Extermination/Incarceration

RUSH Red Sector A (Official Video)-2

On 27th February, 1933, someone set fire to the Reichstag. Several people were arrested including a leading, Georgi Dimitrov, general secretary of the Comintern, the international communist organization. Dimitrov was eventually acquitted but a young man from the Netherlands, Marianus van der Lubbe, was eventually executed for the crime. As a teenager Lubbe had been a communist and Hermann Goering used this information to claim that the Reichstag Fire was part of a KPD plot to overthrow the government.

Adolf Hitler gave orders that all leaders of the German Communist Party (KPD) should "be hanged that very night." Paul von Hindenburg vetoed this decision but did agree that Hitler should take "dictatorial powers". KPD candidates in the election were arrested and Goering announced that the Nazi Party planned "to exterminate" German communists. Thousands of members of the Social Democrat Party and KPD were arrested and sent to Germany's first concentration camp at Dachau, a village a few miles from Munich. The head of the Schutzstaffel (SS), Heinrich Himmler was placed in charge of the operation, whereas Theodor Eicke became commandant of the first camp and was staffed by members of the SS Death's Head units.

Originally called re-education centres the Schutzstaffel (SS) soon began describing them as concentration camps. They were called this because they were "concentrating" the enemy into a restricted area. Hitler argued that the camps were modeled on those used by the British during the Boer War. According to Andrew Mollo, the author of To The Death's Head: The Story of the SS (1982): "Theodor Eicke, a rough unstable character whose violent and unruly behaviour had already given Himmler many headaches. At last Himmler found an ideal backwater for his troublesome subordinate and sent him off to Dachau."

Theodor Eicke later recalled: "There were times when we has no coats, no boots, no socks. Without so much as a murmur, our men wore their own clothes on duty. We were generally regarded as a necessary evil that only cost money; little men of no consequence standing guard behind barbed wire. The pay of my officers and men, meagre though it was, I had to beg from the various State Finance Offices. As Oberführer I earned in Dachau 230 Reichmark per month and was fortunate because I enjoyed the confidence of my Reichsführer (Himmler). At the beginning there was not a single cartridge, not a single rifle, let alone machine guns. Only three of my men knew how to operate a machine gun. They slept in draughty factory halls. Everywhere there was poverty and want. At the time these men belonged to SS District South. They left it to me to take care of my men's troubles but, unasked, sent men they wanted to be rid of in Munich for some reason or another. These misfits polluted my unit and troubled its state of mind. I had to contend with disloyalty, embezzlement and corruption."

With the support of Heinrich Himmler things began to improve: "From now on progress was unimpeded. I set to work unreservedly and joyfully; I trained soldiers as non-commissioned officers, and non-commissioned officers as leaders. United in our readiness for sacrifice and suffering and in cordial comradeship we created in a few weeks an excellent discipline which produced an outstanding esprit de corps. We did not become megalomaniacs, because we were all poor. Behind the barbed-wire fence we quietly did our duty, and without pity cast out from our ranks anyone who showed the least sign of disloyalty. Thus moulded and thus trained, the camp guard unit grew in the quietness of the concentration camp.

Wolf Sendele, a member of the SS thought that these camps were only for political prisoners like Ernest Thalmann and other members of the German Communist Party (KPD): "We knew well enough that these camps existed, detention camps, or whatever they were called, and that political opponents were being incarcerated. We were never quite clear why. God knows, the crimes themselves were not serious enough to remove a man from his house and home. But you thought to yourself - it's just a temporary measure, they'll put them away in a camp for three or four weeks, and then let them go again, when they've established that they're just harmless fellows - not like Thalmann (leader of the German Communist Party - KPD) or people who were real agitators."

Hermann Langbein, the author of Against All Hope: Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps 1938-1945 (1992) has pointed out: "National Socialism replaced democratic institutions with a system of command and obedience, the so-called Fuhrer principle, and it was this system that the Nazis installed in their concentration camps. It goes without saying that any command by a member of the SS had to be unconditionally carried out by all prisoners. Refusal or hesitation was liable to lead to a cruel death. The camp administration not only saw to it that every command was carried out, but also held inmates assigned to certain jobs responsible for completing them. In this way it facilitated its own work and was also able to play one prisoner off against another.... Each unit housing prisoners, whether a barrack or a brick building, was called a block. The camp administration held a senior block inmate (Blockdltester) responsible for enforcing discipline, keeping order, and carrying out all commands. If a dwelling unit was divided into rooms, a senior block inmate was assisted by senior barracks inmates and their staff. A senior camp inmate (Lageraltester) was responsible for the operation of the entire camp, and it was he who proposed the appointment of senior block inmates to the officer-in-charge."

Langbein, who was an inmate in Dachau, explained that each work group was headed by a capo (trusty). "The capo himself was exempted from work, but he had to see to it that the required work was done by his underlings. Capos, senior block inmates, and senior camp inmates were identified by an armband with the appropriate inscription. These armband wearers, as they were generally called, were under the protection of the camp administration, often enjoyed extensive privileges, and as a rule had unlimited power over those under them. This is to be taken literally, for if an armband wearer killed an underling, he did not (with a few exceptions) have to answer to anyone, provided a timely report of the death was made and the roll call was corrected. An ordinary prisoner was completely at the mercy of his capo and senior block inmate."

Heinrich Himmler argued that: "These approximately 40,000 German political and professional criminals... are my 'noncommissioned officer corps' for this whole kit and caboodle. We have appointed so-called capos here; one of these is the supervisor responsible for thirty, forty, or a hundred other prisoners. The moment he is made a capo, he no longer sleeps where they do. He is responsible for getting the work done, for making sure that there is no sabotage, that people are clean and the beds are of good construction.... So he has to spur his men on. The minute we're dissatisfied with him, he is no longer a capo and bunks with his men again. He knows that they will then kill him during the first night."

Inmates had to wear a coloured symbol to indicate their category. This included political prisoners (red), convicts (greens), Jews (yellow), homosexuals (pink), Jehovah's Witnesses (violet) and what the Nazis described as anti-socials (black). The anti-social group included gypsies and prostitutes. The Schutzstaffel (SS) preferred those with a criminal record to be capos. As Hermann Langbein has pointed out: "As a rule the SS bestowed armbands on prisoners they could expect to be willing tools in return for their privileged status. As soon as German convicts arrived in the camps the SS preferred them to morally stable men."

Harry Naujoks, a member of the German Communist Party (KPD), was an inmate at Sachsenhausen near Oranienburg. He later recalled what life was like in the camp: "Every SS guard had to be greeted by the prisoners. When a prisoner walked by an SS guard, six paces beforehand, the prisoner had to place his left hand on the seam of his trousers and with his right hand, quickly doff his cap and lay it on the seam of his trousers on the right-hand side. The prisoner had to walk by the guard while looking at him, as at attention. Three paces afterward, he was allowed to put his cap back on. This had to be done with the thumb pressed against the palm, the four fingers resting on the cap, pressed against the seam of the trousers. If this didn't happen quickly enough or the prisoner didn't snap to attention enough or his fingers weren't taut enough, or anything else happened that struck the SS guard as being insufficient, then one's ear was boxed, he had extra sports, or was reported."

Rudolf Hoess, one of the guards at Dachau, later recalled: "I can clearly remember the first flogging that I witnessed. Eicke had issued orders that a minimum of one company from the guard unit must attend the infliction of these corporal punishments. Two prisoners who had stolen cigarettes from the canteen were sentenced to twenty-five lashes each with the whip. The troops under arms were formed up in an open square in the centre of which stood the Whipping block.Two prisoners were led forward by their block leaders. Then the commandant arrived. The commander of the protective custody compound and the senior company commander reported to him. The Rapportfiihrer read out the sentence and the first prisoner, a small impenitent malingerer, was made to lie along; the length of the block. Two soldiers held his head and hands and two block leaders carried out the punishment, delivering alternate strokes. The prisoner uttered no sound. The other prisoner, a professional politician of strong physique, behaved quite differently. He cried out at the very first stroke and tried to break free. He went on screaming to the end, although the commandant yelled at him to keep quiet. I was standing in the first rank and was compelled to watch the whole procedure. I say compelled, because if I had been in the rear I would not have looked. When the man began to scream I went hot and cold all over. In fact the whole thing, even the beating of the first prisoner made me shudder. Later on, at the beginning of the war, I attended my first execution, but it did not affect me nearly so much as witnessing that first corporal punishment."

After the 1933 General Election Hitler passed an Enabling Bill that gave him dictatorial powers. His first move was to take over the trade unions. Its leaders were sent to concentration camps and the organization was put under the control of the Nazi Party. The trade union movement now became known as the Labour Front. Soon afterwards the Communist Party and the Social Democrat Party were banned. Party activists still in the country were arrested and by the end of 1933 over 150,000 political prisoners were in concentration camps. Hitler was aware that people have a great fear of the unknown, and if prisoners were released, they were warned that if they told anyone of their experiences they would be sent back to the camp.

It was not only left-wing politicians and trade union activists who were sent to concentration camps. The Gestapo also began arresting beggars, prostitutes, homosexuals, alcoholics and anyone who was incapable of working. Although some inmates were tortured, the only people killed during this period were prisoners who tried to escape and those classed as "incurably insane". Inmates wore serial numbers and coloured patches to identify their categories: red for political prisoners, blue for those who were foreigners, violet for religious fundamentalists, green for criminals, black for those considered to be anti-social and pink for homosexuals.

In May 1934 Theodor Eicke was given responsibility of reorganizing Germany's concentration camp system. One of his recommendations was that guards should be warned that they would be punished if they showed prisoners any signs of humanity. Charles W. Sydnor, the author of Soldiers of Destruction (1977) believed that "Eicke's personality, in particular his unremitting hatred for everything and everyone non-Nazi, influenced definitively the development, the structure, and the uniquely inhumane ethos of the concentration camps. Eicke was convinced that the camps were the most effective instrument available for destroying the enemies of National Socialism. He regarded all prisoners as subhuman adversaries of the State, marked for immediate destruction if they offered the slightest resistance. Eicke eventually succeeded in nurturing this same attitude among many SS guards in the camps.... Like many of the concentration camp commanders he trained, Eicke basically was pitiless and cruelly insensitive to human suffering, and regarded qualities such as mercy and charity as useless, outmoded absurdities that could not be tolerated in the SS."

Eicke's biographer, Louis L. Snyder, has argued: "Eicke's influence on the organization and spirit of the SS guard formations was second only to that of Himmler. his regulations included precise instructions on solitary confinement, corporal punishment, beatings, reprimands, and warnings. he informed his guards that any pity for enemies of the state was was unworthy of SS men. It is claimed that Eicke said that any man with a soft heart would do well to "retire quickly to a monastery."

Hermann Langbein arrived in Dachau on 1st May 1941. He later wrote in Against All Hope (1992): "On May 1, 1941, I arrived in Dachau together with many other Austrian veterans of the Spanish Civil War. For over two years, we had been interned in camps in southern France, and only internees who live together day and night can get to know one another as well as we did... The general expressions of support from the old political prisoners that greeted us, the first large group of veterans of the Spanish Civil War to arrive in Dachau, did us good morally and in some instances helped us concretely as well."

