A place where the law was only Nazi law. The concentration camp was a universe of its own with rules at the discretion of the SS. But was this something new? How did the camp system work and how did it change over the years? Was it also important from an economic point of view for the Nazis? And why is it so difficult to understand how many people lost their lives in the Nazi concentration camps? To try to answer these questions, we spoke with historian Claudio Vercelli, author of books and research on the subject.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Were the concentration camps a novelty on the world scene or did the Nazis emulate, so to speak, pre-existing initiatives?
ANSWER VERCELLI: The Nazi concentration camps, as such, were nothing new. The policy, so to speak, of concentrating segments, parts of the non-combatant population, in separate places, concentration of an obviously coercive nature and of treating the same concentrates of the same population according to criteria of real harassment is an element that fits right in with various political actions of contemporary powers. Starting with colonial ones. Suffice it to say that this type of institution had already been built and tested to some extent, so to speak, in wars such as the Anglo-Boer war in South Africa, rather than in other wars such as the American-Spanish war and so on during the early 20th century or even in the preceding decades. More generally, the presence, as far as we know, of places of concentration, of harassment, of possibly even the elimination of civilians who were not responsible for anything but were considered to be elements destined to create problems for the occupying powers or, in any case, for the powers present in certain territories, is something that has to do, among other things, with the colonial campaigns that followed one another in the 19th and early 20th century. The Nazis on this side recovered certain aspects of that institution and adapted it, at first, to the German condition, i.e. Germany from 1933 onwards. They used it above all to concentrate and to imprison and then eventually to eliminate even physically their opponents, whether they were politicians, opponents or in any case subjects considered dangerous for the most diverse reasons. Then comes another story that runs alongside that of the concentration camps but which is a peculiar story, seen in its own right, and that is the extermination camps. And there we find, instead, a Nazi specificity, so to speak, which is in itself a terrible innovation that has, however, a path of its own

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: How did the concentration camp system work and how did it change over the years?

VERCELLI ANSWER: So the concentrationary system in the meantime was born as a form of rationalisation of something that pre-existed the rise of Nazism to power in January 1933 with the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. The pre-existing system consisted of arbitrary imprisonment that the party militia imposed on their political opponents: communists, socialists, social democrats, anyone who was identified from time to time as an element to be neutralised. This type of imprisonment was carried out, for example, in some dwellings, some separate buildings, and was run by Nazi militia. After that, when Hitler came to power, a regulation of this criterion was imposed, so to speak, for how exceptionally such a type of facility could be regulated. And in fact the first formally recognised concentration camp, Dachau, came into being in 33. There was no concealment of the fact that there was a new place of detention and re-education for those identified as enemies of the people, because the ideological game that was played then was to superimpose the regime on the people and the nation by saying that the regime was an expression of the true will of the people and the nation. Those who do not recognise themselves in the regime go against the people, go against the nation and must therefore be eliminated or, in any case, put in a position to do no harm. From this, as it were, this type of structure spread to some extent, although if one looks at the data, the data of arbitrary detentions within the concentration camps in Germany before the war, the numbers are significant but not exorbitant. Compared to those who wanted to see mass detention from the outset, we have tens of thousands of concentrators, of imprisoned people, but they are only a few categories that are systematically targeted and targeted. Certainly we have already mentioned political opponents, starting with the communists who were the most tenacious and also the best organised, then moving on to other subjects and so on. Also individuals, individual subjects, then by extension those belonging to a religious minority such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, who suffered greatly from the concentration as they were identified as enemies of the new Reich, of the new Germany, because of a whole series of events that I won’t go into here to explain or recall. And together with other categories, the first imprisonments of gypsies, nomads or walkers as we say today, as well as the punishments that were imposed on people of the so-called Aryan race who for their conduct were useful to punish precisely not through ordinary imprisonment, the prisons continued to exist from this point of view, subject by the judiciary subject to control and practice, but through the inclusion within precisely such a place of extraordinary detention as the concentration camp was, outside the laws, outside the norms in force, formally even during the years of the Third Reich. After that the turning point came with the approach of war, that is between 38 and 39 the annexation of Austria to Germany and radicalised a series of conducts, of behaviour of the regime. And what the Nazis themselves called the Jewish question came heavily into play. That is to say, what to do with not only the German Jews, about 600,000 out of a population of 70 million, but also the Austrian Jews and in anticipation also those Jews, many of them, in Eastern Europe, should war be waged against countries such as Poland, which happened in 1939, or the Soviet Union and so on. From there as it were, the institution of the concentration camp somehow continued to maintain its function as a place where political, social and cultural oppositions were gathered, but it also began to become a place where, step by step, those belonging to the inferior race by definition, i.e. the Jews, were placed. The next step will occur in late 41, when in the face of the war against the Soviet Union, it will move towards a further radicalisation, that of the systematic extermination of Jews and members of the inferior races. But this will generate a new institution, namely the extermination camp, which was not really a place of concentration. But it was a place of almost immediate physical elimination of those deported there. Concentration camps and extermination camps historically coexisted factually, they fulfilled similar functions, but had very different criteria and modes of operation. In a concentration camp, one was deported, imprisoned and generally died of hardship, forced labour, and the violent treatment they suffered, within one or at most three months. With some exceptions for those who survived. In the extermination camps, on the other hand, one did not survive. One arrived in the morning in the afternoon, one was already reduced to ashes. Only a small proportion of deportees were kept alive to perform the most monstrous tasks such as removing corpses from the gas chambers and so on..

