 For example, an introductory essay on “prisoner societies” in the first volume of the series Der Ort des Terrors (Benz and Distel 2005a) states:

The prisoner societies were the product of arbitrariness, violence, and terror. All of the rules and standards still applicable outside of their fences and walls between 1933 and 1945 had been abolished within them. […] The drawback of the term prisoner society is that it does not express the relationship [between the enforcers and the enforced], and it is deceptive in that it makes the prisoners appear to be the active agents and shapers of this society. (Pätzold 2005: 110–11)

This position assumes that the Nazis largely succeeded in annihilating the concentration camp prisoners as social entities. Apparently the only exceptions to this are the exemplary resistance fighters, whose political motivation and strategic planning enabled them to oppose the brutal violence – and who sometimes also resorted to draconian measures against their fellow prisoners in order to achieve their goals (cf. ibid.).

While the term “prisoner society” is not typically found in the memoirs of former concentration camp prisoners, even the testimonies from regular prisoners clearly reveal that the inmates did assert their humanity and sociality in the camps through a hidden and usually symbolic dimension of social life. In their memoirs, former prisoners often mention the commendable and particularly brave “heroic acts” of others, but they frequently place an even greater emphasis on their own efforts to maintain continuity with their prior social experiences in order to distance themselves from the new, terrifying, and alienating experiences in the concentration camps.

Scholarly analyses of the Holocaust focus on the violence, atrocities, and abnormalities in order to highlight the inhuman aspects of the world in the camps – and for good reason. But this focus has a startling effect: If we follow the reasoning behind Pierre Bourdieu’s3 concept of “symbolic violence” (cf. Bourdieu 1991a, 1993b; Bourdieu and Passeron 1990), then by rejecting the term “prisoner society,” the scholarly perspective described above unwittingly commits a type of “symbolic violence” itself. By denying the prisoners’ fundamental sociality on the basis of the violence of the SS, we limit our perception, thus obscuring the hidden social dimensions of the prisoner society and making it practically impossible to discuss them without simultaneously turning a blind eye to the unbridled violence. Using Bourdieu’s tools, however, we can reveal the multifaceted nuances of this symbolic dimension of a social life under compulsion and adversity and demonstrate that not “all of the rules and standards […] had been abolished” (see above; Pätzold 2005: 110). This approach also portrays the prisoners as “the active agents and shapers of this society” (ibid.: 111) – though ones with extremely restricted freedom of action – and thus restores their human dignity (cf. Suderland 2008).

While the memoirs of former prisoners frequently stress the shocking discrepancy between life in the camps and “normal society,” they also describe a multitude of complex and sometimes contradictory social relations. These had a lasting impact on the prisoners, but this impact can be easily overlooked in the face of the brutal violence that dominated the camps. In their recollections, former concentration camp prisoners depict these multifaceted interpersonal relationships in their own words, which they themselves often feel are inadequate. But by illustrating the social context for us and describing what they felt, thought, and did, they explain which aspects of society were particularly important to them under the extraordinary conditions of camp life. The authors of these texts seem to feel the need to convey that the world in the camps was “topsy-turvy” (Klüger 2001) and that they used any available means in their steadfast attempts to restore a certain degree of “rightness” within it. On the one hand, they vividly describe the traumatic violence of the Nazis and the powerlessness and helplessness they felt in the face of it. But this powerlessness is precisely what compels them to present themselves as actively engaged individuals who, at least on a small scale, tried to restore the familiar and necessary social order – even if only by deliberately holding on to familiar patterns of perception and evaluation. Each personal account reconstructs an individual viewpoint which is nuanced by virtue of its integration in various social contexts and which gives the author a recognizable identity. These reconstructed viewpoints can thus also be viewed as individual conceptions of society. The abnormality in the concentration camps is described as an alternative world in which everything the prisoners themselves felt to be right was not allowed to exist and therefore had to be reconstructed – as much as possible – in secret and using whatever means were available.

