Were "special" personnel stationed at concentration camps?

personnel that would say, not be psychologically damaged by throwing babies into ovens, or just generally being around people that look as sick as those campers looked?

kewl forum btw

nailed that blood and guts question

 

I'm a little confused with your question.. but if your wondering if the camp guards and personel lived in the camp amonst the prisioners.. well not really .

The ss garissons were isolated from the main camp areas and from the prisioners. but it was considered to be part of camp facility, fenced and secluded from the outside world. Some high command officers lived with their families in these garrisons.. Some like Rudolf hoss (Auschwitz commander) had his own private villa for him and his family overlooking the camp grounds.

depending on the camp.. like Auschwitz for example.. there were recreation grounds for SS personel to relax and get away from camp life. Polish homes were demolished to build this area for staff. It was near by and was exclusive only to Auscwitz personel and their families (if allowed).

As far as illness of staff is concerned .. Any prisioner diseased or terminally ill in the camp would be executed. Staff that would get sick were properly treated by camp doctors in the garrison. staff were also given regular check ups and properly nurished.


Again, I'm not really sure what your question was, but I hope this helped you out.

It's important to note that not all camps may have been the same as far as staff lodgings. There were different type of camps and some ran differently than others. I'm just refering to the big camps like Auschwitz

Here is a little more info on the SS guarrison at Auschwitz

http://en.auschwitz.org.pl/h/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=17&limit=1&limitstart=4


And here is a photo gallery of this recreation grounds outside the camp for SS personel that I was mentioning about.

Sickening to see how much fun these people were having while innocent people were being thrown into the furnaces nearby.





More pictures here:

http://photo-muse.blogspot.com/2008/01/karl-hckers-auschwitz-photo-album.html

 

im sure they lived separate from their caged animals.

did they just order other jews gypsies gays ect to throw the bodies into the ovens and guard the skeleton people?

doesnt seem like a job an ordinary citizen just serving his country could do.

of course anyone with a trench coat is a sociopath so im not surprised by those pics. I just mean the normal low ranking penis helmet men.

ive seen some of the GERMAN footage of the concentration camps and it almost made me vomit just watching, hows an enlist gonna just be ok with all that??

if i was a government entity, i would find the biggest sick ****s (which would explain goeth i guess) and station them. i was just wondering if they officially DID that. x )

 

Well, I think (if I understand your query) that the greater bulk of the SS guards at the KZs were simply people who had a job to do, and inside of that Nazism mind-set were not "criminals" nor mentally deranged. Not in their own minds nor in the eyes of their superiors.

That isn’t to say that there weren’t any number of sociopath and psychopath-types in the mix. Nor does it eliminate the possibility that some of those personality types didn’t gravitate toward the opportunity to put their mental deviations to; "work for the good of the new Nazi world order".

But did the SS or the Nazis actively go out and find "special" people who were sick in the head to be guards and such? I doubt it was a specific design. I'm not making excuses here, just noticing that the ability for extremely normal people to subjegate their usual "moral compass" under the directions of authority figures has to be factored in. For "fun" read the Stanley Milgram pschological tests of authority obedience in the US during the sixties.

Goto:

Milgram experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Which contains this section:

Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
​

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority. (bold mine)
​

That said, even Himmler and Heydrich recognized that a "better" and less inhumane type of execution had to be found, as they understood that the repeated shootings of the prisoners was having a detrimental impact on the psychology and morale of the men. As expressed when Himmler visited Einsatzgruppe B where he witnessed a mass shooting at Minsk. An eyewitness describing what happened during Himmler's visit to Minsk while watched the killing of a group of one hundred Jews:

As the firing started, Himmler became more and more nervous. At each volley, he looked down at the ground .... The other witness was Obergruppenfuehrer von dem Bach-Zelewski...Von dem Bach addressed Himmler:

"Reichsfuehrer, those were only a hundred....Look at the eyes of the men in this commando, how deeply shaken they are. Those men are finished ["fertig"] for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages."

(Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka by Yitzhak Arad, p. 8)

 

well lets just hope arizona doesnt rally people to genocide the mexicans seeing as how easy it is to rally that kind of support!

im guessing a justification for most was, when the war is over, and germany is the great national social capital of the world, the jews would need to "disappear" anyway...

 

Does my reply answer a few more of your questions? I was thinking that you were looking to find out if "mind sickness" was a prefered type of person to do those jobs. It appears that was not a "needed type", and in Germany the respect for "authority" was extremely and deeply ingrained.

But even in America of the sixties, when "authority" was questioned by most if not all young people, those in the Milgram experiments followed along like sheep. The lesson here is don't be too quick to judge.

 

ya its true. but it wasnt a racist war in the 60s. at least not on paper. and there were so many camps and they all did the same thing. Gas, starve, separate, enslave, experiment, shoot, and burn.

