Why Were There Survivors in the Concentration Camps?

Some charming Holocaust Deniers in the comments threads (They are nicest people!) have mocked the Holocaust, asking why there were survivors at all from the death camps. The answer is complex. The camps were not necessarily set up for immediate extermination. Even at the death camps, some were selected for the gas right away and others were selected to remain alive at least for a while. These were worked as slave labor, given very little food, and packed together. Many died of starvation and disease, but that was the idea. The idea was to torment them, get some work out of them, and slowly kill them. Other camps were full on labor camps. Auschwitz was pretty much a gigantic factory. At some of these camps, people managed to stay alive for a long time, possibly years. Some also become favored Jews, kapos, or developed relationships, including sexual ones, with camp staff, and stayed alive that way. The guards needed to have some inmates on their side, kind of like in a jail where they have trustees and whatnot. As you can see in the photos on liberation, many of the inmates were not in very good shape, to put it mildly. At the end, they emptied the camps and made them go on death marches, where a lot of them died or were murdered. I suppose they could have just lined them up and shot them in the camps, but they did not do that. There was a large element of sadism, perversity, torture, torment and slow death to the whole enterprise. Further, the Nazi project regarding the Jews was of two minds. Part of the project dealt with killing Jews immediately, and another dealt with keeping them alive, but usually slowly killing them, in the camps over a period of time. And some Jews were just left alive – kapos, girlfriends of guards, etc. The Holocaust was not so much a master plan but an act of madness. As such, its purposes frequently clashed, and in many cases, were poorly developed and even contradictory. The Shoah also seriously hampered the war effort, especially towards the end when trains needed for the war effort were diverted in order to kill Jews, seriously harming the military. So the Jew-killing was not even rational from a military POV. The Nazis were almost afflicted with a Jew-killing psychosis. The notion of exterminating some, leaving others to perish of starvation and disease, and packing others in camps to work them to death until starvation and disease took them over can be seen in the Generalplan Ost intended for the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Belarus. So the Shoah and Generalplan Ost were actually similar, and in Generalplan Ost we have a model for the Shoah, though a much more merciful one. A better analogy would be that Poland and its quisling General Government were Generalplan Ost in praxis.

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18 thoughts on “Why Were There Survivors in the Concentration Camps?”

  1. Most of what you say here and in the previous post is wrong. The videos found here do a superb job of debunking the Holocaust(TM):
    http://www.onethirdoftheholocaust.com/
    I have watched the first set and in process of finishing the second. The creator uses strictly logical arguments. Hence, for you to disagree with him would be irrational on your part.

  2. You forgot to mention that the rail infrastructure of Germany and Poland
    had undergone such ferocious saturation bombing by the Allies towards the end of the war that zero food and medicine could be delivered to the camps. You’re at your worst whenever you start in on the holocaust because you’ve been fellating Jamie Mccarthy at Nizkor for so long your mouth has turned into an “O’ ring. Have you been following the story of that fraudulent old Jewish survivor couple on Oprah’s show? That’s nothing compared to the Bielski brothers DEFIANCE movie fraud.
    1. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/926541.html
    2. http://www.forward.com/articles/13935/
    3. http://www.edu-usa.com/jew1.php
    4. http://mauricepinayblog.w…ategory/bielski-brothers/
    5. http://www.newser.com/sto…ro-preys-on-neighbor.html
    6. http://forum.axishistory….pic.php?f=74&t=142603
    7. http://www.naszawitryna.pl/jedwabne_en_127.html
    8. http://www.iht.com/articl…olocaust-Hero-Charged.php
    [8.http://tinyurl.com/5zjysk%5D
    9.http://wyborcza.pl/1,7684…About_Heroes_or_Murderers\.html
    [9. http://tinyurl.com/5ncwab%5D

  3. Oh, the Holocaust Deniers? Not sure. I write stuff criticizing Jews and Israel (mostly pro-Israeli Jews and the Israeli Lobby in the US and West) and that brought the anti-Semites around. Well, you know, lots of anti-Semites are Holocaust Deniers in one way or another, so there you go. We don’t censor people here, so we let just about anyone post. I pretty much stopped debating the Holocaust Deniers, though.
    There’s also a bunch of White nationalists on here. They’re basically White racists who hate Blacks, Hispanics, etc. Some of them hate Jews too. I’m not sure why they are here either. I wrote some race realist type stuff and I guess that’s what attracted them.

  4. There were some. It’s confusing. I believe that there were survivors at some of the camps, but other camps were simply extermination camps and there were few to no survivors. Several of the camps only operated during 1942-1943 and then they were closed down, bulldozed over and planted with forests. Think Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec. There were very few survivors from places like those because they were meant to have no survivors. Others like Auschwitz were labor or work camps. Most Holocaust survivors survived the Shoah not in camps but by being hidden, running away and living in the woods, joining guerrilla bands, etc. About 2 million Jews survived the Holocaust, but a lot were in Russia, the UK, Spain, Portugal, etc. If the Nazis were out to kill every single one of them, they didn’t do a very good job.