Langbein was shocked by conditions in the camp. "We had to march out at dawn onto the parade ground for early morning roll call. It was always a dreadful military ceremony. Everyone had to stand bolt upright in rows. The order hats off had to be done with total precision. If there was some mistake or other, then there were punishment exercises. Then the SS took the roll call - to check whether the numbers tallied. That was always the most important thing in every concentration camp - the numbers had to be right at every roll call. No one was allowed to be absent. It made no difference if someone had died during the night - the body would be laid out and included in the roll. And then, when roll call was over, we had to form up into our working parties. And every working party had its own assembly area, which one had to know in order to line up. And then the parties set off for work - depending on whether one was working inside the camp or outside. The outside parties were escorted by SS men. The working day was determined by the time of year. Work was determined by hours of daylight, not the clock. The parties could only leave camp when it was already half-light, so that people couldn't escape under cover of darkness."

Langbein was able to survive the experience by gaining a job in the camp hospital: "A German Communist who had been interned for many years - presented me to his SS boss, who had a request for a clerk from the prison hospital... The Work Assignments man told him that no other inmates were available who had the proper qualifications - the ability to spell correctly, use a typewriter, and take shorthand. He had prepared me in advance to answer the SS questions in such a way that I made a positive impression. With surprising speed, I was placed on a detail with exceptionally good working conditions. Because we also slept in the infirmary, we were not subject to the harassing checks in the blocks. We did not need to show up for the morning and evening roll calls, and we had a roof over our heads as we did our physically undemanding work."

In June, 1941, Heinrich Himmler ordered that Auschwitz be greatly increased in size and the following year it became an extermination camp. Bathhouses disguised as gas chambers were added. Hoess introduced Zyklon-B gas, that enabled the Nazis to kill 2,000 people at a time. Hess was promoted to Deputy Inspector General and took charge of the Schutzstaffel (SS) department that administered German concentration camps. In a SS report Hoess was described as "a true pioneer in this area because of his new ideas and educational methods."

At the Wannsee Conference held in January 1942 it was decided to make the extermination of the Jews a systematically organized operation. After this date extermination camps were established in the east that had the capacity to kill large numbers including Belzec (15,000 a day), Sobibor (20,000), Treblinka (25,000) and Majdanek (25,000).

In January 1942, Rebecca Weisner was sent to a women's camp near Breslau in eastern Germany. "When you got to the camp they took away whatever we had - our watches, clothes, and everything. They shaved our hair. It was tragic. You know, you're a young girl and they shave your head. We didn't get any food anymore. If you asked me what was the worst in the camp for me personally, it was hunger. It was also cold; we didn't have much warmth. We slept in an old factory hall, in bunk beds, up and down in wooden bunks and straw. It was like an outdoor, not an indoor, house, with little holes in the middle."

Later that year, Rebecca Weisner's brother, parents, grandparents and cousins were all taken to Auschwitz, an extermination camp. Over 250,000 people who had been living in Poland died in the camp. It is estimated that as many as 4 million people died in gas ovens and by a variety of other methods at Auschwitz. "Somehow we knew those things were more or less going on that there was Auschwitz and that they had gas ovens to gas all the people, children and so. We knew that... You know, they were young - my mother was forty; my father was forty-four; my brother was just barely twenty - and this was something that I had to live with... I cried for maybe two days because I knew that I was all alone. I only had one brother and I really didn't want to live at that point. I never cried again after that time. Until today, I still cannot cry and I have had a lot of emotional problems because of all those things. I can't cry; I choke, but I can't cry."

Rudolf Hoess later admitted: "I must admit that the gassing process had a calming effect on me. I always had a horror of the shootings, thinking of the number of people, the women and children. I was relieved that we were spared these blood baths.... We tried to fool the victims into believing that they were going through a delousing process. Of course, at times they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties. Frequently women would hide their children under their clothes, but we found them and we sent the children to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but the foul and nauseating stench from the continued burning of bodies permeated the whole area and all the people living around Auschwitz knew what was going on."

Gisella Perl was allowed to live because she was employed as a doctor at Auschwitz. One of the tasks that Gisella had to carry out was to persuade inmates to give blood: "The doctors of the hospital were sent for. The sight which greeted us when we entered Block VII is one never to be forgotten. From the cages along the walls about six hundred panic-stricken, trembling young women were looking at us with silent pleading in their eyes. The other hundred were lying on the ground, pale, faint, bleeding. Their pulse was almost inaudible, their breathing strained and deep rivers of blood were flowing around their bodies. Big, strong SS men were going from one to the other sticking tremendous needles into their veins and robbing their undernourished, emaciated bodies of their last drop of blood. The German army needed blood plasma! The guinea pigs of Auschwitz were just the people to furnish that plasma. Rassenschande or contamination with 'inferior Jewish blood' was forgotten. We were too 'inferior' to live, but not too inferior to keep the German army alive with our blood. Besides, nobody would know. The blood donors, along with the other prisoners of Auschwitz would never live to tell their tale. By the end of the war fat wheat would grow out of their ashes and the soap made of their bodies would be used to wash the laundry of the returning German heroes."

In February 1942, Oswald Pohl, chief of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungs Hauptamt), took control of the administration of the concentration camps. Pohl clashed with Theodor Eicke over the way the camps should be run. According to Andrew Mollo, the author of To The Death's Head: The Story of the SS (1982): "Pohl insisted on better treatment for camp inmates, and SS men were forbidden to strike, kick or even touch a prisoner. Inmates were to be better housed and fed, and even encouraged to take an interest in their work. Those who did were to be trained and rewarded with their freedom. There was a small reduction in the number of cases of maltreatment, but food and accommodation were still appalling, and in return for these 'improvements' prisoners were still expected to work eleven hours per day, six or seven days a week."

Pohl came under pressure from Albert Speer to increase production at the camps. Pohl complained to Heinrich Himmler: "Reichsminister Speer appears not to know that we have 160,000 inmates at present and are fighting continually against epidemics and a high death-rate because of the billeting of the prisoners and the sanitary arrangements are totally inadequate." In a letter written on 15th December, 1942, Himmler suggested an improvement in the prisoner's diet: "Try to obtain for the nourishment of the prisoners in 1943 the greatest quantity of raw vegetables and onions. In the vegetable season issue carrots, kohlrabi, white turnips and whatever such vegetables there are in large quantity and store up sufficient for the prisoners in the winter so that they had a sufficient quantity every day. I believe we will raise the state of health substantially thereby."

Harry Naujoks, was senior camp inmate (Lageraltester) of Sachsenhausen. In May 1942, Naujoks was ordered by Lagerführer Fritz Suhren to execute a fellow prisoner. He refused and was forced to stand next to the gallows during the hanging, which was made to be particularly slow and painful. Naujoks was discovered to be part of a camp resistance group and in November 1942, he and 17 other political prisoners were deported to Flossenbürg, a concentration camp under the control of the Greens. However, his earlier fairness was rewarded as Naujoks was told by one Green "In Sachsenhausen you treated as like comrades, and you can be sure that we shall treat you the same way here."

Gisella Perl later provided information on the activities of Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz. Nadine Brozan has argued: "As one of five doctors and four nurses chosen by Dr. Mengele to operate a hospital ward that had no beds, no bandages, no drugs and no instruments, she tended to every disease wrought by torture, starvation, filth, lice and rats, to every bone broken or head cracked open by beating. She performed surgery, without anesthesia, on women whose breasts had been lacerated by whips and become infected." Gisella admitted: ''I treated patients with my voice, telling them beautiful stories, telling them that one day we would have birthdays again, that one day we would sing again. I didn't know when it was Rosh ha-Shanah, but I had a sense of it when the weather turned cool. So I made a party with the bread, margarine and dirty pieces of sausage we received for meals. I said tonight will be the New Year, tomorrow a better year will come.''

Gisella later admitted: "Dr. Mengele told me that it was my duty to report every pregnant woman to him. He said that they would go to another camp for better nutrition, even for milk. So women began to run directly to him, telling him, 'I am pregnant.' I learned that they were all taken to the research block to be used as guinea pigs, and then two lives would be thrown into the crematorium. I decided that never again would there be a pregnant woman in Auschwitz... No one will ever know what it meant to me to destroy those babies, but if I had not done it, both mother and child would have been cruelly murdered.''

Anne S. Reamey has suggested that Gisella Perl made a controversial decision to deal with Mengele's experiments: "After Dr. Perl's startling realization of the fates of the pregnant women discovered by Dr. Mengele, she began to perform surgeries that before the war she would have believed herself incapable of - abortions. In spite of her professional and religious beliefs as a doctor and an observant Jew, Dr. Perl began performing abortions on the dirty floors and bunks of the barracks in Auschwitz 'using only my dirty hands'. Without any medical instruments or anesthesia, and often in the cramped and filthy bunks within the women's barracks, Dr. Perl ended the lives of the fetuses in their mothers' womb (estimated at around 3,000) in the hopes that the mother would survive and later, perhaps, be able to bear children. In some instances, the pregnancy was too far along to be able to perform an abortion. In these cases Dr. Perl broke the amnionic sac and manually dilated the cervix to induce labor. In these cases, the premature infant (not yet completely developed), died almost instantly. Without the threat of their pregnancy being discovered, women were able to work without interruption, gaining them a temporary reprieve from their death sentences."

As the war progressed Adolf Hitler became greatly concerned about the problems of production. Himmler wrote to Pohl on 5th March, 1943: "I believe that at the present time we must be out there in the factories personally in unprecedented measure in order to drive them on with the lash of our words and use our energy to assist on the spot. The Führer is counting heavily on our production and our help and our ability to overcome all difficulties, just hurl them overboard and simply produce. I ask you and Richard Glucks (head of concentration camp inspectorate) with all my heart to let no week pass by when one of you does not appear unexpectedly at this or that camp and goad, goad, goad."

The historian, Louis L. Snyder, has pointed out: "In this post he (Oswald Pohl) had charge of all concentration camps and was responsible for all works projects. He saw to it that valuables taken from Jewish inmates were returned to Germany and supervised the melting down of gold teeth taken from inmates... The railroad wagons which brought prisoners to the camps were cleaned out and used on the return journey to transfer anything of value taken from the inmates.... Gold fillings retrieved from human ashes were melted down and sent in the form of ingots to the Reichsbank for the special Max Heiliger deposit account."

Oswald Pohl formed a limited company called Eastern Industries or Osti to manage the ghetto and labour camp work shops. It has been argued that Pohl's policies prevented the deaths of thousands of concentration camp inmates. Rudolf W. Hess complained that "every new labour camp and every additional thousand workers increased the risk that one day they might be set free or somehow continue to remain alive". Reinhard Heydrich attempted to sabotage this enterprise by arranging for large numbers of Jews to be taken directly to extermination camps.

