Academic literature on the topic 'Concentration camp inmates as guards'

This article investigates music in the concentration camps before the second world war. For the camp authorities, ordering prisoners to sing songs or play in orchestras was an instrument of domination. But for the prisoners, music could also be an expression of solidarity and survival: inmates could retain a degree of their own agency in the pre-war camps, despite the often unbearable living conditions and harsh treatment by guards. The present article emphasizes this ambiguity of music in the early camps. It illustrates the emergence of musical traditions in the pre-war camps which came to have a significant impact on everyday life in the camps. It helps to overcome the view that concentration camp prisoners were simply passive victims.

В статье на основе рассекреченных документов архива Управления Федеральной службы безопасности Российской Федерации по Республике Карелия и Национального архива Республики Карелия представлена картина лагерного быта заключенных Киндасовского концентрационного лагеря тюремного типа. Лагерь находился на территории Пряжинского района Карело-Финской ССР в годы Великой Отечественной войны и предназначался для «неблагонадежных» советских граждан. На основании протоколов допросов и воспоминаний узников удалось установить распорядок дня, условия труда и отдыха, рацион питания, отношение руководства и лагерной охраны к заключенным. Киндасовский лагерь отличался особенно жестоким режимом. Лагерная администрация имела всеобъемлющую власть и не боялась наказания за совершенные преступления против личности. На примере лагеря в Киндасово в статье показаны проявления преступной политики администрации Военного Управления Восточной Карелии на территории оккупированных районов КФССР. Based on declassified sources of the archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation for the Republic of Karelia and the National Archive of the Republic of Karelia, the article presents a picture of the camp inmates of the Kindasovskoye prison-type concentration camp. The camp was located on the territory of the Pryazhinsky district of the KFSSR during the Great Patriotic War and was intended for «unreliable» Soviet citizens. Based on the protocols of interrogations and memoirs of prisoners, it was possible to establish the daily routine, working and rest conditions, diet, attitude of the leadership and camp guards towards prisoners. Kindasovskogo camp was distinguished by a particularly cruel regime. The camp administration had allencompassing power and was not afraid of punishment for committed crimes against the person. The camp in Kindasovo is the example for the article to show the manifestations of the criminal policy of the administration of the Military Directorate of Eastern Karelia in the territory of the occupied regions of the KFSSR.

The camp in Pravieniškės was located within the administrative boundaries of Pravieniškės, located about 25 km from Kaunas. It was established during the period of the Republic of Lithuania, as a correctional facility. In August 1941 the Germans established the Pravieniškės Transitional Labour Camp (Zwangsarbeitslager Provenischken) there, which from 1943 was a branch of the Kaunas Concentration Camp (KL Kaunas) and continued to serve as a labour camp. Detainees were brought to this camp from the prisons of the General Commissariat of Lithuania, i.e. the Lukiszki Prison in Vilnius, the Kaunas Prison and Ponevezh (Panevėžys). People of various nationalities were held in Pravieniškės (Prawieniszki): Lithuanians (60%), Poles, Russians, Roma and Jews (mainly from the Kaunas ghetto). About 1,000 prisoners could be held in this camp at a time. People were sent here for a variety of offences: political prisoners, violators of forced labour orders, Soviet prisoners of war with their families, and those convicted of common crimes. Also incarcerated in Pravieniškės by administrative decision were deserters from the German army convicted of evading military service in the German army. People of Polish nationality placed in Pravieniškės were mainly accused of belonging to the resistance movement, communist activity, listening to the radio, possession of weapons, sabotage, escape from forced labour and communist activity. Guards executed prisoners on the camp grounds and in nearby forests. About 280 Jews were shot there in August 1941, and another 253 Jews in September 1941. Also, many attempts to escape from the camp were punished by execution. As the Eastern Front approached the borders of the Reich, the process of obliterating the traces of the crimes committed began. Due to the relatively small number of those murdered, it was not necessary for the notorious Sonderkommando 1005 to arrive in the area. A few dozen men directed to burn the corpses of those murdered in the nearby forest were enough. Members of the Pravieniškės camp crew were tried after the war by various organs of the Soviet justice system: courts, tribunals and collegia. Also in Poland, at the Institute of National Remembrance in Gdansk, an investigation was conducted into the case. Beginning in mid-July 1944, people convicted by Soviet tribunals were incarcerated in the camp in Pravieniškės: former camp guards, as well as members of the Vilnius Home Army arrested after Operation ‘Ostra Brama’. The prisoners were again employed to work on the peat bog and in the camp greenhouse. Today, every Lithuanian associates the name of Pravieniškės with the prison. A penitentiary facility still operates on the site of the former camp with places for 2,500 inmates, including those sentenced to life imprisonment.

