princeton univ pr the order of terror nov 1996

THE ORDER OF TERROR
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Wolfgang Sofsky
THE ORDER OF TERROR:
THE CONCENTRATION CAMP
Translated by William Templer
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Originally published as Die Ordnung des Terrors. Das Konzentrationslager
Copyright  1993 S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main
English translation copyright  1997 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sofsky, Wolfgang.
[Ordnung des Terrors. English.]
The order of terror : The concentration camp / Wolfgang Sofsky :
translated by William Templer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-691-04354-X (cl : alk. paper)
1. Concentration camps—Germany—History. 2. World War, 1939–
1945—Concentration camps—Germany. 3. Concentration camps—
Psychological aspects. 4. Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter–Partei.
Schutzstaffel—History. I. Title.
DD256.5.S5813 1996
940.54′7243—dc20 96-19212 CIP
The publication of this work has been subsidized by Inter Nationes, Bonn
This book has been composed in Times Roman

Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet
the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production
Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources
Printed in the United States of America by Princeton Academic Press
10987654321
It happened,
therefore it can happen again. . . .
It can happen everywhere.
(Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved)
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Contents
List of Tables and Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi
PART I: INTRODUCTION 1
1. Entry 3
2. Absolute Power 16
3. On the History of the Concentration Camps 28
PART II: SPACE AND TIME 45
4. Zones and Camp Plans 47
5. Boundary and Gate 55
6. The Block 65
7. Camp Time 73
8. Prisoner’s Time 82
PART III: SOCIAL STRUCTURES 95
9. The SS Personnel 97
10. Classes and Classifications 117
11. Self-Management and the Gradation of Power 130
12. The Aristocracy 145
13. Mass, Exchange, Dissociation 153
PART IV: WORK 165

14. Work and Slavery 167
15. The Beneficiaries 173
16. Work Situations 185
viii CONTENTS
197PART V: Violence and Death
17. The Muselmann 199
18. Epidemics 206
19. Terror Punishment 214
20. Violent Excesses 223
21. Selection 241
22. The Death Factory 259
Epilogue 276
Selected Glossary and Abbreviations 283
Abbreviations Used in Notes and Bibliography 289
Notes 291
Bibliography 343
Tables and Figures
Tables
Table 1: New Admissions and Deaths in Four Camps, 1937–1945 36
Table 2: Admissions and Deaths in Selected Camps, 1933–1945 43
Table 3: Transports and Selected Admissions to Auschwitz,
August 18–31, 1943 253
Table 4: Death Factories in Auschwitz and the Immediate Vicinity:
Capacity and Period of Operation 263
Figures
Figure 1: The System of Classifications 120
Figure 2: The Ordering of Social Structure 126
Figure 3: The Social Field 128
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Acknowledgments

I WISH TO THANK the many friends, colleagues, and students with whom I have
had the opportunity over a number of years to discuss the problems treated
here. Their stimulating comments and probing questions have contributed to
the sharpening of my thinking on these topics. In particular, I owe a debt of
gratitude to Horst Kern, Walter Euchner, Iring Fetscher, Hans Joas, and Bernd
Weisbrod for their detailed remarks and critical suggestions. Rainer W.
Hoffmann read an earlier version and made helpful comments and sugges-
tions. Michael R. Heydenburg’s remarks contained many valuable pointers.
Martin Kronauer, Michael Neumann, and Rainer Paris followed the progress
of my work on the manuscript with friendly interest and, in numerous fruitful
discussions, helped me overcome various obstacles. Fred Lönker was, as al-
ways, a trusted companion and an attentive reader.
I would like to extend special thanks to the Department of Sociology at
Göttingen University for generously allowing me ample time to do research
and complete the manuscript. The study was accepted by the Division of So-
cial Sciences at Göttingen University as a habilitation thesis in the spring of
1992, and was slightly altered for publication in its German original edition by
S. Fischer Verlag in 1993.
The English-language edition is a faithful rendering of the German original
and contains some added bibliographical references and minor changes. I am
very grateful to William Templer for his accurate and insightful translation,
and for preparing the glossary.
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Part I
INTRODUCTION
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1
Entry
MARCH 22, 1933. The first prisoners arrive in Dachau.
1

