The Camps from the SS perspective

[Dan]

Thorfinn said that the camps were better than generally believed.

Well, here in the USA the view that the average person has of the camps is much worse than what happened. I'm not sure how anyone could deny this.

This isn't to say that the camps were good, but at least here, our views are shaped more by Hollyweird than by historical fact.

[Roberto]

Thorfinn said that the camps were better than generally believed.

Well, here in the USA the view that the average person has of the camps is much worse than what happened. I'm not sure how anyone could deny this.

This isn't to say that the camps were good, but at least here, our views are shaped more by Hollyweird than by historical fact.

Hi Dan,

I suggest an interesting exercise, if you have the time:

Take a look at the standard features of one of those not-so-bad places:

http://www.mauthausen-memorial.gv.at/en ... ichte.html

and then tell us which of them have been portrayed in an exaggerated manner in a Hollywood film you have seen.

Cheers,

Roberto

[Benoit Douville]

Dan,

I also suggest you to visit Auschwitz...

Regards

[Scott Smith]

Dan,

I also suggest you to visit Auschwitz...

To see what exactly, barracks and a pile of shoes, perhaps? Dan didn't say that the concentration camps didn't exist. And he didn't say that they weren't hellholes. However, it is a bit simplistic to generalize about each person's experience or use Allied footage from the chaos of the liberation to draw mighty conclusions.

[witness]

However, it is a bit simplistic to generalize about each person's experience or use Allied footage from the chaos of the liberation to draw mighty conclusions.

So what are your conclusions Scott ?
Oh ..Let me guess..
Something approximating this one ?

For inmates, it was better than being in a modern day strict prison.

Am I mistaken ? I hope I am.

[Davey Boy]

Thorfinn said that the camps were better than generally believed.

Well, here in the USA the view that the average person has of the camps is much worse than what happened. I'm not sure how anyone could deny this.

This isn't to say that the camps were good, but at least here, our views are shaped more by Hollyweird than by historical fact.

Dan,

He didn't just say that. He said a lot more, such as: "For inmates, it was better than being in a modern day strict prison."

LOL

Yeah, in a few third world countries maybe yes.

[Birgitte Heuschkel]

Bill..a very good question..we don't enough about the war-time camp guard units....we do know that the guard units were not permitted by regulation to enter the protective custody camp..their contact with the prisoners was limited to guarding outside labor details (in these duties, the kapos and detail leaders were responsible for the discipline and "performance" of a detail, not the guards) or hunting down escapees..several major exceptions: at KL Auschwitz-Birkenau, guard unit details were used to secure the railhead landing platforms during extermination operations. Also, many murders were committed by individual guard personnel on the "death march" evacuations which took place in the last months of the war. At KL Mauthausen, guard personnel were responsible for many of the arbitrary quarry shootings when inmates would be driven over the guard line by sadistic kapos and SS detail leaders. Generally speaking, the guard units represented an amorphous "outer circle of hell" in the camp system. Most of the individual SS crimes you read about were committed by camp administrative personnel, particularly Block and Detail leaders, Rapportfuhrers, and Schutzhaftlagerfuhrers. These individuals had life and death authority over the camp inmates' day-to-day existence. Many, perhaps most, camp guards could in fair conscience say they never committed any crimes against inmates, but they were all complicit in the system of oppression.

Tom, you raise some very good points there. It makes a lot more sense to me than the idea of every SS guard being a frothing sadist or an angel of innocence abused by an evil system. What you write pretty much suggests that the individual guard may have been able to lull himself into a belief that he himself was 'just doing his job' while he was obviously still a supportive instrument of the overall opression. The individual may not have participated in sadistic games or treatment, but he was still a tool of the camp system.

I'd also like to raise the point that not every camp was an extermination camp. I am quite confident that treatment would vary a good deal depending on where you were and in which camp facility. Is this a production facility? Shooting the labor force isn't the best move, then, because you just have to train new people. Is it an extermination camp? Then who gives a damn whether a few men 'ship out early'?

[Rick-rs]

Please come on people,don't get dragged in in this discussion,everybody knows there where modelcamps for the Red Cross etc.

The biggest nightmare of the 20th century and you try to tone it down a little by saying the inmates had it better than now in a average prison?

Scott,to see a pile of shoes??
Are you crazy?Have you ever seen this pile?
I did and it's sickening,I have spoken many survivors and you friend haven't got a clue,I wonder do you have a brain at all?
If your family was dragged down across Europe in a cattlecar,taken everything away that they owned,including their hair and then turned them into 3 bars of soap,you still feel the same way?

About the guards,this is how it went,5 days on 2 days off,no leave,and enough booze,for your enjoyment there where just outside off the camps casino's(whorehouses)and kino's,if you couldn't hack it anymore you got send to the front,but only to"trusted"divisions where they made sure that you wouldn't survive the first week.
The higher echolons of the SS where allready working on plans that if they pulled of killing every not-worthy in Europe the guards would be next so they won't leave frustated drunks alive,because in general the most guards turned into just that.

Cheers Rick

[Roberto]

If your family was dragged down across Europe in a cattlecar,taken everything away that they owned,including their hair and then turned them into 3 bars of soap,you still feel the same way?

Well, the soap manufacture is a myth never confirmed by any evidence.
The most that can be confirmed are some isolated experiments at the Danzig Anatomical Institute. And it doesn't matter a damn thing what they made of the bodies. The people were murdered, period.

