[ad_1]
The first concentration camp built by Nazi Germany was that of Dachau, in 1933, using the structure of an old factory. Located in Bavaria, it was initially for political opponents of the regime or “unwanted elements” of society: communists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, among others. A great prison, which includes torture, terrible conditions, daily violence and psychological terror. It progressively expanded to include forced labor camps and also received other types of people, from common criminals to foreigners from Nazi-occupied countries. The camp operated until April 1945 and, according to its commemorative website, received a total of approximately 188,000 prisoners; of these, about 41,000 died in custody.
There were 28 other concentration camp complexes similar to those in Dachau, including prison halls, forced labor camps, factories, torture and death. If Dachau was the first, the last one established was that of Kistarcsa, Hungary, in 1944, already in the throes of the defeated Reich. Many of these fields were on German territory. The largest concentration camp was Buchenwald, built in 1937, in the Weimar region; There, 300,000 people were arrested and 56,000 died. Killed, due to malnutrition, illness, work to complete exhaustion. The list of 28 complexes can be debated as smaller fields also existed, often only for transit. The total number can exceed 60 fields.
Extermination, not concentration
Some readers may have been surprised by the column that says the largest concentration camp was Buchenwald. “Why, and Auschwitz?” That is the point. Auschwitz was the largest complex, with dozens of smaller camps and three large camps. Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a forced labor camp for the IG Farben factories. And the Auschwitz and Auschwitz II-Birkenau camps, which were not “simple” concentration camps. They were death camps. A Nazi peculiarity, something completely unique, incomparable in other places until today. The death camps place the violence of Nazism as something unique, the highest expression of the “banality of evil”, a term by the German philosopher Hannah Arendt when covering the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.
She, while reporting and analyzing the behavior of one of the architects of the Jewish Holocaust in her opinion, points out that Nazism ran an immense bureaucratic machine, in which “orders were carried out” with extreme efficiency, for the extermination of people on an industrial scale. An assembly line of death. In Auschwitz, in total, there were some 1,300,000 prisoners; Of these, at least 1,100,000 people were exterminated, most of them Jews. These figures are less frightening than the machine that was implemented for this extermination. Train schedules, number of people, guard shifts, inspections, a gigantic apparatus destined for the annihilation of people for their ethnic origin, their religion, their sexual orientation.
There were only seven death camps. In addition to Auschwitz, the fields of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Majdanek were built and operated by Germany in the territory of occupied Poland; In Treblinka, around 800,000 people were killed in just 14 months of operation. Added to the list is the particular case of the Jasenovac camp in present-day Croatia, operated by the local fascist regime in Ustaše, puppets of the Axis. Most of its victims were ethnic Serbs, but Jews, Roma and others were also killed there. These seven private camps cannot be located as “concentration camps”, and from there the debate arose about the words used by Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo.
Comparing the quarantine measures with the “Nazi concentration camps”, Ernesto Araújo ended up offending many people because he linked the restriction of the movement of a person in his own house with a systematic extermination of people forcibly taken to a camp. And it is not a matter of judging the chancellor’s text, but of historical precision. If the reader hears or reads the expression “Nazi concentration camps,” he will probably immediately think of scenes from Auschwitz, at the huge crematoriums, on the train line that ends directly at the camp gate. Even if the author of the expression wants to refer only to the act of restricting mobility, limiting people or even a penal colony.
Relativization in history
It is repeated, without relation to the specific case of the chancellor, this columnist has no way of knowing what the chancellor meant, or stopped wanting. The fact is, the comparison will sound offensive to many people because it seems to lessen acts of Nazi violence, a violence that was far from the barbarism of mad mobs, but was extremely organized, cold and methodical. And, in fact, this term is often used to relativize or diminish the unique character of the extermination promoted by Nazism. “Ah, but in that place or time there was also a concentration camp!” Still in the 1860s, the Confederates built a concentration camp in the United States Civil War, the striking photos of which can be seen in the documentary series by the brilliant Ken Burns.
The British built concentration camps in the Boer Wars in South Africa. The German Empire confined survivors of the Herero genocide to camps in present-day Namibia. During World War II, the United States government arrested a large part of its Japanese-origin population in concentration camps. Actor George Takei, the Star Trek Sulu, grew up on one of them. We had concentration camps even in Brazil, which were largely ignored, like those in Ceará in the 1930s, to prevent sertão drought refugees from reaching larger cities, such as Fortaleza.
Labor camps or penal colonies are also not relatively new. Australia was colonized by the British as a penal colony. The Russian empire occupied Siberia with forced labor penal colonies, the Katorga, even for political dissidents. Later, the katorga were expanded by the Soviet Union under the Gulag agency; the length of the fields was so great that it inspired the name of Alexander Soljenítsin’s seminal work, the Gulag Archipelago, as a group of islands spread across the Urals and Siberia. Nor is it a practice that was in the distant past. Until 1996, for example, South Africa had a political penal colony, Robben Island, where Mandela was.
Today, in 2020, a sizable portion of the Uighur Muslim male population in western China is confined to “vocational education and training centers,” a euphemism for a practice that 22 countries have identified as a concentration camp. Even with all these historical and contemporary examples, where many people suffered, died, and their most basic rights were undermined, nothing compares to the industrial-scale extermination of people carried out by Nazi Germany. Probably, if we were talking about “Nazi death camps”, in addition to being conceptually more precise, some sensible comparisons would not be made.