The abandoned
powder factory looks dreary and depressing: more than twenty flat stone build-
ings, half-dilapidated, dot the grounds. The only structure that appears
usable is the former administration building. It has just been fenced in with a
triple barrier of barbed wire. Down in the basement, the police officers, newly
arrived for work the evening before, prepare a list, recording the names of
the inmates. There is no set uniform for the prisoners. The procedure is or-
derly: no hitches, no shouting, no one is mistreated. No one thinks of
shaving the heads of the newcomers. That evening, the first meal is distributed:
tea, bread, a chunk of liverwurst for every inmate. In the rush of the moment,
that is all the food that can be put together. Afterward, the prisoners are led
upstairs to makeshift sleeping quarters on the first floor. Because there are no
cots and there is no straw, they have to bed down on the concrete floor. The
thin blanket each prisoner is given from police stocks is meager protection
against the cold.
The next day, the prisoners search through the empty buildings and factory
halls, rummaging for material. From scattered boards they piece together
the first beds. A joiner is given permission to set up a workshop. The inmates
fend for themselves; they make do. No one is forced to work against his or
her will. But there are few tools, and there is not enough barbed wire to
close off the grounds. The hoes and spades that are gradually amassed are
kept in a storeroom administered by an inmate together with a camp official.
Surveillance is correct and proper. Guards and prisoners converse; they even
discuss the political situation. Some inmates are slipped cigarettes on the
sly; rations are adequate and tasty. Prisoners get the same meals as the security
personnel.
But this lasts only for a few days. One night, the sleeping inmates are
awakened by the thud of marching feet, the clang of weapons. An SS unit,
militiamen in brown shirts and black caps, has formed up in front of the admin-
istration building. Its commander gives the men a pep talk that terrifies the

prisoners:
Comrades of the SS! You all know what the Führer has called upon us to do. We
haven’t come here to treat those swine inside like human beings. In our eyes, they’re
not like us, they’re something second-class. For years, they’ve been able to pursue
their criminal devices. But now we’ve got the power. If these swine had taken over,
4 CHAPTER 1
they’d have made sure our heads rolled in the dust. So we too know no sentimental-
ity. Any man in our ranks who can’t stand the sight of blood doesn’t belong here, he
should get out. The more of these bastards we shoot, the fewer we’ll have to feed.
2
Twelve years later, on the afternoon of April 29, 1945, three jeeps of the
Forty-second Rainbow Division, United States Army, roll through the south-
ern entrance into the camp enclosure. In order to open the gate to the prisoners’
barracks, a soldier must shove aside the body of a prisoner who was shot the
night before in an attempt to get out to meet the Americans. The rattle of
machine-gun fire sounds from the watchtowers. On the north side of the camp,
a Forty-fifth Infantry Division patrol is still locked in battle with the last of the
SS. But the huge expanse of the Appellplatz (roll-call square), the camp yard,
stands empty. The main street of the camp is also deserted. Among the soldiers
is a journalist, Marguerite Higgins. Her report appears a few days later in the
New York Herald Tribune:
But the minute the two of us entered, a jangled barrage of “Are you Americans?”
in about sixteen languages came from the barracks 200 yards from the gate. An
affirmative nod caused pandemonium.
Tattered, emaciated men, weeping, yelling and shouting “Long live America!”
swept toward the gate in a mob. Those who could not walk limped or crawled. . . .
I happened to be the first through the gate, and the first person to rush up to me turned
out to be a Polish Catholic priest, a deputy of August Cardinal Hlond, Primate of
Poland, who was not a little startled to discover that the helmeted, uniformed, begog-
gled individual he had so heartily embraced was not a man. In the excitement, which