As well as the one built at Dachau concentration camps were built at Belsen and Buchenwald (Germany), Mauthausen (Austria), Theresienstadt (Czechoslovakia) and Auschwitz (Poland). Each camp was commanded by a senior Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and staffed by members of the SS Death's Head units. The camp was divided into blocks and each one was under the charge of a senior prisoner. As well as using members of the SS the camp commander often recruited Baltic or Ukrainian Germans to control inmates. As they had previously been minorities of repressed communities, they were particularly good at dealing harshly with Russians, Poles and Jews.

Heavy bombing of the camps further damaged production. Peter Padfield, the author of Himmler: Reichsfuhrer S.S. (1991) points out that Himmler suggested a possible solution to the problem: "Himmler urged Pohl to build factories for the production of war materials in natural caves and underground tunnels immune to enemy bombing, and instructed him to hollow out workshop and factory space in all SS stone quarries, suggesting that by the summer of 1944 they should have ... the greatest possible number of such 'uniquely bomb-proof work sites'... Pohl's Works' Department chief, Brigadeführer Hans Kammler, succeeded in creating underground workshops and living quarters from a cave system in the Harz mountains in central Germany."

Alfried Krupp the industrialist, made use of inmates from Auschwitz to produce goods for his company. On 19th May, 1944 he received the following report: "At Auschwitz the families were separated, those unable to work gassed, and the remainder singled out for conscription. The girls were shaved bald and tattooed with camp numbers. Their possessions, including clothing and shoes, were taken away and replaced by prison uniform and shoes. The dress was in one piece, made of grey material, with a red cross on the back and the yellow Jew-patch on the sleeve."

Inmates were used to provide medical care at the camps. Gisella Perl was a Jewish doctor at Auschwitz: "One of the basic Nazi aims was to demoralize, humiliate, ruin us, not only physically but also spiritually. They did everything in their power to push us into the bottomless depths of degradation. Their spies were constantly among us to keep them informed about every thought, every feeling, every reaction we had, and one never knew who was one of their agents. There was only one law in Auschwitz - the law of the jungle - the law of self-preservation. Women who in their former lives were decent self-respecting human beings now stole, lied, spied, beat the others and - if necessary - killed them, in order to save their miserable lives. Stealing became an art, a virtue, something to be proud of."

Rudolf Vrba escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944 and reported to the Allies: "The crematorium contains a large hall, a gas chamber and a furnace. People are assembled in the hall, which holds 2,000. They have to undress and are given a piece of soap and a towel as if they were going to the baths. Then they are crowded into the gas chamber which is hermetically sealed. Several SS men in gas masks then pour into the gas chamber through three openings in the ceiling a preparation of the poison gas maga-cyclon. At the end of three minutes all the persons are dead. The dead bodies are then taken away in carts to the furnace to be burnt."

By 1944 there were 13 main concentration camps and over 500 satellite camps. In an attempt to increase war-production, inmates were used as cheap-labour. The Schutzstaffel (SS) charged industrial companies around 6 marks for each prisoner working a twelve-hour day. In April of that year, Oswald Pohl, chief of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, issued orders to camp commanders: "Work must be, in the true sense of the world, exhausting in order to obtain maximum output... The hours of work are not limited. The duration depends on the technical structure of the camp and the work to be done and is determined by the camp Kommandant alone." One inmate of Auschwitz complained that Pohl was guilty of "the systematic and implacable urge to use human beings as slaves and to kill them when they could work no more."

It has been estimated that between 1933 and 1945 a total of 1,600,000 were sent to concentration work camps. Of these, over a million died of a variety of different causes. During this period around 18 million were sent to extermination camps. Of these, historians have estimated that between five and eleven million were killed.

By John Simkin (john@spartacus-educational.com) © September 1997 (updated January 2020).

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Primary and Secondary Sources

(1) Hermann Langbein, Against All Hope: Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps 1938-1945 (1992)

National Socialism replaced democratic institutions with a system of command and obedience, the so-called Fuhrer principle, and it was this system that the Nazis installed in their concentration camps. It goes without saying that any command by a member of the SS had to be unconditionally carried out by all prisoners. Refusal or hesitation was liable to lead to a cruel death. The camp administration not only saw to it that every command was carried out, but also held inmates assigned to certain jobs responsible for completing them. In this way it facilitated its own work and was also able to play one prisoner off against another. This system was already working when the first foreigners arrived at the camps in 1938. Each unit housing prisoners, whether a barrack or a brick building, was called a block. The camp administration held a senior block inmate (Blockdltester) responsible for enforcing discipline, keeping order, and carrying out all commands. If a dwelling unit was divided into rooms, a senior block inmate was assisted by senior barracks inmates and their staff. A senior camp inmate (Lageraltester) was responsible for the operation of the entire camp, and it was he who proposed the appointment of senior block inmates to the officer-in-charge. After the expansion of the camps, several senior camp inmates were appointed in a number of the camps, and they divided the tasks among them. Each labor detail was headed by a capo (trusty), and if the size of the detail required it, he had assistant capos or foremen under him. The capo himself was exempted from work, but he had to see to it that the required work was done by his underlings. Capos, senior block inmates, and senior camp inmates were identified by an armband with the appropriate inscription. These armband wearers, as they were generally called, were under the protection of the camp administration, often enjoyed extensive privileges, and as a rule had unlimited power over those under them. This is to be taken literally, for if an armband wearer killed an underling, he did not (with a few exceptions) have to answer to anyone, provided a timely report of the death was made and the roll call was corrected. An ordinary prisoner was completely at the mercy of his capo and senior block inmate.

As a rule the SS bestowed armbands on prisoners they could expect to be willing tools in return for their privileged status. As soon as German convicts arrived in the camps-that is, before 1938 - the SS preferred them to morally stable men. Thus, having been despised as outsiders by society all their lives, they now wielded immense power over others by virtue of a simple armband. If one of these men earned the hatred of his fellow prisoners by misusing this power, he was utterly at the mercy of the SS, for armband wearers with blood on their hands, once they lost their jobs and thus the protection of the SS, were fair game for a vengeful camp. A number of fallen capos were gang-murdered...

With years of practice behind them, many camp commandants were virtuosos at running this system. Since it was aimed at completely destroying the human dignity of anti-Nazis, a hardened criminal was able to order an anti-Nazi around as he saw fit. Such people were at the criminal's mercy when there was no SS man in the camp. Anyone who wanted to fight this system had to reduce or, if possible, abolish the effectiveness of this Fuhrer principle, as it applied to the inmates. Occasionally even some SS leaders assisted in this endeavor.

On a number of occasions, commandants and officers-in-charge could be persuaded to entrust the self-government of the inmates to prisoners without a criminal past. On the basis of his experiences in Buchenwald, Walter Poller writes: "Even some SS henchmen in the concentration camp who tried very hard to treat political prisoners in accordance with instructions could not conceal the fact that this demand of their leadership and ideology (that is, to assess political offenses as criminal ones).

(2) Harry Naujoks, My Life in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp (1987)

Every SS guard had to be greeted by the prisoners. When a prisoner walked by an SS guard, six paces beforehand, the prisoner had to place his left hand on the seam of his trousers and with his right hand, quickly doff his cap and lay it on the seam of his trousers on the right-hand side. The prisoner had to walk by the guard while looking at him, as at attention. Three paces afterward, he was allowed to put his cap back on. This had to be done with the thumb pressed against the palm, the four fingers resting on the cap, pressed against the seam of the trousers. If this didn't happen quickly enough or the prisoner didn't snap to attention enough or his fingers weren't taut enough, or anything else happened that struck the SS guard as being insufficient, then one's ear was boxed, he had extra sports, or was reported.

(3) After the war George Topas recalled meeting for the first time Reinhold Felix, the commandant of the camp in Budzyn.

"You are fortunate to have come here. This is a good camp. Here you will work and get fed. Of course, if you expect to eat, you will have to work for it and as long as you work, you will get along fine. Now, it is prohibited to possess any silver, gold, money, or jewelry - therefore, if you turn it in now, you will not be punished." Just at this moment, someone moved in the ranks. Felix whipped out his gun and shot him on the spot, then resumed without a pause: "Now, when I finish speaking, I want you to turn in your valuables, such as gold, silver, diamonds, and currency."

(4) Wilhelm Jäger, a doctor working for Alfried Krupp at his fuse factory at Auschwitz, reported about conditions in the camp on 15th December, 1942.

Conditions in all camps for foreign workers were extremely bad. They were greatly overcrowded. The diet was entirely inadequate. Only bad meat, such as horsemeat or meat which had been rejected by veterinarians as infected with tuberculosis germs, was passed out in these camps. Clothing, too, was altogether inadequate. Foreigners from the east worked and slept in the same clothing in which they arrived. Nearly all of them had to use their blankets as coats in cold and wet weather. Many had to to walk to work barefoot, even in winter. Tuberculosis was particularly prevalent. The TB rate was four times the normal rate. This was the result of inferior housing, poor food and an insufficient amount of it, and overwork.

(5) Witold Pilecki, an officer in the Tajna Armia Polska, the Polish Secret Army, began sending out information on what was happening in Auschwitz in October 1940.

On the way one of us was ordered to run to a post a little off the road and immediately after him went a round from a machine-gun. He was killed. Ten of his casual comrades were pulled out of the ranks and shot on the march with pistols on the ground of "collective responsibility" for the "escape", arranged by the SS-men themselves. The eleven were dragged along by straps tied to one leg. The dogs were teased with the bloody corpses and set onto them. All this to the accompaniment of laughter and jokes.

(6) Tadeusz Goldsztajn, a sixteen year old Jewish boy from Poland, began work at Alfried Krupp's fuse factory at Auschwitz in July, 1943.

At work we were Krupp's charges. SS guards were placed along the wall to prevent escape, but seldom interfered with the prisoners at work. This was the work of the various 'Meisters' and their assistants. The slightest mistake, a broken tool, a piece of scrap - things which occur every day in factories around the world - would provoke them. They would hit us, kick us, beat us with rubber hoses and iron bars. If they themselves did not want to bother with punishment, they would summon the Kapo and order him to give us twenty-five lashes. To this day I sleep on my stomach, a habit I acquired at Krupp because of the sores on my back from beating.

(7) Harry Naujoks, My Life in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp (1987)

In normal occupancy, each barrack had 146 prisoners. This was true until mid-1938. After that, a third bed was added. Then the barrack occupancy was 180-200 men... In essence, this was case only in the first ring after 1938-1939... In other barracks, the overcrowding of the camp led to the beds being removed and the straw sacks were laid on the ground. There were also times where day rooms were covered with straw sacks at night; during the day, the straw sacks were stacked in the other room with the beds. In the large barracks, dubbed mass barracks, often 400 prisoners were jammed together.

(8) Rudolf Vrba, I Cannot Forgive (1963)

We marched into the commercial heart of Auschwitz, warehouses of the body-snachers where hundreds of prisoners worked frantically to sort, segregate and classify the clothes and the food and the valuables of those whose bodies were still burning, whose ashes would soon be used as a fertilizer.

