Extermination through labour
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Extermination through labour[1] (German: Vernichtung durch Arbeit) was a Nazi German World War II principle that regulated the aims and purposes of most of their labour and concentration camps.[2][3] The rule demanded that the inmates of German WWII camps be forced to work for the German war industry with only basic tools and minimal food rations until totally exhausted.[4][5][2][6] As the slaves had no individual worth, they were of no use to the German war machine[7] and were to be exterminated as soon as they were used up, as the German WWII documents put it.[8]
In many sub-camps unrelated to the German war machine the principle was realised through pointless heavy work, most commonly digging ditches around the camp and then levelling them or excavating earth and transporting it on foot to the other side of the camp.[2] In others, the political aims of the camps were paired with the policies of extermination through labour.[9]
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[edit] See also
- Forced labor in Germany during World War II
- Gulag, the system of officially "corrective labor" in the Soviet Union which often amounted to extermination through labor.[10]
- Hunger Plan, a German plan to starve the Slavic and Jewish populations
[edit] Notes
- ^ Often also translated as death through work, extermination through work, annihilation through labor or destruction through labor
- ^ a b c (Polish) Stanisław Dobosiewicz (1977). Mauthausen/Gusen; obóz zagłady (Mauthausen/Gusen; the Camp of Doom). Warsaw: Ministry of National Defence Press, 449. ISBN 83-11-06368-0.
- ^ (English) Wolfgang Sofsky (1999). The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 352. ISBN 0-691-00685-7.
- ^ (Polish) Władysław Gębik (1972). Z diabłami na ty (Calling the Devils by their Names). Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 332.
- ^ (English) Günter Bischof; Anton Pelinka (1996). Austrian Historical Memory and National Identity. Transaction Publishers, 185–190. ISBN 1-56000-902-0.
- ^ (German) Cornelia Schmitz-Berning (1998). "Vernichtung durch Arbeit", Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (Vocabulary of the National Socialism). Walter de Gruyter, 634. ISBN 3-11-013379-2.
- ^ (English) Miroslav Kárný. The Genocide of the Czech Jews.
- ^ (English) Gretchen E Schafft (2004). From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich. University of Illinois Press, 140. ISBN 0-252-02930-5.
- ^ (English) Paul B Jaskot. The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy. London: Routledge, 141. ISBN 0-415-17366-3.
- ^ Islands of Slavery TIME magazine. June 24, 1974
[edit] References
- (German) Hermann Kaienburg (1990). Vernichtung durch Arbeit. Der Fall Neuengamme (Extermination through labour: Case of Neuengamme). Bonn: Dietz Verlag J.H.W. Nachf, 503. ISBN 3-8012-5009-1.
- (German) Gerd Wysocki (1992). Arbeit für den Krieg (Work for the War). ISBN.
- (English) Donald Bloxham (2001). Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of History and Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 296. ISBN 0-19-820872-3.
- (English) Nikolaus Wachsmann. "Annihilation through Labor: The Killing of State Prisoners in the Third Reich". Journal of Modern History 71 (3): 624–659.
- (English) various authors (2002). in Michael Berenbaum, Abraham J Peck: The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined. Indiana University Press, 370-407. ISBN 0-253-21529-3.
- (English) Eugen Kogon; Heinz Norden, Nikolaus Wachsmann (2006). The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 368. ISBN 0-374-52992-2.