was not the least dampened by the German artillery and the sounds of battle in the
northern part of the camp, some of the prisoners died trying to pass through the
electrically charged barbed wire. Some who got out after the wires were decharged
joined in the battle, when some ill-advised S.S. men holding out in a tower fired upon
them. The prisoners charged toward the tower and threw all six S.S. men out the
window. After an hour and a half of cheering, the crowd, which would virtually mob
each soldier that dared to venture into the excited milling group, was calmed down
enough to make possible a tour of the camp.
The barracks at Dachau, like those at Buchenwald, had the stench of death and
sickness. But at Dachau there were six barracks like the infamous No. 61 at Buchen-
wald, where the starving and dying lay virtually on top of each other in quarters
where 1200 men occupied a space intended for 200. The dead—400 died of sickness
yesterday—lay on concrete walks outside the quarters and others were being carried
out as the reporters went through.
The mark of starvation was on all the emaciated corpses. Many of the living were
so frail it seemed impossible they could still be holding on to life. The crematorium
and torture chambers lay outside the prisoner inclosures. Situated in a wood close by
was a new building that had been built by prisoners under Nazi guards. Inside, in the
two rooms used as torture chambers, an estimated 1,200 bodies were piled. In the
ENTRY 5
crematorium itself were hooks on which the S.S. men hung their victims when they
wished to flog them or to use any of the other torture instruments. Symbolic of the
S.S. was a mural the S.S. men themselves had painted on the wall. It showed a
headless man in uniform with the S.S. insigne on the collar. The man was astride a
huge inflated pig into which he was digging his spurs. . . . Below the camp were
cattle cars in which prisoners from Buchenwald had been transported to Dachau.
Hundreds of dead were still in the cars due to the fact that prisoners in the camp had
rejected S.S. orders to remove them. It was mainly the men from these cattle cars that
the S.S. leaders had shot before making their escape. Among those who had been left
for dead in the cattle cars was one man still alive who managed to lift himself from

the heap of corpses on which he lay.
3
The liberators found thirty-three thousand inmates still alive in Dachau—a
third of them Polish, thousands of them Russian, French, Yugoslav, Italian.
Prisoners from thirty-four nations, and about a thousand Germans. In their
zebra-striped rags, the survivors looked like creatures from another planet.
Liberation had arrived, yet the dying was far from over. During the following
month, another 2,226 inmates would perish from exhaustion or typhoid fever.
Civilians would loot the nearby SS supply depot, oblivious to the procession
of death nearby. Children on bicycles would ride past the corpses, their handle-
bars slung with clothing picked up along the way.
It began as terror against political adversaries, and it ended with the death of
millions. In the beginning, vengeance raged: the lust for revenge of a regime
that had just gained power, bent on suppressing any who had stood in its way.
But after its opponents had been eliminated, a new species of absolute power
was unleashed that shattered all previous conceptions of despotism or dictato-
rial brutality: systematic destruction by means of violence, starvation, and
labor—the businesslike annihilation of human beings. In the span of twelve
years, the concentration camp metamorphosed from a locus of terror into a
universe of horror.
Some survivors reported on the camps and their ordeal immediately after
liberation, others only after decades had elapsed. The justice authorities
amassed a large corpus of documents, affidavits, and testimony. But trials were
late in coming and few in number. Some of the verdicts smack of astounding
leniency, although they also attest to the discomfort felt by the judges, their
perplexity in applying juridical norms to the exceptional “emergency” condi-
tions of the camps. Educators, officially charged with the task of “mastering
the past,” have tried laboriously to impart a kind of historical conscience to the
generations born later—as if the mass death were a morality play from which
coming generations might learn a lesson. Historiographers have been able to

establish sequences of events and interconnections, and have documented the
history of several camps. In recent years, younger researchers in local history
have been combing the archives, collecting oral testimony from witnesses of
6 CHAPTER 1
the time, and unearthing evidence of the many unknown camps that existed
back then in the neighborhoods—just around the corner, across the street or
down the block. Yet although numerous facts are now familiar, our under-
standing lags behind. The reality of the camps appears to burst the bounds of
imagination, the precincts of conceivability. It still triggers diverse forms of
defense meant to exculpate conscience, to extinguish memory.
When it comes to defensive maneuvers, people are far from finicky. The
spectrum ranges from bald denial of the camps to comparisons that downplay
their gravity to intellectually more subtle techniques of reinterpretation and
rationalization. Much energy is expended on defensive parrying; the snarl of
diverse methods employed is often difficult to disentangle. Thus, the very exis-
tence of the death camps is still categorically denied by some. Then there is
“everyday revisionism,” a grim accountancy that tallies up a balance sheet of
atrocities: Auschwitz set against Dresden, Dachau weighed against Katyn
or the “special camps” of the Soviet occupiers, genocide on one side of the
scales and the expulsion of the German population on the other—the obscene
numbers game of a fallacious arithmetic that seeks to defuse the past, to
dispose of it by balancing the ledger. There are those who claim they knew
nothing, although the regime had instrumentalized the concentration camps,
using them to intimidate the German people. Many who fervidly celebrated
the regime looked idly on as their neighbors suddenly vanished. When a col-
umn of prisoners was marched through town, onlookers stood watching—
indifferent, maybe frightened, perhaps even gloating. This gives rise to a
double denial: a disavowal today of what the watchers had even then already
refused to acknowledge.
When that method fails, people take refuge in euphemism. Many Germans

