The nightmare process of the camps

[dissentient]

Was reading about the process of the prisoners of the concentration camps during World War 2. Listen to this, first, if you were lucky enough to be selected as "being able to work", which meant you weren't immediately sent to the gas chambers, then you went to another place in the camp, and they would cut all your body hair off, sometimes with a dull razor. This was especially humiliating and traumatic for the women. And this would happen after you had to go take a shower, and get this, the shower would either be unbearably hot water, or freezing cold water, or when they were feeling particularly sadistic, they would alternate them. That was your "welcome" to the camps. And they would force prisoners already there to play upbeat music as all the new ones would arrive, yep, it was grotesque.

Then, you were given no soap to bathe yourself, and had to do hard labor all day. So, you have to wash yourself in dirty water, with no soap. And the toilets were just holes in a long line, no privacy at all. And all that was just the beginning of the nightmare. Every morning you were woken up at 4 or 5 am, then you had to attend a roll call, which meant standing perfectly still, for hours, while they gave instructions for the day and counted everyone. If you didn't, then you were beaten. And then in the evening, after doing back breaking work all day, you had to do it again, standing still for hours during roll call. Oh, and also, you couldn't talk to anyone during roll call. You had to be silent. And you had to survive on watery soup and half a piece of bread as your food all day, while doing hard labor. One of the worst things was the "standing cells", you could be punished just for the tiniest infraction, it could be anything the guards said on a whim, and you were put in a cell, where it was so tight, that you literally had to stand for days. You couldn't even sit down in the cell, it was that small. And no place to go to the bathroom either of course, except right there, which would eventually cause burns on the skin. Sometimes you were left in there for days. Just reading all the little details of daily life and the processing is pretty horrible, there are no words.

[Journeyman]

1. If you want hope from the death factories, read Viktor Frankl, "Man's Search for Meaning". . .

If you desire understanding, read Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

[OnyxCollie]

2. Speaking of Arendt,

{The Origins of Totalitarianism}: A Reply. Author: Hannah Arendt Source: The Review of Politics, 15(1) (Jan., 1953) pp. 76 - 84.

Thus my first problem was how to write historically about something-totalitarianism-which I did not want to conserve but on the contrary felt engaged to destroy. My way of solving this problem has given rise to the reproach that the book was lacking in unity. What I did -and what I might have done anyway because of my previous training and the way of my thinking-was to discover the chief elements of totalitarianism back in history as far as I deemed proper and necessary. That is, I did not write a history of totalitarianism but an analysis in terms of history; I did not write a history of antisemitism or of imperialism, but analyzed the element of Jew-hatred and the element of expansion insofar as these elements were still clearly visible and played a decisive role in the totalitarian phenomenon itself. The book, therefore, does not really deal with the "origins" of totalitarianism - as its title unfortunately claims - but gives a historical account of the elements which crystallized into totalitarianism, this account is followed by an analysis of the elemental structure of totalitarian movements and domination itself. The elementary structure of totalitarianism is the hidden structure of the book while its more apparent unity is provided by certain fundamental concepts which run like red threads through the whole.

The same problem of method can be approached from another side and then presents itself as a problem of "style." This has been praised as passionate and criticized as sentimental. Both judgments seem to me a little beside the point. I parted quite consciously with the tradition of [i[sine ira et studio of whose greatness I was fully aware, and to me this was a methodological necessity closely connected with my particular subject matter.

Let us suppose - to take one among many possible examples -that the historian is confronted with excessive poverty in a society of great wealth, such-as the poverty of the British working classes during the early stages of the industrial revolution. The natural human reaction to such conditions is one of anger and indignation because these conditions are against the dignity of man. If I describe these conditions without permitting my indignation to interfere, I have lifted this particular phenomenon out of its context in human society and have thereby robbed it of part of its nature, deprived it of one of its important inherent qualities. For to arouse indignation is one of the qualities of excessive poverty insofar as poverty occurs among human beings. I therefore can not agree with Professor Voegelin that the "morally abhorrent and the emotionally existing will overshadow the essential," because I believe them to form an integral part of it. This has nothing to do with sentimentality or moralizing although, of course, either can become a pitfall for the author. If I moralized or became sentimental, I simply did not do well what I was supposed to do, namely to describe the totalitarian phenomenon as occurring, not on the moon, but in the midst of human society. To describe the concentration camps sine ira is not to be "objective," but to condone them; and such cannot be condoning changed by a condemnation which the author may feel duty bound to add but which remains unrelated to the description itself. When I used the image of Hell, I did not mean this allegorically but literally: it seems rather obvious that men who have lost their faith in Paradise, will not be able to establish it on earth; but it is not so certain that those who have lost their belief in Hell as a place of the hereafter may not be willing and able to establish on earth exact imitations of what people used to believe about Hell. In this sense I think that a description of the camps as hell on earth is more "objective," that is, more adequate to their essence than statements of a purely sociological or psychological nature.