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: What was the day like for a deportee? And what was he forced to do? Did it change from lager to lager? Why were so many moved from camp to camp?

VERCELLI ANSWER: It was a day conditioned by the rigours of violence, by systematic brutality. A brutality, however, this must be understood, not occasional, not gratuitous, that is, the brutality was, I would say, a fundamental, inescapable part of the system of functioning of the concentration camps. Inside the concentration camps one was not only detained, imprisoned unjustly, unjustly. But one was deliberately and deliberately mistreated. In the concentration camp one did things that one generally does not do in prison, or if one does, it is done as an exception, not as the norm. If you ended up in a German prison in the 1930s, you suffered the rigours of imprisonment, but you were within certain limits guaranteed life, existence and certain elementary rights. In a concentration camp, on the other hand, this was abrogated. And this is a distinction that we already mentioned in the beginning, a very important one. The day of a deportee consisted of a series of activities that were themselves, as it were, absurd, meaningless. But this meaninglessness, pardon the pun, made sense. That is, the deportee had to progressively deteriorate and then die going through an experience where in essence, not only violence but senseless violence and therefore a daily routine of harassment, through also, very often, the use of labour for jobs that were completely useless but which were extremely heavy and debilitating, through a whole series of rituals, from roll-call in the early hours of the morning to delivery to the barracks in the evening, after an exhausting day’s work, underfed and so on, this set of things had to serve in some way to ensure that the mark remained on the victims on the one hand, but also on the perpetrators on the other, of a regime that conceded nothing and was establishing a new order by literally passing over the bodies and consciences of individuals. I realise that this is not easy to understand here, I realise the complexity of this fact. One asks oneself but what sense does it make, from a factual, material point of view. Wasn’t it better to kill them straight away, so that the problem is solved? But totalitarian regimes have always had a vocation, that of educating by example or re-educating by example. As we said before, it was not necessary for the Germans to know exactly what was going on there. There had to be some distant echo of this, places forbidden to the eyes of the common citizen, but places that emanated, at a certain point, in addition to the stench of corpses when things evolved during the war in a particularly dramatic if not tragic manner, they also emanated a self-image that in some way meant: those who do not abide by the rules and within the parameters of the new Nazi order, of Hitler’s order, are destined to be consumed, to die out. And this served to frighten, but I repeat again, also to give an idea, albeit a fallacious one, of an order that actually functioned and was on the march. So it is not why they were doing these things to the victims and what was the residual meaning, if any, of doing these things, against bodies, defenceless people, but the image they left behind was at least in a shifted form towards a society that was transforming itself, incorporating brutality as an element I would say of self-consideration.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Was there also an economic logic to the deportation?

VERCELLI ANSWER: Absolutely. At the beginning, at least until the war, the economic logic was secondary if not completely inessential. After that with the war effort, which was a resounding effort, a gigantic effort, which moved the entire German society to the brink, the presence of slave labour began to be extremely convenient. One factor, especially at a time when Germany started the war in the East, which also stimulated the spread of the concentration system was that one could dispose of, by capturing elements of the inferior races as well as enemies, in this case Russian prisoners of war, for example, one could dispose of labour that was obviously not paid but had an economic value, which was quantified. So much so that the ss, which constituted a veritable empire even economically within the Nazi regime itself, granted the use of slave labour to the large German companies, which made abundant use of it, especially in the war economy, demanding remuneration for each piece, for each piece, for each subject that was delivered into the concentration and labour camps, to the industries that were willing to use this criterion, this system of systematic exploitation, i.e. there was an economic return where more subjects came into play. On the one hand the industries that commissioned the construction of camps or the management of them for production purposes, on the other hand the German state that financed the war through the war taxation of the German population and through the policy of robbing goods from the occupied countries, and a further element was the very structure of the SS, which fed itself thanks to the exploitation of this circuit that had spread especially in eastern Europe.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Why do we talk more about some deportations and less about others and what are the numbers of deportations?