It was an incredible sight, an enormous rectangular yard with a watchtower at each corner and surrounded by barbed wire. There were several huge storerooms and a block of what seemed like offices with a square, open balcony at one corner. Yet what first struck me was a mountain of trunks, cases, rucksacks, kitbags and parcels stacked in the middle of the yard.

Nearby was another mountain, of blankets this time, fifty thousand of them, maybe one hundred thousand. I was so staggered by the sight of these twin peaks of personal possessions that I never thought at that moment where their owners might be. In fact I did not have much time to think, for every step brought some new shock.

(9) Rudolf Höss initially concentrated on killing Red Army prisoners-of-war at Auschwitz. Later he was instructed to murder all the Jews sent to his camp.

The gassing was carried out in the detention cells of Block II. Protected by a gas-mask, I watched the killing myself. The Russians were ordered to undress in the anteroom; they then quietly entered the mortuary, for they had been told they were to be deloused. The doors were then sealed and the gas shaken down through the holes in the roof. I do not know how long this killing took. For a little while a humming sound could be heard. When the powder was thrown in, there were cries of "Gas!," then a great bellowing, and the trapped prisoners hurled themselves against both the doors. But the doors held. They were opened several hours later, so that the place might be aired. It was then that I saw, for the first time, gassed bodies in the mass.

The killing of these Russian prisoners-of-war did not cause me much concern at the time. The order had been given, and I had to carry it out. I must even admit that this gassing set my mind at rest, for the mass extermination of the Jews was to start soon and at that time neither Eichmann nor I was certain how these mass killings were to be carried out.

In the spring of 1942 the first transports of Jews, all earmarked for extermination, arrived from Upper Silesia.

It was most important that the whole business of arriving and undressing should take place in an atmosphere of the greatest possible calm. People reluctant to take off their clothes had to be helped by those of their companions who had already undressed, or by men of the Special Detachment.

Many of the women hid their babies among the piles of clothing. The men of the Special Detachment were particularly on the look-out for this, and would speak words of encouragement to the woman until they had persuaded her to take the child with her.

I noticed that women who either guessed or knew what awaited them nevertheless found the courage to joke with the children to encourage them, despite the mortal terror visible in their own eyes.

One woman approached me as she walked past and, pointing to her four children who were manfully helping the smallest ones over the rough ground, whispered: "How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?"

One old man, as he passed me, hissed: "Germany will pay a heavy penance for this mass murder of the Jews." His eyes glowed with hatred as he said this. Nevertheless he walked calmly into the gas-chamber.

(10) Report sent to Alfried Krupp about conditions at Auschwitz (19th May, 1944)

At Auschwitz the families were separated, those unable to work gassed, and the remainder singled out for conscription. The girls were shaved bald and tattooed with camp numbers. Their possessions, including clothing and shoes, were taken away and replaced by prison uniform and shoes. The dress was in one piece, made of grey material, with a red cross on the back and the yellow Jew-patch on the sleeve.

(11) Hermann Langbein, Against All Hope (1992)

The prisoners had always been obliged to work, and they had been organized in labor units. Since work was intended as punishment, many of them performed meaningless tasks, the kind that really wears a person down. Only members of units that were charged with maintaining the operation of the camp and its workshops escaped such demoralizing activities as swiftly carrying rocks to a certain place and then carrying them back the same way.

To be sure, to the end, many an SS officer relapsed into his favorite pastime of tormenting prisoners by ordering them to perform meaningless tasks, but for the growing number of inmates who were placed at the disposal of the armaments industry, the nature of the work did change.

This reorganization was pursued vigorously after the defeat at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-43, and it was stepped up as the fortunes of war declined for the Third Reich. As a result, it was necessary for each concentration camp to establish subsidiary camps at nearby arms factories. The number of such camps grew by leaps and bounds.

The reorganization produced an ambivalent attitude among the central leadership. On the one hand, the greatest possible number of "racial" prisoners were to be exterminated. On the other hand, as Himmler was to tell his Fuhrer, a growing number of prisoners were placed at the disposal of the armaments industry

This ambivalence made itself felt most strongly at Auschwitz, the camp of choice for those destined for immediate gassing. Auschwitz's four rapidly erected crematories with built-in gas chambers made such killing possible with the smallest expenditure of guards and service personnel. But because the arms industry required ever more workers, those destined for extermination were subjected to a selection process, something that was not done in the extermination camps of eastern Poland. Those who appeared to be capable of working were not immediately escorted to one of the gas chambers, but the young and strong became inmates of the camp, where they were prepared for "extermination through labor" - an expression taken from the record of a discussion between Himmler and Minister of Justice Otto Thierack in late September 1942. This record also contains the classification of the various groups of people. The purpose of the conference was to arrange for the penal system to provide as many people as possible for this "extermination through labor." This agreement obligated the German courts to supply to Himmler - in addition to Jews and Gypsies, who were first on the list - Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles with sentences of more than three years, Czechs and Germans with sentences of more than eight years, and finally the "worst antisocial elements among the last-named."

By concentrating all the extermination measures in Auschwitz and using the system of selections, this concentration camp became the largest by far. The number of Jews classified as fit for work at the admissions selections, together with other newly admitted prisoners, exceeded the number of those "exterminated through labor." This necessitated the establishment of a women's camp at Auschwitz for the female deportees who were designated as fit for work. In accordance with general practice, in March 1942 female inmates of Ravensbruck were sent to Auschwitz, together with female SS guards, to help build the camp. As a consequence of conflicting tendencies in the management of the concentration camps, one side-the Main Security Office of the Reich (Reichsssicherheitshauptamt), the central office in which Eichmann was active-pushed the deportation of Jews, and as a result crematories repeatedly broke down because of overuse. The other side-sections of the SS Main Economic and Administrative office-instructed all camp commandants to lower the mortality rate substantially, as a directive dated December 28, 1942, put it. On January 20, 1943, this directive was repeated with the following admonition: "I shall hold the camp commandant personally responsible for doing everything possible to preserve the manpower of the prisoners."

(12) In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz. Two months later they were able to publish the Vrba-Wetzler Report providing details of conditions in the camp.

The crematorium contains a large hall, a gas chamber and a furnace. People are assembled in the hall, which holds 2,000. They have to undress and are given a piece of soap and a towel as if they were going to the baths. Then they are crowded into the gas chamber which is hermetically sealed. Several SS men in gas masks then pour into the gas chamber through three openings in the ceiling a preparation of the poison gas maga-cyclon. At the end of three minutes all the persons are dead. The dead bodies are then taken away in carts to the furnace to be burnt.

(13) Walter Kramer, statement made at American Military Headquarters in Marburg, Germany (September, 1945)

In Danzig we were unloaded onto old barges in which the water was twenty centimetres deep. One tugboat drew the four barges up the Vistula to the notorious concentration camp of Stutthof. The camp S.S. immediately took us into custody. They took everything from us; we didn't keep even a belt and had to fasten our pants with twine. They led us to Compound Three, designed for two hundred fifty men, but we filled it with nine hundred. There were only three-level bunk beds - four men on the bottom, three in the middle and three more on the top. I always slept at top, for at least up there you don't get whipped so easily by the compound superior. The first two days we got nothing at all to eat. In a camp such as Stutthof where there were forty-five thousand prisoners nine hundred didn't matter very much. Everything to speed our deaths. . . . One evening we had just lain down in our bunks when we had to line up for roll call. We simply stormed out of the barracks and the billy clubs did their work. Then right about face and to the gallows; forty-five thousand men were kicked out of bed to watch a prisoner being hanged for violation of camp rules.

(14) Richard Dimbleby, BBC radio broadcast from Belsen (19th April 1945)

I picked my way over corpse after corpse in the gloom, until I heard one voice raised above the gentle undulating moaning. I found a girl, she was a living skeleton, impossible to gauge her age for she had practically no hair left, and her face was only a yellow parchment sheet with two holes in it for eyes. She was stretching out her stick of an arm and gasping something, it was "English, English, medicine, medicine", and she was trying to cry but she hadn't enough strength. And beyond her down the passage and in the hut there were the convulsive movements of dying people too weak to raise themselves from the floor.

In the shade of some trees lay a great collection of bodies. I walked about them trying to count, there were perhaps 150 of them flung down on each other, all naked, all so thin that their yellow skin glistened like stretched rubber on their bones. Some of the poor starved creatures whose bodies were there looked so utterly unreal and inhuman that I could have imagined that they had never lived at all. They were like polished skeletons, the skeletons that medical students like to play practical jokes with.

At one end of the pile a cluster of men and women were gathered round a fire; they were using rags and old shoes taken from the bodies to keep it alight, and they were heating soup over it. And close by was the enclosure where 500 children between the ages of five and twelve had been kept. They were not so hungry as the rest, for the women had sacrificed themselves to keep them alive. Babies were born at Belsen, some of them shrunken, wizened little things that could not live, because their mothers could not feed them.

One woman, distraught to the point of madness, flung herself at a British soldier who was on guard at the camp on the night that it was reached by the 11th Armoured Division; she begged him to give her some milk for the tiny baby she held in her arms. She laid the mite on the ground and threw herself at the sentry's feet and kissed his boots. And when, in his distress, he asked her to get up, she put the baby in his arms and ran off crying that she would find milk for it because there was no milk in her breast. And when the soldier opened the bundle of rags to look at the child, he found that it had been dead for days.

There was no privacy of any kind. Women stood naked at the side of the track, washing in cupfuls of water taken from British Army trucks. Others squatted while they searched themselves for lice, and examined each other's hair. Sufferers from dysentery leaned against the huts, straining helplessly, and all around and about them was this awful drifting tide of exhausted people, neither caring nor watching. Just a few held out their withered hands to us as we passed by, and blessed the doctor, whom they knew had become the camp commander in place of the brutal Kramer.

(15) Peter Combs was a British soldier who witnessed the liberation of Belsen. He wrote about what he saw in a letter to his wife in April 1945.

The conditions in which these people live are appalling. One has to take a tour round and see their faces, their slow staggering gait and feeble movements. The state of their minds is plainly written on their faces, as starvation has reduced their bodies to skeletons. The fact is that all these were once clean-living and sane and certainly not the type to do harm to the Nazis. They are Jews and are dying now at the rate of three hundred a day. They must die and nothing can save them - their end is inescapable, they are far gone now to be brought back to life.

(16) Manchester Guardian (1st May, 1945)

The capture of the notorious concentration camp near Dachau, where approximately 32,000 persons were liberated, was announce in yesterday's S.H.A.E.F. communiqué. Three hundred S.S. guards at the camp were quickly overcome it said.

A whole battalion of Allied troops was needed to restrain the prisoners from excesses. Fifty railway trucks crammed with bodies and the discovery of gas chambers, torture rooms, whipping posts, and crematoria strongly support report which had leaked out of the camp.

An Associated Press correspondent with the Seventh Army says that many of the prisoners seized the guards' weapons and revenged themselves on the SS men. Many of the well-known prisoners, it was said, had been recently removed to a new camp in the Tyrol.