(and not only Germans) are quite willing to incorporate the title of an Ameri-
can television series into their vocabulary in order to be able to delete the term
“genocide.” In the meanwhile, the word “holocaust” has been drained of
meaning, reduced to a token that permits rapid concord, sparing one the need
to confront the facts. In the language of the Hebrew psalms, however, “holo-
caust” signifies a “complete burnt offering.”
4
It designates the ritual martyr-
dom that Jews took upon themselves because they refused to renounce their
faith. The expression thus forges a link, totally inadmissible, between the
genocidal murder of the Jews and the fate of Jewish martyrs, although the Jews
were not murdered because they had refused to renounce their religious con-
victions, but simply because they were Jews. By distortion of the term’s core
meaning, the impression is generated that the mass murder of the Jews had
some deeper religious import—as if the victims had, in a sense, offered them-
selves up for the slaughter.
Another example of such discursive disburdenment is the redesignation of
the numerous concentration camps that existed on German soil, the external
work Kommandos (Außenkommandos) of the main camps. The list of such
ENTRY 7
camps reads like a directory of Central European place-names. Yet abruptly,
conveniently, they have been retermed “work camps” (Arbeitslager) or “ex-
ternal stations” (Außenstationen). These concentration camps were located
right next door, along busy transportation arteries, in the nearby municipal
forest preserves, in requisitioned school buildings, or on the grounds of private
firms. Now that regional researchers, often underfunded, have uncovered
evidence of many a forgotten local camp, concerned city fathers want to
have the public believe that these camps were not such a terrible thing after
all. A truly fastidious distinction is made between the supposedly innocuous
“work camps” inside Germany and the “death camps” (Todeslager)inthe

distant East—a basic difference that no one had contested. Yet talk of such
“work camps” masks the truth: that labor itself also led to death; that the ex-
hausted and emaciated inmates who toiled in such camps were removed and
sent back to die in a main camp or a so-called Sterbelager (“camp for dying”);
that there were gas chambers in Germany as well. Such discursive maneuver-
ing attempts to block out the crimes from the field of vision; it tries to exterri-
torialize their reality.
It is merely the other side of the coin when public discourse turns evasive
and noncommittal, such as in the clichés of hollow Sunday speeches, droning
on about tragic guilt and entanglement, forgiveness and reconciliation—
though nothing can actually be reconciled. We perpetrators, children and
grandchildren of perpetrators, we do not bear any grudge against the victims.
Someinvoke the notion of incomprehensible forces of fate that swept over
the Germans, speaking of crimes committed “in the name of Germany”—as
though there were no flesh-and-blood culprits, no oppressors who could be
searched out, found, and arrested. Others speak about “crimes against human-
ity,” as if the tormenters’ only failing was their lack of humanity. There is a
veritable inflationary boom in the spread of expressions such as the “unjust
regime,” “contempt for the human being,” the acceptance of “full responsi-
bility”—again, as if all the regime had done was to treat people with “con-
tempt.” As though someone could assume “full responsibility” for the con-
sequences of mass murder. . . . The ideology of disburdenment, of “safe
disposal” (Entsorgung), has penetrated public discourse, leeching the lexicon.
It diminishes the significance of facts and takes flight into sanctimonious
moralizing, although no form of traditional religious or political morality can
adequately grapple with the enormity of the atrocity.
If discursive obfuscation does not achieve the desired effect, defensive
maneuvering changes to defiance and self-pity: we have made enough amends,
given enough compensation; we have paid our debts, our dues. Depending
on the political climate, there are also official statements asserting that the

