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hands of the Vichy authorities. The interned Communist deputies were
released immediately, even (if my memory is correct) before the as–
sassination of Darlan: Mr. Bogomolov had his entries at the Hotel Saint–
Georges. But for all the othhs, it was a long, long wait, in desert hell–
holes which, innocent as we were, seemed to us as terrible as man could
devise.
Talking to these people as they emerged from the camps, I heard
for the first time the names of Portuguese prisons, of Miranda in Spain,
Gurs, Fresnes, Draney, Vernet, and Les Milles in France; and for the
first time I fully realized. the existence-and the special importance–
of what Rousset calls the concentration-camp universe. Already, two
things were clear :
First, the camps were not a specifically German phenomenon. The
Nazis came prepared with an ideology of human abasement, a delib–
erate desire to foster sadistic behavior patterns in German men, and
a romantic exaltation in flouting the gods, transgressing traditional
moral law. Further, they were (especially after 1936) faced with prob–
lems of production which suggested that the camps which had been
conceived, as it were, as a pleasure and a luxury, as well as a means
of terrorizing the German population, could also become a great, na–
tionalized industry, a source of wealth and power for the German
state. (There is a book by Germaine Tillon which adds up the balance–
sheet of Ravensbruck and finds that it was an immensely profitable
enterprise.) The immediate result of this was a slight but general bet–
tering of conditions and, after 1940, the camps were organized by the
hundreds, with all the minute thoroughness, the maniacal attention to
detail, and the grotesque solemnity which characterize the planned ac–
tivities of a modem totalitarian state. Nevertheless, and before one had
access to such details, it was clear that the phenomenon of internment
combined with forced labor, i.e., the concentration camp, was an es–
sential function of modem (police) power, a normal mode of repression
and production, as well as a specifically twentieth-century form of the
Terror. As such, it existed in greater or lesser degree in every country of
Europe.
Secondly, the camps were societies; their inner organization tended
to make manifest, in terms of the most unprecedented violence, drama,
tragedy, even of humor, the tensions and the political-moral problems
of Society itself. The camps in the south of France where, during one
period at least, whole families were interned together, and the Displaced
Persons camps
in
postwar Germany, present this aspect most obviously;
but David Rousset's brilliant books on the German camps show that,
even in such hells as Dora and Matthausen, social groupings were
formed, the struggle for power took place between Poles and Germans,
for example, or between the politicals and the common-law prisoners.