The leitmotif in this polyphonic and by no means always harmonious choir of memories appears to be the need for differences and similarities. These were apparently essential to the prisoners as individuals and were based on just a few principles of differentiation, even under these extraordinary conditions. Paul Martin Neurath, who was imprisoned in Dachau and Buchenwald in 1938 and 1939 and later became a sociologist, observed this phenomenon himself and made a sharp sociological analysis of it early on (Neurath 2005: 261). However, his exceptional dissertation entitled “Social Life in the German Concentration Camps Dachau and Buchenwald,” which he completed in 1943 after emigrating to the USA, was of no immediate interest to anyone and was therefore not published until 2004 (as The Society of Terror).4

In this book, I have adopted Zygmunt Bauman’s research perspective and directed my sociological gaze through the “window” of the Holocaust to examine the prisoner society within the concentration camps5 in order to learn something about both the prisoners and their view of the world from the former inmates themselves. The main goal of my study is to understand the points of view of the concentration camp prisoners (cf. Bourdieu 1994, 1999) and to reconstruct and describe them with the help of sociological theories focusing on the social practices of real social agents.

To express this goal another way, allow me to draw on a metaphor used at various times by Bourdieu: I want to make the polyphonic lament of the people who were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps at least partially audible once again and, in doing so, identify both the unwritten musical score of the whole and the improvised melodies of the individuals (cf. Bourdieu 1993a: 56). This will involve examining the recurring leitmotifs and elucidating the sharps and clefs that fundamentally modify all of the determining factors (cf. Bourdieu 1997b: 222), thereby revealing the structures created by the social agents themselves that form the basis of both the unwritten musical score and the improvised melodies of everyone who participates in it.

Academic studies of the Nazi concentration camps and autobiographical accounts from former prisoners leave no doubt that the camps were places of horror where their victims were robbed of their dignity, dehumanized, and ultimately murdered. This physical destruction was usually preceded by psychological destruction; neither the body nor the mind, neither individuality nor community was tolerated in the camps. In his dissertation submitted to Columbia University in New York in 1943, Neurath writes of his experiences and observations in Dachau and Buchenwald:

A man is thrown into a concentration camp as a means of cutting him out of human society like a rotten piece of flesh out of the living body. He shall have nobody to speak or listen to. […] His life, as long as it is left to him, shall be only a physical vegetating, with no memories about the past, no meaning to the present, and no goals for the future. He shall be only a cog in the huge mechanism of Nazi terror, pressed by other cogs and the weight of the whole machinery, seldom repaired, but used until worn out, when finally the late individual, now a number, will be written off the inventory. (Neurath 2005: 132–3)

There were no limits to the harassment and torment meted out to this end by the Nazi bureaucrats and guard squads. The situation was made all the worse by the prisoners’ strict isolation from the world outside. The Nazis wanted the rules of normal life to hold no sway over life in the concentration camps.

Since one of the main tasks of a concentration camp is to break the prisoner as a human being, two of the first prerogatives of a human being are withdrawn from him: the right to expect that there shall be some reason in the way he is treated, and the right to influence his own fate by reasonable behavior. Instead he is subject to completely arbitrary treatment. (Neurath 2005: 86)

This arbitrary treatment plainly corresponded to the values of the Nazis, but the prisoners felt it to be a reversal of their concept of humanity and of all conventional values. It is no coincidence that former prisoners often speak of a “topsy-turvy world” (e.g., Klüger 2001). The Nazis’ enormous experiment to dehumanize their opponents and all other undesirables seemed, to the prisoners, to be an attempt to turn them into wild animals who would fight and tear each other apart in their desperation.

Though it may seem cynical under the circumstances, a closer look reveals that even in the concentration camps there was a social life that corresponded to that of a normal society in many respects, although the opportunities to express differences and nuances were drastically restricted. Regarding the “social status” (Neurath 2005: 261) of the prisoners and their respective sense of honor, Neurath writes: “The difference between the two societies, that outside and that inside the camp, seems […] one of rules of behavior rather than basic concepts” (Neurath 2005: 261; emphasis added). Inherent in this realization is the minimal scope the prisoners had to continue to feel like human beings, that is, to feel like individuals and members of a human society in which the “basic concepts” still applied, while adhering to the relevant “rules of behavior.” In light of the transparent desires of the SS regime, this was existentially important to the prisoners if they wanted to resist being dehumanized.

This raises the following questions: What ideas can be considered “basic concepts” of society, and which measures were necessary in the Nazi concentration camps to express these ideas in a way appropriate to the situation?