Prisoners with access to the records said that 9,000 died of hunger and disease, or were shot in the past three months and 4,000 more perished last winter.

(17) Martha Gellhorn was with the United States troops that liberated Dachau in 1945. She later wrote about it in her book The Face of War (1959)

I have not talked about how it was the day the American Army arrived, though the prisoners told me. In their joy to be free, and longing to see their friends who had come at last, many prisoners rushed to the fence and died electrocuted. There were those who died cheering, because that effort of happiness was more than their bodies could endure. There were those who died because now they had food, and they ate before they could be stopped, and it killed them. I do not know words to describe the men who have survived this horror for years, three years, five years, ten years, and whose minds are as clear and unafraid as the day they entered. I was in Dachau when the German armies surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. We sat in that room, in that accursed cemetery prison, and no one had anything more to say. Still, Dachau seemed to me the most suitable place in Europe to hear the news of victory. For surely this war was made to abolish Dachau, and all the other places like Dachau, and everything that Dachau stood for, and to abolish it for ever.

Camps and prisons

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermax_prison    http://mafiagame.wikia.com/wiki/Old_Prison     http://mafiagame.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Prison    http://silenthill.wikia.com/wiki/Toluca_Prison    http://silenthill.wikia.com/wiki/Water_Prison

In propagating a politicized view of German history many in the media and academia have attempted to portray the German system of imprisonment in concentration camps as some sort of precursor to genocide, as a living hell where it was official German policy to make life miserable and to victimize, beat, torture, rape and murder innocent civilians simply because of religious or political persuasion or sexual orientation.

Is this sensational view of history correct? No, the role of German concentration camps was much different and probably better in many ways than the American prison system today. German concentration camps had a much more positive role to play in Hitler's new and progressive National Socialist state.

The facts will bear out that the Establishment historians have purveyed a view of concentration camp life that cannot be substantiated.

The daily life in a concentration camp was much different than most historians will admit.

In 1948, Paul Rassinier, a former Socialist and critic of National Socialist Germany who had himself been interned in the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dora, published Crossing the Line (Le Passage de la Ligne). In this work, Rassinier claimed that the Germans had been benign, if not positive, in their motives for putting enemies of Hitler's National Socialist state in concentration camps. Rassinier claimed that the concentration camps were a "gesture of compassion" since inmates had been placed where they could "not hurt the new regime and where they could be protected from the public anger."

Not only did the concentration camps protect anti-social elements in Rassinier's view, but they were also designed to "rehabilitate the strayed sheep and to bring them back to a healthier concept of the German community."¹ According to Rassinier, the German government was helping those whom it committed to concentration camps by putting them in a setting so that they could be rehabilitated into more productive members of the German community.

Those who fell into the categories of persons assigned to concentration camps included any person condemned for treasonable activities, as well as Communist Party officials and anyone who incited a German citizen to refuse military service.² Persons who were considered by the authorities of the Third Reich as being an anti-social malefactor were also sent to the camps. Anti-social malefactors consisted of professional and habitual criminals, that is, those people who had been sentenced to a minimum of six months imprisonment or hard labor on at least three separate occasions. Anti-social malefactors also specifically included beggars, prostitutes, homosexuals, drunkards, psychopaths and lunatics.³ Persons who were "work shy" were also sent to concentration camps. According to Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, work shy meant unemployed men who "could be proved to have refused without adequate reason employment offered to them on two occasions."⁴

The first persons arrested and sent to concentration camps were communists who had taken part in efforts to undermine the fabric of the German state. Most of these communists arrested were denounced to local authorities by fellow workers and neighbors who were concerned about their activities.

During March and April 1933, the German people reported the activities of over 10,000 communists in Germany. Given the large membership and well-organized activities of the German Communist Party (KPD), the local jails were soon filled, and the National Socialist government in Berlin was forced to decide where to house these persons, who were a clear and present danger to the continuation of Germany as an independent and sovereign nation. With the jails and prisons filled to capacity, local officials began to take over abandoned warehouses and factories to hold the communists. These makeshift holding facilities have since become known as "wild concentration camps" since they were spur-of-the-moment inventions.

The name "concentration camp" simply means an area where dangerous elements are concentrated. Hitler once said the idea for concentration camps came from his studies of the Boer War in South Africa.⁵

During that war, the British built camps and concentrated women and children of Dutch ancestry. During their confinement in British concentration camps, over 26,000 died mainly of starvation, since the British made no effort to feed the unarmed and helpless women, nor did they allow them to leave and go back to their farmsteads. This action of the British against unarmed women and children mainly goes overlooked by Establishment historians, who instead accuse the German concentration camps of being death camps whose sole purpose was killing unarmed civilians. But this is not the case.

The first official concentration camp set up in Germany was established about 12 miles from Munich in the town of Dachau, inside a former gunpowder factory, on March 22, 1933. Unlike what Allied propaganda would have us believe, the Germans were not ashamed of this camp. In fact, Heinrich Himmler held a press conference to announce its opening two days before the first inmates were scheduled to arrive. His announcement was carried in German newspapers,⁶ and the camp was opened with the arrival of 200 communists. But the camp was built to hold 5,000 and was mainly established to act as a deterrent to further communist activity.

Himmler stated that it was his promise not to wait until crimes were committed before arresting criminals, and pledged that, in order to protect the populace, professional criminals who had been sentenced many times would be pursued more ruthlessly than before and isolated away from the German people by being incarcerated in concentration camps. Himmler also added that his camps were to be models of cleanliness, order and instruction. It was through this instruction that Himmler hoped to re-educate minor criminals as well as communists. Himmler had ordered strong disciplinary measures to be employed, but the treatment inmates received was just, and they learned trades through their work and training. In the concentration camps, the motto was: "There is one way to freedom. Its milestones are: obedience, zeal, honesty, order, cleanliness, temperance, truth, sense of sacrifice and love for the Fatherland."⁷

In the Soviet Union's "model" of socialism, the German communists found what they were looking for: liberalism, urbanism, and modernism - all of which rejected the traditional Aryan-German way of life. For this reason, the German communists looked at Hitler's appointment to the chancellorship by President Paul von Hindenburg as a signal for an uprising aimed at creating a German soviet state, closely modeled on the Soviet Union and taking its orders from the Comintern in Moscow. But Hitler saw the threat the communists posed to German society, and after the burning of the Reichstag by a communist, he reacted swiftly to take them into custody. Hitler now decided to build the first concentration camps.

However, instead of being vindictive or out to do harm to the communists, the concentration camp at Dachau was designed to reform them and make them into citizens that the Germans could be proud of - citizens who could return to German society at large and live out their lives as peaceful and proper German men and women. Instead of being an institution aimed at punishment, the German system of concentration camps was designed to reform and to reeducate enemies of the new German state.

A correspondent for The New York Times was allowed to visit Dachau shortly after it was opened and came away with the impression that the commandant of the camp, Theodor Eicke, and the men under his command took their job of reeducation seriously. "They honestly and sincerely believed that their task was pedagogic rather than punitive.... They felt sincerely sorry for the misguided non-Nazis who had not yet found the true faith."⁸ Not only had the inmates not yet found faith in the leadership of Adolf Hitler, but they also took part in or supported subversive activities aimed at overthrowing the state.

An internal document written in 1934 and circulated at Gestapo headquarters stated that National Socialist Germany would not be complete until its opponents learned to support it and identify with the goals of the German community at large. The writer of the document reiterated the educational value and ideological indoctrination that the camps were to instill in the inmates, and suggested imbuing the inmates with the knowledge that upon their release they would be able to become full members of German society.⁹ Just a short time later, another Gestapo document warned all state authorities not to harass released inmates so as not to make their complete re-integration into German society difficult.¹⁰

The Germans themselves often referred to these camps as "education camps." In the summer of 1942, three years after World War II began, Himmler was still emphasizing the re-educational aspects of the camps when he wrote a letter to Oswald Pohl.¹¹ The language that he used in this letter was also given as part of official instructions to guards at the camps. Himmler instructed each guard to make his behavior a personal example to the prisoners, in order to imbue them with respect for the National Socialist state and to teach them how to behave properly.¹² This re-education at the camps was to stress traditional Aryan virtues, such as hard work, strict discipline, a belief in law and order, support for the complete family and respect for traditional German society, as well as encouraging them to respect the National Socialist state and the Nazi movement in general.

Over the years, tens of thousands of inmates were released from the camps once they had shown that they had chosen to reform themselves. On many occasions the commandants of the camps had determined that inmates had abandoned their old ways and had chosen to become loyal members of German society. As late as October 1944, inmates were being released, and many of these were communists who had abandoned their previous beliefs.¹³

This World War II-era woodcut sought to convey the impression that German concentration camps were hardly more than mass torture chambers. The truth is that the German authorities maintained strict rules against mistreatment of prisoners and punished those found in violation of the rules. After the war, many Jews who had been held in the camps complained that Jewish guards inside the camps were actually far more brutal than the Germans and others who were stationed on the periphery of the camps.

Of the persons sent to the concentration camps, many were sent there by court order for fixed terms. Other persons were arrested because of the danger they presented to German society. Some prisoners, who had been convicted during the Weimar era, were sent to the concentration camps after their release from prison. Since some of these prisoners were murderers, rapists and pedophiles, the National Socialist state refused to allow them to return to German society until the authorities were sure that they had abandoned their old ways. Contrary to modern political myth, German newspapers frequently carried stories on the concentration camps and often reported on the internment of dangerous persons.

Many of the camps were open to inspection by foreign diplomats and even by German civilians. Often the curious persons would travel to the camps only to be met by friendly guards and escorted through the camps on a personal tour. Of the tens of thousands of prisoners who were released, most probably told their relatives, friends and neighbors of the conditions present in the camps. Over the years, judges, lawyers, members of the clergy, social workers and repairmen were allowed into the camps for official business. Merchants often visited the camps to bring new stocks of supplies, and local civilians were often employed in the camps. If conditions in the camps had been deplorable, German society would have learned of it and would have been outraged. The Germans were and still are a decent people whose only crime in establishing the camps was showing leniency to persons who wanted to do them harm.

In a book written on the camp established at Oranienburg, Werner Schafer claimed that some citizens in the local communities asked permission to send some of their rebelling children to the camps to learn self-discipline. Schafer also said that there were some prisoners who were offered release who refused since they could not remember doing work since the beginning of the Great Depression.¹⁴ Schafer listed the types of food eaten by the prisoners and computed how much weight they had gained during their internment in the camp. Citizens of National Socialist Germany therefore had good reason to support the officials who administered the camps.

