Soviets aside, the regimes, leaders, and guards who run large camp systems do not try to hide them from their societies. Such enormous systems, as those of the Germans, Soviets, Chinese, Vietnamese, Khmer Rouge, North Koreans, or even American internment camps for Japanese Americans and the British pipeline in Kenya, would be impossible to conceal. But while some seek to prevent them from being known, such as the Soviets, who sequestered them in Siberia and in the uninhabited Arctic, others publicized them, as the British colonials in Kenya did. The Germans constructed twenty thousand camps around Europe and thousands in Germany itself. Berlin alone had 645 camps just for forced laborers and the Hesse (about the size of New Jersey) had at least 606 camps—one for every five-by-seven-mile patch.31 Germans knew full well about the camps and their basic functions of violent domination, enslavement, and killing. (The farcical notion that ordinary Germans did not know about these things taking place openly all over their country is one of the myths that Germany’s apologists still propagate despite the unanimity of serious scholarship that knowledge even of the Jews’ mass murder was enormously widespread in Germany.)
The broader populace’s knowledge of the camps’ character and murderousness varies from country to country, yet that camps exist as eliminationist institutions of great privation and violent domination is well known. Secrecy is unfeasible and is usually not even desired. Morally, the eliminationist regimes consider the camps just and, instrumentally, they often use the camps to terrorize even people outside them whom they wish to subjugate or eliminate. Everyone knows that entering a camp is to enter a circle of hell or beyond.
Political leaders typically boast about their camps. Less than two months after the Nazis took power in 1933, Heinrich Himmler, the leader of Germany’s SS, convened a press conference to announce the founding of the first formal camp, Dachau, and to tell Germans and the world that it would incarcerate five thousand people. The Chinese communist leadership was proud of its Laogai camps, where leaders claimed to be reeducating people and getting them to do honest labor. The Khmer Rouge heralded its cooperatives—holding a good portion of Cambodia’s population—as the authentic Khmer revolutionary community. The American government saw no reason to conceal its internment of Japanese Americans (notwithstanding the great injustice, it fundamentally differed from these others). The Indonesians were open within their country that they were incarcerating the communists they did not kill. The same was true of the British in Kenya. Regimes often announce to their followers that camps salt away putatively dangerous elements, transform them into productive and responsible people, and by implication forge the future. Political leaders often happily convey that the camps are for eliminating unwanted groups, even if they fail to specify all the means they use. The principal, often the only, reason regimes try to hide aspects of the camp system or do not publicize their existence more is the difficulties such information might cause them abroad. The Germans, the Soviets, the Chinese, the North Koreans, to whatever extent they each have, have been circumspect about their camps’ existence and real character because their adversaries abroad would use the truth to mobilize peoples and countries against them.
The camp system has been one of our age’s distinctive and quintessential eliminationist tools, frequently used for various goals serving one or another of modernity’s visionary transformative projects. The major camp systems were produced by communist and Nazi regimes that called for radical societal transformation and, if not explicitly, then implicitly, the elimination of those they saw standing defiantly astride the path to the future. Such transformative regimes’ political leaders, whether with foresight or through trial and error, came to understand that realizing their vision, murderous at its core, requires a social infrastructure of domination. They needed places for plunging into misery the designated implacable class enemies or the putative subhumans they did not kill, and for rendering them slaves in accord with the perpetrators’ conceptions of the world. They had to fell or transform enormous numbers of people—in the case of the Germans, Soviets, and Chinese tens of millions or hundreds of millions—and thus created an enduring system to dispatch obstructionist people and others they, for whatever ideological or capricious reason, slated for elimination. Hence the camp system, which formed a new system of each society. Under these and other regimes, camp systems became worlds of their own, maintaining relations with normal society but governed by norms and practices that made them separate netherworlds of misery and destruction. The ways that camp systems in Germany, the Soviet Union, China, Kenya, and elsewhere were integrated into the economy and society, locally, regionally, and nationally, and the kinds of relations they had with the broader societies and their peoples, are barely explored topics.
Camp systems vary enormously, depending on the regime’s character, its transformative and eliminationist goals, the prisoners’ identities, and the perpetrators’ conception of the victims. Death rates vary from system to system, and even within a given system. Economically irrational, some camps nevertheless are more productively organized than others. Camp systems have differing release rates. Perpetrators’ cruelty differs from system to system, and within a given system depending on who the prisoners are. The guards in the German camps personally tortured and brutalized their prisoners, especially the Jewish prisoners, much more than the Soviet guards did their prisoners. Camps’ proximity to and integration into the broader society also vary enormously. The people they are meant to terrorize differ markedly: The Soviet and Chinese leaders used camp systems to terrorize almost all people, while the German leaders directed the terror potential not at the German population in general but only at selected groups within Germany—Jews, Sinti, Roma, gays, so-called antisocial elements, dedicated political opponents—as well as vast populaces of putative subhumans in German-occupied Europe. The camp systems’ variable character suggests aspects of the future that each regime was building.
