Extermination through labour

Gate in the Dachau concentration camp memorial.

Imprisonment in concentration camps aimed not merely to break and exploit but to destroy inmates. The admission and registration of the new prisoners, the forced labour, the prisoner housing, the roll calls—all aspects of camp life—were accompanied by humiliation and harassment.[6]

Admission, registration and interrogation of the detainees was accompanied by scornful remarks from SS officials. The prisoners were stepped on and beaten during roll call. Forced labour partly consisted of pointless tasks and heavy labour, which aimed to wear down the prisoners.[3]

Many of the concentration camps channeled forced labour to benefit the German war machine. In these cases the SS saw excessive working hours as a means of maximizing output. Oswald Pohl, the leader of the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt ("SS Economy and Administration Main Bureau", or SS-WVHA), who oversaw the employment of forced labour at the concentration camps, ordered on April 30, 1942:[7]

The camp commander alone is responsible for the use of man power. This work must be exhausting in the true sense of the word in order to achieve maximum performance. [...] There are no limits to working hours. [...] Time consuming walks and mid-day breaks only for the purpose of eating are prohibited. [...] He [the camp commander] must connect clear technical knowledge in military and economic matters with sound and wise leadership of groups of people, which he should bring together to achieve a high performance potential.[7]

Up to 25,000 of the 35,000 prisoners appointed to work for IG Farben in Auschwitz died. The average life-expectancy of a slave laborer on a work assignment amounted to less than four months.[8][9] The emaciated forced-labourers died from exhaustion or disease or they were deemed to be incapable of work and killed. About 30 percent of the forced labourers who were assigned to dig tunnels, which were constructed for weapon factories in the last months of the war, died.[10] In the satellite camps, which were established in the vicinity of mines and industrial firms, even higher death-rates occurred, since accommodations and supplies were often even less adequate there than in the main camps.

The phrase "Arbeit macht frei" ("work shall set you free"), could be found in various places in some Nazi concentration camps (for example, on the entrance gates). The Buchenwald concentration camp was the only concentration camp with the motto "Jedem das Seine" ("To each what he deserves") on the entrance gate.

The Soviet Gulag is sometimes presented as a system of death camps,[11][12][13][14] particularly in post-Communist Eastern European politics.[15] This controversial position has been criticized, considering that with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive.[16] Alexander Solzhenitsyn introduced the expression camps of extermination by labour in his non-fiction work The Gulag Archipelago.[17] According to him, the system eradicated opponents by forcing them to work as prisoners on big state-run projects (for example the White Sea-Baltic Canal, quarries, remote railroads and urban development projects) under inhumane conditions. Political writer Roy Medvedev claims: "The penal system in the Kolyma and in the camps in the north was deliberately designed for the extermination of people."[14] Soviet historian Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev expands upon this, claiming that Stalin was the "architect of the gulag system for totally destroying human life".[18]

Political theorist Hannah Arendt argued that although the Soviet government deemed them all "forced labor" camps, this in fact highlighted that the work in some of the camps was deliberately pointless, since "forced labor is the normal condition of all Russian workers, who have no freedom of movement and can be arbitrarily drafted for work at any place and at any time."[19] She differentiated between "authentic" forced-labor camps, concentration camps, and "annihilation camps". In authentic labor camps, inmates worked in "relative freedom and are sentenced for limited periods." Concentration camps had extremely high mortality rates and but were still "essentially organized for labor purposes." Annihilation camps were those where the inmates were "systematically wiped out through starvation and neglect." She criticizes other commentators' conclusion that the purpose of the camps was a supply of cheap labor. According to her, the Soviets were able to liquidate the camp system without serious economic consequences, showing that the camps were not an important source of labor and were overall economically irrelevant.[20]

The only real economic purpose they typically served was financing the cost of supervision. Otherwise the work performed was generally useless, either by design or made that way through extremely poor planning and execution; some workers even preferred more difficult work if it was actually productive.

According to formerly secret internal Gulag documents, some 1.6 million people may have died in the period between 1935 and 1956 in Soviet forced labour camps and colonies (excluding prisoner-of-war camps). Some 900,000 of these deaths fall between 1941 and 1945,[21] coinciding with the period of the German-Soviet War when food supply levels were low in the entire country.

These figures are consistent with the archived documents that Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk presents and analyzes in his study The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, according to which some 500,000 people died in the camps and colonies from 1930 to 1941.[22] Khlevniuk points out that these figures don't take into account any deaths that occurred during transport.[23] Also excluded are those who died shortly after their release owing to the harsh treatment in the camps,[24] who, according to both archives and memoirs, were numerous.[25] The historian J. Otto Pohl states that 2,749,163 prisoners perished in the labour camps, colonies and special settlements, while stressing that this is an incomplete figure.[26]

Like the Soviet system, Mao Zedong's rule of China also included a forced labor prison system known as the Laogai or "reform through labour". According to Jean-Louis Margolin during the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the harshness of the official prison system reached unprecedented levels, and the mortality rate until 1952 was "certainly in excess" of 5 percent per year, and reached 50 percent during six months in Guangxi.[27] In Shanxi, more than 300 people died per day in one mine.[27] Torture was commonplace and the suppression of revolts, which were quite numerous, resulted in "veritable massacres".[27]

In Mao: The Unknown Story, the Mao biographer Jung Chang and historian Jon Halliday estimate that perhaps 27 million people died in prisons and labor camps during Mao Zedong's rule.[28] They claim that inmates were subjected to back-breaking labor in the most hostile wastelands, and that executions and suicides by any means were commonplace.[28]

Writing in The Black Book of Communism, which describes the history of repressions by Communist states, Jean-Louis Margolin claims that perhaps 20 million died in the prison system.[29] Professor Rudolph Rummel puts the number of forced labor "democides" at 15,720,000, excluding "all those collectivized, ill-fed and clothed peasants who would be worked to death in the fields."[30] Harry Wu puts the death toll at 15 million.[31]