THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS
absolute faith in its triumph remained intact. We never believed in the final
disaster of humanity. For collectively it is the highest, strongest elCpre:;sion of
the vital gesture in the history of the universe." It is not surprising that this
"vital gesture" should have appealed to Georges Bataille with his theory of
"extreme experience"-yet it is somehow surprising that the proponents of
extremity and meaninglessness should not have changed their mind in the face
of a reality that surpassed all their dreams. Bataille
(Critique,
October 1947)
writes: "One of Rousset's most unexpected reactions is his exultation, almost
to the point of euphoria, before the idea of participating in an experience that
made no sense. Nothing could be more virile, more
healthy."
The translation is
quoted from
Instead
(No. 1, 1948); it would seem to be no accident that this
pseudo-profound reflection was the first break in the silence that the intellec–
tuals have maintained on this whole matter.
2. Kogon has the following to say of working conditions in the Nazi camps,
which presumably were better organized from this point of view than those of
the Soviet Union: "A large part of the work exacted in the concentration camps
was useless; either it was superfluous or
it
was so miserably planned that it had
to be done over two or three times. Buildings often had to be begun several
times because the foundations kept caving in" (p. 58). As for Russian condi–
tions, even Dallin
(Forced Labor in Soviet Russia,
p . 105) who has built his
whole book on the thesis that the purpose of the Russian camps was to provide
cheap labor, is forced to admit: "Actually, the efficiency of forced labor, despite
incentives and compulsion, was and is on an extremely low level. The average
efficiency of a slave laborer has certainly been below 50 per cent of that of a
free Russian worker, whose productivity in turn has never been high."
3. "Gestapo and SS have always attached great importance to mixing the
categories of inmates in the camps. In no camp have the inmates belonged
exclusively to one category" (Kogon, p. 19). In Russia it has also been cus–
tomary from the first to mix political prisoners and criminals. During the first
ten years of Soviet power, the leftist political groups enjoyed certain privileges
as compared with counter-revolutionaries and criminals. But "after the end of
the twenties, the politicals were even officially treated as inferior to the common
criminals" (Dallin, 177 ff).
4. This is evident in Russia as well as in Germany. In Russia, the concen–
tration camps, which were originally intended for enemies of the regime, began
to swell enormously after 1930, i.e., at a time when not only all armed resistance
had been quelled, but when all opposition to Stalin within the Party had been
liquidated. In the first years there were in Germany at most ten camps with a
total of no more than ten thousand inmates. All effective resistance against the
Nazis ceased by the end of 1936. But at the outbreak of the war there were
more than a hundred concentration camps, which after 1940 seem to have
maintained an average population of one million.
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