To the rest of your post I fully agree.

Welcome to the forum!

[Rick-rs]

Hi Roberto,

Thanks,and about the soap,I know,but it was just to make a point.

Cheers Rick

[Birgitte Heuschkel]

Rick, can I convince you -- as you seem to know these things not from textbooks but from talking to people who had the jobs -- to share more details on the camps? The testimonies given that way are worth hundreds of trial reports when it comes to diluting the notion of the camps as a prisoners' paradise -- the raw impact of individually experienced stories is far higher than page after page of transcripts which are much easier dismissed as 'made up' as victors' propaganda.

[tomalbright]

Clarification regarding the KL guard units..they were a component Waffen SS reserve pool just like the the Waffen SS Training and Replacement units and various panzergrenadier and non-commissioned officer schools. After the horrendous losses incurred by W-SS units during the 1941-43 in Russia, whole companies of the SS-Totenkopfwachsturmbanne were transferred directly to the frontline units or through the "feeder" systems of the W-SS Training and Replacement battalions. At KL Auschwitz we know that up to 3000 men were transferred out to the W-SS during this period. Later in the war, as the reserve pool really became depleted, there were less transfers out and more transfers in; convalescent W-SS troops and wholesale Wehrmacht transfers to the SS predominantly. The KL guard units, by 1944-45, were the dregs of the SS manpower system. The camp administration, on the other hand, seemed to remain relatively stable until the various camps closed. These were the "specialists" in terror, the core group being holdovers from the pre-war camp system augmented by A-SS reservists called up in the mobilizations of 1939-40.

[Rick-rs]

Hi Birgitte,

I can and I will,but what is the use?
I hope you can relate to this but I'm the grandson of a wiking veteran and I have spend a large part of my life trying to understand how it is possible that normal intelligent people are driven to these acts,and everytime I answer a question I get 5 more in return,and to make things worse,there are people that either question the way the prisoners are treated ore worse,deny there ever was a holocaust.

Let me bore you with one example,I was stationed in Libanon as a soldier,
and I decided to take my leave in Israel where I had the chance to speak with survivors,there was even a Lady who originated from Holland,my native country,and whe shared the same city as place of birth,so by knowing the roots where she came from she felt at ease and told me a few things about daily routines in a camp.
She had seen a few camps,in Holland and from there to Terezin where she met another Dutch girl who was pregnant by a polish prisoner,the Germans did not like this at all and deceided to make an example,they tied her to a pole on the appellplatz and cut out the baby while everybody was forced to watch,this kind of horror was daily routine and Theresienstadt was not even a deathcamp but a durchganglager,a camp ment as gatheringcamp to keep it simple.

A Dutch Girl in Mauthausen,only 15 years old,just arrived and didn't know the daily routine,so she walked the wrong way and this was explained as trying to escape,they crucifixed her with barbwire and put a sign around her neck,"Es gibt einen weg zur freiheit"she took three days to die,and if I am not mistaken as I saw earlier in this thread,the SS guards who are suppoosed only to guard the outer camp limits where there to make sure those 3 days lasted a century.

Denying those things ever happened ore say it wasn't that bad makes me sick,if you had the chance to talk to those people who survived you never question the horror and suffering they went through,and they are the lucky ones,they survived.

As far as the SS guards,no doubt their are books that state they where rotated back to normal militairy duties,but they weren't,everybody who could think straight could imagin you can never set those animals free in the normal world,they where a timebomb,if only by the knowledge they had,in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse they where allready making plans for after the war,no place there for these kind of people....

This way of thinking was not new either,as far back as the start of the Polish Campaign,the original KG that invaded the radiostation and started the war,all of them were dead in 3 months,so why let campguards walk?

Cheers Rick

[Davey Boy]

This way of thinking was not new either,as far back as the start of the Polish Campaign,the original KG that invaded the radiostation and started the war,all of them were dead in 3 months,so why let campguards walk?

Rick,

Can you explain this paragraph?

[tomalbright]

Camps did vary in their regimens, depending on their classification (1-III) and the policies set down by the Kommandant's office and WVHA. We know that Mauthausen. Majdanek and Auschwitz were the nexus of hell for most prisoners, particularly Jewish and Slavic. Only slightly less hellish were Gross-Rosen, Neuengamme and Flossenberg; the nature of the work details at these camps lent themselves to the term "extermination through work" for the majority of the prisoner population. Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen were the most stratified as far as conditions were concerned, with veteran German criminal and political prisoners and some Western European inmates carving out "tolerable" existences through their inmate networks while the rank-and-file from the East toiled in misery on their pathway to doom in an ever changing turnover of the workforce through "attrition". The prisoner "elites" of these camps were larger and more influential than at Mauthausen, et al. This explains the incongruity of the photos taken at the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald; large groups of relatively well-fed prisoners welcoming the GIs juxtaposed with barracks full of emaciated and dying inmates, many of whom were recent transfers from camps to the east and survivors of death transports. The attempt by the WVHA to exploit inmate labor during the later war years also mitigated the worst excesses of the camp "old guard" somewhat. At Dachau for example, the relatively "humane" Martin Weiss reformed the corrupt and harsh regime of Alex Piorkowski; at Buchenwald, Hermann Pister's bureaucratic rule was an improvement over Karl Koch's sadistic and arbitrary tenure. Also, conditions at satellite camps were markedly worse than at the base camps; any prisoner with connections would avoid a transfer to these hellholes.