The nature of imprisonment in concentration camps can best be guessed by a document signed by Himmler, in which the principles of internment in a concentration camp were clarified. The document was not meant for public distribution and was classified "secret" before being sent to senior officers of the Gestapo on 27 May 1942. It reads:

¹⁵

Not only does this document illuminate the fact that the concentration camp system was not vindictive or there to terrorize the civilian population, but it also shows that the leaders of the state had concern for the prisoners. Himmler recognized that imprisonment involved isolation and separation from loved ones and was determined to allow the German people to know that the only persons imprisoned in the camps were extreme cases. But more importantly, as the value of hindsight allows us to [see], the document also allows us to understand where some of the Allied propaganda came from; minor officials were eager to add threats to their orders in an attempt to give the impression that they were more powerful than they actually were. Because of the actions of these minor officials, the Allies had the propaganda to claim that the concentration camps were there to terrorize the civilian population and to force them to become subservient to a state that only cared about itself. This was exactly what Himmler was afraid would happen: that the concentration camps would be seen to be a punitive punishment and not the center of re-education that they really were.

To meet the needs of re-education, the camp command in each camp was divided into several departments, which dealt with matters of administration, personnel, transport, communications, mail, equipment, kitchen work, supplies, health and sanitation and so forth. The camp commandants were assisted by a deputy, an adjutant, a master sergeant, a medical officer and education officer, a legal officer, a fire officer and others. The commandants were held personally responsible for the re-education of those prisoners who were not considered to be "lost cases." Because the camps were often open for public inspections, the commandants were also required to have some amount of political sensitivity. Starting in 1942, the commandants were also responsible for the work of the camp doctor and the medical staff.

The camp commandants had full responsibility for almost everything that happened in the camps, except for the work of the political departments. The political department operated in the camp as an extension of the Gestapo, and a plainclothes officer of the secret police headed it. This department dealt with the reception and registration of inmates, and was also in charge of their release. This department:

• Kept files on each inmate that included personal details about the inmate, the inmate's picture and fingerprints;
  
• Was responsible for filing death notices and was responsible for passing this information on to government authorities;
  
• Corresponded with the relatives of the inmates in cases where there was a need for guardianship of underage children, insurance claims and so forth;
  
• Had the authority to decree special conditions of imprisonment;
  
• Was responsible for all interrogation that went on in the camps; and,
  
• Supervised prisoner informers, censorship, field security, and the prevention of rebellion.

Not all members of the command had direct and daily contact with the inmates. The inmates were kept in a special compound within the camps, overseen by their own commanding officer and his staff. Some staff officers were responsible for head counts, others for work arrangements; others actually accompanied prisoners when they went out to work, while other officers were responsible for each of the living quarters, which were themselves referred to as a block. The personal deputy of the camp commandant usually oversaw the prisoner division of the camp.

This grotesque sculpture of "Jews Being Gassed" is displayed at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Although the NBC television extravaganza "Holocaust" - then one of the most-watched events in TV history - featured a scene which implied there were photographs taken of Jews dying in the gas chambers, no such images have ever been found, despite the fact that the Germans did photograph executions of Jews and other anti-German partisans on the Eastern Front. Why Jews seem to revel in such distasteful imagery remains a mystery to many non-Jews who are unable to understand why Jews are not pleased to learn that the extent of the tragedies that befell the Jewish people during World War II was not quite as severe as long believed. For this reason, even many Jewish philosophers question placing the Holocaust at the center of Jewish existence.

The camp commandants were also required to prevent cruelty to inmates. A training manual for camp guards asked the following question: "What is completely prohibited a camp guard? Answer: Under all circumstances he is forbidden to strike prisoners at his own initiative, outside the framework of the disciplinary regulations."

In 1935 Reinhard Heydrich wrote to the camp guards stating that "it is not becoming an interrogator to insult a prisoner, demean him, or behave with rudeness and brutalize or torture him when there is no need to do so." Heydrich went on and warned the camp men that if they beat prisoners they would be court-martialed.¹⁶ Eicke himself wrote in 1937 that "the guards should be instructed to abstain from mistreating prisoners.... Even if a guard had done no more than slap a prisoner's face, the slap will be considered an act of brutality and the guard will be punished."¹⁷

The SS actually punished a number of its own men for their conduct while serving in the concentration camps. Two concentration camp commandants, Adam Gruenwald and Karl Chmielewshi, were placed on trial and found guilty of the deaths of prisoners as a result of brutality in their camps. The SS tried over 700 staff members throughout the course of the Third Reich for their conduct toward inmates. This was because the SS and the National Socialist state always considered concentration camps to be re-education camps first and foremost.

It is true that persons who were considered to be hopeless cases such as habitual offenders were sent to the camps, but most prisoners always could earn their release by conforming to traditional Aryan-German standards of conduct. Unfortunately, many guards could not tell the difference between the habitual criminals and those who were there to be re-educated. This problem plagued the camp administration throughout the history of the Third Reich.

Oswald Pohl complained that "As a result of my personal attention to the matter, and the repeated irregularities recently noted, I have learned that many of the guards at the camps are aware only in the faintest way of the obligations imposed upon them."¹⁸

But historians must take into consideration the fact that tens of thousands of individuals served in the camps. If 700 committed crimes and were punished for it, it only highlights the fact that the other tens of thousands of Germans serving in the camps took their responsibilities seriously. Most camp men understood that their personal behavior was a way of encouraging inmates to aspire to be upstanding and proud citizens of Germany According to an SS booklet: "The prisoner must know that the guard represents a philosophy superior to his, an unblemished political approach and a higher moral level, and the prisoner must take these as a personal example as part of his efforts to correct himself so that he may once again be a loyal citizen in his community."¹⁹

In April 1939, Adolf Hitler celebrated his 50th birthday. To celebrate this occasion, plans were drawn up for a pardon for several thousand prisoners in the camps. The instructions that determined who was to be freed and who would remain as an inmate reveal the different kinds of prisoners in the camps as well as revealing Hitler's generosity and good will. The intention of the pardon was to free inmates who were brought to the camps in 1933, six years before.

It was determined to at least consider releasing repeat offenders who were arrested in the years 1933 to 1934 for short sentences and who had at least served a year in the camps; political and white-collar offenders who had been convicted on minor offenses and who had served at least six months; prisoners of 60 or more years of age, including Jehovah's Witnesses whose faith would not allow them to swear loyalty to the German state; first-time homosexuals who had not been convicted of sexual relations with minors; as well as prisoners who had in the past been members of the Nazi Party.²⁰

Then in 1941 the camps were classified into four groups, in accordance with the severity of the discipline and conditions of imprisonment imposed upon the inmates. Those prisoners who had been imprisoned for minor offenses and whom the SS considered to be possible to re-educate had the conditions of their imprisonment eased.

The workdays in the camps were formalized in 1938. On weekdays, the inmates worked from 0730 to 1200 and from 1230 to 1700, for a total of nine hours a day. On Saturdays work was from 0730-1200, for a total of four and one-half hours. Not only were Saturday afternoons free, but Christian inmates had all of Sunday to attend their own services within the camp and to contemplate the reasons for their imprisonment.²¹

Shown above are concentration camp inmates at their work stations. Clean, orderly working conditions were the norm. War materiel and other products vital to the war effort were among the items produced in the concentration camps and, as a consequence, camp administrators made strenuous efforts to assure that internees were healthy. In many instances, during wartime, the living conditions of camp inmates were sometimes superior to the conditions in which German civilians were living.

Inside the camp, the barracks were segregated by sex, but in many cases prisoners were allowed to marry, even other prisoners. Registration in such cases was carried out by SS officers.²² The heirs of any prisoner who died while being held at one of the camps were eligible to collect their life insurance. Since the life insurance policies would expire if the premiums were not paid, and the inmates were incarcerated and without any substantial income, the SS came up with a solution that Establishment historians will not give them credit for. The SS set up its own fund to pay the insurance premiums of prisoners until the day they died.²³ In this way, the loved ones of incarcerated inmates would not be overly burdened if their relative died while in custody.

In 1936, the question was raised for the first time as to who would take care of the children when both parents were prisoners in concentration camps. Instead of taking the children away from their loving parents as is now done in countries such as the U.S. and Great Britain, the National Socialist authorities in Germany decided it would be better for the children if the parents were released on a rotating monthly basis so at least one parent would always be there to care for their needs. This rotating release continued until one of the parents was released for good.²⁴

Needless to say, this program did pose a slight security risk to Germany, but Hitler apparently was more concerned about the welfare of young German children than he was with anything else.

Even though Allied war-time propaganda concerning the German concentration camps paints a bleak picture with ritual murder, rape, assault and other crimes, the facts of the period do not support this view.

The efforts of the National Socialist authorities to rehabilitate and re-educate incarcerated criminals and communists show a dedication and a firm belief in their convictions that, in comparison, the United States and Great Britain are sorely lacking in their own prison administrations. Those Germans, tens of thousands of patriotic citizens, who served in the camps as doctors, nurses, cooks, clerks, bookkeepers, and guards, were much maligned and viciously attacked by Allied authorities in post-war Germany.

There over 600 prison camps in the United States, all fully operational and ready to receive prisoners. They are all staffed and even surrounded by full-time guards, but they are all empty. These camps are to be operated by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) should Martial Law need to be implemented in the United States.

The Rex 84 Program was established on the reasoning that if a mass exodus of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA. Rex 84 allowed many military bases to be closed down and to be turned into prisons.

Operation Cable Splicer and Garden Plot are the two sub programs which will be implemented once the Rex 84 program is initiated for its proper purpose.

• Garden Plot is the program to control the population.

• Cable Splicer is the program for an orderly takeover of the state and local governments by the federal government.

FEMA is the executive arm of the coming police state and thus will head up all operations. The Presidential Executive Orders already listed on the Federal Register also are part of the legal framework for this operation

The camps all have railroad facilities as well as roads leading to and from the detention facilities. Many also have an airport nearby.

The majority of the camps can house a population of 20,000 prisoners. Currently, the largest of these facilities is just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska.

The Alaskan facility is a massive mental health facility and can hold approximately 2 million people.

U.S. CONCENTRATION CAMPS

A person named Terry Kings wrote an article on his discoveries of camps located in southern California. His findings are as follows:

• Over the last couple months several of us have investigated three soon-to-be prison camps in the Southern California area. We had heard about these sites and wanted to see them for ourselves.

• The first one we observed was in Palmdale, California. It is not operating as a prison at the moment but is masquerading as part of a water facility. Now why would there be a facility of this nature out in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no prisoners? The fences that run for miles around this large facility all point inward, and there are large mounds of dirt and dry moat surrounding the central area so the inside area is not visible from the road. There are 3 large loading docks facing the entrance that can be observed from the road. What are these massive docks going to be loading?

• We observed white vans patrolling the area and one came out and greeted us with a friendly wave and followed us until we had driven safely beyond the area. What would have happened had we decided to enter the open gate or ask questions?

• This facility is across the street from the Palmdale Water Department. The area around the Water Department has fences pointing outward, to keep people out of this dangerous area so as not to drown. Yet, across the street, the fences all point inward. Why? To keep people in? What people? Who are going to be it's occupants?

• There are also signs posted every 50 feet stating: State of California Trespassing Loitering Forbidden By Law Section 555 California Penal Code.

The sign at the entrance says:

Pearblossom Operations and Maintenance Subcenter Receiving Department, 34534 116^th Street East.

