Sociology from hell: a thorough study of the harrowing dynamics of
terror, violence, and absolute power in the Nazi concentration
camps. Sofsky's (Sociology/Univ. of Gottingen) impeccably
researched study focuses on the structuring of space, time, and
sociality in Nazi concentration, labor, and extermination camps.
Sofsky begins by classifying the thousands of camp and ghetto
facilities, largely by the intent of the planners. In some, inmates
lived to do specific work, but in others they worked merely because
they were not yet dead. Sofsky offers both detailed descriptions of
the camps and powerful quotes from survivors; his portrait offers
unique insights into the physical and psychological effects of, for
instance, the experience of sharing tiers of wooden bunk beds with
other work-exhausted skeletons, and of everyday life in these
horrific, carefully zoned landscapes of "survival, dying, and
killing." While some of this reads like industrial psychology,
Sofsky's most significant chapters illuminate with great clarity
the social patterns of the camps. While the SS bureaucracy is
carefully outlined, emphasis is placed on the kapos, overseers, and
German guards at the camps. Without apologizing for their behavior,
the author places kapos and other collaborating inmates among the
victims: "One can hardly imagine a greater power than that which
transforms victims into accessories to their own execution." Those
kapos who most often resorted to kicks and blows are seen as the
most vulnerable, the ones who had to constantly prove that they
were indispensable to their superiors. Rather than simply
dismissing camp personnel as gleeful sadists, Sofsky explains how
the social dynamics and design of the camps encouraged innate
tendencies for mayhem on the part of the lower layers of the power
elite. "The more dead bodies subculture members could chalk up, the
greater was their fame; the more adroit and imaginative their
brutality, the higher their rankings in the group pecking order." A
detailed, rigorous sociological analysis of the incomprehensible.
(Kirkus Reviews)
During the twelve years from 1933 until 1945, the concentration
camp operated as a terror society. In this pioneering book, the
renowned German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky looks at the
concentration camp from the inside as a laboratory of cruelty and a
system of absolute power built on extreme violence, starvation,
"terror labor," and the business-like extermination of human
beings.
Based on historical documents and the reports of survivors, the
book details how the resistance of prisoners was broken down.
Arbitrary terror and routine violence destroyed personal identity
and social solidarity, disrupted the very ideas of time and space,
perverted human work into torture, and unleashed innumerable
atrocities. As a result, daily life was reduced to a permanent
struggle for survival, even as the meaning of self-preservation was
extinguished. Sofsky takes us from the searing, unforgettable image
of the Muselmann--Auschwitz jargon for the "walking dead"--to
chronicles of epidemics, terror punishments, selections, and
torture.
The society of the camp was dominated by the S.S. and a system
of graduated and forced collaboration which turned selected victims
into accomplices of terror. Sofsky shows that the S.S. was not a
rigid bureaucracy, but a system with ample room for autonomy. The
S.S. demanded individual initiative of its members. Consequently,
although they were not required to torment or murder prisoners,
officers and guards often exploited their freedom to do so--in
passing or on a whim, with cause, or without.
The order of terror described by Sofsky culminated in the
organized murder of millions of European Jews and Gypsies in the
death-factories of Auschwitz and Treblinka. By the end of this
book, Sofsky shows that the German concentration camp system cannot
be seen as a temporary lapse into barbarism. Instead, it must be
conceived as a product of modern civilization, where
institutionalized, state-run human cruelty became possible with or
without the mobilizing feelings of hatred.
General
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