The article examines the everyday life of the staff of Koltuban filtration camp. It operated from early 1942 to autumn 1943 in the west of the Chkalov (Orenburg) region. Its task was to filter Soviet soldiers who returned from captivity or who had been in the occupied territory. The article describes the identity of the camp commanders, the sources of recruitment of ordinary employees, their number, educational levels and gender composition. In many respects, the camp staff were close to inmates: forced mobilization for service, harsh material conditions, the desire to go to the front. Strict discipline was maintained among minor staff members, but large-scale theft and embezzlement was regularly carried out mainly by middle-ranking management. Everyday contacts between the guards and inmates primarily centred around trade and barter. Cases of aggression and cruelty are not reflected in the documents, neither are close contacts between the staff and the inmates. This article pays special attention to the tensions among the camp administration due to the uncertain status of the filtration camps. The special department not only maintained its independence in filtration but also claimed to play the main role in the management of the entire camp. The prosecutor sought to go beyond the boundaries of his functions. The commissar wanted to solve all issues on an equal footing with the head of the camp and make changes to the regime for inmates, which would turn the filtration camp into a kind of reserve military unit.

To solve insurmountable manpower shortages in its concentration camp guard forces, the Nazi ss turned in early 1943 to an untapped, highly experienced and brutal source. Former Soviet prisoners of war recruited in 1941 and 1942 and trained at the Trawniki training camp in Poland, had effectuated the mass murder of over one million Jews in the three Operation “Reinhard” killing centers in about 9 months. By early 1943, however, some of those guards had come to doubt the wisdom of their collaboration with the Nazis, and deserted to the partisans. ss authorities decided to solve manning shortages in concentration camps by transferring 150 Trawniki guards to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in March 1943. By failing to accommodate the foreign auxiliaries’ discontent, Auschwitz’s commandant faced his own mass desertion three months later. Berlin’s response to events at Auschwitz fundamentally reconfigured the relationship between the ss and its eastern guards in the Reich’s entire concentration camp system. About 1,500 Trawniki-trained guards eventually entered the camp system and served loyally until the Reich’s end. In coming to know their Slavic clients, the “new Soviet men,” the Nazis abandoned collaboration and turned to hierarchical discipline and integration with their own German guards.

Stories abound about the medical abuses that have come to define medicine and the “pseudo”-neurosciences in the Third Reich. Well known are the Nazi program of euthanasia and the neuroscientific publications that arose from it. Nevertheless, during this widespread perversion of medical practice and science, true medical heroics persisted, even in the concentration camps. In December 1942, inmates of Camp Vapniarka began experiencing painful lower extremity muscle cramps, spastic paraparesis, and urinary incontinence. In order to reduce the cost of feeding the 1200, mostly Jewish, inmates of Camp Vapniarka and surreptitiously hasten their deaths, the Nazi-affiliated Romanian officers of the camp had begun feeding them a diet high in Lathyrus sativus. L. sativus is the neurotoxin implicated in neurolathyrism, a degenerative disease of the upper motor neurons. Dr. Arthur Kessler, one of the camp's prisoners, eventually identified the source of the epidemic. Armed with this knowledge, the inmates collectively organized to halt its spread.

My goal is to explore how the members of the liberated Hungarian inmates lived in "half freedom" in German DP camp Hillersleben, and Swedish sanatoria camps right after the liberation of the concentration camps and from May to August 1945 until they first managed to leave their temporary camp dwellings. My narrative is based mostly on ego-documents of Hungarian survivors of Bergen-Belsen, which is part of a research project on the Hungarian inmates of Belsen and their liberation and return.