whole matter is finally finished and laid to rest; a new national conscious-
ness is proclaimed. There is the pious claim that necessary lessons have been
learned from history. But the very choice of words proves the opposite. Shame
8 CHAPTER 1
gives rise to rage, and that rage is turned against the victims. Now it is the
perpetrators and the generations of their innocent descendants who suppos-
edly suffer under the barrage of accusations from the victims. Conversely, the
critical opposition is preoccupied with scrupulously avoiding any charge
of collective guilt. This is not a question of some banal confusion between
collective guilt and historical responsibility for the consequences of actions.
Naturally, not all Germans were criminals or trusting supporters of the regime.
Yet neither were they the helpless victims of some mode of satanic seduction.
They were not guileless, unsuspecting children who had no idea of what was
happening. Just as there is no collective guilt, there can be no collective
innocence. Admittedly, knowledge of events was less widespread than the
victors assumed. But it was far more pervasive than many Germans were
willing to admit. The active accomplices numbered in the tens of thousands,
the accessories in the millions. Complaints about repression and the call to
confront and “work through the past” have long since become hackneyed.
Experience suggests that one cannot seriously expect Germans now to have
feelings of shame, or any insight into the connections among commission,
omission, and toleration.
The patterns of defense are replayed in curious variations within the dis-
course of the scholarly community. The crude balance sheet commonly tallied
up at the local bar, evil against evil, is replaced by questionable comparisons
and abstruse causal chains meant to relativize the extent of the German crimes.
Critical discourse all too quickly seeks to evade the issue by detouring to
weighty questions in the history of philosophy or social theory. Why waste
effort analyzing the realities of camp existence? Instead, scholars dwell on the
typological features of fascism, thus avoiding the essence of the Nazi regime:

organized terror and genocide. All too quickly, researchers turn to the question
of how all this could have happened, without having tried to comprehend in
detail what in fact occurred. Such tactics of evasion are convenient: they let
you tarry in the antechamber of the problem. In another approach, analytical
interest is focused on the presumed authoritarian dispositions and biases of
the culprits—a perspective that is scandalous in the way it downplays the im-
portance of social factors, affording no insight into the processes of violence
and organized terror. One can thus skirt the unpleasant truths that humans can
be cruel without feeling resentment, and that to reduce prejudice is not to
guarantee that it will never arise again.
But can the concentration camp—where power, bureaucratized, was orga-
nized in its most extreme form—ever be made comprehensible through scien-
tific methods? Can it ever be described and grasped in this way? In order for
us to enter into sociological analysis, several preliminary observations seem
unavoidable. Any attempt to engage in a theoretically guided investigation
runs up against two reservations: the topos of the basic incomprehensibility of
the camps and the notion of singularity, the incomparability of that welter of
ENTRY 9
crimes subsumed under the name of Auschwitz. Both theses are familiar in
political debates; their defensive function remains transparent. They serve to
justify a barrier erected to block perception: if something is labeled incompre-
hensible, one can avoid having to perceive its horror in all its details. Yet such
remarks take on a different weight if they come from survivors. They warn the
generations born later to be vigilant: they should not thoughtlessly equate the
suffering and dying of the victims with familiar conceptions. This counsel is
admonitory, not a defensive ploy.
If the caveat of incomprehensibility is interpreted in a theoretical sense, then
any cultural science seeking to understand what is alien or unique would be
destined to fail right from the start. Counterposed to this is the epistemic axiom
that all human action and suffering are in principle interpretable, although

understanding the “other” may be more difficult in some cases than in others.
Since the camps were a product of human action, they are amenable to analysis
and rational comprehension. This does not imply that events and their conse-
quences can be easily traced back to the motives, intentions, or decisions of
individual culprits. Once the camps were established, a configuration of power
evolved whose dynamic was neither planned nor predictable. The present
study attempts to reconstruct the practices, structures, and processes of this
power. It does not seek to discover any historical meaning in the events, and
it refrains from philosophical speculations. Instead, the camp is examined as a
specific form of society, albeit one lying at the margins of sociality. Part of the
essence of absolute power is that it shifts arbitrarily between sociation and
dissociation, between the total formation (Formierung) and complete dissolu-
tion of society. This sociological approach has as little in common with psy-
chological empathy as it does with the narrating of a story or the construction
of historical finality.
5
Analysis focuses on the typology of social (con)fig-
urations and processes. Herein lies its limit, and its opportunity.
However, the topos of incomprehensibility has, first and foremost, a moral
meaning. Manifestly, the customary moral criteria geared to the actions of
individuals break down in the face of collective crime. In describing such
crime in terms of responsibility or “criminal energy,” individual psychopa-
thology or ideological blindness necessarily leads to a banalization of the con-
crete deeds. There is an unbridgeable gap between the perpetrators and their
actions. The organized crime was monstrous—not the perpetrators. Yet this
should not mislead the analyst into orienting the investigation toward the gen-
esis of political and macrosocial structures. The alternative to criminology or
psychology is not a general theory of society. Between the two poles lies the
true and distinctive field for the analysis of power: the organization of the
camp, and the situated actions and suffering within it.