~snip~

Reflections of this kind, originally caused by the special nature of my subject, and the personal experience which is necessarily involved in an historical investigation that employs imagination consciously as an important tool of cognition, resulted in a critical approach toward almost all interpretation of contemporary history. I hinted at this in two short paragraphs of the Preface where I warned the reader against the concepts of Progress and of Doom as "two sides of the same medal" as well as against any attempt at "deducing the unprecedented from precedents." These two approaches are closely interconnected. The reason why Professor Voegelin can speak of "the putrefaction of Western civilization" and the "earthwide expansion of Western foulness" is that he treats "phenomenal differences" which to me as differences of factuality are all-important-as minor outgrowths of some "essential sameness" of a doctrinal nature. Numerous affinities between totalitarianism and some other trends in Occidental political or intellectual history have been described with this result, in my opinion: they all failed to point out the distinct quality of what was actually happening. The "phenomenal differences," far from "obscuring" some essential sameness, are those phenomena which make totalitarianism "totalitarian," which distinguish this one form of government and movement from all others and therefore can alone help us in finding its essence. What is unprecedented in totalitarianism is not primarily its ideological content, but the event of totalitarian domination itself. This can be seen clearly if we have to admit that the deeds of its considered policies have exploded our traditional categories of political thought (totalitarian domination is unlike all forms of tyranny and despotism we know of) and the standards of our moral judgment (totalitarian crimes are very inadequately described as "murder" and totalitarian criminals can hardly be punished as "murderers&quot .

28 Words of Hate: Rotting In Guantánamo/Hell
http://www.commondreams.org/further/2015/02/09/28-words-hate-rotting-guantanamohell

On Monday, an already-drawn-out pre-trial hearing for five men accused of conspiring in the 9/11 attacks suddenly went into abrupt recess after detainees said they recognized a courtroom translator as a former CIA worker at one of its black sites. The halt in the proceedings was only one glitch among many facing Guantánamo trials - from mounting backlogs to unwieldy travel to and from Cuba to the FBI’s reported attempted infiltration of defense counsel - recently revealed to be costing US taxpayers at least a whopping $7,600 per minute, or $2,294,117 per day. Though the tribunals only met 34 days last year, they cost over $78 million. That's in addition to the cost of continuing to hold 122 men at Gitmo for an estimated $3.5 million per detainee.

For many, those insane financial costs pale before the even more egregious moral and legal ones. A Senate hearing on a bill that would effectively block the executive branch’s ability to transfer or release those currently still held featured much talk of threats, terrorism and national security. Lacking in the discussion, some noted, was any mention of the human cost of holding so many men under such brutal conditions for so long - up to 13 years - who have never been found guilty of or even charged with a crime - and about half of whom were cleared years ago by the same government that imprisoned them in the first place.

Enter freshman wacko winger Sen. Tom Cotton, who was actually elected. Cotton seemed to stun military officials with his bizarre, pretzel-logic that because terrorism pre-dated Gitmo, how could Gitmo possibly inspire yet more terrorism and anger at the U.S., as opponents often argue. The astute Cotton also seems to have missed the possible connection between the orange jumpsuits worn by ISIS terrorists and prisoners at Guantánamo. Showing a startling level of acumen and empathy, he went onto declare, “In my opinion the only problem with Guantánamo Bay is there are too many empty beds and cells there right now...As far as I’m concerned, every last one of them can rot in Hell, but as long as they don’t do that they can rot in Guantanamo Bay.”