Annihilationist and eliminationist institutions vary, then, along two dimensions: space and time. The most ad hoc one is the death march, which is created as needed and disbanded when its victims have died or reached their site of expulsion. Spatially and temporally, the death march is transitory. Those guarding the murderous marches often do so by sheer circumstance and on a one-time basis. Death marches fleetingly pass through an environment, leaving behind—except for the corpses—no visible sign. At the same time, death marches create the broadest permanent imprint on a human landscape precisely because they cover so much territory, with the dying, broken, and unwanted strewn in columns over main roads, past cities and towns, announcing to the countless bystanders unmistakably what their leaders and countrymen do in their name, and leaving indelible images in mind after mind.
Mobile killing units are spatially transitory, yet endure over time. They are used repeatedly, moving from place to place, from targets to targets. They appear to be the most conventional killing institutions, because they resemble military and police units, and sometimes are composed of them. In form, they are the most familiar major eliminationist institutions, though their activities defy conventional social and political life. Mobile killing units combine permanence with flexibility, allowing them to kill, singly or in conjunction with other institutions, and then move on to the next kill. Their activities, or at least their effects, are also not hidden from sight, and burrow deeply into a society’s consciousness. Their permanence in people’s minds derives from their capacity to appear at any time, and their fleetingness comes from the likelihood that they will appear in a locale but once, even if stories of their activities can be heard repeatedly.
The camp world, fixed in space and durable over time, has a destructive and lethal monumentality that escapes other eliminationist institutions, and that can become a defining feature of a regime, a society, and its human and physical landscape. As a domination and destruction system, the camp world absorbs, redirects, and reshuffles society’s human and material resources. It is a social and political blac
k hole, sucking in life and extending its gravitational field, providing a constant tug on the rest of society’s consciousness and practices.
Means and Methods
Just as political leaders employ for their annihilationist and eliminationist projects existing and new institutions in varying combinations, they kill in different ways. It is worth sketching out these methods even if they are of little analytical importance. Notwithstanding that many writers about the Holocaust fetishize killing logistics and technology, organizing mass killing, and, technically, ending a life, even many lives, is easy. Survivors of the Tutsi’s mass murder of Hutu in Burundi in 1972 explain: “There were many manners of killing them,” said one. Another agreed: “Several techniques, several, several. Or, one can gather two thousand persons in a house—in a prison, let us say. There are some halls which are large. The house is locked. The men are left there for fifteen days without eating, without drinking. Then one opens. One finds cadavers. Not beaten, not anything. Dead.”32 Political leaders possessing the most limited capacities in organizationally and technologically simple societies, including Burundi, Cambodia, and Rwanda, have easily managed to slaughter hundreds of thousands or millions. Killing speed, methods, and implements have more to do with the perpetrators’ character, their conception of the victims, the available technological means, and perceived time pressure than with fundamental logistical and technical problems in killing. All technologically and organizationally more sophisticated killing regimes could employ simpler means than they do, with the same results and often more efficiently.
The implements of genocide, western Rwanda, July 1994
Burundi and Rwanda have been among the least developed countries in the world. When the Tutsi slaughtered Hutu in Burundi, it was among the poorest countries, with a per capita yearly income hovering around two hundred dollars and an adult illiteracy rate exceeding 70 percent. When the Hutu slaughtered the Tutsi, Rwanda was only marginally better off, still one of the twenty poorest countries in the world, with an adult illiteracy rate around 50 percent. Burundi and Rwanda each had an extremely undeveloped infrastructure, with a military and police force that were outfitted with archaic weaponry and insufficient guns and munitions. Guns and bullets were so relatively rare and costly that each country’s perpetrators (like Turkey’s and others) used them sparingly, choosing the more primitive killing implements of clubs, knives, and machetes. They typically apprehended the victims simply by removing them from their homes, or wherever they were, and butchered or bludgeoned them on the spot or nearby. There was nothing sophisticated about these killing operations: no gas chambers, no “assembly-line killing,” no advanced technology, no intricate logistical planning, no complex bureaucratic machinery moving mindlessly forward in supposed “stages of destruction,” no need for massive transportation. To execute their murderous intentions, political leaders needed only: people to carry it out, basic institutional organization, simple communication, and machetes and clubs, sometimes (and only sometimes) backed up by a few twentieth-century weapons. With such simple means, Rwanda’s Hutu conducted as intensive a killing campaign as any of our time. Their average monthly death toll exceeded the Germans’ monthly body count of Jews.
