Various historians like to talk about Nazi concentration camp. Some like to even present it as a unique crime against humanity never seen elsewhere.
In reality Nazis copied the idea of their camps from Soviet Gulag. Pol Pot, Mao and Stalin did much worse than Nazis. North Korea, China and probably Russia still have concentration camps. However, communism and Russia biased commenters and historians always liked to single out German Nazis.
However, one other fundamental issue that communists like to claim that camps were created for extermination. That cannot hold against any critical thinking. Why does one need to waste money and build a camp when one can instead simply lead people into the forests and shoot them, like USSR did to Polish officers. You can even do that in basements of secret police buildings, like USSR did in basements of infamous KGB headquarters, called Lubyanka.
If one can simply do that, then why build camps? The reason for that that camps originally were not intended to exterminate people inside. They did evolve or devolved into that over the course of WWII and evolution of Nazi regime.
Camps begun as simply way to intern political opponents and Jews. At this stage Nazis thought that Jews can be later resettled in Madagascar or somewhere else. So, they were kept there temporary.
Conditions were poor and oppressive from the start. Before taking power, Nazi were often pariahs and used the camps to settle scores with their opponents. Jews were targeted because Nazis believed that they are the only demographic that benefited from Germany's defeat in WWI. Nazis thought that that is because they were in cahoots with enemies of Germany already during the WWI. When in power Nazis thought to reverse this injustice by confiscating Jewish property and subjecting them to poor living conditions. Another reason was to isolate them from broader German society.
Communists had it worse since Nazis believed communist values and ideology is worst thing in the world and believed adherents of this ideology deserve only the worst.
Many did connect Jews with Communism as many early leaders of October Revolution in Russia were Jewish, including Trotsky. So, some Jews suffered from alleged communist views even if they were not communists.
Finally, job of a camp guard would naturally attract abusive people who want to take advantage of the fact that camp inmates have no real way to fight back against abuse. Nazis never properly vetted applicants to camp guard positions. The abusive camp guards made camp conditions much worse than intended by architects.
During the peacetime camps did grew quite significantly as Nazis eventually realized that there were more opponents of their rule as they initially anticipated. Too many civilians sabotaged Nazis polices, so Nazis had to intern them too. Number of camps and number of inmates kept constantly growing. Anti-Nazis, Jenova Witnesses, Roma, draft evaders, anti-social and many others soon became new categories of inmates.
With number of camps this large it became hard to properly supervise any of that even if Nazis tried to. They had other things to worry about, so SS Totenkopf department of the SS in charge of guarding camps got nearly unrestricted and almost completely unsupervised rule over the camps and inmates. Camp guards acted with impunity, knowing that people will blame Hitler and Nazis rather than some humble guard with forgettable name.
Beginning of WWII did not made life in camps any easier. Many actual Germans were conscripted into military and government needed someone to replace them. Camp prisoners was not the best options but for the lack of better options government opted to use them.
Camp inmates had no reason to work properly for the oppressive regime that held them in contempt. Sabotage or even honest mistakes made quality of weapons and other goods they produce poor.
That produced negative feedback loop. Every time tank just breaks down mid battle due to poor manufacturing, Nazis would blame useless camp inmates for not working property and ruining the Reich with sabotage. Every time Nazis crack down on inmates, that give inmates more and more reasons to sabotage tanks and other weapons they are forced to make. The longer that continues, the more each side of this divide blames and hates the other one.
Later stages of war brought shortages of various goods and even food. Government had to prioritize who gets what. Camp inmates were clearly in the bottom of priority list. That is how already abusive and oppressive camps became starvation camps as well.
Yet even at this stage Nazis still wished to keep inmates alive for work. That is why they would evacuate inmates from French and Polish camps into Germany.
They however did not hesitate to shoot or otherwise kill those who could not work. Nazis saw inmates valuable only as work force. They also suspected that some faint inability to work or walk to dodge work or escape so they would kill them as an example for others irrespectively if they cannot or would not work.
Finally at the closing stages of war, when even camp guards and common solders have realized that was is lost, many dedicated Nazis blamed their loss on camp inmates failing to provide them with good quality ammunition and weapons. For that reason, many guards and SS men decided to exterminate all camp inmates as a final act of revenge before their inevitable surrender and defeat.
Even more cautious among the SS men would fear that after the war many inmates would like to take revenge for their treatment at the hands of Nazis. So, they thought it's better to kill all the inmates before they will be freed by allies.
SS leaders were likely in favor of that as well. Many of them would know that Allies would likely treat actions of camp guards as crime against humanity and there would be repercussions for those involved. Because of that they thought that best course of action would be to kill all inmates and destroy all evidence of what have happened in the camps.
It is similar how East German Stasi during Eastern Bloc collapse in 1989 would try to destroy all their archives to hide their crimes and prevent justice against Stasi agents and the regime that created them.
It is during this final stage of concentration camp history, that Allies soldiers have found most of the camps. In some SS managed to kill everyone and destroy all evidence they could. In others, for example Dachau, Allied soldiers advanced into camp right while the guards were in process of the exterminating inmates.
Seeing SS Totenkopf actually gassing people in locked buildings right as GIs break thought the gates of the camp left an impression on common American soldiers. That eventually led towards this simplified and misleading understanding of the Nazi camps and the Nazi regime as a whole.
Unfortunately, Americans did not get to break into Vorkutlag or Solovki in the same manner as they did with Dachau. That allowed communist apologists to pretend that their regime was not like that at all.
However, people who were "liberated" from such camps by Red Army often talk about it in different terms.
One woman in Auschwitz described period between when the SS left, and Soviet Army have not arrived yet as interregnum. Implying that after than NKVD would simply replace SS Totenkopf and the same will continue.
Most of the camp inmates, "liberated" by Red Army, including even Red Army own PIW, would end up being sent to even worse Gulag camps in Siberia, where most of them will die.
Mistaken understanding of history of Nazi camps and Gulag led towards its low-key repetition in contemporary Australia.
Work for the Dole, in theory it was created to help people learn working skills. However, in reality it became a de-facto slave labor program where people are forced to do unpaid work for years on and on.
Australian radical conservatives together with Rupert Murdoch press revile unemployed as dole bludgers and at the same time exploit them via byzantine system of unpaid slave labor, managed by private subcontractors such as Max Employment and Sarinna Russo.
Work for the Dole and other mutual obligations should be abolished and people like Sarina Russo should be prosecuted for their abuses.
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