And now we have come to the heart of the matter. I am going to talk about the extermination camps. My outline is that I will talk about when these camps were set up. I will talk about the five extermination camps, and the sixth is Auschwitz which, of course, deserves special attention. When we think of the Holocaust, of course what comes to mind are the extermination camps. This seems to be the heart of the matter. But of course we must remember that perhaps only half of the people who died during the Holocaust were victims of the extermination camps. The other half were shot in the territory of the Soviet Union, died in ghettos, died in various concentration camps which were not extermination camps. But still, the uniqueness of the Holocaust has something to do with these extermination camps. After all, genocides have occurred before and after. But extermination camps have not. This is unique. Now, it seems to me that there are two components of the extermination camps. And each had it's predecessors. They themselves were not new. What was new that bring these two aspects together, one aspect is the concentration camp. And actually in the course of the 20th century, the first concentration camps were set up by the British in the course of the Boer War. Concentration camp, meaning that you would take people who seemed, who are opponents and you think of them as opponents, and you keep them under control without legal means. Now immediately, when the Nazis came to power in January 33, a number of concentration camps came into being. And here, the first inmates were political opponents. And then later on, to these were added individual Jews, anti-social elements, and what have you. And these camps remained in existence and in the course of the 1930s, the number of people interned varied. In the beginning, there was something like 20,000 people in those major camps. Dachau, which was the first which was established. And then the number of inmates actually declined in the mid-30s, and then it started to grow with the attack on Poland and vastly expanded in the course of the war. There were 60, well, there were a large number of major concentration camps, and the concentration camps had satellite camps. So altogether, there were something like 160, 180 of these camps. And the camps were instruments of murder. They did not have gas chambers. The instrument of murder was that the people were ,on occasion, worked to death. The concentration camps, unlike the extermination camps, were not limited to Jews. That is, in these camps, you could encounter a large variety of people. Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, or anybody that the Nazis had reason to fear and wanted to get rid of. Now, some of these camps, they varied from one another. Ravensbruck, for example, was a female camp. Mauthausen, which was in Austria. But, of course, by this time, Austria was part of the Reich. Mauthausen was a particularly dreadful place. And which had that famous Staircase of Death. It was a quarry and the inmates had to carry rocks from the bottom to the top, and quite often, they fell in to their death. Now, the concentration camps had crematoria to burn the dead, but they did not have gas chambers. This is the distinguishing feature of the Nazi Holocaust, the gas chamber. Well, the gas chambers also were not new in 1941. Mike Vehler, if you remember, he talked about the program of eugenics to get rid of those who, in the Nazi point of view, lived a life not worth living. And the race would be improved by eliminating people who were found to be a burden on the German people. And so, the first victims of gas were not Jews, but, at this eugenic program, in the course of which some tens of thousands of people were killed. The mentally handicapped, physically handicapped, and I'm repeating perhaps, what Vehler said. This is, by the way, terribly important for our purposes, in as much as the Nazis already started with a great deal of know how and the personnel. There is a direct connection from the personnel from these eugenics program to the famous extermination camps. That is the same people were transferred now to carry out killing people who, in the Nazi point of view, where not deserve to live. And, of course, the Jews were the ones who did not deserve to live. The concentration camp were labor camps, in which people died because they were overworked and insufficiently fed. That is, you had the chance to survive. The extermination camp had no other purpose but to kill. This is not quite true because there is Auschwitz, which is a hybrid. Auschwitz was a labor camp and an extermination camp. But only extermination camps had gas chambers and all the extermination camps were in Poland. Europe, Germany had no extermination camps, they had labor camps. In labor camps in which, well, hundreds of thousand people died. And the great turning point, again, will be the attack on the Soviet Union, 1941, when mass murder begins, and the plan for the Nazis, that we want to get rid of the Jews has been there. But, how are we going to get rid of the Jews? What does it mean to get rid of the Jews? And, in the course of the 1930s, they agonized. And well, we'll make their lives so miserable they want to leave. That's one thing. And then, well, we'll put them in ghettos, and many of them will die. That's another thing. And then, what do we do? Well, we'll send them to Madagascar. This is a half-baked idea, but the Nazis were full of half-baked ideas. Then we'll send them to the East. And then, as I will be talking about it next time, and I talked about [FOREIGN], that came to be a synonym, sending them to their death. But they don't say it, it's so difficult to say, well, what should we do? Well, kill them all. It doesn't come easily. Now, in my mind, this goes well with the so-called, with not with the intentionalist, but the functionalist. Namely, that they were stumbling on the way, that's the title of a wonderful book, is The Twisted Road to Auschwitz. It's a twisted road. This is the functionalist position with which I identify.
