[...]... from an interest in the maintenance and augmentation of power: the suppression of political opponents, the elimination of potential resistance, the intimidation of the population and dissemination of terror in the occupied territories The rationale for police security, the prophylactic expansion of the camp system in the event of war, the locating of camps on or near factory grounds, the search for conscripted... situations The aim of the investigation is a “thick description” of the universe of power in the concentration camp.19 In methodological terms, thick descriptions are analyses of meaning They do not provide protocols of events but rather interpretations of actions and situations; not reports, but explications of structures and processes Thick descriptions present a reading of the meaning of what has... establishment of camps in which inmates were deprived of their liberty, compelled to work at slave labor, and subjected to arbitrary terror was central to the National Socialist apparatus of power.15 The concentration camps lay at the very center of this network of terror The present study does not investigate the social history of the German concentration camp system and of the murder of the Jews.16 Rather,... dependent on their confederates among the prisoners Nonetheless, the camp regime did not forfeit any of its surfeit of power Gradation of power does not diminish absolute power; it enhances it The pressure of annihilation made the prisonerfunctionaries into accomplices of the system Terror became for them a means of self-preservation They were thus faced with an unresolvable dilemma In order to avoid... resistance Most of the prisoners able to describe their camp experiences in written form emerged from their ranks Among the inmates, the privileged prisoners were an exiguous minority; but among the survivors, they composed the majority This limitation of the sources is only partially offset by the reports of Jewish or foreign prisoners They too were generally classified as political prisoners; as a... aside the body of a prisoner who was shot the night before in an attempt to get out to meet the Americans The rattle of machine-gun fire sounds from the watchtowers On the north side of the camp, a Forty-fifth Infantry Division patrol is still locked in battle with the last of the SS But the huge expanse of the Appellplatz (roll-call square), the camp yard, stands empty The main street of the camp is also... “special camps” of the Soviet occupiers, genocide on one side of the scales and the expulsion of the German population on the other the obscene numbers game of a fallacious arithmetic that seeks to defuse the past, to dispose of it by balancing the ledger There are those who claim they knew nothing, although the regime had instrumentalized the concentration camps, using them to intimidate the German people... in preserving their physical strength They are fed, clothed, and housed so as to be able to regain their strength, to husband their energy By contrast, labor in the camp sapped the life energy of the prisoners totally, irretrievably The economy of the concentration camps was an economy of waste, the squandering of human labor power Personnel there had little interest in the reproduction of that power,... ultimately foundered on the praxis of terror common in the camps The working and living conditions of the inmates contradicted any notion of economic rationality There was no need to worry about the preservation of a prisoner’s labor power Right from the start, the objective relation of labor was dominated by the relation of power Absolute power is always able to abandon any rationale of economic utility... into misery or lynched by their fellow prisoners, these inmates had to proffer their services to the center of power On the other hand, assistance was impossible without first becoming an accessory Even if the accomplices wished to protect their comrades, they had to become representatives of the regime, rejecting numerous requests from fellow prisoners for help, implementing the requisite discipline . h1" alt="" THE ORDER OF TERROR This page intentionally left blank Wolfgang Sofsky THE ORDER OF TERROR: THE CONCENTRATION CAMP Translated by William Templer PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, . barrier of barbed wire. Down in the basement, the police of cers, newly arrived for work the evening before, prepare a list, recording the names of the inmates. There is no set uniform for the prisoners excitement, which was not the least dampened by the German artillery and the sounds of battle in the northern part of the camp, some of the prisoners died trying to pass through the electrically charged