Archive/File: people/g/goldhagen.daniel.jonah/non-extermination-camps Lasr-Modified: 1996/07/12 "THE FIRST FACET of the camp system consisted of the obvious instrumental ends for which camps were used. These were the ends which were understood by all of the Germans participating in the camp system (and millions outside it), and they are the features of camps that are most discussed in the literature: the systematic slaughter of designated enemies, principally of Jews, the enslavement of people, primarily "subhumans," for economic benefit, and the incarceration and punishment of the enemies of the new Germany. "At the apogee of the camp system were the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka. In them the Germans constructed extermination facilities for the annihilation of European Jews who composed the overwhelming majority of the victims, and slaughtered crematoria are well known, so they do not have to be elaborated upon here.[30] Yet the Germans slaughtered people wholesale in camps other than those which have come to be known as `death camps.' After the beginning of 1942, the camp system in general was lethal for Jews. Whether the Germans were killing them immediately and directly in the gas chambers of an extermination camp or working and starving them to death in camps that they had not constructed for the express purpose of extermination (namely in concentration or `work' camps), the mortality rates of Jews in camps was at exterminatory, genocidal levels and typically far exceeded the mortality rates of other groups living side by side with them. "Once the German genocidal program was under way, the distinction between extermination camps (which the Germans had constructed expressly for the killing of Jews) and non-extermination camps can be seen as having been specious for Jews -- though not for other peoples. The monthly death rate for Jews in Mauthausen was, from the end of 1942 to 1943, 100 percent. Mauthausen was not formally an extermination camp and, indeed, it was not for non-Jews, who at the end of 1943 all had a mortality rate below 2 percent.[31] Camps housing Jews did so on a temporary basis, because the Germans had consigned all Jews to death. Only the rate of extermination, not the goal, might vary." (Goldhagen, 173) Notes: 30. For a general account, see Eugon Kogon, Hermann Langbein, and Adalbert Rueckerl, eds., Nazi Mass Murder: Adocumentary History of t he Use of Poison Gas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 73-204; for the memoir of a Jewish survivor who worked in the extermination facilities of Auschwitz, see Filip Mueller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (New York: Stein & Day, 1979) 31. Pingel, Haeftlinge unter NS-Herrschaft, p. 186 Work Cited Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996
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