Högskolan Dalarna
Master Programme in European Political Sociology

“Constructing Social Reality in a Concentration Camp”: the example of Buchenwald
Inner Stratification – Norm Formation – Solidarity in a Total Institution with Absolute Power

Master Thesis

by

Stefan Lochner

2005

Table of Contents

I. Introduction ... 2

II. Method ... 6

III. Theoretical Discussion ... 15

IV. Empirical Part ... 22
4.1. The Functional Development of the Concentration Camp System and the 22 Quantitative Composition of Buchenwald ... 22
4.2. The Concentration Camp as a Total Institution with Absolute Power: The External Stratification of the Prisoners’ Society ... 26
4.2.1. The System of Categorizing or Labeling 27
4.2.2. The Underlying Criteria of the External Stratification ... 30
4.2.3. The Delegation of Power: The Functional Prisoners ... 31
4.2.4. A Model of the External Stratification of the Prisoners’ society ... 34
4.3. The Internal Stratification: The Fight between the “Greens” and “Reds” ... 38
4.4. The Formation of Norms ... 46
4.5. Aspects of Solidarity ... 49

V. Conclusion ... 52

Bibliography ... 56

I. Introduction
60 years ago, on April 11th in 1945, the first American soldiers of the Third Army reached the area of the concentration camp KL Buchenwald¹, close to Weimar in the centre of Germany. Until April 10th, the SS commanding officer had tried to clear the camp, also an order of the bombardment of the area could no longer carried out.² Most of the SS guards (“Schutzstaffel”/ Guard Unit) had left the camp rashly shortly before the arrival of the American soldiers, and the low number of those who had stayed was overpowered by armed prisoners.³ In the camp were 21000 prisoners under miserable conditions, a multitude of seriously ill persons, wasting away and numerous corpses. Buchenwald so was the first of the big concentration camps, which was liberated and not removed before by the SS. Still, over the next weeks, one thousand persons died because of malnutrition and illness. Altogether, about 239000 people were arrested, of whom 56000 died in the concentration camp, set up in July in 1937, as well in the numerous outward camps.⁴

On April 10th in 2005, there was the memorial celebration of the liberation of the concentration camp Buchenwald – which was at the same time the German official main celebration of all camps’ liberation in Weimar. The main intention of the speeches was focused on the importance of a continuing remembrance process of the events in the Third Reich and especially the Holocaust or Genocide⁵ on the European Jews and the Sinti and Roma; or as the president of the German Central Council of Jews, Paul Spiegel, said, the transmission of the “baton of memory“⁶. The author and Buchenwald survivor Jorge Semprún pointed out that the contemporary witnesses will die the next years, and that so a new epoch within the memory process begins, for him, above all the fictional literature shall assume this obligation⁷, but necessary is a continuation by society as a whole.

The remembrance of the responsibility and guilt for the Holocaust is and will be an important part of the German national identity and collective memory. The renowned historian Raul Hilberg wrote in his core literature about the extermination of the Jews: “History cannot be undone, all the more not the history of this occurrence, which stood at the centre of the shake up, which changed the world. Not to know this past means not to understand oneself.”⁸ To know and to reappraise the past in order to understand oneself, this difficult path of self-examination, must be gone ahead, and as well in a European context. Not only the passing on of the memory, but also protection, deepening and extension of knowledge, a closer examination of facts and re-asking of questions in order to find new answers must therefore be the goal of every research generation in this field. History shows that what was possible can recur, everywhere, completely, partially or similarly⁹ – it is a matter of prevention – and that is why any study of the period from 1933 till 1945 is meaningful.

When I started to deal with the topic of concentration camps, my basic interest was to analyze how the victims tried to react – as far as this was possible - to the systematic terror of the National Socialists. In short, how they constructed their social reality within the secluded and all-pervasive system of the concentration camp in interpersonal and inter-group relations. Therefore, one has to examine on the one hand on the vertical level the captive’s relations with the SS and on the other hand on the horizontal level the relations between the different captives. The latter will be in the center of my attention. A multitude of question arises in this broad field of interests, which require answers: Which stratifications and social hierarchies were developed? Which norms and laws were negotiated within the prisoners’ society? How were the power relations among the prisoners organized? Was there a far-reaching solidarity among the prisoner groups?

Even when the text corpus about the Holocaust and the concentration camps seems to be huge, it turns out, according to my current enquiries, that this perspective of the social life of the victims in a concentration camp has been relatively neglected. Especially conspicuous is the fact that sociology has stayed out to a large extent of the scientific discourse about this field, although basic micro-sociological aspects are approached.¹⁰ The change of this and the obtaining of systematic insights concerning the “how” and “why” with the help of sociological tools shall be the basic field of interest of my work.

At first sight, the terms which I use like “social life” or “construction of reality”, appear disconcerting but it is obvious that in every social situation, and therefore also in a concentration camp, under certain aspects social reality is created trough externalization of sense.¹¹ Moreover, it is clear that the institution concentration camp form the absolute frame, the everything-determining instance for the processes of creating reality of the prisoners. But under the surface of this “standardized machinery of terror”¹² there were niches and partial possibilities to structure the life. The prisoner’s were not only passively suffering and enduring, but also active and reactive in individual and group related acting; fighting for survival in cooperation and conflicts, and defending through communal and protection forms.¹³ The fact that the self-government was introduced in German concentration camps in 1937 to maintain order because of rising prisoner numbers is therefore central, as more and more functions of the camp administration were transferred to the prisoners and consequently partly and indirect possibilities of organizing this reality emerged.14

[...]