Just as the interpretive recourse to individual intentions and plans is blink-
ered and inadequate, little light is shed by the functional perspective: it de-
grades the perpetrators, debasing them into the attendants of a terror machine
10 CHAPTER 1
running seemingly by itself. The camp system functioned because the murder-
ers actually took on their roles; they were only too willing to carry out the work
of terror. They exploited the opportunities offered by the absolute power to
kill, and expanded its scope.
6
Social relations exist only in the regular behavior
of individuals interacting, organizations only in the actions of their personnel.
Collective crimes, in the final analysis, are individual crimes in a collective.
7
The tactic of emphasizing historical constellations and social functions is mis-
conceived. It misses what is precisely the distinctive feature of the concentra-
tion camp: absolute power that has broken free, fundamentally and totally,
from the familiar forms of social power. Functional analysis aspires to grasp
only the external history of the system; the explorations here begin their probe
one stage deeper. They do not examine social history, but focus on relations
within the camps and on the situations of absolute power.
The topos of incomprehensibility takes on greater importance insofar as
it relates to the experience of the victims, their burden of suffering and death.
Eli Wiesel describes the burden thus:
Those who have not lived through the experience will never know; those who have
will never tell; not really, but completely. The past belongs to the dead, and the
survivor does not recognize himself in the images and ideas which presumably de-
pict him. Auschwitz means death, total absolute death—of man and of all people, of
language and imagination, of time and spirit Thesurvivor knows. He and no one
else. And so he is obsessed by guilt and helplessness. . . . At first the testimony of
survivors inspired awe and humility. At first, the question was treated with a sort of

sacred reverence. It was considered taboo, reserved exclusively for the initiated. But
popularization and exploitation soon followed. . . . As the subject became popular-
ized, so it ceased to be sacrosanct, or rather was stripped of its misery. People lost
their awe. The Holocaust became a literary “free for all,” the no-man’s land for
modern writing. Now everyone got into the act. Novelists made free use of it in their
work, scholars used it to prove their theories.
8
What Wiesel describes is the banalization of this catastrophe in human
history, the disenchantment of a taboo, a sacrilege. Modern science has always
tried to contribute to the disenchantment of the world, its Entzauberung.
The illumination of mysteries is part of its fundamental agenda. Certainly, a
sociological study can contribute little to an appropriate manner of remem-
brance (if there is any such “proper” mode). Nor can one expect it to provide
any “ultimate” reasons. The camp is quite unsuitable as an experimental
arena for testing sociological hypotheses. On the contrary: the concentration
camp demolished the central concepts of civilization, the ideals of reason,
progress, freedom, and understanding. It also made obsolete the very concepts
with which we attempt to render society intelligible: social action and reci-
procity, work and power. The ideal of an abiding society, which is covertly
ENTRY 11
intrinsic to both everyday thought and sociological reasoning, has been shat-
tered, its foundations razed.
The question of the singularity of the German crimes has recently emerged
as a hotly debated political issue, although there has been no painstaking anal-
ysis of the nexus between moral significance and historical uniqueness. This is
not the place to review the arguments in that debate.
9
Yet one cannot help
noticing a certain reciprocity in the claims and countercharges. To be too quick
to compare Auschwitz with other atrocities—the British concentration camps

