This essay seeks to examine a Holocaust phenomenon so foreign to the standard conception of death camps that it seems to defy both comprehension and belief. The persistence of such apparently humane and civilized features in such horrific circumstances demands historical attention and, as far as is possible, explanation.

For lack of a better word, I will refer to these occurrences in the concentration camps of Europe as abnormalities. This term is not intended to imply that they were uncommon, but, rather, that they are not easily reconcilable with a standard understanding of the Holocaust as an event devoid of any marks of humanity, lacking elements of civilization in any form. In fact, that such abnormalities could have existed in a place like Auschwitz seems impossible, bordering on ridiculous.

When comedian Lewis Black, in a stand-up routine about the lack of sportsmanship in modern quail hunting, exclaimed that “they turned a petting zoo into Auschwitz” he was capitalizing on the outright absurdity of this comparison; surely, for a modern audience confronted with the term Auschwitz, one of the last things to come to mind would be a petting zoo. However, in the camp grounds of Auschwitz there was indeed a petting zoo, where inmates were employed. Incredibly, in the death camps of Europe, it is evident that the absurd was not absent or uncommon, but a daily reality.

That these abnormalities actually occurred is uncontroversial fact. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum displays photographic evidence of prisoners’ orchestras in Auschwitz I, Buchenwald, Westerbork, Janowska, and other concentration camps. Numerous news agencies, including CNN, have recently featured stories about these camp orchestras. Evidence for the existence of concentration camp theater companies is similarly plentiful, such that even the programs for concentration camp theater productions are preserved and on display at Mauthausen camp.

Evidence of SS v. Sonderkommando Only the most ardent disbelievers in the Holocaust could attempt to refute these factual claims, which rest upon mountains of historical evidence. soccer games is abundant in Debarati Sanyal’s work, most notably her article “A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism.” Countless inmates’ memoirs refer to the hospital of their camp, and some, such as Primo Levi, testify that they were actually kept alive in part because of them.

Accordingly, this essay does not seek further verification, but rather to account for these phenomena by examining four possible reasons for their existence. One obvious reason is that the seeming abnormalities may actually have had nothing to do with humanitarian concerns, but existed merely for reasons of efficiency, to increase worker productivity and to bolster a deception scheme designed to smooth the process to the gas chambers.

Another reason is that they may have been part of a deliberate Nazi attempt to depersonalize and humiliate the victims of the Holocaust. Also, they may have originated out of the camp guards’ desire for simple amusement. Finally, and most controversially, they may have been necessary to satisfy the “moral” feelings and self-professed “civilized” nature of the personnel who ran the camps.

The first of these possible explanations, that the abnormalities were useful in the smooth running of the camps , is perhaps the easiest to accept because it accords with the well-established stereotype of German efficiency. There is no doubt that efficiency in the camps was hard fact when they were in operation. According to the research of historian and sociologist John Roth, when SS Head Heinrich Himmler met Rudolf Höss at Buna in the summer of 1942, his main concern was “to increase worker efficiency.” Accordingly, Höss wrote of his desire to make Auschwitz “a clean and healthy place” in order to encourage productivity.

He believed that the philosophy of Arbeit Macht Frei could apply completely only “where the conditions are [more] normal.” Roth suggests that it was this pragmatic, business-like concern during a time of war that allowed such contradictory, and indeed seemingly paradoxical, aims to co-exist. Since working people to death, along with direct extermination, provided the “most efficient Final Solution,” it was important to ensure that the slave laborers – who were already “less than energetic because of their meager diet” – kept to at least a basic level of efficiency.

The potential positive effects of hearing music or of playing a game of soccer, however absurd these concepts might have seemed in the face of prisoners being worked to death, would likely have been desirable to efficiency-minded commanders like Höss and Himmler. Film director Christoper Nupen, who spoke with several survivors regarding the role of concentration camp music, reports that it “gave them a spiritual sustenance.” Terezin historian Joza Karas writes that the music of Terezin played an important part in prisoners’ lives, helping them to survive day to day. He explains that though “there was no food for the body, there was food for the soul.”

It is not hard to speculate that camp administrators would have recognized this, and capitalized on it to keep efficiency as high as possible given the circumstances. For similar reasons, prostitution was institutionalized in many camps as an incentive for inmates to work harder. Even the incongruous presence of a hospital in a death camp, when viewed through the narrowly focussed lens of efficiency, can be viewed logically, as a means to prevent the rampant spread of disease that might cause productivity to drop Sadly, it seems that to those in command it made more sense to order an orchestra to play, to force a woman into prostitution, or to isolate the worst medical cases in a hospital than it was to order more food or otherwise improve living conditions.