  5. Jamie McCarthy is the Canadian founder of the Nizkor website. It’s rumored that he’s gay. He looks pretty gay to me in photos. “Tomhdintino’s” question, “Where do these people come from, Robert?” belies his squareness. He wouldn’t have to ask you this loaded question if he’d done any more reading and movie watching than the course requirements. Skepticism about the received history of the holocaust is a Sine Qua non for membership in the new underground, Daddy-o.

  6. Read Primo Levi, “I sommersi ed i salvati”. He explained how hard it was for survivors to live with the suspicion (“if he survived, he should have been a kapo” and so on) and the eternal question (“why me?”)

  7. Yes, I read, “If Not Now, When? If Not Me, Who?” It’s a very good book! About some Jewish partisans in Belarus late in the war. Some Jews took up guns and fought! One of the best parts of the book is when the Red Army rolls through. It’s a whole huge cities or counties pouring through with no end in sight.
    Primo Levi was a suicide. I think his experience had to do with that.
    This “Why me?” thing seems to haunt so many war veterans with guilt. I should have died instead of them. It’s a real universal. Also, Zionism poured scorn on the Holocaust and probably the survivors for having gone willingly to their deaths without standing up and fighting. That must be hard to deal with. As a counterpart to this, the sabra was the badass Jew that would stand and fight to the death.

  8. I’m a square too anymore. I’m such a dork these days, I can hardly even get any chicks. Hot young chicks look at me and laugh in my face, I’m so lame. Even those dead girls, down in the graveyard, even they won’t go out with me! I dug a couple of them up, and all they did was lie there!
    All this transformation from the Player of the Year multiple years running as a young man.
    Life is strange and cruel.

  9. The chicks won’t go out with you cubes because you read self-flagellating books by sorry ass suicides like Primo Levi. Ditch that dude! Embrace your race! Come on down to the piano bar and groove along with Primo Kim http://tinyurl.com/afabf7

  10. Are you for real? Is this article supposed to be a joke? Everything you wrote is pure suggestion and speculation. I could literally predict what you were going to say next because it was like reading a short fantasy story.
    People who need to use words like “evil, monster, darkness, hate, diabolical, unhuman, sadism, perversity, torture, torment and slow death are called ‘propagandist’ for good reason. Propaghanda is aimed at striking a knee jerk emotional reaction opposed to intellectual discussion.
    Stop using your imagination to describe what you ‘think’ might of happened and try spending a little time researching the abundance of evidence out there now, especial the overwhelming wealth of evidence provided by unclassified Soviet archives.
    Typical Holocaust rubbish. Short on facts.. Big on imagination.

    1. Who the Hell are you? Some creepy Holocaust Denier? Crawl back under your rock, you Orc.
      What are the “unclassified Soviet archives” going to show us? That the “Holohoax” never happened?

  11. dear mr Robert
    I may very well be an anti-Semite by some peoples standards (some of those jews are up to some realllll no good). I also may be a holocaust denier, or actually intellectuals would probably say “holocaust revisionist” before calling me a crazy anti-Semite and dismissing me. Now, I have 0 evidence or fact to base this off of, but I could care less what the victors of world war 2 got to write in history books about the whole shibang (is that a portmanteau for shit bang?).
    So here’s what I got about the holocaust, from my objective uninformed POV. Hitler wanted to kill people. he was a bit crazy. He wanted some sort of genetic purity.. but i dont know who the fack came up with blue eyed blonde aryans and I dont care at all to consider that Hitler’s goal was some stupid fucking hair color.
    Now i’m sure there’s a lot about Hitler and his past and why jews…. haven’t read it. Surely they sheisted him some way (jews are sneaky..) and he was generally a bit disturbed, hence killing any human deemed inferior.
    But I guess I fall into those that don’t believe Hitler hated Jews as much as said. I just care how it’s all been twisted, which it most certainly has.
    At some point Hitler focused on jews, I will agree to that… but that may only been a point in time where he was on a zionist fear/hate trip – which I guess could have caused a greater proportion of jewish deaths ( for I believe this emphasis on jews became stronger as time went on, and I believe towards the end of the war is when more people were sent to pure death camps, and supplies were nill).
    But me and hitler arent thatt stupid and i think we know jews are sneaky but there are good jews. just like niggers spics chinks and white trash, there are exceptions far and wide to all the stereotypes. You have to kill all the weak ones of any race, doesn’t matter which. Hitler showed he knew this and that’s just one reason this whole thing seems fishy. SURELY THOUGH- those sneaky zionist elite powerful jews pulled 50 strings really fast in the perfect order and turned Hitler’s plans into a perfect way to fulfill their fucked up prophecies. Whether they enticed Hitler go on that jew bashing trip, whether that even happened and they really just inflated jewish numbers and emphasis or both – IDK, but they pulled something. Someone did. All the hate for the jews, in turn giving them all the worlds sympathy, getting them into the holy land and setting up everything to fulfill their apocalyptic prophecy…
    If somethign even could drive such a crazy convoluted plan, Religion would certainly be a prime suspect (not to mention all the christian jew controversy I left out). I dont think I have a problem with jews either just the evil ones.

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