The article focuses on death zones in concentration camps and those that in themselves were purely death camps. In 1944–1945, in the concentration camp system, these places were spaces of dying, where emaciated and sick prisoners were locked away, thus condemning them to death. Although mass murders were also committed in these places, the majority of the inmates died due to the inaction of camp personnel, who out of their passivity made yet another way of killing prisoners deemed “useless”. The first section of the paper presents the findings of historians, and strives to show on their basis when and why death camps and death zones appeared, how they functioned, and where they were located. In the second part the focus is on a specific death zone: the Little Camp at Buchenwald. This fragment of the article gives the floor above all to former prisoners of this place, as well as inmates of the main camp at Buchenwald who were able to observe from behind the barbed wire the fate of those consigned to the Little Camp.

In 1939-1945, the Nazi invaders organized over 1300 prisons and jails in the occupied territory of Poland. The institutions were instrumental to the policy of extermination the Polish nation which was among the aims of the invasion. Prisons and jails were places where Polish people were isolated, tortured and slaughtered. Inmates were transported to places of mass execution and to concentration camps; during evacuation in January l945, route columns were sent on ,,death marches”. The prisons where such genocidal practices were particularly intense are still present in Polish historical consciousness as places of torture and martyrdom. A symbol of this kind is the Pawiak prison in Warsaw where the Nazi confined over 100 thousand persons; 37 thousand were put before a firing squad, slaughtered, or tortured to death, and 60 thousand were sent to concentration camps. The Pawiak prison was also the site of the inmates' incessant struggle for freedom, survival, and preservation of dignity. In their struggle, the prisoners were assisted in a variety of ways by many Polish members of the staff compulsorily employed by the Nazi out of necessity especially during the first months of occupation. The assistance was both material and spiritual. The Staff would hand over to inmates articles such as food, drugs, cigarettes etc., and to confined priests - the Host. The Polish prison staff smuggled messages, contacted the prisoners' families, disclosed informers, warned against the Gestapo and helped to escape. Their acts resulted from patriotic, humanitarian and religious values. Attitudes of a considerable proportion of Polish prison staff who sabotaged the rulings of Nazi administration helped to accomplish intelligence operations started in prisons as early as the autumn of 1939 by underground independance organizations. In December 1939, Warsaw District Headquarters of Siuïba Zwycikstwu Polski [Service to Poland’s Victory, SZP] recruited three prison guard officers who were ordered to organize intelligence divisions in each of the Warsaw prisons. In the Pawiak prison, the structure continued to operate till July 1944; it based on the work of Polish staff duty prisoners, and a group of outside liaisons. Participation of the prison staff in intelligence operations undertaken by independence organizations broadened the notion of prison conspiracy, adding to it a variety of actions directly related to struggle against the invaders. Symbols similar to the Pawiak prison were also other institutions in Nazi-occupied Poland and in Polish territories included in the Reich. On the local scale, the prisons were symbols of particular torment of their inmates and of underground involvement of the Polish staff. The actual possibility of forming a prison conspiracy in Nazi-occupied territories depended on many factors. This was related to differences in the functioning of prisons systems in different regions. Individual administrative districts in territories included into the Reich differed in this respect from the occupied regions and from the eastern borderland of Poland, Nazi-occupied since 1941. The basic factor that determined the nature and intensity of underground activities was the size of Polish staff and their individual motivation resulting from the system of values professed. In territories included into the Reich, the prison system subordinated to Ministry of Justice controlled 142 formerly Polish prison institutions. Their arrangement in individul administrative districts was as follows: Warta Land - 49, Gdansk and West Prussia - 28, Silesia - 12, East Prussia - 6, and Białystok - 4. Among those taken over by Nazi invaders, the largest in respect of inmate population were the prisons in Sieradz (capacity of 1,146), Rawicz (1,075), Wronki (1,016), Koronowo (562), Poznań (464), and Łódź(420). Some of the prisons were taken over together with their inmates and Polish prison staff who were ordered to work on. This corresponded with the order that all inhabitants of invaded territories return to work on pain of severe sanctions, the death penalty included. The order applied also to prison staff who stayed on in their original place of residence or returned from evacuation or POW camps. Among those returning to work were guards who on the day of evacuation had been given secret orders to stay on and to take a job under occupation (Cracow, Wronki). In some localities, during the first weeks of occupation, there was a shortage of candidates for prison guards among both the Polish population and the local German community. The invaders thus had to hire German-speaking Poles with some knowledge of prisons, as e.g. court ushers. In November 1939, the process started of Polish staff being removed from prisons, in Warta Land in particular, and replaced with German guards brought in from the Reich, local Germans, and Poles who had signed the German nationality list. In 1943, the front situation becoming worse, some of the German prison staff were mobilized. Vacancies were filled with forcefully employed former Polish guards. Thus according to the changing staff conditions, also the possibilities of clandestine assistance to inmates changed. The possibility of intelligence operations in prisons in territories included into the Reich depended also on the functioning of independence organizations. The extent of repressions suffered by Polish people in those territories made it impossible to develop regular underground activities in prisons. In some prisons in the Gdansk and West Prussia district where Polish staff were left on the job (Grudziądz, Koronowo, Starogard Gdański), the guards immediately started helping prisoners: they contacted the families and smuggled packages, letters and messages. Most important was assistance in organizing escapes, saving persons from