There is also a guard shack located at the entrance.

We didn't venture into this facility, but did circle around it to see if there was anything else visible from the road. We saw miles of fences with the top points all directed inward. There is a railroad track that runs next to the perimeter of this fenced area.

The loading docks are large enough to hold railroad cars.

I wonder what they are planning for this facility? They could easily fit 100,000 people in this area. And who would the occupants be?

Another site is located in Brand Park in Glendale. There are newly constructed fences (all outfitted with new wiring that point inward). The fences surround a dry reservoir. There are also new buildings situated in the area. We questioned the idea that there were four armed military personnel walking the park. Since when does a public park need armed guards?

A third site visited was in the San Fernando Valley, adjacent to the Water District. Again, the area around the actual Water District had fences logically pointing out (to keep people out of the dangerous area). And the rest of the adjacent area which went on for several miles was ringed with fences and barbed wire facing inward (to keep what or who in?) Also, interesting was the fact that the addition to the tops of the fences were fairly new as to not even contain any sign of rust on them.

Within the grounds was a huge building that the guard said was a training range for policemen. There were newly constructed roads, new gray military looking buildings, and a landing strip. For what? Police cars were constantly patrolling the several mile perimeter of the area.

From the parking lot of the Odyssey Restaurant a better view could be taken of the area that was hidden from site from the highway. There was an area that contained about 100 black boxes that looked like railroad cars. We had heard that loads of railroad cars have been manufactured in Oregon outfitted with shackles. Would these be of that nature? From our position it was hard to determine.

In searching the Internet, I have discovered that there are about 600 of these prison sites around the country (and more literally popping up overnight do they work all night). They are manned, but yet do not contain prisoners. Why do they need all these non-operating prisons? What are they waiting for? We continuously hear that our current prisons are overcrowded and they are releasing prisoners because of this situation. But what about all these facilities? What are they really for? Why are there armed guards yet no one to protect themselves against? And what is going to be the kick-off point to put these facilities into operation?

What would bring about a situation that would call into effect the need for these new prison facilities? A man-made or natural catastrophe? An earthquake, panic due to Y2K, a massive poisoning, a panic of such dimensions to cause nationwide panic?

Once a major disaster occurs (whether it is a real event or manufactured event does not matter) Martial Law is hurriedly put in place and we are all in the hands of the government agencies (FEMA) who thus portray themselves as our protectors.

• Yet what happens when we question those in authority and how they are taking away all of our freedoms?

• Will we be the ones detained in these camp sites?

• And who are they going to round up?

• Those with guns?

• Those who ask questions?

• Those that want to know what's really going on?

• Does that include any of us?

• The seekers of truth?

When first coming across this information I was in a state of total denial. How could this be? I believed our country was free, and always felt a sense of comfort in knowing that as long as we didn't hurt others in observing our freedom we were left to ourselves. Ideally we treated everyone with respect and honored their uniqueness and hoped that others did likewise.
It took an intensive year of searching into the hidden politics to discover that we are as free as we believe we are. If we are in denial, we don't see the signs that are staring at us, but keep our minds turned off and busy with all the mundane affairs of daily life.

We just don't care enough to find out the real truth, and settle for the hand-fed stories that come our way over the major media sources television, radio, newspaper, and magazines. But it's too late to turn back to the days of blindfolds and hiding our heads in the sand because the reality is becoming very clear.

The time is fast approaching when we will be the ones asking,

"What happened to our freedom? To our free speech? To our right to protect ourselves and our family? To think as an individual? To express ourselves in whatever way we wish?"

Once we challenge that freedom we find out how free we really are. How many are willing to take up that challenge? Very few indeed, otherwise we wouldn't find ourselves in the situation that we are in at the present time. We wouldn't have let things progress and get out of the hands of the public and into the hands of those that seek to keep us under their control no matter what it takes, and that includes the use of force and detainment for those that ask the wrong questions.

Will asking questions be outlawed next? Several instances have recently been reported where those that were asking questions that came too near the untold truth (the cover up) were removed from the press conferences and from the public's ear.

Also, those that wanted to speak to the press were detained and either imprisoned, locked in a psychiatric hospital, slaughtered (through make-believe suicides) or discredited.

• Why are we all in denial over these possibilities?

• Didn't we hear about prison camps in Germany, and even in the United States during World War II?

Japanese individuals were rounded up and placed in determent camps during the duration of the War.

• Where was their freedom?

• You don't think it could happen to you?

Obviously those rounded up and killed didn't think it could happen to them either.

• How could decent people have witnessed such atrocities and still said nothing?

• Are we going to do the same here as they cart off one by one those individuals who are taking a stand for the rights of the citizens as they expose the truth happening behind the scenes?

• Are we all going to sit there and wonder what happened to this country of ours?

• Where did we go wrong?

• How could we let it happen?

There over 800 prison camps in the United States, all fully operational and ready to receive prisoners. They are all staffed and even surrounded by full-time guards, but they are all empty. These camps are to be operated by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) should Martial Law need to be implemented in the United States and all it would take is a presidential signature on a proclamation and the attorney general's signature on a warrant to which a list of names is attached. Ask yourself if you really want to be on Ashcroft's list.

The Rex 84 Program was established on the reasoning that if a "mass exodus" of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA. Rex 84 allowed many military bases to be closed down and to be turned into prisons.

Operation Cable Splicer and Garden Plot are the two sub programs which will be implemented once the Rex 84 program is initiated for its proper purpose. Garden Plot is the program to control the population. Cable Splicer is the program for an orderly takeover of the state and local governments by the federal government. FEMA is the executive arm of the coming police state and thus will head up all operations. The Presidential Executive Orders already listed on the Federal Register also are part of the legal framework for this operation.

The camps all have railroad facilities as well as roads leading to and from the detention facilities. Many also have an airport nearby. The majority of the camps can house a population of 20,000 prisoners. Currently, the largest of these facilities is just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. The Alaskan facility is a massive mental health facility and can hold approximately 2 million people.

Now let's review the justification for any actions taken...

Executive Orders associated with FEMA that would suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These Executive Orders have been on record for nearly 30 years and could be enacted by the stroke of a Presidential pen:... A typical American reaction to footage of the Third Reich’s concentration camps is to shudder and say "But that could never happen here." At which point, an interior monologue voice is compelled to come back in an ominous tone with, "Or could it?" 

The answer to that question, of course, is "yes, of course it could," followed by "in fact, it already has," in addition to "and it still is," with the added stipulation that "it’s possibly much worse than you imagined."

Now granted, even the most paranoid theories regarding the American use of concentration camps falls far short of the atrocities perpetrated by the Germans. No one is claiming that mad scientists are dissecting live prisoners for warped experiments here... Well, OK, the point is only a very few people are claiming that.

But the reality of U.S. concentration camps, both historically and in modern use, can’t be denied. They’ve been used in the Civil War and WWII, and they are currently being used in the War on Terror, and they might be in use on U.S. soil under an insane Federal Emergency Management Agency plan called REX-84, which was drafted by none other than Oliver North at the order of Ronald Reagan (a nutty-sounding conspiracy theory which is unfortunately 100% true).

Speculation only enters into it when you try to estimate just how big the iceberg under that tip really is.


The Past Is Prologue

The U.S. has employed prison camps of one sort or another since the Revolutionary War, when British soldiers were interned in locations like a York, Pa., camp which held about 1,500 prisoners and their families. Revolutionary era camps were relatively benign compared to what the term invokes today, at least for the British, and Native Americans were more often driven West than imprisoned in this period.

Through the first century of U.S. history, the major internment issue affecting Americans was slavery, which for all intents and purposes created a series of forced labor camps across the country, but without the centralized location, i.e., the "concentration" of prisoners.

The first major prison camp operations in the U.S. came during the Civil War. Starting in 1863, both the North and the South began holding large numbers of prisoners. Before 1864, there had been some provisions for the exchange and release of captured soldiers, but these talks broke down when the Confederates refused to treat black soldiers they had captured on an equal footing with white prisoners. The Confederacy wanted to treat former slaves, who has been enlisted by Union forces, as escapees rather than prisoners of war, which the Union found unacceptable, or at least that was the story.

When the Confederates finally agreed to a color-blind prisoner exchange, General Ulysses S. Grant still declined, this time citing his actual reason for refusing, not so much a matter of the race equality principal as the viewpoint (not entirely unreasonable) that exchanged prisoners would become active soldiers again, prolonging the war perhaps indefinitely and escalating the number of casualties.

A final attempt to pull off a prisoner exchange again ran aground on the pretext of race, with General Robert E. Lee informing Grant that "Negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange." His moral superiority intact, Grant broke off negotiations, and both sides set about dealing with the actual question of what to do with all the prisoners they’d been accumulating.

The South took the brunt of public outrage over prison camp conditions, but both sides ran some pretty appalling operations. The most notorious camp was run by the Confederates in Andersonville, Ga. More than 45,000 Union soldiers were imprisoned there during little more than a year of the war. Almost 13,000 died from gangrene, dysentery and diarrhea. A second camp in Macon, designed to hold 10,000 prisoners, was crammed with more than 32,000 by the end of the war. Prisoners were dressed in rags, or nothing at all when the rags became unwearable, and they lived in their own sewage, due to insufficient latrine capacity.

In Union camps, prisoners were also dressed in rags or naked, and contemporaneous news reports described Confederate inmates eating rats and dogs to survive. In Elmira, N.Y., a concentration camp meant for 5,000 prisoners held nearly 10,000. Union soldiers sold tickets to local gawkers, who apparently enjoyed the site of dying men dressed in tatters. Union camps were also infested with smallpox and a host of other deadly diseases.

Welcome to Amerika! But it didn’t end there...


World War II

It’s fairly well-known that during World War II, Americans of Japanese descent were shipped off to internment camps. In the late 1930s, as World War II raged around the globe, U.S. authorities began compiling lists of "suspicious" U.S. nationals and citizens, much as John Ashcroft is doing today.

By 1941, the focus had shifted to Japanese-Americans. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered a list of all first and second generation Japanese in the country, including naturalized citizens and American-born citizens. On Dec. 7, 1941, more than 700 American citizens who happened to be ethnically Japanese were observing the day that would live in infamy from a prison cell.

By year-end, more than 2,000 Japanese-Americans were in detention. Several states began indiscriminate round-ups of Japanese and other "enemy aliens." At the beginning of 1942, American soldiers of Japanese descent were discharged or ordered into menial positions. San Francisco waterfronts were declared verboten to enemy aliens, including Japanese, Germans and Italians. Curfews were established, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy the slavering hordes of angry racists running federal, state and local governments.

Nine years to the day after Adolf Hitler seized the authority to revoke civil rights in Germany and create the first Nazi concentration camps, the House Committee on Unamerican Activities issues a list of charges against Americans of Japanese descent. Truman ordered the enforcement of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the president to order the "removal" of any citizen for any reason.