Its my reservation of judgment that leads me to believe the bulk of the soldiers were normal people that couldnt stomach being a guard at any of those camps x )

 

The problem with that extrapolation (racist war) is that the Milgram experiments were carried out between "normal" American citizens, mostly white. Race had nothing to do with that exposure of the "ability" of humans to torture fellow humans. They met their "students" before the tests, and went right ahead and electrocuted them at a "too high a rate" (over 60%) to be abnormal in the general population. Race had nothing to do with the test, simply humans (of both genders) doing things against what they would normally consider "moral".

It is a very disturbing "test".

 

its hard to trust these studies as the participants probably know it is illegal to hurt people for experimentation.

i wont pretend to know what being a german after ww1 was like and how willing they prolly were to believe ANYTHING. There is no such thing as evil only maddening desperation.

 

The way the camp system worked was that there were special inmates in the camp selected by the SS. They were given the task to "supervise" the prisoners.. These inmates were called Kapos. Most were hated by fellow inmates because of their brutality against their own people. Some saw them as simply doing what it takes to survive, while others believe they sold their soul to the nazis. They were to do the nazis dirty work by being amongst the prisioners, rat on and discipline other prisioners. They were treated better by the nazis and got more rations than the avg. prisioner.

Then there were the prisioners who were ordered to work in the Crematoria and gas chambers. They assisted the guards by ordering the victims to strip naked and told would be getting a "shower". They helped keep the victims calm and orderly before being escorted to the "shower room" to be gassed to death. These prisioners also transported the dead bodies from the gas chamber to the crematorium. Also disposing the ashes. These prisoners were also better treated with more food rations and separated from all other prisioners in Auschwitz. These prisioners were called sondercommandos.

The SS guards involvment in the whole process was to guard the facility, sort new arrivals and revoke their belongings, take disiplinary actions on inmates, exectute, and for selected soldiers, drop Zyklon B poison into the gas chambers.

the Sonderkommandos were chosen by the SS apon arrival to the camp. They had no other choice but to do it. Anyone who refused would be killed. They were also sworn to secrecy. They were not to disclose any information as to what was happeneing in that area of the camp. When the SS no longer needed the songercommando prisioner, he simply would be murdered. Very few Sonderkommandos survived the holocaust.. Over the years sondercommandos would commonly be replaced with new ones in order to ensure secrecy. The former sonfercommando prisioners would be killed and The "new arrivals" would dispose of their predecessors' corpses. Horrible to imagine.

Most of the sonderkommandos were killed in the final days of the war in order to keep the nazi mass murder system secret. Very few survived to tell their story.

So as you see, the SS guards were there to just watch over the concentration camp system. And to answer your question, yes, most of these soldiers had no choice as to where they were stationed. They were sworn by Hitler himsekf to obey and follow orders. These soldiers were selected by high command and sworn to secrecy as to what was happening.

Then there were the officers who organized the mass killings. The lunatic hard core nazis who enjoyed killing the innocent and the doctors who performed cruel experiments on inmates. All were convicted war criminals and executed. others never captured and were lucky to get away. Like Mengele for example.

It was common for SS guards in the extermination camp system to be alcoholics. they were drunk all the time to forget the horrors of what was happeneing there. Eventaully it became normal to watch and be part of the mass crimes.

Many were involved in war crimes because of their knowledge and involvement of what was happening. Some were brutal while others simply had not other choice but to be there. Many prison camp guards served time in jail after the war.

it's important to note, that not all the Germany's soldiers were like this. A small percentage of soldiers had knowledge of the holocaust and what was going on in the camps and killings fields. But the majority of Germany's soldiers and officers fought for their country in the battlefields like any other soldier would. Unfortunatly they and Germany's citizens continue to this day to carry the shame and blame for the evil crimes the nazis commited. The nazis not only killed millions of innocent people but also destroyed the image of the German people and her soldiers.

 

it's not about believing anything... Brainwash and propaganda are powerful tools!

Hitler promised many things to the German people. He promised economic recovery for the Germans, he strenghtened the defeated and limited German military. Employment was restored. He gave what the people wanted.. and so he lured the Germans to believe nazis would ruler the world.. He used Goebbles Propaganda machine to create a scapegoat by blame the jews for everything.

After he got into power he needed a strong army to conqure the world, a strong propaganda team to brainwash the masses, a death squad to enhiliate ememies . And most imporatantly, a strong spy network to watch over anyone who thinks differently.

Thats the formula to complete power.

 

Kinda hard to reconcile that statement against your chosen username.
Most German soldiers were needed at the front rather than gusrding PoW or Concentration Camps. That was left to less fit soldiers or sympathisers, even some of the camp prisoners as long as they did exactly what was required, they lived another day. Under that kind of pressure, I guess evil prevails.....

 

In some circumstances wounded soldiers who couldn't return to the frontlines in a reasonable amount of time were sent to guard camps (which included concentration camps), in there place, a fit guard was sent.

I don't think this happened very often and I'm not sure of the full circumstances of this happening either, maybe someone with more info can fill it in?

 

Thank you Lou, i'll do that. But it doesn't change what he's doing. You have
a great forum here. I'll tread more lightly. Thanks.

 

I was waiting to see how long it would be before someone came up with that analogy.