Polokaust Negationism Poles Killed For Cause Myth Sofsky

The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, by Wolfgang Sofsky, William Templer (Translator). 1999

Soundly Debunks the Myth That “Jews Were Killed Because They Were Jews and Poles Were Killed Because It Was War”. Red=Brown: Double Genocide Affirmed. Holodomor Was Genocide

The author, a German scholar, surveys the Nazi concentration camps system. His work tells us a great deal about the comparable Nazi German mentality against Poles as well as Jews, and that is the primary focus of my review.

AMBIVALENCE ON HOLOCAUST SUPREMACISM

On one hand, Sofsky (p. 12) asserts what he calls the unique and unparalleled state-initiated and industrially organized mass annihilation of Jews and Gypsies by the Germans. Note that this confuses the technology and methodology of murder with the significance of the murder. [Is a person murdered by the relatively new technology gunshot wound one iota more significance than a person murdered by an old technology stab wound?]

Then Sofsky reverses himself a bit as he comments, “On the other hand, those who insist on the singularity of Auschwitz can be suspected of wishing to diminish the importance of those other crimes, of not wanting to perceive them in their full and atrocious magnitude.” (p. 11). Yeah, no kidding.

CAMPS BUILT “ONLY FOR JEWS” DO NOT MAKE THE HOLOCAUST EXCEPTIONAL

Nor is there anything special about the Holocaust just because death camps such as Treblinka, Sobibor, etc., were established “only to kill Jews.” Besides ignoring the non-Jews that sometimes died in these ostensibly “Jews only” camps, this talking point deliberately confuses the geographical deployment of the mass murder with the presumed special-ness of the mass murder. Nor is it even true. The Third Reich had no self-consistent policy on where and how they killed Jews. Thus, Jews were killed en masse not only in the supposedly “Jews only” death camps, but also in “multi-victim” camps such as Majdanek and Auschwitz. In the Holocaust by Bullets, Jews were shot at many of the same sites as non-Jews (e. g, Babyn Yar). Finally, “Jews only” killing sites were not the ONLY ethnicity-specific killing sites. There are literally thousands of “Poles only” sites of mass hangings and especially mass shootings of Poles by Germans, but no one suggests that this makes the Polokaust special!

A SLAV INCARCERATED FOR SOME OFFENSE WAS FIRST AND FOREMOST A SLAV, JUST AS A JEW INCARCERATED FOR SOME OFFENSE WAS FIRST AND FOREMOST A JEW

Part of the mystification of the Holocaust involves the premise that a Jew was always the enemy or the Third Reich solely for being born a Jew. In fact, one Polonophobic Holocaust myth actively belittles Polish suffering by having us believe that “Jews died because they were Jews; Poles died because it was war.” Or, “A Pole had to do something to be persecuted by the Nazis; a Jew only had to be a Jew to be persecuted.”

Sofsky neatly demolishes this Holocaust supremacist myth with these remarks, “The racial criterion was predominant. A Jew from Belgium or France who was also classified as a political enemy or criminal was nonetheless primarily a Jew…The Soviet POWs were not merely political and military mortal enemies of the Germans: above all they were Slavic UNTERMENSCHEN. According to the logic of classification, they were doubly threatening: militarily and BIOLOGICALLY.” (p. 119; Emphasis added).

POLES AND JEWS OVERLAPPED CONSIDERABLY IN NAZI GERMAN VALUATION

In describing the Nazi concentration camp populations after the start of WWII, Sofsky comments, “The internationalization of prisoner society increased internal social differentiation, leading to profound contrasts between the various national groups. German prisoners rose in the social pecking order, and accounted for the majority of functionaries in prisoner self-administration. At the bottom of the heap were the ‘non-Aryan’ categories: along with the Jews, principally Poles and Russians.” (p. 35).

Now consider the situation at Mittelbau Dora, famous for the underground factory that produced the V-2 rockets. Sofsky writes, “The camp pariahs—Jews, Soviet POWs and Slavs—were placed in the dilapidated wooden barracks or tents, and new arrivals, confined in the quarantine blocks, were compelled to vegetate in the most wretched conditions.” (p. 67).

