Commemorating Hell: The Public Memory of Mittelbau-Dora available in Paperback, eBook
Commemorating Hell: The Public Memory of Mittelbau-Dora
- ISBN-10:
- 0252077881
- ISBN-13:
- 9780252077883
- Pub. Date:
- 02/15/2011
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0252077881
- ISBN-13:
- 9780252077883
- Pub. Date:
- 02/15/2011
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
Commemorating Hell: The Public Memory of Mittelbau-Dora
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$27.00Overview
Prisoners at Mittelbau-Dora built the V-1 and V-2 missiles, some of them coming into direct contact with Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, who later became leading engineers in the U.S. space program. Through the continuing story of Mittelbau-Dora, from its operation as a labor camp to its social construction as a monument, Schafft and Zeidler reflect an abiding interest in the memory and commemoration of notorious national events. In extending the analysis of Mittelbau-Dora into post-war and present-day Germany, Commemorating Hell uncovers the intricate relationship between the politics of memory and broader state and global politics, revealing insights about the camp's relationship to the American space pioneers and the fate of the nearby city of Nordhausen.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252077883 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2011 |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
Commemorating Hell
The Public Memory of Mittelbau-DoraBy GRETCHEN SCHAFFT GERHARD ZEIDLER
University of Illinois Press
Copyright © 2011 the Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07788-3
Chapter One
Conceptualizing Horror
KZ-Gedenkstätte. KZ- Mahn- und Gedenkstätte. For speakers of English, these German words are without meaning. However, for a few, whose numbers are dwindling, these are key words. Key in the sense of being among the most meaningful in one's vocabulary. Key in the sense of unlocking for an individual the most deeply needed information and emotional truths.
Take Leo Kuntz, for example. The concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora is for him a center within his cognitive space, a phrase that is vivid in mental pictures and constructions that are inseparable from his personal history and his current concerns. The camp, once a widely held secret, now is a site of public history, open to interpretation and reinterpretation, and it impacts Leo's own conceptions, adding to or detracting from his own sense of self in the most fundamental ways.
What had been the grounds of a notorious concentration camp, where V-missiles were assembled under murderous conditions by slave laborers, has been commemorated since the 1960s in the same geographic space where the actual events occurred as a memorial site, a "Gedenkstätte." Germans refer to this concept as commemoration in "Ort des Geschehens," or on the site where the events took place. For many, this combines two functions: providing a reference to historical events within the concentration camp and also commemorating the resting place of its victims. How these functions are carried out is important to survivors, their families and friends, people with political agendas that include or depend on this history, and people of strong moral or righteous convictions that the past must not be repeated. Leo falls into several of these categories.
Mittelbau-Dora was founded in the last years of the Third Reich, which projected a thousand-year reign of the National Socialist Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP) that lasted twelve years. First an outer camp of Buchenwald populated at the end of August 1943, Mittelbau-Dora became independent of this larger camp in October 1944 and operated until April 1945. The purpose of this particular camp was to provide the workforce to assemble "wonder weapons" for the Third Reich, the last hope for victory in an already failed war. The abandoned mines of the Kohnstein Mountains (hardly more than hills) were to be enlarged to make the largest-ever underground factory. The camp, which expanded to include forty subcamps, held approximately sixty thousand prisoners in this period, of whom about twenty thousand did not survive.
Leo's father, Albert Kuntz, was one of those prisoners who did not return from Mittelbau-Dora. In the last months of the camp, he was seized and taken to the "bunker" on the camp grounds where he was tortured and beaten to death in order to discover the roots of a resistance cell operating in the camp. Or perhaps he was taken to the Gestapo (Nazi secret police) headquarters in nearby Ilfeld. Most of the records were destroyed, and much is left to speculation. Perhaps he was seized not because of the illegal resistance committee he was thought to have formed and fostered throughout his tenure in several camps but for some other reason. Perhaps the SS believed he had to be killed before the camp was captured by the Allies because he knew too much and had experienced too many years in the confines of SS prisons and camps.
The significance of Mittelbau-Dora to Leo is that it is the place where the answers to these riddles reside, either within its collected documentation or in the minds and hearts of survivors he may meet there or come to know through the records and networks of those intimately connected with the history. The documents that are available to him, the people he might come to learn of, the connections he might make will lead him to answers, or so he hopes.
On the other hand, the way in which Albert Kuntz is remembered also defines that for which he stood, those ideologies that took him from his family, his loving wife, his larger group of relatives, his little son, Leo. Those ideologies have to be recognized as legitimate and humane in order to make the sacrifice that Leo made as not only a fatherless child but the progeny of "an enemy of the state" bearable and even meaningful. Elie Wiesel has said it best: "'Memory' is the key word. To remember is to create links between the past and present, between past and future. To remember is to affirm man's faith in humanity and to convey meaning on our fleeting endeavors. The aim of memory is to restore its dignity to justice."