VERCELLI ANSWER: So we have between 5 and 6 million Jews murdered. The point is that the numbers as they will never be exact, and about 6 million non-Jews murdered in concentration camps. Now, there has been much talk of deportations being racist or racial in nature as it were, because those deportations had only one function, that of exterminating a human group defined according to race. Other deportations also had elements that we have already mentioned in part. Namely exploitation as labour, i.e. internment from captivity to neutralise any form of opposition and so on. There are, one cannot establish a hierarchy of pain, but it is clear that the extermination enterprise against the Jews of eastern and western Europe, for the Jews and the countries that fell under the Nazi heel, represents in several respects a unique event, that is, the creation of factories of death, not just factories of exploitation, but of factories of death, i.e. places of extermination camps, far fewer in number than concentration camps, where people were immediately subjected to what was called as an apparently neutral but sinister expression, special treatment, is an element and a factor that is not matched, at least in contemporary times, by other events, albeit very violent ones. Here again, I repeat, it is not a question of saying who comes first and who comes second. The question is to understand the different mechanisms of the deportations and thus the different level of attention that was given to them. If the deportation of a political opponent within the Nazi system of repression could still take on a meaning, not a justification, but a meaning, it is evident that the systematic extermination of defenceless civilians because they simply belonged to a presumed race, in this case here the Jewish race, takes on a distinct, different, not necessarily or not only worse, different connotation from the experience of the political deportee. After which it is clear that within the plans for a new Europe as Nazi Germany was envisaging for itself and for its military actions, and not only these, it is clear that the place reserved for those who were not considered functional to the new order that would be established across the continent under the Aryan-Nazi heel would be that of the cemeteries and nothing else. But fortunately this was not to be seen, things turned out differently. The fact remains that the terrible history of those years has left us with this double circuit, on the one hand a concentration camp and on the other hand an exterminationist one, with some overlapping between one circuit and the other, with deportations that differed from each other, but which had in common the fact that they were part of a more general political project, let’s call it that, which wanted to transform the European continent, not only politically and culturally, but also socio-demographically.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Why is it so difficult to understand how many people lost their lives in the Nazi camps?

ANSWER VERCELLI: I answer like this. It’s not just a technical problem that exists because in any case somehow the Nazis tried to keep accounts, they were very meticulous, but it was an accounting based on numbers not on people. The point is this. Within this kind of project for the radical transformation of Europe through recourse also to these abominable instruments, there was an underlying idea that, if you like, is also a bit of a founding idea of violence in National Socialist violence and not only perhaps of it. But we are dealing with this. And the underlying idea is that of those who passed through those places and died there, no memory must remain. No memory must remain. The extermination of, for example, the Jews entails the destruction of Jewish society in Europe, of Jewish communities. Hence deportation of entire families, entire communities and the erasure, the erasure along with the people also of the memory of them. This was a how to say fundamental trait in the Nazi action. Because it fulfilled an assumption, what I call the perfect crime. If there is no longer any memory of those who were thus murdered, can one ever speak of a crime?
That it took place is that it was consummated in the process. If there is no memory of those who were erased from the earth, even destroying the material evidence, not only of the crime itself, but of the previous life of these people. For example, the looting of their property, the destruction, perhaps of the villages where they lived, and so on. The destruction of cemeteries which is a very common thing towards the Jewish population. Someone said, with this regime even the dead are not safe. Here it is, what will be remembered once one should be victorious on the Nazi side, what will be remembered in the rest of society of what in the meantime took place. In the way things were done. Erasing not only the bodies, e.g., burning them, e.g., incinerating them, reducing them to ashes either out of organizational logistical necessity or literally wiping out their memory. But also erasing the objects, the things that belonged to these people. This was like to say a work, I don’t want to use lofty words, but they were work I don’t want to say Mephistophelean, diabolical, it was a work like to say that had its own brutal and fierce rationality. The day when we win and we will have as it were settled accounts with all those we have to destroy, for the next generations, there will be no more remembrance, memory of what has been done because at that point there will be no more traces of those whom we destroyed, whom we annihilated, whom we annihilated first and then reduced in kind.