The Connection Between the Totalitarian States and the Camps

Every real totalitarian system’s distinctive features are the workcamps.

They are the basic terrorization resort to frighten the masses. And on the other hand we must not to forget that there is no regime that can be existing not only for a short time without their beneficiaries. They need collaborators too who make profit out of the cooperation.

It is also typical that the rulers of these social systems, the leadership learns from the mistakes, they take over ideas from other states. During the operation of these camps they not only try to deprive the imprisoned people from its dignitary and its self-esteem, they also make an effort to make the convicts exploiting the costs of the prison life. They widely put into practice the every-day thrashing, the starvation and they force these people to inform against each other. It is typical of these regimes, apart from the Soviet Union, that the fascist and the communist governments wage war against their own nation.

It wasn’t necessary to be an active rebellious. In most of the cases the causes of the detentions wasn’t always that thing that the person has committed but he has should committed. They wanted to suppress any kind of potential revolt before it begins.

With a good chance the camps were established on two possible purposes. One of them has to be the purpose to exterminate a whole nation, a whole ethnic group or a social class, especially from 1942 in the Nazi camps.

This task was carried out by the Stalinist soviet camps. Those who don’t have a willing to have a proper passion for the almighty ideology they considered as an enemy and treated as an enemy of the people sign.
In a way a camp is needed as an operating system that is acquits the ordering person of commands from every responsibility that the he doesn’t murder in person, the casualties arise from the camp conditions.

However it is thought-provoking that the world-wide protests against the soviet work camps, that involve the democratic countries, have became stronger from the 70’s. Although the extension of these camps was an open secret by then all around the world. There weren’t too many things that can hide from the spy satelits or from the spy planes. On the other hand, by that time the number of the camps , the applied internal methods, and the number of causalities slowly have decreased since the level of the „golden age” of the 30’s and the 50’s. Since then the human right’s movements have started prospering, the world became opened, the flowing of the information was almost impossible to control and disturb by the old procedures.
There are several kind of camps:

• concentration camps, where the undesirable persona are collected
• labour camps, where the collected people are forced to work
• extermination camps, where the people didn’t even got food
• the mishmash of the uppers where an other feature became determined, even if only for a short time

After performing a lecture about the former nacist and socialist countries’ camps therefore I will give only a general outline of this topic.
After the ideological connections let’s see the economical part.

It is well-known to everyone that the Soviet Union’s great state investments were carried out by prisoners especially if it was dangerous or it had gone off in inhuman circumstances. This is how a lots of investment were made for example the Kujbisev Power Plants, the Bratszk Power Plants, the BAM (Baikal-Amour railway), deforest many regions, the Moscow-Volga channel, the White-see, the Baltic-see channel, gold and coal mining in the Sakhalin islands. The coalmining had an overriding importance in the polar regions and in Kazakhstan. In Kazakhstan the copper mining was also significant. The workers didn’t get any wage at all or the managers embezzled that paltry, or in many cases the leaders forced the wokers to pay off their wages as the costs of the detention.

If there was less manpower when an investment has started the NKVD had announced a competition for their employees to increase the number of the arrests. The Nazi solution is not far behind from the soviet solution. In Germany the finance office of the SS managed the employing of the convicts, they billed the employer companies 6-8 marks for one skilled worker, 4 marks for one unskilled worker. After progressing the war the manpower were used by the army, in the other hand the industrial production must be continued moreover at an increased speed without taking care of the convicts’ life. In the strictest sense of the word they forced their workers to work hard to death. The Dora war factory was bore into a mountain in less than 3 months at the costs of the thousands of the weakened and starving forced laborers’ death.

These are the most famous companies who employed compulsion workers:
BMW (aeroplane engines, cars), Heinkel (aircrafts), I.G. Farben (chemicals), Ardo (aircrafts).
Until 1943 it was typical that the convicts were executed because they were the government’s enemy but since then because they didn’t yield enough profit.
Just one more thing about the former socialist camps that they tried to copy the Soviet sample. In cruelty they weren’t far behind.

István Boros