1 K.L. was the official term; K.Z. was the term used by the prisoners (Elie A. Cohen, Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1953), p. 3).

2 David A. Hackett, (ed.), Der Buchenwald-Report. Bericht über das Konzentrationslager bei Weimar (1995), (München: C.H.Beck, 2002), p.22.

3 In the GDR, the role of the prisoners at the liberation of the camp was put in the center of attention. The socalled self-liberation through the resistance of the international communist prisoners was exaggerated and ideologically instrumentalized for the authorization of the GDR. The role of the Americans was downplayed. However, it is obvious that without the approaching American army this would never have been possible. Nevertheless, one should not belittle the accomplishments of the communist prisoners, who developed a military unit, obtained and produced weapons and above all through their passive resistance during the last days could delay or partly ruin the evacuation, ordered by the SS (Gedenkstätte Buchenwald (ed.), Konzentrationslager Buchenwald 1937-1945. Begleitband zur ständigen historischen Ausstellung, (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1999), p. 232).

4 ibid,. p. 253.

5 The term ‘Holocaust’ asserted itself in the analysis of the events in the context of the annihilation of the European Jews. It denotes a sacred act, in which the totally burnt victim is exclusively dedicated to God. The term emphasized the role of the Jews as victims and is an expression of the Jewish fate and period of suffering as well as the unique character of the event. In the Jewish collective memory, however, the term ‘Shoa’ is used first and foremost, which literally means catastrophe. The term ‘Genocide’ derives from jurisprudence and denotes annihilation of entire nations and ethnics, it also refers to several victim categories (Michael Pollak, “Ein Forschungsbericht und seine Bedeutung. Ein Nachwort”, in Jacob Goldstein, Irving F.Lukoff, Herbert A. Strauss, Individuelles und kollektives Verhalten in Nazi-Konzentrationslagern. Soziologische und psychologische Studien zu Berichten ungarisch-jüdischer Überlebender, (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 1991), p. 195). 6 Paul Spiegel, Rede des Präsidenten des Zentralrates der Juden in Deutschland am 10. April 2005 im Weimarer Nationaltheater anlässlich der zentralen Gedenkveranstaltung aus Anlass des 60. Jahrestages der Befreiung der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, (15-04-2004).

7 Jorge Semprún, Rede am 10. April 2005 im Weimarer Nationaltheater anlässlich der zentralen Gedenkveranstaltung aus Anlass des 60. Jahrestages der Befreiung der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, (15-04-2004).

8 Raul Hilberg, Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden (1961), (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999), pp. 9-10.

9 Volkhard Knigge, “Statt eines Vorwortes: Vorgeschichte einer Ausstellung“, in Gedenkstätte Buchenwald ed., Konzentrationslager Buchenwald 1937-1945. Begleitband zur ständigen historischen Ausstellung, (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1999), p. 14. Not only from a history perspective, this thesis is emphasized, which does not interpret the Holocaust as a unique and principally not again possible return of the events. So for example Zygmunt Bauman – as a representative of sociology – concludes in a similar way, of course from other points of view. He puts the Holocaust explicitly in the development history of the modern age and the civilization process, which had to, according to its bureaucratic-rational features, contain the possibility of the Holocaust, with the result that a repetition can be possible on principle. Interpretations of the Holocaust as a “unique return to barbarity” or as an “accident of history” are therefore misleading and not permitted (Zygmunt Bauman, Dialektik der Ordnung. Die Moderne und der Holocaust (1989), Uwe Ahrens trs., (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2002), pp. 12- 14.

10 Cp.: Wolfgang Sofsky, Die Ordnung des Terrors: Das Konzentrationslager (1993), (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2004), p. 327.

11 Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann, Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit (1966), (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2000), p. 65. They use this term to explain the dialectic of the continuous process of constructing social reality. Which they summarise in the following way: “society as a human product“, which means the externalisation of sense in the empiric reality; the “society as an objective reality”, which means that the externalised products - for example through history - take an objective character (objectification) and “the human as a social product”, which means first the unconscious internalisation of the objective reality - for example through socialisation - and later conscious examination of the reality. So, the term externalisation refers only to becoming reality of sense and ideas in the actor perspective on the micro-level (ibid, p. 65).

12 Paul Martin Neurath, Die Gesellschaft des Terrors. Innenansichten der Konzentrationslager Dachau und Buchenwald (1951), (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), p. 37

13 Jacob Goldstein, & Irving F. Lukoff. & Herbert A Strauss, Individuelles und kollektives Verhalten in Nazi- Konzentrationslagern. Soziologische und psychologische Studien zu Berichten ungarisch-jüdischer Überlebender, (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 1991), p. 17.

14 Neurath, Die Gesellschaft des Terrors, p. 29.