Some reported the room seemed "oddly quiet" after he spoke those "28 words of hate." Later, lawyers for some of the detainees noted that Cotton in his "reflexive hatred" of their clients didn't seem to get that Guantánamo is, in fact, the same as hell for them. The lawyer for Tariq Ba Odah noted his client arrived at Gitmo in 2002, was on hunger strike for eight years, and has since then been subjected to solitary confinement, violent cell extractions and daily forced feedings through his nose, all without ever being charged with a crime, tried, or allowed to know the length of his sentence. "The anguish this uncertainty produces is hellish indeed," he notes.

[Turbineguy]

6. One of the successes of Al-Qaeda

is to cost. And those running this operation have been helpful in that regard.

[ripcord]

3. I visited Dachu in high school

36 years later and it is still affecting me.

[yeoman6987]

4. I visited there too

After a night at Octoberfest. Sobered me up real quick. I still am affected by it too.

[blkmusclmachine]

5. Sounds like Guantanamo.

[SheilaT]

7. As awful as Guantanamo is, the concentration

camps of the Nazi regime were even worse.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib were in any way okay. But what the Nazis did was a degree of dehumanization unmatched in human history. And they did it to millions of people.

I've read any number of books on the various concentration camps, recently watched a several part series about Auschwitz on Netflix. On my honeymoon in 1980, when we went to Poland, where part of my husband's family was from, I insisted we visit Auschwitz. He was understandably reluctant, as he is Jewish, although all of his immediate family to the second or third degree, got out before the Nazis arrived.

As difficult as it was, I'm very glad we went, and he was also. More than once I've wondered if I could have survived, had I been around then. Part of that answer depends on how old I would have been. In my younger days, possibly yes. Now that I'm well over 60, the answer is no, not at my age. Oh, maybe I'd have survived the initial selection, but I would not have had the strength and resilience of youth to make it very long.

And it's hard to realize, even though it's important to remember, that each and every person that perished was part of a larger network: son, daughter, father, mother, sister, brother, niece, nephew, cousin, and so on. Entire families were wiped out totally.

And so, while Guantanamo is unspeakably awful and should never have come into existence, it pales in comparison to Auschwitz and the system of death camps of the Nazi era.

[KingCharlemagne]

8. Brilliant response (which really should be its own OP, imo). Guantanamo offends

the decent respect of mankind because it violates individual rights of those detained, while the Nazi regime of concentration and death camps transcends traditional bourgeois conceptions of 'individual rights' to plumb the nexus between advanced industrial civilization and genocide. Really not in the same category, imo.

[SheilaT]

10. Thank you.

I don't often start threads on my own, so I don't think I'll do it with this.

[cali]

12. not even close.

Most inhabitants of the concentration camps died horribly. the op didn't convey the horrors of concentration camps too well.

here is more info:

<snip>

Two types of barracks, brick and wooden, housed prisoners in Birkenau concentration camp. The brick buildings were erected in great haste, without suitable insulation, on marshy ground. More than 700 people were assigned to each barrack, although in practice the figure was sometimes higher. These barracks lacked any true heating; nor did they contain sanitary facilities.

The second type of accommodation for prisoners at Birkenau consisted of wooden stable-barracks (Pferdestallbaracken). The interiors, designed to hold 52 horses, were partitioned into stalls. The stalls contained three-tier wooden bunks. Several hundred prisoners lived in each such barrack.

Dampness, leaky roofs, and the fouling of straw and straw mattresses by prisoners suffering from diarrhea made difficult living conditions worse. The barracks swarmed with various sorts of vermin and rats. A constant shortage of water for washing, and the lack of suitable sanitary facilities, aggravated the situation.


<snip>

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/auconditions.html

[KingCharlemagne]

9. What are you reading, just out of curiosity? - nt

[GliderGuider]

11. My mother-in-law is an Auschwitz survivor, after going through Bergen-Belsen first.

Her stories mirror the one you posted. She tends to go pretty light on the details.

[HereSince1628]

13. Yes, the point was to cage, work and punish people until their deaths

It -was- the final solution to millions of various types of deviants that didn't meet the accepted moral, racial and religious standards of Nazis. The Nazis being people who at least -said- they acted in a manner that kept God on their side.