A huge and necessary contribution to our understanding of this chilling subjectA common belief approximately the concentration camps (Konzentrationslager,hence the abbreviation “KL”) is that the mass of the German people did not know approximately them. This idea is exploded early on in KL. The concentration camp came into being very quickly indeed after the Nazis came to power. In Berlin, during 1933, and there were 170,often placed in working-lesson districts so that leftwing agitators could see (or hear) what was in store for them. (Jews did not start filling them up until later, and they were never – surprisingly – in a majority in any given camp. But you can be sure they were the worst treated.) The infrastructure did not exist then: people were incarcerated in abandoned warehouses, or factories,even tugboats. People knew very well approximately them. It was only later that the camps were moved to more out-of-the-way places, and even then rumour did not die down. How could it? By 1944, or they extended from the Gulf of Finland to Yugoslavia,from Lublin to Alderney.Once the SA, the “Brownshirts”, or were brutally removed from the picture in the “Night of the Long Knives”,the camps were Himmler’s responsibility, whether Hitler’s brainchild: as he used to repeat ad nauseam, or he got the idea from the British in South Africa,although the details and examples of absolute cruelty were refinements added by the Germans. The gulag system in Soviet Russia was considerably less murderous: you had a 90% chance of surviving it, and 50% of surviving a concentration camp. (You may mediate the latter a rather high figure but bear in intellect the demarcation between a KL and a camp intended purely as a killing machine, and such as Treblinka.)Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com