6 - Structures and agents of violence

Summary

This chapter deals with the interrelated issues of the organizational structures of German mass violence against Jews and others, and of the people who participated in these processes. It contradicts the popular image that Nazism worked on the basis of strict hierarchies, orders and obedience, and that the extermination of Jews was organized smoothly in a factory-like fashion. In reality, the Nazi system was semi-decentralized and permitted a good deal of flexibility, informal coordination and autonomy, but it also generated some friction because it gave individuals and groups room to pursue their own interests.

A semi-decentralized process

Table 6.1 is telling in several ways. It shows that of the five major German extermination camps three different agencies were in charge and three different technologies used. Four of these camps, or rather killing stations, had a regional function and were run by regional agencies. They were primarily used to kill Jews from the areas where they were located. Virtually everyone who arrived there was murdered, unlike at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where staff sorted out considerable numbers of deportees for forced labor. (Regarding the other killing centers, ‘selections’ took place at the location of departure before deportation.) The experimental character of the methods of destruction in the beginning is well known. But although the planning of these five killing stations stretched over a year, new technologies or operational procedures for murder introduced at one site did not lead to a change at the others. All of this shows that the killing process was not fully centralized.

Table 6.1 also indicates that about every second murdered Jew was gassed, if one includes the victims of gas vans at other places than Chełmno and murders in other concentration camps than Auschwitz. About 2 million Jews were shot, primarily in the occupied Soviet territories. The existence of gas chambers and gas vans did not stop the mass shootings, which continued through 1942 and into 1943, claiming far more than half a million victims in 1942 alone. Thus, four major technologies for murder existed in 1942. Much has been made of the smoothly working so-called ‘industrial’ German mass murder that was taking place in extermination camps, but this picture is somewhat misleading given that half of the murdered Jews did not perish in gas chambers, that three of the five major annihilation centers listed above had no crematorium,[…]