The Nazi desire to maintain or enhance camp efficiency may have governed the treatment of prisoners marked for immediate death as much as it did those who were initially allowed to live and work. Put simply, if the men, women, and children disembarking into a death camp from newly-arrived trains could be tricked into believing that they were not walking towards their deaths, then they would be far less likely to resist. A camp orchestra playing as people walked into the gas chambers would be an instrumental part in this deception. So, too, might be rumors of the theater in a camp, or of its hospital. In this way, the Nazis “conjure[d] up a world of eerie banality,” in order to retain some semblance of normality, and further promote their deception. Thus, these abnormalities, as I refer to them, were useful precisely because they were so unexpected, so out of place in a death camp.

However cold-blooded, the desire for efficiency seems at least to be a logical reason for providing amenities in the camps. However, other darker motives may have been at work. It is common in sociological and psychological accounts of the Holocaust to stress that the annihilation of the Jews was not enough for the Nazis. Avishai Margalit and Gabriel Motzkin write that “[i]t has become a cliché that the Germans sought to dehumanize the Jews before killing them.” They suggest that this cliché is nonetheless grounded in fact, writing that “the Nazis sought both the humiliation and the death of the race enemy.” Zygmunt Bauman’s declaration that the Holocaust was a “massive scheme of social engineering” may be extended to include not only the Nazi attempt at racial purification, but also to encompass the actual engineering of Jewish life inside the concentration camps to destroy their very humanity.

This hypothesis is often borne out in primary accounts from the camps. When the SS Guards forced Jozef Kret and his fellow inmates to sing songs as they marched, Kret became convinced that his head guard “must have been a first rate psychologist.” The contrast between the lyrics of the song (“Wandering in the mountains gives us joy…”) and the “tragic creatures” forced to sing it was extremely painful to Kret and the other prisoners. If indeed such an effect was intentional, it is not difficult to see how this psychological attempt to destroy the prisoners’ humanity could just as easily be applied to many of the abnormalities I have identified: being forced to perform in theater productions as their family was exterminated, to play in an orchestra in front of lines of people walking to the gas chambers, or to play soccer in a field only meters away from a smoking crematorium could impose unbearable psychological burdens of dissonance, humiliation, and guilt. As Kret saw it, this “mental torment” was part of a “specific experimental psychology of the SS…to torment prisoners till they were destroyed.”

In the particular case of the SS v. Sonderkommando soccer games, Debarati Sanyal suggests that they were designed to blur the distinction between the oppressor and the oppressed. This event “quite literally makes sport of the incontrovertible distinction between executioners and victims,” as guard and guarded mingle and become more similar. What Primo Levi refers to as the Gray Zone, in which prisoners become more and more like guards, is widened and strengthened by such abnormalities. The “we” of the past, of older community links, vanishes, and is replaced by a new “we” of camp life. Social scientist Edith Wyschogrod suggests that this breaking of bonds served to further depersonalize the camp inmates, writing that “[i]n the epoch of the death event, social existence founded on nostalgia reflects an attempt to resist the depersonalization.” Before they ended the Jews’ lives, these analyses would suggest, the Nazis also sought to erase all traces of their identity. If this is the case, the abnormalities on which this essay centres would certainly have been key tools to this end.

A much simpler reason may explain some of these abnormalities, however, one which does not hinge upon a deliberate Nazi attempt to depersonalize and humiliate the Jews in addition to killing them: the intention may simply have been to enable the camp authorities and their families to exploit the inmates for their own entertainment and diversion. In a position of near-supreme power, the SS and other personnel running the camps could play God. They had the some of the best resources of Jewish culture at their fingertips. Furthermore, it is evident that many of the Nazi camp administrators believed themselves to be highly cultured and sophisticated. Holocaust historian Tzvetan Todorov notes that Höss, Auschwitz’s commandant, was a “music lover”.

Even the guards in the camp were products of the Weimar society that had been so dominant in the 1920s. Paradoxically, it would seem, the Nazis held Jewish culture in very high esteem. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, an Austrian Christian doctor, Ella Lingens, remembered a conversation with Chief Doctor Josef Mengele, who noted that “[t]here were only two gifted nations in the world – the Germans and the Jews.”  In light of these facts, it may not seem so surprising to note that camp personnel forced Jews to play in orchestras, or to act in theatre productions.