I suggest that the “basic concepts” of society must include those ideas that:

•  first, pertain to the characteristics considered typical of individual members of a society or of social groups and their relations with one another;

•  and, second, were so important to the prisoners, even in the extremely restricted and oppressive conditions in the concentration camps, that former inmates continually addressed them in various ways in their accounts of their imprisonment.

If these concepts were inessential trivialities, they would have lost their significance under the enormous pressure of the situation and given way in the prisoners’ memoirs to other subjects which were more important in this context.

With regard to the subject of the work at hand, we must look for the distinctions made by the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps – distinctions made not solely on account of the particular situation in these camps, but because they represented the last thread of continuity with the inmates’ former lives.

I am most interested in the hidden social practices of the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps which sometimes made it possible for them to preserve their human dignity by striving to realize certain aspects of their social identity. On the basis of autobiographical material and memoirs as well as academic literature, I will explore the conditions and opportunities for such social situations in the camps and their significance to the prisoners. I intend to look at both the concepts that served as templates for social identity and the means employed to manifest and maintain this social identity in the camps. My theory is that the “basic concepts” of society are hidden behind these notions of social identity, and that the means of putting these concepts into practice reveal something about the special “rules of behavior” in the camps.

How could concentration camp prisoners create a sense of individuality and social position, and what role did their bodies and minds play – despite their physical and psychological destruction? What value was placed in the social structural characteristics of class and gender – characteristics considered to be fundamental in sociological theory – and how did other criteria such as “ethnic” affiliation influence the prisoners’ interactions with one another?

Human sociality appears to be a trait extinguished only in death and one which is a driving force in life, even under the most adverse conditions. Bourdieu refers to this type of social urge as “social libido.”6 Following Bourdieu’s arguments, my study reveals that even in the concentration camps, people were driven by “socially constituted interests which only exist in relation to a social space in which certain things are important and others don’t matter and for socialized agents who are constituted in such a way as to make distinctions corresponding to the objective differences in that space” (Bourdieu 1998: 79; emphasis added). In connection with this, I view the concentration camps as outposts of the social space in which the prisoners must also be considered agents who – though their scope for action was extremely restricted – continued to make socially relevant distinctions that were important to them. But how is this “social libido,” this “impulse” toward the social, expressed in a realm in which all connection to the outside world and to your own individual, social past appears to have been cut off? And what remains of the various types of social differentiation when you are as fundamentally restricted in your personhood as the concentration camp prisoners were?

A historical overview is needed in order for these questions to be addressed. Paul Neurath’s thesis that the “basic concepts” of society were still effective in the concentration camps necessitates that we examine the society of the “Third Reich,” as it was this society that made possible in the first place the establishment of camps for interring or annihilating its opponents and anyone else considered “useless.” This fact alone reveals that within this society there were apparently antagonistic forces at work that must be described. In the following chapter (chapter 2), I turn my attention first to the origins of the concentration camps in order to set the stage, so to speak, for the aspects of interest to us here. I will look at the historical and social conditions at the time as well as the camps’ organizational structure and staff.

Following this historical introduction to the topic, part II introduces the basic methodological and theoretical sociological considerations that lay the groundwork for examining the empirical evidence presented in part III. This detailed sociological reflection is necessary because the general scholarly consensus – namely, that concentration camp prisoners did not constitute a society – demands that we give careful consideration to the social differentiation criteria used by social agents to describe different social positions. In order to take a new approach to the well-trodden path of concentration camp research, we first need to determine the key differentiation criteria in modern European societies in the twentieth century. Only then can we see whether the empirical materials provide sufficient evidence that the camp prisoners can actually be viewed as social agents because, independent of any coercion arising from their situation, they made social distinctions of their own accord which correspond to the fundamental differentiation principles of Western societies.

The grim reality of the concentration camps was so unprecedented that it is tempting to view them as utterly beyond comparison in every respect. But the singularity of the crime must not blind us to the fact that it was committed by people against other people. If we want to investigate what people do in such a situation to defend their human dignity, we must not ignore what the concept of human dignity actually means and how deeply engrained it is in human thought and action. At the same time, there is no denying that there were opposing tendencies in Nazi society anchored in a “völkisch” (populist, racialist, nationalist) ideology that rejected the value of individuality and that also influenced how people behaved during this period. The aspect of human dignity, along with the question of the potency of the social structural characteristics of class and gender as well as other differentiation criteria used by the prisoners, must be examined closely so that in the following empirical section (part III) we can see whether these differentiation characteristics are accorded significance and what importance they have in the accounts of Holocaust survivors.