Thus, the existence of the Gedenkstätte is critical to Leo's identity, and the content of its historical record is a significant determinant of his mental and physical health. Now in his eighties, Leo has experienced changes in the presentation of this public history and the history of the German state(s) with trauma and has emerged strong, watchful, critical, and empowered in his own right, while very aware of his limits in controlling the presentation of the historical record.
In many ways, Leo's journey is mirrored not only in the lives of other survivors but in that of the Gedenkstätte itself. It too has both evolved and been dismantled and regrouped under the critical direction of many different individual, governmental, and corporate forces and lobbies. It does not now exist, and never has, outside of the political realities of its times, for the Nazi concentration camps were political institutions set up within a political context. How the camps are remembered by subsequent politically based regimes defines their own relationship to this original political ideology and, thus, defines their values and predicts their behaviors. The commemorations have deep-seated consequences for the perceived legitimacy of states, or lack of it, by the citizens. Most people will not be very concerned about the commemorations, but for some, the interpretation of the past will be intensely watched and critically assessed.
The Concept of the Nazi Concentration Camp
Hitler came to power January 30, 1933, with the plan to restructure the German state into a totalitarian, modern, rational, and terror-driven country that would expand its borders in all directions. His assumption of power was quick, although in the first election, he won no majority of the people's votes. The Nazi Party's personally directed paramilitary forces, the "Sturmabteilung" (SA) and the "Schutzstaffel" (SS), were ready to move. They immediately arrested and put into "protective custody" in "wild concentration camps" those who might produce resistance to the state. These were temporary places of internment: factories, warehouses, local jails and prisons, unused buildings of any kind that offered secure enclosures.
The term concentration camp was first used by the British in the Boer War of 1899–1902 in which they "concentrated" Boer families in large enclosed areas. Hitler began to use this existing concept early in his speeches and writing. In 1927, at a party meeting, Hitler had declared that his opponents "must get a taste of what it is like to live in a concentration camp." Other forms of imprisonment were also used, but it was clear from the beginning that the state would be holding such large numbers of people that camps would be the most efficient. They also could then be the sites of labor for the state, medical experimentation, "reeducation" through torture, and elimination of unwanted societal elements.
As he often did, Hitler combined in his threats the Jews and the Communists as "Jewish Bolsheviks." The burning of the Reichstag, or parliament building, in Berlin on February 27, 1933, provided the first excuse for massive roundups of Communist and other political opponents amid the overwhelming support of the German population. "The Emergency Decree for the Protection of the Nation and State," signed on that very day, provided the legal basis for eliminating many basic civil liberties, such as freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech. Political opponents or potential opponents of Hitler were the first to be taken into these concentration camps. Jews, certainly a major target of the regime, were not arrested early in Hitler's regime unless they had a political connection that placed them in this initial category of opponents. Regulations, however, began to affect their ability to access and maintain employment, to move freely, to maintain their standard of living, even to be considered full citizens.
The three major political opposing forces to Hitler were the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and the labor unions. From March to October 1933, twenty thousand Communists were imprisoned and between five and seven hundred people murdered. Women active in the Communist Party of Germany and other active female opponents were not exempt from internment. They were taken in the fall of 1933 to "women's protective custody camps" first in Moringen and later to the ancient prison in Lichtenburg in 1937. Other camps held women as well, but Ravensbrück was the most famous of all the women's camps, established in 1938–39. Both women and men came under the same administration unit, the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, and in addition to the hard labor they endured, they were also subjected to punishments such as withdrawal of food, physical force, solitary confinement, and imprisonment in punishment cells. Men and women were often in the same camps in different sections or outer camps.
The original "wild concentration camps" quickly evolved into permanent camps that grew in number and geographic range. The temporary holding places were closed, and the first actual concentration camp built by the SS was Dachau in April 1933. The system became more permanent, although new improvised camps sprang up as needed to service particular manufacturing or processing needs of the state or even private enterprise. Columbia-House in Berlin, Dachau near Munich, Esterwegen in northwestern Germany, Lichtenburg in the Southeast, and Oranienburg/Sachsenhausen north of Berlin provided coverage for much of the country within the first years of Hitler's tenure.
The reason given for imprisonment was usually the necessity for "protective custody." This was defined as "to protect against all persons who through their manner or acts endanger the security of the people or the state." There was no further definition, nor any way to effectively protect oneself against the charges.
