The Holocaust deniers claim: “The conditions in the German concentration camps were no worse than in Allied prisoner of war camps. The mortality figures are comparable when properly compared. The German camps have been singled out for moral condemnation that other wartime detention systems should equally attract.”
The claim works as a comparative-equivalence argument and depends on the listener not knowing the actual comparative figures. The Allied POW camps for German prisoners had mortality rates of approximately one to two per cent across the war (depending on theatre and date); German POW mortality in Soviet custody was much higher, in the order of thirty to forty per cent, reflecting the savagery of the Eastern Front conflict on both sides. The German concentration camps had mortality rates of approximately twenty to forty per cent annually for non-Jewish political prisoners, and approaching one hundred per cent for Jewish prisoners not selected for labour on arrival. The killing centres of the Operation Reinhard system had a mortality rate of approximately one hundred per cent within hours of arrival. There is no comparison.
The Allied POW figures
The Allied treatment of German POWs is well documented. The British and American forces captured approximately 3.5 million Germans by the end of the war and held them in a network of camps across Britain, France, the United States and the various theatres of operations. The death rate in British custody was approximately 0.2 per cent of the total, in American custody approximately 0.3 per cent, in French custody approximately 2 per cent (with the higher rate in French custody reflecting the conditions of the immediate post-war chaos and a deliberate French policy of using German prisoners for hazardous post-war work, particularly mine clearance). The treatment was governed by the Geneva Convention of 1929, to which Germany was a signatory; the International Committee of the Red Cross conducted regular inspections of the major camps; the standards of accommodation, food, medical treatment and labour conditions were broadly comparable to those for Allied troops. Some prisoners died of disease, accident or hostile action by guards (the latter rare and prosecuted when discovered), but the system was not designed to kill them.
The Soviet treatment of German POWs was substantially harsher. Approximately 3 million Germans were captured by the Soviets, and approximately one million died in Soviet custody (the figures are contested but the order of magnitude is settled). Conditions in the Soviet camps were brutal, food rations were inadequate, and medical care was minimal. The Soviet camps were not, however, designed to kill the prisoners; the Soviets were, in many cases, struggling to feed their own population in the same period. The mortality reflected wartime privation and indifference rather than a killing programme. The standard scholarly account, by the Russian historian Pavel Polian and others, treats the Soviet camps as appallingly run prisoner camps in which mass deaths occurred, not as designed killing facilities.
The German concentration camp figures
The German concentration camp system, by contrast, was characterised by structurally lethal conditions. The annual mortality rate among non-Jewish political prisoners in the WVHA labour camps in 1943 to 1944 was approximately twenty to forty per cent depending on the camp and the work assignment. The mortality rate at the satellite labour camps attached to industrial projects was higher, often fifty per cent within six months of arrival. The mortality rate at the punishment camps (Mauthausen-Gusen, the Mauthausen quarry detail) was higher still. These were not facilities in which prisoners were merely held and incidentally died of disease; they were facilities in which the work assignments, the food rations, the housing and the medical provision were calibrated to produce death within a known time window.
For Jewish prisoners the mortality rate was substantially higher. Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz I and Birkenau who had been registered at the labour camp (rather than killed on arrival) had an average life expectancy of approximately three to four months. Of the approximately 1.3 million Jews deported to Auschwitz over the operation’s life, approximately 1.1 million were killed; of these, approximately 900,000 were killed within hours of arrival without registration, the remainder dying in the labour camp through the working-to-death regime.
For Jews sent to the Operation Reinhard camps, mortality was effectively one hundred per cent. The camps had no labour function; everyone who arrived was killed within hours. Of approximately 1.7 million people deported to Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka combined, fewer than two hundred survived (almost all of them Sonderkommando members who escaped during the various uprisings). The mortality rate at the Reinhard camps cannot be sensibly compared to anything in the Allied POW system because no Allied facility was designed to function in this way.
The category error
The denier comparison is a category error. The Allied POW camps were custodial facilities for captured combatants, governed by international law, with mortality rates of one to two per cent. The German concentration camps were extra-legal facilities for civilians defined as racial or political enemies, governed by no external rule, with mortality rates of twenty to forty per cent annually for political prisoners and effectively one hundred per cent for Jews. The Operation Reinhard camps were killing facilities for civilians, with no custodial function whatever and a mortality rate of one hundred per cent. Comparing the first to the second or third is comparing radically different kinds of institution, with radically different purposes, governed by radically different rules, producing radically different outcomes. The comparison only works if the listener does not know the figures.
Why the claim is harmful
The claim is harmful because it asks the listener to morally equate institutions that were not equivalent. The Allied POW camps were custodial holding facilities run within the Geneva framework. The German concentration camps were a system of extra-legal detention, forced labour and mass killing for which no comparable Western analogue exists. The Operation Reinhard camps were dedicated killing facilities. To accept the equivalence, one would have to accept that mortality rates of one per cent are equivalent to mortality rates of forty per cent, and that custodial detention is equivalent to systematic killing. The argument’s purpose is to spread the moral discredit of one operation across other operations to which it does not properly attach. It is a method of moral evasion through false equivalence.
What was the mortality rate in British and American POW custody? What was the mortality rate at the Operation Reinhard camps? On what comparison can the camps be said to be equivalent?
See also
Sources
- Stephen Ambrose et al., Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood, Louisiana State University Press, 1992, on the actual mortality figures in Western Allied POW custody
- Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR, Central European University Press, 2004, on the Soviet POW camps and their mortality
- Stefan Karner, Im Archipel GUPVI: Kriegsgefangenschaft und Internierung in der Sowjetunion 1941 bis 1956, Oldenbourg, 1995, on the Soviet POW system
- Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, Hamburger Edition, 1999, on the German concentration camp mortality regime
- Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, Princeton University Press, 1997, the standard structural analysis
- Yitzhak Arad, The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, revised and expanded edition, Indiana University Press, 2018, on the killing rate at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka
- Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Institut für Zeitgeschichte / Oldenbourg Verlag, 1991
- Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, 27 July 1929, with the German signature and the standard treatment for Western Allied POWs in German custody and German POWs in Western Allied custody
- International Committee of the Red Cross, Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities during the Second World War, 1 September 1939 to 30 June 1947, Geneva, 1948, with the inspection records for the POW camps
- Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich (eds.), Prisoners of War and Their Captors in World War II, Berg, 1996
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Concentration Camps 1939 to 1942” and “Killing Centres”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org