This fairly extended introduction to my topic, which appears under the heading of “Sociological Avenues of Inquiry,” must not be construed to mean that I am taking an intellectual-historical approach to these issues. Instead, I must explore the “basic concepts” of society and humanity so that, in the empirical section of this work, I can show that these ideas could only remain effective in the Nazi concentration camps because they existed as convictions in the minds of real, physical human beings. We must reconstruct the “basic concepts” so that we can sociologically analyze their power to shape human behavior, as this work aims to do.

While the first avenue of approach to my topic serves to develop a theoretical argument that can illuminate the various facets of my questions relating to a prisoner society, the second avenue of approach focuses solely on the empirical material. With the help of autobiographical accounts and literature of memory, I will reconstruct both the diverse micro-social levels of camp life and the key elements of the social structure of the prisoner society. My analysis, which is influenced heavily by Bourdieu’s sociological theories, will reveal the extent to which individual perspectives depend on one’s position in the social space and how deeply the symbiosis of body and mind is embedded in human social behavior. The empirical material shows that there was a great deal of social differentiation in the Nazi concentration camps. However, it is also apparent that the fundamental distinguishing characteristics of social identity – regardless of how they are actually materialized based on one’s social position – can be boiled down to a few equally fundamental aspects, some of the most important of which are gender, class, and the belief in “ethnic” affiliation.

In the final section (part IV), I review the concepts and means used to constitute a social identity – and thus human dignity – in the Nazi concentration camps on the basis of the theoretical and empirical material. The “basic concepts” of society that have been identified and the special “rules of behavior” in the concentration camps will be examined in light of the questions formulated earlier, and I will consider the extent to which looking through the “window” of the Holocaust can enable us to draw conclusions about the social reach of these “basic concepts.”

2

The “Third Reich” and the Nazi Concentration Camps

If one asks how Hitler was possible, one cannot help concluding that the spread of socially sanctioned models of violence and of social inequality are among the prerequisites of his advent.

Norbert Elias (1996: 19)

To lay the groundwork for a theoretically supported view of the social world of the Nazi concentration camps, we first need to examine the social reality of the time. To this end, I will present a historical-sociological overview of the situation – one which strives to depict not the full historical picture but rather an outline of the social dimensions and proportions of this National Socialist experiment.1 I follow Zygmunt Bauman’s argument that

the Holocaust […] should be looked upon as, so to speak, a sociological “laboratory”. The Holocaust has exposed and examined such attributes of our society as are not revealed, and hence are not empirically accessible, in “non-laboratory” conditions. […] I propose to treat the Holocaust as a rare, yet significant and reliable, test of the hidden possibilities of modern society. (Bauman 1989: 12; emphasis in original)

To use Bauman’s terms, we first need to describe the historical “laboratory” so that we can observe the “experiment” more closely and analyze what happens when people are subjected to such horrific trials.

To this end, I will present the historical, social, and legal background to the establishment of the concentration camp system (2.1) and discuss what it meant to the society of the “Third Reich” (2.2). I will supplement this sociological sketch with a description of the organizational structure of the concentration camps (2.3), and I will also take a closer look at the SS personnel who worked in the camps (2.4).

This historical, organizational, and social overview should reveal the constraints and automatisms to which both the normal population and those persecuted by the Nazi regime were subjected. It will also show how the persecution and surveillance strategies used against opponents of the regime and other victims of persecution were accepted by society. Furthermore, it will reveal the weaknesses in the system that, as will be seen later, made it possible for the prisoners to defend certain “territories of the self” (Suderland 2004) and thus their own humanity.

In depicting this situation, I will focus not only on ruptures and radicalization but also on the continuities that made such radicalization possible in the first place and that therefore have a bearing on the sociological questions to be explored here. These continuities not only constituted the conditions for the existence of the Nazi concentration camps, they were also the foundation of the common threads running through the hidden social world of the concentration camp prisoners – common threads that could not be eliminated despite the best efforts of the SS and that are the particular focus of this work.