ALEXANDER KIMEL - HOLOCAUST UNDERSTANDING & PREVENTION

In camps with a majority of Jews, like Auschwitz area, an active or passive defense was particularly difficult. Here the prisoners were, of most part, devoid of any kind of organizational or military experience. They came from every country in Europe, spoke different languages and, as a result, could not understand one another. They were more starved, weaker and more exhausted than the others because their living conditions were harsher and because they often had a long history hunger, persecution and humiliation in the ghettos. The final consequences of this were that the length of their stays in the camp were tragically brief. They were, in short, a fluctuating population, continually decimated by death and renewed by the never-ending arrivals of new convoys. It is understandable that the seed of revolt did not take root in a human fabric that was in such a state of deterioration and so unstable.

In the Concentration Camps the Germans used also the proven method of pyramidal power structure: Terror - Obedience - Privileges. The Germans set-up an elaborate self-governing body, designed to make the job easier for the SS. The Germans appointed heads of the camp (Camp alteste), Head of barracks responsible for maintaining order in the barracks, Kapos responsible for the work squads. In return for blind obedience the Germans awarded the "functionaries with privileges: better food, relative security from the "selections to the gas chambers, and right to mistreat and abuse their fellow prisoners.

Primo Levy an Auschwitz survivor notes:

"We soon learned that the quest of the Lager are divided into three categories: the criminals, the political and the Jews. All are clothed in stripes, all are Haftlinge (prisoners), but the criminals wear a green triangle next to the number sewn on the jacket; the political, wear a red triangle; and the Jews, who form the large majority, wear the Jewish Star, red and yellow. SS men exist but are few and outside the camp, are seen relatively infrequently. Our effective masters in practice are the green triangles, who have a free hand over us, as well as those of the other two categories who are ready to help them - and they are not very few."

The "prominent" is the name for the camp officials, from the Haftling Director to the Kapo, the cooks, the nurses, the night- guards, even to the hut-sweepers and to the Scheismeister and Bademeisters (superintendents of the latrines and showers). We are more particularly interested in the Jewish prominents, because while the others are automatically invested with offices as they enter the camp in virtue of their natural supremacy, the Jews have to plot and struggle hard to gain them. They are the typical product of the structure of the German Lager (Camp): if one offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in state of slavery, exacting in exchange the betrayal of natural solidarity with their comrades, there will certainly be someone who will accept. He will be withdrawn from the common law and will become untouchable; the more power that he is given , the more he will be consequently hateful and hated. When he is given command of a group of unfortunates, with he right of life or death over them, he be cruel and tyrannical, because he will understand that if he is not sufficiently so, someone else, judged more suitable will take over his post. Moreover, his capacity for hatred, unfulfilled in the direction of the oppressor, will double back, beyond all reason, on the oppressed; and he will only be satisfied when ha has unloaded onto his underlings the injury received from above.

kimel@systec.com