transports to concentration camps, putting them in the infirmary, or finding them a job in the prison. The Koronowo prison had special conditions for development of underground activity: throughout the period of occupation, its Staff included 44 Poles, 39 of them among the guards. Most guards became involved in various forms of assistance to prisoners; they cooperated with an inmate self-defense group and with an underground group of Koronowo women who rendered material assistance to inmates and helped their families coming on permitted visits. They also helped to find shelter for escaped prisoners. The only Polish woman guard in the Fordon women’s prison was only employed in 1943. From the very start, she rendered material and moral assistance to political prisoners, and organized a local group who gathered food and drugs for the inmates. Most limited were the possibilities of assisting prisoners in the institutions of Warta Land. The conditions were favorable during the first months after the invasion only when the invaders were forced to employ Polish prison staff and the system of internal and external supervision and surveillance had not yet been introduced to the full. In this situation, Polish guards mainly assisted inmates materially and morally and served as liaisons between them and their families. For example, a guard in the Leszno prison smuggled farewell letters of hostages wainting for execution; another one in the Rawicz prison orsanized a contact station for prisoners’ families in his own apartment; and a guard in the Kościan prison help priests to say masses in secret. Later on when few Polish guards were still in service, they could only assist inmates on a limited scale and with extreme caution. But even in this situaion, they were still willing to help. During the first months after the invasion, a Polish clerk in the Kościan prison not only assisted the inmates but also documented Nazi crimes: among other things, he kept lists of the executed. In prisons of the Warta Land district involvement of Polish prison staff in underground intelligence was practically non-existent. This was due to a rapid replacement of Polish guards and to organizational difficulties encountered by the underground in that district. Favorable conditions could be found in the Wieluń prison which had a large group of pre-war Polish Staff throughout the period of Nazi occupation. Moreover, one of prison staff leaders, reserve oficer of the Polish Army, was sworn as agent of Sieradz and Wieluń Inspectorate of the underground Armed-Struggle Union - Home Army (ZWZ AK). In prisons taken over by the invaders in Silesia district, the Nazi administration created a climate of mistrust, suspicion and intimidation with respect to Polish staff temporarily left on the job. This limited and in some cases precluded the guards’ secret contacts with inmates and their families. A special role in prison conspiracy in Silesia was played by Emil Lipowczan, forcefully recruited to the police and delegated to work as guard in Gestapo remand prison in Mysłowice. Acting for patriotic, humanitarian and religious reasons, he rendered comprehensive material and spiritual assistance to prisoners. He reached their families and warned persons threatened with arrest. He was assisted in this work by his entire family. Starting from 1943, he worked for Home Army intelligence. Once the Nazi-Soviet war broke out in June 1943, the eastern territories of Poland - previously occupied by USSR – were taken over by Nazi administration. Extremely few Polish prison guards could actually be used by the new invaders as the staff had been pacified by NKVD in 1939-1941. For this reason, prisons of Białystok district were staffed with various persons; some of them were subsequently recruited by ZWZ AK intelligence. Many a time, ZWZ AK would also appoint its members to take a job in prisons and Gestapo remand prisons and to carry out information and intelligence tasks there while at the same time assisting detained AK soldiers. Such guards only rendered material and moral assistance to other prisoners with utmost caution as a side-activity which they pursued for humanitarian reasons. In Nazi-occupied Poland (Generalgouvernement), the conditions were entirely different and more favorable for prison conspiracy. Nearly all prisons, also those subordinated to security police (except the Montelupi prison in Cracow), had Polish staff throughout the occupation. Besides, operating in ihe neighborhood of individual institutions were numerous legal, semi-legal and illegal organizations assisting prisoners and their families. Through persons who stayed in touch with the inmates, SZP-ZWZ AK would penetrate prisons on regular basis. The prison staff (pre-war guards forcefully reassigned to the job) not only assisted the inmates but also became involved in intelligence work. Tasks of this kind were performed mainly by guards purposely sent to the prison by an independence organization. Prison conspiracy has a variety of organizational forms. In Tarnyw, there was an highly centralized prison section; Lublin, instead, had several active but independent small groups of guards and duty prisoners. In Cracow, Częstochowa (prison in Senacka Street), and in a few other smaller prisons, the structure was atomized and based on independent underground work of individual guards. The extent of assistance rendered to inmates and of intelligence tasks assigned often depended on the committal and personality of the head of AK prison section; this can be said e.g. of the prisons in Jasło, Pinczów and Rzeszów. Significant was also the contribution of intelligence officers who supervised the prisons sections e.g. in Biała Podlaska, Siedlce, Wiśnicz and Zamość. Added to Generalgouvernement in August 1941 was Galicia district. Polish guards were but a small group among the prison staff of that district; they were supervised by Germans, Ukrainians and other nationalities. In such conditions, the scope of assistance to inmates was extremely limited. Yet ZWZ AK intelligence officers would get in touch even with those few Polish guards and gain them over for cooperation. Prison conspiracy in Galicia and in the remaining eastern territories consisted first of all in individual guards’ committal and performance of tasks assigned by his superior intelligence officer. This form could be found in Lvov, Pińsk, and Równe. The Nazi prison administration mistrusted Polish staff who were submitted to everincreasing surveillance by the Germans and other nationalities, and also by few quislings among Polish guards and informers among the inmates. Yet neither persecution nor repression (arrests, executions, confinements to concentration camps) applied to Polish staff could reduce the extent of assistance to political prisoners or check intelligence work in prisons.