A variety of types of camps existed, and each independent concentration camp had a large number of subsidiary camps and Aussenkommandos, or work details, outside of the main camp that often had hundreds of prisoners. The various types of camps included work/education camps, transit camps, prisons, ghettos, internment camps, prisoner-of-war camps, punishment camps, impressed-labor camps, and death camps. Thus, it is difficult to give a definitive number of concentration camps existing on German soil and in occupied countries, but if one were to consider all the variations, most likely they numbered in the thousands. Mittelbau-Dora itself was "host" to more than forty Aussenkommandos, and could be considered to incorporate the characteristics of a work camp, a transit camp, a prison, a prisoner-of-war camp, a punishment camp, and an impressed-labor camp. Because it lacked a gas chamber, it could not be considered a death camp, although to a third of its prisoners, that distinction had no meaning.
The post–World War I period had been traumatic for Germany: in addition to losing the First World War, there was uncontrollable inflation, reparation payments under the Versailles Treaty, as well as a major cultural shift. Modernization brought unfettered behavior, especially in Berlin, and changes in lifestyles overall. It also brought rapid innovations in industry and new roles for university faculty in industry. Political life took to the streets in violent demonstrations, and people no longer felt safe. Increased security under the Nazis was temporary and came with a price tag. Civil liberties for everyone were severely reduced. Although many were worried and at least privately were against the Nazis, the majority of Germans threw their support and enthusiasm to the new regime in overwhelming numbers in the mid-1930s. The cost to the "others," those increasingly well-defined outsiders, remained of secondary importance to the large majority of citizens. With the outlawing of first the Communist Party and then the Social Democratic Party, as well as the imprisonment of their leaders, there was no serious opposition to the increasing takeover and Gleichschaltung (regimentation and homogeneity) of the German people and their institutions. For those with thoughts of opposition, the concentration camps and those who returned from them served as powerful deterrents.
The concentration camps imprisoned increasingly those considered "asocial," including those without work, unwed mothers, prostitutes, petty criminals, homosexuals, and Jews or Gentiles who violated the Nuremberg laws. These laws, among other things, defined who was "a Jew" according to Nazi precepts, and deprived those so defined of their German citizenship. By the summer of 1937, mainstream German society became defined by its very lack of diversity and its willing compliance with directions and orders from those in charge of almost every aspect of life (the Führer Prinzip).
Administration of Concentration Camps
It is easy for the outsider to get the wrong conception of camp life; a conception mingled with sentiment and pity. Little does he know of the hard fight for existence, which raged among the prisoners. This was an unrelenting struggle for daily bread and for life itself, for one's own sake or for that of a good friend. —Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
The words above were written by psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, some years after his release from Auschwitz. They stand in counterpoint to the Nazi rationality of the planning of the camps and their careful administration and show the subjective space between the hegemony of the system and the lives of prisoners.
Hermann Göring stood next to Adolf Hitler as the named successor and head of the Air Force (Luftwaffe). More important to the concentration camp history was another central force behind Nazi power: Heinrich Himmler, the national leader of the SS (Reichsführer SS) and also police commissioner/ president of Munich. Hitler gave almost unlimited power to Himmler to coerce the German people into a single force, eliminating all opposition. The "wild concentration camps" were under the jurisdiction of local authorities, state agencies, party groups, and political police. A few months after Dachau was built, however, Himmler and the SS had complete charge of it, the first long-standing concentration camp, designed to hold all those in protective custody in Bavaria. Hermann Göring, the Prussian state minister, was given authority over several other camps for a time, but all of the camps reverted to Himmler's control when he became head of the political police in Prussia on April 20, 1934.
Himmler placed Theodor Eicke, who had been the first commandant in Dachau beginning in the summer of 1933, in charge of expanding the concentration camp system. Eicke was head of the Totenkopf (death head) units of the SS, as well as a member of the secret police, or Gestapo. In the post of inspector of the concentration camps, Eicke developed under Himmler's guidance the basic plan and model for the use and "training" (punishments) of prisoners. The system was in place for the permanent detention of anyone who posed a threat to the regime.
Whitehead has pointed out that the nature of systematic violence is always rule governed and has meaning to both the perpetrator and the victim. Part of that meaning comes from the culturally shared symbolism of the rules and punishments. However, in the case of the Nazi concentration camps, rules came from a small group of men who had no understanding of the multinational prison population they were about to see in their camps. There was no single national or religious culture to be shared. Instead, the shared understandings came from a deeper source: the terror itself that created a single urge among prisoners to survive and, for some, to retain some vestige of personal agency.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Commemorating Hell by GRETCHEN SCHAFFT GERHARD ZEIDLER Copyright © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction....................ix1. Conceptualizing Horror....................1
2. The Camp Mittelbau-Dora....................19
3. An End and a Beginning....................39
4. The Change of Command....................59
5. Shaping the New Land and Its Memories....................77
6. The Mahn- und Gedenkstätte in the GDR....................93
7. The Wall Comes Down....................115
8. The Modern Gedenkstätte....................137
9. Major Themes and Conclusions....................152
Notes....................169
Bibliography....................183
Index....................195