I use the word "trustee" because that's what they call the people I'm talking about in the prison system.
In English, those people are called trusties plural, trusty singular. A trustee is someone on a charity board.
In the US, the trustee system isn't organized on an unofficial basis nor is it essentially informers and enforcers for the guards. It's prisoners who do various jobs within the prison such as work the laundry, meal prep, etc. A prison trustee is analogous to the SK.
Nope.
Boarding schools could also be considered "total institutions." Not really relevant however.
and mental asylums, barracks... there is quite a wide set of institutions to use for comparison. And quite a lot of literature drawing parallels and noting the differences. One doesn't have to be a disciple of Saint Michel to realise that carceral institutions have succeeded quite well in their task of disciplining and punishing segregated groups in the modern era.
Whatever the similarity or differences between trustees and SK, to say that a "trust deficit" exists in both prisons and Nazi concentration camps and because prisons today work, the concentration camps must have worked as well is crazy.
That wasn't anybody's argument. swright777 started us off down the 'trust' route by stating that:
Even in prisons today where none of these atrocities are happening you can't trust the inmates. And it doesn't stop the daily routine.
Trust doesn't make sense in a situation where you have guards and inmates.
If you could trust the inmates then you wouldn't need guards.
making it pretty explicit that even in a much less violent situation such as a contemporary Western prison, guards do not trust the inmates. Certainly not en masse; and certainly not as an undifferentiated individual. The average inmate is not to be trusted, that is the reasoning behind prison discipline, and it was also the reasoning behind KZ discipline.
The whole point of using trusties and informers is to divide and rule a potentially dangerous group of individuals who might unite to act in concert against the guards. A mixture of blandishments and threats generally works fine; suborn some of the potential ringleaders and make them do your dirty work for you; or make potential ringleaders responsible for any violations of order and discipline. Or both.
The level of alleged violence between the two institutions makes comparisons between the two a false analogy.
No it doesn't. One can equally make analogies with uniformed militaries. Indeed I already made just such an analogy when discussing kapos. Prisoner functionaries occupied NCO-type roles, belonging firmly to an 'enlisted' class versus an 'officer' class.
In a number of KZs, the kapos were recruited from another nationality, thus German 'greens' were imported from Sachsenhausen to lord it over the largely Polish inmates of Auschwitz in the early phase of the camp; and the SS also sent German 'greens' from Sachsenhausen to Riga when the ghetto became a KZ in 1943. We then find Polish kapos in charge of the crematoria Sonderkommandos at Birkenau from 1943-44.
At Treblinka, we have a small 'officer' class of German SS men with NCO rank, numbering 30, alongside a whole company of 125 Trawnikis, further hierarchised into NCOs and ordinary guards, forming a large guard force to watch over 700 plus prisoner workers. That was a much higher guard to inmate ratio than was found in ordinary KZs. It was in fact about 1:5, which is extremely high. Why? Because the circumstances required it.
Since the SS and Trawnikis were of different nationalities and cultural background, the Trawnikis fulfilled part of the role which would have been assigned to kapos in, say, Auschwitz.
However, we further find Jewish kapos selected from the prisoner labour force, who were made individually responsible for collective behaviour, i.e. coerced into coercing others. Then there were Jewish informers among the prisoner workforce, a number of whom were identified and avoided by the other inmates, as happens with stoolpigeons elsewhere. Some of the kapos appointed from the labour force became quite brutal and savage, most remained 'decent' and play-acted shouting and beating the workers.
Those workers were in turn divided into squads by function, with the entire labour force fundamentally split between two separate sections of the camp, with only a very small number of skilled workers able to move between the two. At Sobibor,
nobody was allowed to move between the sections.
The work squads were confined to barracks if not needed, eg clothes-sorters were confined while transports arrived, leaving only a few prisoners to witness the arrival of transports. The work squads were overseen by Trawnikis and SS, who made first resort to whips,
just like American slave overseers in the 19th century. Guns were available on pistol belts or in the hands of guards on the perimeter and could be used in the event of resistance, or at the end of the day when an exhausted worker was summarily executed.
Work squads were summoned for roll calls and threatened with decimation if anyone was found to be missing, imposing collective responsibility on the entire group. In addition, prisoners were subjected to 'sport', the traditional KZ humiliations which served to break down individual will, and ordered to sing songs. These latter aspects of the camp are going to remind pretty much everyone of Full Metal Jacket and other films about basic training, and indeed, they had the same functions - de-individuation, disciplining, and coercing inmates into what the Germans liked to call Kadavergehorsam (of their own military recruits).
It is quite apparent from reading a representative cross-section of Treblinka testimonies that the inmates learned which SS men to avoid, and thus their basic day-to-day survival strategy was to go out of their way not to attract attention of the sadists among the guards. If they did attract attention, then they had to obey unflinchingly, otherwise they knew they would be killed.
By 1943, moreover, the SS had more time on their hands since there were fewer transports coming in, and correspondingly more time to torment the inmates. The inmates who were left had survived the winter, survived several outbreaks of typhus, and had become 'familiar' to the guards, to the point where fewer were being killed on a whim. Some SS men even had what can be considered decent human relations with the prisoners. The collective chicaneries of forced sports matches and concert performances for the benefit of the SS continued the same practice of disciplining the inmates as we see in 'sport' and in forcing the workers to sing songs. With too much time on their hands, the SS became quite creative. That was when the zoo appeared. At this stage, one is fully entitled to regard Treblinka circa the spring and early summer of 1943 as something like Goffman on acid, or a bad trip described by RD Laing about the worst mental asylum ever.
The chicaneries, however, did not succeed in distracting the workers from their plans to escape and revolt, which they duly did in August 1943.
Long experience organising men to charge into musket, rifle and machine gun fire against their better instincts, as well as the evidence of the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments, suggest that it is not terribly difficult to discipline bodies of men of whatever nationality or background you care to name, to perform extremely unpleasant tasks.
Discipline does break down, yes, but that's precisely what happened at Treblinka. There were no mutinies of any kind in most big Nazi KZs, despite the obviously life-threatening conditions which prevailed in them. There were multiple mutinies at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and mutinies at Treblinka and Sobibor, as well as individual acts of resistance and escape (despite the threat of collective punishment, which was carried out on several occasions).
So the incredulity about why didn't they resist is answered: they did. Why didn't they resist
sooner? That is where one has to study the methods used to coerce the workforce and keep them passive, but also pay attention to the necessary preconditions for an organised revolt, which were not easily brought about in those camps.