Thesis (Dr. phil.)--Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, 2000.
Vol. 3 is a catalog of 55 selected concentration camp inmate uniforms from concentration camp memorials, German museums, Bet loḥame ha-geṭaʼot, and Yad Vashem. Includes bibliographical references (p. 305-324). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Defence date: 14 December 2000
Examining Board: Andrea Graziosi (Università di Napoli Federico II) ; Alan S. Milward (IUE) ; Arfon Rees (IUE) ; Nicholas Werth (CNRS, Paris)
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017

Abstract The concentration camp system grew from the initial ‘wild’ camps established largely spontaneously to deal with political opponents on the local level to encompass a massive network of camps all across Europe, which combined the roles of ‘re-education’, persecution, and extermination with attempts to harness the labour of their inmates in the service of the National Socialist regime. By 1944—5 there were up to three-quarters of a million inmates in the concentration camps alone—not including those in the forced labour and extermination camps. Although, as Falk Pingel argues here, the economic aspect of the concentration camps grew in significance, their function remained overwhelmingly political.

Abstract The first large-scale arrests of Gypsies destined for the concentration camps took place in 1938 during Operation Work-Shy. Other individual Gypsies were sent to the camps during the war years for various offenses grouped under the name “asocial conduct.” Camp inmates were used for slave labor as well as for medical experiments. The total number of Gypsies incarcerated in the camps is not known. About 1,500–2,000 were arrested as asocials in 1938–1939, and around 3,500 were transferred to German concentration camps from Auschwitz. This means that at least 5,000 Gypsies were imprisoned for varying amounts of time in concentration camps other than Auschwitz.

