Holocaust Researchers Make Horrifying Discovery

[Alexander's Horse]

Lebensraum. Look at the size of the conquered territories in eastern Europe. Given the German penchant for logistics, they probably figured it was easier to set up lots of smallish camps near forced labor sites, than large camps and transport workers back and forth. Lots of mining, timbering and other resource gathering operations, as opposed to the more (in)famous industrial camps.

It was more a case of the haphazard and unplanned growth of the camp system as the nazis experimented with the best way to confine and kill people as rapidly as possible while also exploiting their economic potential. This tension was always present. The Nazi system was quite chaotic and inefficient we now know. Policy also kept evolving, becoming more extreme as the war turned against Germany. Some work camps became death camps.

Also the camp system encompassed categories of slave workers - Russian POWs, political prisoners, intellectuals, clergy, Slavs, anyone the Nazis classified as untermensch or dangerous elements; who died in droves and were essentially worked to death but these people were not designated as marked for extermination as such. The movie Schindler's List brings these contradictions out very well, even amongst Jews, who were all marked to die after the Wannsee conference in early 1942.

Primo Levi, a camp survivor, also wrote extensively about this. He was a Jew but survived because he was a chemist and worked at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. This was the largest death camp but also an industrial complex with many satellite camps. There were endless distinctions between prisoners, which could mean life or death. Allied POWs worked there, including some Australians. Many did not know mass killing was going on there, some who did find out were not initially believed because of the widespread impression after the war that everyone who went to Auschwitz was killed - so they could not have been there. One Australian POW saw the gas chambers and ovens and lived to tell about it. I highly recommend Levi's books.