In 1975 the Khmer Rouge took power in war-ravaged, poor Cambodia. The leadership, headed by Pol Pot, was animated by a strange ideological brew of apocalyptic Marxism and a romanticized vision of ancient Cambodian civilization. They hated modern civilization, particularly modern technology, so they destroyed the country’s physical plant, mainly by neglecting it into ruin. Cities are the principal sites of modernity, of economic productivity, of technological capacity. The Khmer Rouge emptied Cambodia’s cities almost entirely, forcing the people into a network of rural camps called cooperatives, to live and work preindustrially, with the most primitive means, using only their hands or cups to dig irrigation ditches or Borgesian roads that stretched onward to nowhere for no good purpose. The perpetrators, frequently just teenage boys with little training, were only somewhat better equipped, often having but poor weapons and insufficient munitions. But that didn’t stop them from killing. Chhun Von, a survivor, explains that when the Khmer Rouge “executed the people they didn’t shoot a bullet because they [wanted to] save the bullet. They just hit the people with a stick or like an ant. . . . Some people were not dead yet but they buried them anyway. And sometimes they just cut them to take their bladder. Or, for their medicine.”33
The poorly equipped Khmer Rouge also managed to construct a camp system that contained the vast majority of the country’s people, whom they controlled with an unsurpassed totalitarian grip. It was mainly in the camps, using primitive means, that the Khmer Rouge killed 1.7 million people. Most perished from planned, or what might as well have been planned, starvation, though the perpetrators shot and beat many to death. Thoun Cheng, a Cambodian survivor, explains:In 1977 and 1978 we got nothing but gruel to eat. Production was low because of flooding; the dam broke. The locals told us that you had to plant floating rice in this area. But the Khmer Rouge wanted to try something else, and it all died. So there was nothing to eat. The locals’ land and houses were all flooded out. . . . In the old society, a family could get by on one hectare of land, but now under the Khmer Rouge there was nothing to eat. This was because farming was collective, or if there was enough food, it was stored away, not given to us to eat. There were eleven people in my family. None were killed, but ten died of starvation in 1977-78, and only I survived. By 1979 just over twenty families out of 500 were left in the village.34
Over less than four years, this technologically backward and regressing society’s political leaders induced their followers to turn society into a large concentration camp, in which they steadily killed or let die through calculated malnutrition those not conforming to the leaders’ immediate wishes or image of the future. They turned Cambodia into our time’s arguably most murderous, brutal, inhuman small country, utterly dragooning and terrorizing, and killing the greatest percentage of a country’s entire population (the sparsely populated German colony of South-West Africa aside). All without modern technology, gas chambers, or “assembly-line killing.”
The Germans’ extermination of the Jews is infamous precisely for the gas chambers and the so-called assembly-line killing. Yet whatever such death factories’ existential horror and significance, these installations were not essential for the mass murder. This is so obvious it is astonishing that the gas chambers have been turned into the horror’s central aspect, to the longtime neglect and exclusion of so much else (particularly the perpetrators and the victims), as if the gas chambers and technology themselves caused the killing instead of being the incidental implements of people who wanted to kill. Modern technology was unnecessary and the Germans knew this. They killed their victims overwhelmingly without gassing. This included their annihilation of three million Soviet prisoners of war they mainly starved to death. They just as easily could have starved their Auschwitz gassing victims. While the Germans were gassing Jews, they continued to shoot Jews by the tens of thousands, just as they had before they built the gas chambers. In the first phase of their attack on the Soviet Union, during summer and early fall 1941, the Germans shot hundreds of thousands of Jews, including 23,600 in Kamenets-Podolski over two days, 19,000 in Minsk in two massacres combined, 21,000 in Rovno over two days, 25,000 near Riga over three days, and more than 33,000 in Babi Yar over two days. These killing rates far exceeded what the death factories using gas chambers ever achieved.
Gassing, especially in camps, may offer the perpetrators aesthetic advantages, but it is inefficient—so inefficient that no other mass murderers have seen it economically rational or technically necessary to construct them. Shooting people on the spot is much easier and requires fewer resources than rounding them up, getting them to a train line, guarding them the whole way, diverting scarce train engines and freight cars from critical military and economic functions, loading the victims, transporting and guarding them hundreds
of miles, and only then killing and disposing of them using technology that sometimes breaks down. The Germans adopted gassing for killing Jews not for efficiency but because they had a rare inventive killing spirit, were consciously planning to continue killing well into the future, wished to distance the killers from the gruesome task, and symbolically liked to think they were disinfecting the world, especially of Jews.
Only a tiny percentage of our era’s mass-murder victims were felled by methods of killing invented during our time: roughly 4 million out of the 125 million or more victims—less than 4 percent. The Germans gassed most of those killed with “modern technology,” Japanese exterminated 580,000 Chinese and Koreans with biological warfare weapons and experimentation, American atomic bombs incinerated or killed with radiation more than a quarter million Japanese, the Americans and British bombed German and Japanese civilians, slaughtering several hundred thousand more, Assad used artillery and tanks to shell Hama, Saddam gassed several tens of thousands of Kurds, and Al Qaeda used hijacked airplanes to murder nearly three thousand Americans. Our age’s mass murderers killed more than 95 percent of their victims using technologically unsophisticated means. Starvation and attendant diseases have taken the lives of most, followed, in some order, by gunshots and various types of blades or clubs that have been available since antiquity. The Soviets killed the overwhelming majority of their victims by starvation, the cold, and predictably devastating diseases. In Turkey, China, Kenya, Indonesia, Nigeria, Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and virtually all our age’s mass murders, the perpetrators murdered the vast majority of their victims by calculated starvation or bullets or some combination of the two.
B002QX43GQ EBOK Page 15