Let us put all this is broader context: “At the apex of the class taxonomy (category I) stood the racial contrast between human beings and UNTERMENSCHEN—subhumans. Members of the Slavic ‘Eastern peoples’ (who at best were assigned lives as helots by racial theory) along with Gypsies and Jews, were not regarded as part of human society.” (p. 119).

Not surprisingly, the Nazi German overseers, of concentration camps, saw their Jewish and Polish inmates in a similar light. Sofsky comments, “There is no doubt that among the camp personnel, political and racial stereotypes, especially of the Slavic and Jewish UNTERMENSCHEN, were common and widespread.” (p. 235).

UNKNOWN SCALE OF THE NAZI POLOKAUST

Sofsky, having warned of the questionable reliability of SS records (p. 42), nevertheless uses them to estimate the total admissions and deaths in the 10 best-known Nazi German concentration camps for 1933-1945. They were 1,650,000 and 1,100,000, respectively, which comes to a 2/3rds mortality rate. (p. 43). The Auschwitz concentration camp alone had 400,000 admissions and 261,000 deaths, a 2/3rds mortality rate.

The foregoing estimates, even if reliable, are absolute minima. They do not take into account the mortality-lowering skewing effects of recent arrivals and of the better-treated western European inmates. Dachau is instructive. Sofsky (p. 43) lists 206,206 admissions and 31,591 deaths, which amounts to only a 15% death rate. Even if accurate, this surely does not tell the whole story. For Polish priests at Dachau, the mortality rate was 86%. See my review of SHAVELINGS IN DEATH CAMPS.

The main Nazi camps do not encompass the total scope of the Nazi German murder machine: Far from it. Apart from the well-known extermination and concentration camps, there also were vast numbers of smaller ones. Sofsky (p. 292) cites Schwartz and his grand total of 10,006 Nazi camps. Even so, he warns that, “The total number of penal camps and camps for forced laborers is not known, nor can we determine the exact number of camps for infants and small children in Germany, where the children of female conscripted workers were ‘collected’ and subsequently murdered.” (p. 292).

Note that forced labor was itself a form of genocide: Large numbers of Poles of mostly-childbearing age were removed from the Polish population and thereby made unavailable to the normal population-replacement process. Besides, their new circumstances greatly reduced their birth rates. Then, on top of all that, a large fraction of the children actually born to Polish forced laborers were murdered.

“PRODUCTIVE” AND “UNPRODUCTIVE” JEWISH WORKER DESIGNATIONS WERE LARGELY ARBITRARY

It has been argued that the Holocaust was uniquely irrational because the Nazis killed even those Jews that were productive workers and could thereby have contributed to the German war effort with their labors. The fallacy of this argument is shown by the fact that the Nazis also killed non-Jews who could have done the same!

In addition, Sofsky (pp. 252-254) shows actual worker productivity was not even the main issue. Instead, the relative number of Jews in the arriving transports, admitted as inmates into the concentration camps instead of immediately gassed, depended largely upon the camps’ absorption capacity. Thus, at times when many concentration camp inmates had recently died and newly-arriving transports were relatively infrequent, a relatively large fraction of arriving Jews was admitted as inmates. Sofsky concludes that, “Fitness for work was therefore not a fixed attribute: it was a label changed pragmatically by the SS and adapted to the given situation. It had LESS TO DO WITH ACTUAL VOCATIONAL ABILITIES, age, and physical strength than with the organizational context of selection, and the absolute power of category definition enjoyed by the personnel.” (p. 253; Emphasis added).

We thus see that, far from having some kind of mystical drive to kill as many Jews as possible, the Nazis not only spared some Jews from death, but also were quite arbitrary about which Jews they spared for forced labor.

DOUBLE GENOCIDE AFFIRMED: RED=BROWN. HOLODOMOR WAS GENOCIDE, AND NOT JUST “FORCED COLLECTIVIZATION”

With special reference to the Holodomor, Sofsky comments, “Contrary to what is widely believed, Soviet terror also made use of ethnic and ‘social-biological’ criteria. Mass murder as the result of a deliberately engineered famine in the Ukraine fulfills the criterion of genocide.” (p. 292).