The kapos were the prisoner functionaries who ran the camp on behalf of the SS. Every concentration camp and every labour detail had them. They were prisoners themselves but they were given small additional rations, slightly better clothing, freedom from the worst work, and the authority to drive other prisoners on the SS’s behalf with sticks, fists and, in many cases, fatal violence. The system was the SS’s main labour-saving device. A few hundred SS guards could not have run a camp of forty thousand prisoners without it. The system also produced some of the worst abuses inside the camps and produced, after the war, the most painful internal arguments inside the survivor communities.
The German term Kapo, of disputed origin, possibly from the Italian capo, meaning head, was applied across the system to any prisoner with authority over other prisoners. The hierarchy ran from the Lagerältester, the camp elder, at the top, through Blockälteste, the block elders, to Stubenälteste, the room elders, to Vorarbeiter, the foremen, to the kapos who ran individual labour details. Below them were the Schreiber, the clerks, who kept the camp records, the Sanitäter, the prisoner medics, and the Stubendienst, the room duty. All of these positions had access to slightly more food and slightly less violence and were therefore, in camp economy, the difference between probable death and possible survival.
The SS chose the functionaries by category. The earliest concentration camps in 1933, 1934 had used political prisoners, mostly communists and social democrats, as the first functionaries. From 1935 onwards the SS shifted toward German criminals, the men with green triangles, on the explicit theory that criminals would be more brutal toward the politicals and the Jews. Inside the major camps from the late 1930s onwards there was a running war for control of the prisoner functionary positions between the green triangles and the red triangles, the political prisoners. The camp the reds controlled, like Buchenwald in its later phase under the political-prisoner administration, was a measurably less murderous place than the camp the greens controlled, like Mauthausen. The difference was sometimes the difference between a thirty per cent and a sixty per cent death rate.
Jewish prisoners were not, as a rule, given the higher functionary positions in the camps in the west. They were given the lower-ranking kapo positions in the all-Jewish details, in particular the Sonderkommando in the death camps, the men forced to operate the gas chambers and crematoria. The Sonderkommando was the most isolated of all the functionary groups; the men were murdered every few months and replaced. The kapo of a Sonderkommando shift had a few weeks of better food and would then be killed.
The behaviour of individual functionaries varied. Some were sadists and used the position to settle personal scores or to extract sexual favours from younger prisoners. Some were professional criminals who applied the violence the SS expected and beat people to death routinely on the work details. Some were political prisoners who used the position to shield others, divert food, falsify the work records to hide the weak, and warn fellow members of the underground when an SS sweep was coming. The same camp could have, on the same day, a brutal kapo on one labour detail and a kapo on the next detail who was risking his own life to get bread to a sick man in the infirmary. The literature is full of cases of both kinds.
After the war, the kapos faced their fellow survivors. Some were lynched in the displaced persons’ camps in 1945 and 1946 by the survivors of their own labour details. The state of Israel passed the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law in 1950, which was used to prosecute, between 1951 and 1972, around forty Jewish kapos and ghetto police functionaries. The trials were uneasy, the verdicts were mostly convictions on lesser charges, and the law fell into disuse after the embarrassing acquittal in the Eichmann era of several defendants whom many survivors believed guilty. The state quietly stopped bringing cases.
The moral question is the question Primo Levi tried to address in his last book, The Drowned and the Saved, in the chapter on the Grey Zone. The chapter is one of the great pieces of writing on the Holocaust. Levi argued that the men who had taken the kapo positions were not, in any straightforward way, perpetrators or victims; they were both. The grey zone between the two was the SS’s most successful creation. To force the prisoners to administer the killing of their own people was the deepest of all the cruelties. It produced, in many cases, behaviour that no one outside the camp had any standing to judge.
See also
- The Sonderkommando
- Political Prisoners
- Adolf Eichmann
- Primo Levi
- The Judenrat
- The Jewish Response During the Holocaust
- Food and Starvation
Sources
- Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Summit Books, 1988, especially the chapter The Grey Zone
- Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat, 1946; The Theory and Practice of Hell, Berkley, 1980
- Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, Princeton University Press, 1997
- Karin Orth, Die Konzentrationslager-SS, Wallstein, 2000
- Dan Porat, Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators, Harvard University Press, 2019
- Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, Stein and Day, 1979, on the Sonderkommando