In March, the Federal Reserve began seizing the property and assets of Japanese-descended citizens, and the War Relocation Authority was formed to "assist" the Japanese-Americans who were being driven out of several states. By summer, well over 100,000 Japanese-Americans had been "evacuated" from the West Coast to other states and military prison camps.

Thousands of these prisoners were exploited for farm labor in the heartland, and thousands more were moved into internment camps. Ten camps were set up in all, holding around 10,000 people each. Riots and protests struck occasionally. While the inmates of these camps were, at least, spared from being made into lampshades, they were forced into labor and some were actually drafted into the military (a practice which resulted in a sharp rebuke from a federal judge when the government tried to prosecute resisters).

As the war ended, the prisoners were eventually allowed to return to their "homes," or rather their hometowns, since most of them had lost all their possessions in the process of being interned. In 1948, the federal government, realizing the error of its ways, generously offered to recompense internees for their property losses — to the tune of 10 cents on the dollar, and then only if they could show proof of their loss.

Welcome to Amerika! But it didn’t end there...


The Reagan Era

We must now dip into the truly creepy conspiracy arena for a while, to claims and conspiracies so extraordinary that they defy belief, to the shadowy corners of the unknown and unproven... except that (uh-oh) they’re true, known and proven.

The year, oh-so-appropriately, is 1984. Sounds bad already? It gets soooooo much worse. Then-President Ronald Reagan issues an executive order for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to start running "Readiness Exercises" for national emergencies, such as a massive terrorist attack.

The simulations, known as REX-84 and Night Train 84, were drafted and run by FEMA’s contact person with the National Security Agency, one Lt. Col. Oliver North. No, really. This is actually, honest-to-God true.

North worked with FEMA from 1982 to 1984, drafting a variety of emergency contingency plans for declared national emergencies (the U.S. has been in a continuously declared state of National Emergency since 1933 and is currently under several new ones in the wake of the 9/11 al Qaeda attack on America).

Among the REX-84 simulations devised with North’s assistance was a plan to declare martial law and "temporarily" suspend constitutional protections such as freedom of speech and due process in criminal prosecutions.

A draft executive order based on North’s fantasy scheme gave the president and FEMA the power to institute these plans on the president’s say-so. The draft order was presented by the White House to then-Attorney General William French Smith, who was appalled and said so. The White House then "dropped" the plan, at least as far as Smith and the public were concerned.

The plans called for the assumption of emergency powers and granted the president to power to enact emergency legislation and judicial functions, essentially destroying the entire fundamental structure of the U.S. Constitution.

As part of REX-84 and the related executive orders, provisions were made for the detention of aliens, enemy aliens and citizens, and restricting the movements of the population. A draft executive order was given to Reagan which would have activated the provisions of Rex-84 according to presidential whim, according to the Miami Herald, which reported that it could not confirm whether or not the order was actually signed.

Finally, we may for a moment flee the unrelenting and horrific true and verifiable portion of our story to venture into the unproven and merely rumored. According to various sources with less credibility (on the face of it) than the Miami Herald, Rex-84 was in fact activated.

According to these stories, FEMA set up detention camps all around the U.S. for use in case of that so-called "emergency" scenario. Some claim that these camps have in fact been built and are fully staffed, just waiting for the day they will be put into use.

Even better, some claim that these concentration camps are already in use, possibly as many as hundreds of them! The FEMA goon who drafted the plans based his blueprint on a scheme he concocted for mass arrests and detentions of black militants during the 1970s. Grant Morrison’s epic comic-book pane to paranoia The Invisibles suggests the camps are already being used for exactly that — the detention and "disappearance" of black radicals. Others have floated this idea, as well as its opposite, that the camps are currently being used to secretly incarcerate white supremacists and members of right-wing militia groups.

Welcome to Amerika! But it doesn’t end there...

Permanent Emergencies

Back to the cold, hard reality. When al Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with hijacked commercial jets, President George W Bush finally got the chance to start throwing some of these nifty, non-Constitutionally-sanctioned powers around.

On September 11, 2001, the FAA grounded the entire domestic air travel industry. The White House and every major federal facility were evacuated. The president himself was swept into the air and tossed about from secret location to secret location like a hot potato. Part of lower Manhattan was evacuated, U.S. financial markets were crippled and shut completely down, and states of emergency were declared in New York and Washington, D.C. And the emergency powers hit parade began.

Within hours of the attacks, long before the smoke had stopped rising from the rubble, the White House had authorized Attorney General John Ashcroft to begin massive roundups of Arab-Americans and foreign nationals of Arabic descent. Whole families were arrested and detained without charges.

No formal accounting of the detentions has ever been offered, so it’s impossible to know just how many were taken, but even low estimates run into the thousands. Their locations were kept secret. Without knowing who was taken, it is also impossible to know how many were deported and how many are still being held.

While many of these detentions were shrouded in secrecy, the war on Afghanistan yielded a bumper crop of prisoners who had to be accounted for. Many were transferred to Camp X-Ray, a heavily fortified compound located in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in order to circumvent any efforts to apply the U.S. judicial process on behalf of those being held. Prisoners included citizens of several countries, including some U.S. citizens. Detention at Camp X-Ray is an indefinite sentence — releases happen only at the whim of the U.S. military, and that whim is rare. Camp X-Ray, presumably the most humanitarian of the detention facilities in use, is a harsh but apparently semi-humane set-up, with Orwellian propaganda posters in abundance and tiny razor-wire cells sized just large enough to allow prisoners to lie down.

Other high-security prisoners are being kept in unknown locations around the world, under unknown conditions. According to various media reports, prisoners at military compounds in Afghanistan and elsewhere are kept under duress in order to encourage "cooperation." Some prisoners, such as accused dirty bomber Jose Padilla are kept in mainland military brigs. Others, like al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, have completely disappeared from any documented location for "special" treatment.

Shortly after 9/11, crazy apocalyptic Attorney General John Ashcroft (image right) called for the creation of detention camps to hold anyone designated as an "enemy combatant" in the War on Terrorism. As seen in Padilla’s case, this can include noncombatants arrested by domestic law enforcement on U.S. soil. The White House is arguing in court that the president has the sole authority to designate an enemy combatant for any reason the president sees fit, and the Justice Department has further argued that U.S. courts have no jurisdiction to challenge such a designation.

After a flurry of public protest, the "detention camp" discussion went sub rosa. But under existing presidential authorities and executive orders issued both before and after 9/11, there is no need for public discussion. The camps could (under the sketchy legal justifications drafted by current and previous administrations) be open for business without a word ever being spoken in public.

Furthermore, it’s been explicitly stated by various federal, state and local officials that if the U.S. terror alert status ever rises to Code Red, anything goes — and that includes martial law, tanks on city streets, enforced curfews, restricted travel, unlimited secret arrests and unlimited mass detentions... Sky’s the limit, Oliver North-style!

Welcome to Amerika! Who knows what tomorrow will bring? Hell, who wants to?

No one knows what freedom feels like more than the inmates of a Federal Supermax prison, who have none. What most people take for granted as mundane everyday tasks – simple things like making coffee in the morning, feeding the cat, filling up the gas tank and waiting in line at the bank – are the stuff of fantasies of those in Supermax prisons. After conviction, these men spend the rest of their lives boxed in by steel walls, their communication with the outside world shut off entirely. But it’s not easy to end up here. The criminal justice system does not throw anyone into such desolate conditions. To be admitted, the crime must seriously infringe upon the freedom of others.

What Is A Federal Supermax Prison?

Approximately 25,000 inmates in the United States spend their days in the most extreme state of non-freedom known to the West. A Federal Supermax Prison, short for super-maximum security, is a prison, or section of a prison, that is reserved for only the most dangerous criminals. It is a highly guarded containment facility in which each prisoner is kept in a single, tiny steel unit and only taken out for a solitary hour of exercise each day. That’s 23 hours of solitary confinement every day for a minimum of 25 years. They eat their meals alone, pushed through a slot in the door, they exercise alone and they are allowed absolutely no contact with the outside world.

The infographic below gives a detailed visual of the “home” of these prisoners, along with many grim facts about the reality of prison life. As you can see, the cell does not look inviting and it does not look comfortable. Freedom may only exist in memories and fantasies for these men, but could they tell you what it means in their dreams? Absolutely.

How Did They Get There?

Such highly contained and segregated prison units are determined fit only for the “worst of the worst.” Inmates kept in these extremely isolated, cold and lonely cells are deemed high-risk prisoners who pose a threat to national or international security. They are generally not white collar thieves, robbers or drug dealers; these are dangerous mass murderers who would kill again given the chance. Thus, they are not allowed any contact with other people. By contrast, medium- and low-risk prison facilities may still separate prisoners from each other, but not to the extreme degree of those souls in permanent solitary confinement.

Who Are They?

You have probably heard of or seen TV reenactments of the infamous men kept in Supermax prisons. One thing they all have in common? Pervasive plans to murder, destroy or harm mass amounts of people without remorse. Ted Kazcynski, more commonly known as the “Unabomber,” made headlines in the 1990s for his covert mail bombings, which killed three people and harmed dozens. This particular domestic terrorism was based on his belief that he needed to call a revolution against our modern technological society. He does not believe he is insane, and pleaded guilty to life in prison without possibility of parole.

Who else makes the cut? Terrorists are at the top of the list for Supermax prisons. Richard Reid is another man who harbors nefarious plans to destroy, this time in the name of Al-Queda. More commonly referred to as the “shoe bomber” because he tried to blow up an airplane using explosives hidden in his shoes, Reid also faces a sentence of life in prison without any chance of parole. Raul Leon, leader of the Mexican mafia, spends his days in solitary confinement, along with Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, and Terry Nichols, accomplice in the Oklahoma City bombings.

As you can see, Federal Supermax prisons are not simply for your Average Joe Criminal. Those unfortunate enough to be locked in one of these steel cages have committed heinous crimes against humanity, and would continue to do so if set free. Florence, Colorado houses the only complete Supermax prison in the U.S., though there are solitary confinement units within regular prisons throughout the country. Built in 1994, no one has ever escaped.

Criminal Justice

For these prisoners, freedom is something of the past. But for their victims and would-be victims, freedom has been preserved and upheld. Inmates like the Unabomber may have had their freedom of movement stripped of them, but such extreme punitive measures are only a result of their unashamed infringement on the rights and freedoms of others. Most everyone would agree that criminal justice has been employed, as these men are now incapable of causing harm to anyone but themselves. The dreams of prisoners in Supermax facilities may consist of anything from savoring a home cooked meal to planning their next attack strategy, but one thing is for sure: the worst prisons are reserved only for the worst criminals, and they will do neither ever again.

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One thought on “Anatomy of a SuperMax Prison”

1. jamesfugate1 month agoI understand that you believe you are protecting the citizens of the unitedstates and by keeping them from writing letters to whom may possibly lead you to ay accomplice is in some way you have crippled your own by not following to who there sent to so you must say that isn’t very smart it seems you’ve made things harder for every one now these people who ever they are will continue to do there evil thanks to all you smart asses and killing innocent people so I no every one has there own strategy thank you all for keeping us all safe god bless you all and every one.

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