during the Boer War, the genocide in Armenia at the hands of the Turks, the
atrocities in Uganda and Cambodia, Vorkuta and Kolyma—is to open oneself
up to the suspicion of revisionism decked out in the trappings of science. Such
revisionism not only wishes to exculpate, but presumably also violates ele-
mentary rules of historical comparison. On the other hand, those who insist on
the singularity of Auschwitz can be suspected of wishing to diminish the im-
portance of those other crimes, of not wanting to perceive them in their full and
atrocious magnitude. The very act of comparison is regarded as necessary for
one’s moral and political integrity.
Yet to call an event “incomparable” presupposes that one has already com-
pared it with other events and come to the conclusion that it is radically differ-
ent. It is only proper to assert incomparability after it has been established by
comparison.
10
However, comparisons are totally ill suited as a means for ex-
culpation. In moral judgment, there is no moral arithmetic, no tu quoque. Mur-
derers who justify their actions by arguing that there are other murderers do
nothing to lessen their responsibility. Even if one can see structural similarities
among German, Soviet, and Chinese camps—a comparison both meaningful
and necessary
11
—this does not change the moral facts one iota. The crime
remains the same. Injustice can only be judged from within itself; it cannot be
lessened or mitigated by comparison.
12
The Germans and their accomplices
cannot be exonerated of their guilt for Auschwitz.
For the most part, the present analysis does not engage in synchronic and
diachronic comparisons. It does not aim at general validity, but tries to achieve
interpretive depth. Nonetheless, an investigation that attempts to ascertain the

typical structures of absolute power can contribute to further analyses of orga-
nized terror on a comparative basis. It provides serviceable analytical catego-
ries for making valid comparisons. Yet what was singular about the camps can
certainly be spelled out here in advance. The mass murder and massacre of
strangers, social outsiders, political adversaries, enemies in war, and ethnic
minorities have been recurrent features throughout human history. But the
concentration camp—the locus of organized terror and extermination—is an
invention of the twentieth century. In its organizational structures and meth-
ods, in the indiscriminate selection of its victims and their destruction by star-
vation and work, it is not a German specialty.
13
What remains historically
12 CHAPTER 1
unique and unparalleled is the state-initiated and industrially organized mass
annihilation of Jews and Gypsies by the Germans. The unicum lies less in the
procedures of murder practiced than in genocide having been carried out with
the aid of an experienced bureaucratic administration, a civil service for exter-
mination. The setting up of death factories, to which an entire people, from
infants to the aged, was transported over thousands of kilometers to be obliter-
ated without a trace and “exploited as raw material” was not just a new mode
of murder; it represented a climactic high point in the negative history of social
power and modern organization.
Fundamental to any sociological analysis is the distinction between the con-
centration camps and the extermination camps. Like the “euthanasia institu-
tions” in the Reich, the “death factories” of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibór, and
Treblinka were not concentration camps. Bureaucratically, they constituted
separate facilities. Their sole purpose was the destruction of the Jews. The SS
kept only as many alive there as were necessary for the smooth functioning of
the machinery of death. All others were shot at mass graves immediately after
arrival, or lured into the gas chambers. Here, there was no inmate society that

persisted over a certain time. The few work squads that existed can only be
compared with the Sonderkommandos (special units of corpse workers),
whose job was to keep the death factories in Auschwitz running. By contrast,
in the concentration camps inmates were registered by name, given numbers,
assigned quarters, and usually deployed as laborers. They were almost totally
isolated from the outside world, compelled to eke out an existence bereft of all
rights, living in extreme misery and deprivation. Hundreds of thousands were
killed in every manner imaginable: by shooting, gassing, torture, starvation, or
work. Auschwitz and Majdanek occupied a kind of intermediary position
within the spectrum of terror in that they were simultaneously concentration
and extermination camps. The “selection” at the ramp in Auschwitz was the
historical hinge where the genocide of the Jews was linked with the organiza-
tion of the concentration camps. In contrast with the death factories, which
were kept strictly secret, the concentration camps were multifunctional facili-
ties. They served as places for incarceration, production, and execution, as
training centers for the SS Death’s Head units (Totenkopfverbände), and as
instruments of social terror.
The concentration camps formed only a subsegment within the National
Socialist camp system. Based on figures ascertained to date, there were fifty-
nine early concentration camps; during the war, there were twenty-three main
camps (Stammlager), along with about thirteen hundred subcamps of differing
size. In addition, the SS and other Nazi authorities set up many other camps
and camplike incarceration facilities: thousands of camps for foreign forced
laborers, “labor-education camps” (Arbeitserziehungslager), camps for crim-
inal prisoners, POWs, and civilians, camps for adults and for children. There
were “transit camps” (Durchgangslager) and “collection camps” (Sammel-