That the Nazis could have held such respect for the talents of their prisoners and yet have no respect for the people themselves is a warning that “civilization” can often exist in the absence of civilized behavior. George Steiner was acutely aware of this phenomenon when he wrote, “We now know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.” The existence of cultural amenities, such as a camp orchestra, within a system of such barbarity prompts historians Margalit and Motzkin to redefine civilized society as “one whose members do not humiliate each other and those who depend on them.” Hannah Arendt recognized this paradox of Nazi “culture” as a “moral collapse” in “respectable European society.”

In the context of the more conventional, pre-Holocaust sense of the term civilized society, the “civilized” desires of the guards for cultural diversion, like the business-like quest for camp efficiency, is logical. But, again, a more sadistic desire for amusement may just as easily have been the driving force behind many of the abnormalities in this essay. One morbid example, during the Christmas of 1940, stands out. Tadeusz Paczula remembers a tall Christmas tree, decorated with electric light bulbs, “strangely contrasted” against the image of inmates dropping dead during roll call. Dead bodies were placed under this tree in place of presents, to the amusement of the guards. It is difficult to view such acts as products of a civilized society, no matter how cultured the Nazis believed themselves to be.

However, as easy as it is to label the Nazis as uncivilized and barbaric – which they undoubtedly were on countless occasions – it oversimplifies the situation to suggest that all of these abnormalities in the camp were due to a self-interested, self-amusing, and cruel guards and administrators. Bauman notes that no more than 10% of the SS “could be considered “abnormal” [and the majority] would have easily passed all the psychiatric tests ordinarily given to American army recruits.” I cite this statistic not to defend their actions, but to point towards the nature of those who committed the crimes of the Holocaust. The Einsatzgruppen, who perpetrated the killing of Jews outside of the death camps by face-to-face murder, suffered from the trauma of their terrible actions. Bauman writes that “other murder techniques were therefore sought” to separate the killers from their task, referring chiefly to the gas chambers in the death camps, which made killing far more palatable for those who did it.

It is possible to view many of the abnormalities this essay deals with in a similar light. Arendt writes that the Nazis’ most difficult problem was “how to overcome…the animal pity by which all normal men are affected.” I propose an answer to this question. Much in the same way that consumers today would prefer to buy free-range or “Happy Farm” chicken, the SS may have found it easier to kill Jews if they soothed their consciences with the “nicer” elements of the camp, such as its orchestra, theater, hospital, soccer games, and petting zoo. If this hypothesis is accurate, then these abnormalities were, like the gas chambers and crematoria, an integral part of the industrialized mass-killing process.

Whether or not we label the SS as uncivilized demons, it is clear that they did not see themselves as such. Bauman suggests the SS felt that, by overcoming their animal instincts of pity and dutifully killing the Jews, they had become even more civilized. Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss appeared to the commandant of Treblinka and Sobibór, Franz Sangl, as “a kindly, unselfish family man who loved his wife.” Höss took pride in being the first to use “Zyklon B to gas Jews to death, finding the poison gas to be “rational, hygienic, and “humane.’”

Dr. Mengele of Auschwitz, who on the one hand participated in selections at the railway junction and killed prisoners himself, has been described as having “compassionate” moments in which he gave his patients the “best of care”. Robert Wistrich calls such discontinuities examples of “a high degree of personal fragmentation.” Perhaps it may stand as an explanation for many of the abnormalities found in camp existence. This suggests that, at times, the SS were not just killers, but also men who felt bound to certain morals. Perhaps this may explain why basic medicine was made available and distributed in camp hospitals.

In this essay, I have attempted to account for certain abnormalities found in concentration camps – such as camp orchestras, theaters, sports events, and hospitals – by examining several possible reasons for their existence. Explanations include the Nazi desire for camp efficiency, the deliberate attempt at dehumanization and humiliation of the Jews, and the guards’ desire, whether “civilized” or sadistic for diversion. A final explanation points to the fact that many Nazis saw themselves as civilized individuals, and may have, at times, acted accordingly. If this final explanation has any merit, it illuminates what has been perhaps the starkest contrast of the Twentieth Century, an intimate interconnection of civilization and barbarity.