‘The Third Reich’s world of camps’ examines the history of the Nazi camp system, comparing labour camps devised to build the ‘racial community’ with concentration camps set up to exclude political opponents and eventually to eradicate unwanted others—‘asocials’ and then Jews. The SS concentration camps at Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen, which were designed to brutalize the inmates and at which death was common, can be distinguished from the death camps at Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Exceptions were Majdanek and Auschwitz, which by 1942 combined the functions of concentration and death camps. The images and testimonies of the liberation of the Nazi camps have shaped our definition of concentration camps.

‘The Gulag’ examines the Stalinist system of camps and ‘special settlements’ that developed through different phases of deportation from 1929–30 through to the late 1950s, although the camp system prevailed until the end of the USSR. Many of these camps were remote, where workers were needed for large mining or factory operations. Throughout the Gulag, the phenomenon of ‘de-convoyed’ prisoners permitted interaction between inmates and those ‘outside the zone’ to a surprisingly large extent. Prisoners in the Gulag could survive for many years and there was a constant stream of prisoners being released. However, in terms of numbers, far more people suffered in the Gulag than in the Nazi camps.

Abstract This chapter describes the experiences of those who were sent on the so-called ‘death marches’ as the concentration camps under threat of being overrun by the Red Army were evacuated and their inmates sent west to camps still operating in Germany. As concentration camp inmates passed through villages and towns throughout Germany and Austria, the victims of Nazism appeared in daylight in just about every small place. The death marches constituted a ‘societal crime’. Here the examples widen the story from Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen to encompass the camp system in general. This allows us to capture something of the general scene in Germany at the end of the war as we follow some of the same routes trodden by the ITS fieldworkers as they set about to discover the details of the death marches. The chapter then examines the ‘liberation’, using the ITS archives. Irrespective of the circumstances, it quickly becomes clear that for most survivors, initial feelings of joy were almost immediately tempered by a realization of the devastation that had befallen their families and communities, and fear at what the future might hold.

typhus epidemic that broke out in the Giado concentration camp in Libya in December 1942 constituted the major cause of death among the hundreds of Jewish detainees. Seeking to prevent its spread, the camp guards shaved the heads of those who had lice in their hair. In interviews conducted between 2009 and 2017 with survivors of the camp who were children at that time, only the women mention the shaving of heads and their desperate attempt to evade this fate. This chapter relates the story of three women who, as children, were incarcerated in the camp. Their narratives, which move fluidly between their perceptions as children and their adult recollections, point to a gender-related phenomenon pertaining to the dread of being caught and subjected to a head-shaving, and the trauma associated with a girl’s being shorn of her hair.

Abstract This chapter uses the ITS documents to show how the Gross-Rosen and Auschwitz sub-camps functioned and the roles they played in the context of the German economy, the concentration camp system, and the Holocaust. Examining the sub-camps not only brings to light an under-appreciated aspect of the Nazi camp system, showing its significance for the German war economy and for our understanding of Nazi ideology; it also allows us, through the ITS documents, to follow the trajectories of individual persecutes through the camps. Looking at the Holocaust ‘from the bottom up’ means we can appreciate the extent to which some victims were moved around and the ways in which the Nazis’ desperate search for labour towards the end of the war facilitated some camp inmates’ survival.

The power of the words “forgive me” and the even greater power of forgiving sincerely, held by someone who has been wronged or suffered injustice, is not very often considered in literature and psychology. The motif of revenge is much more prevalent in art, and the theory of psychoanalysis, derived from clinical practice, pays much more attention to unhealthy psychological phenomena such as hatred than to positive emotions. Unexpectedly, given the scale of evil in the concentration camps, Đorđe Lebović speaks about forgiveness in nine stories published posthumously in the book Angels will not come down from heaven. One characteristic story is The wicked die vertically about a trial undertaken by a group of camp inmates against a Kapo. The common idea to try the criminal is the first thing they want to do as free men and they sentence him to death. The power of words, to expose evil and condemn it in the name of humanity, gives strength to physically weak camp inmates to forgive their tormentor. Instead of executing the sentence, they allow him to rest. Only the victim has the power of forgiveness, all who have done evil are deprived of it. From the position of a traumatized victim, the surviving camp inmates are faced with perpetrators deprived of former omnipotence but also of human virtues, primarily the ability to be good. Therefore, their forgiveness is a kind of revenge by which the victim is psychologically compensated, while dehumanized criminals devoid of speech are punished even before death.