40% of the Holocaust’s victims were killed
face-to-face, shot into pits close to their homes in
eastern Europe. In just one instance, at the Babi
Yar ravine just outside the Ukrainian capital, Kiev,
more than 33,000 Jewish people were massacred
across two days in September 1941. Most of the rest
of the victims of the Holocaust died by asphyxiation
in the death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.
As such, the Holocaust was, for the most part,
separate from the SS’s regular concentration-camp
system. We can attribute the confusion that has
grown on this subject to the most famous of the
Nazi camps: Auschwitz. Rather than being a single
facility, it was actually three camps. Auschwitz I was
a concentration camp, originally intended to house political prisoners. Auschwitz
II-Birkenau was a death camp, primarily designed for killing people. Auschwitz III
(Monowitz) was a slave-labour sub-camp set up to staff a nearby factory. Monowitz
was also the administrative centre for a large number of other slave-labour sub-
camps, the names of which (such as Blechhammer, Janinagrube and Eintrachthütte)
have largely been forgotten.
Because Auschwitz was in existence almost until the end of the Second World
War, many months after the Operation Reinhard death camps (Belzec, Sobibor
and Treblinka) were closed down in 1943, and because tens of thousands of
inmates had passed through it and been transferred elsewhere, there were lots of
witnesses from across the whole of Europe. And, even though it had been largely
evacuated by the time the Red Army liberated it in January 1945, the huge camp
and some 7,650 of its inmates who had been left behind were still there to be seen.
The point at which the Holocaust and the concentration-camp system really
converged was at the very end of the Second World War. In January 1945, there
were 714,000 recorded inmates of the SS concentration-camp system, a figure that
doesn’t include every camp in Germany (and excludes forced labourers working in
factories across the Third Reich). About a third of these died on the so-called ‘death
marches’, when evacuees from camps in the east – many of them Jews – were
forcibly marched to others still in existence in Germany and Austria to avoid them
being captured alive by the Red Army. Such people were made to travel huge
distances in the middle of winter, with minimal food or shelter. If they couldn’t
keep up, they were shot or left to die on the roadside. This explains why there was a
massive overcrowding of desperately ill people in places such as Belsen in March
and April 1945. Because of the disastrous conditions in those camps, they began
functioning as death camps, even though they hadn’t been set up for that purpose.Those are the main causes of the present-day confusion between the Nazi policy
of extermination of the Jews and their use of a system of concentration camps.
It’s a confusion that only really started about 20 years after the end of the Second
World War. Before that point, western Europeans didn’t think only of Jews when
they talked about concentration camps, but also of political resistors, or other
groups of deportees such as forced labourers. A s people became increasingly aware
of the Nazi murder of the Jews, confusion also, ironically, grew about that policy
of extermination and its implementation. And, as the Holocaust has turned into BRIDGEMANThe entrance to
the Nazi Auschwitz I
camp. The infamous
Auschwitz complex
is at the heart of
much present-day
confusion about
what constitutes a
concentration camp,
argues Dan Stone