Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

The Camps and Their End
Chapter 2: The Camps
The subject of this book is the question of whether or not the Germans attempted
to exterminate the European Jews. We are not concerned with considering
in any detail the general question of alleged Nazi brutalities of all sorts or with
presenting a complete picture of the functioning of German camps. However, it
has been found that many people have such distorted views of these camps that,
because at Auschwitz there were camps, it is difficult to separate Auschwitz at the
outset and consider it in isolation from other camps. Thus, a few general words
about the camps are in order. Fig. 23 presents a map (January 1938 boundaries)
that shows the locations of a few of the most frequently referred to camps together
with the locations of a few large cities.
There were many types of German camps, and only a fraction of them were
called “concentration camps.” There were thirteen German concentration camps,
each of them actually being a collection of neighboring camps. Only two of the
six alleged “extermination camps,” Auschwitz and Lublin, were “concentration
camps.” A table of many types of German camps, which includes many ordinary
prisons, is given by Aronéanu, pp. 203-251, who lists about 1,400 “camps,” together
with their locations and “characters.” While this table gives some idea of
the scope and diversity of the German prison and camp systems, it has obvious
major errors, such as giving the “character” of Birkenau as “medical experiments.”
The major significance of Oranienburg, near Berlin, was that it quartered
the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, and was thus in direct communication
with all concentration camps.
The typical inmate of a German concentration camp was a person being detained
for punitive or security reasons. There were five major categories, and they
were distinguished by colored insignia, which were associated with their uniforms:
61 Table 5: Concentration camp inmate insignia
COLOR CATEGORY
Green Criminals
Red Political prisoners (mainly communists)
Pink Homosexuals
Black Asocials (vagrants, drunkards, etc.)
Purple Considered disloyal on account of
religious views (mainly Jehovah’s Witnesses)
At Auschwitz and some other camps, a triangle of the appropriate color was
attached to the uniform. If the prisoner was Jewish, a yellow triangle was superimposed
on the first triangle, forming a star of David. This is referred to as the
Auschwitz “star system.”
Economic conditions being what they were, the German government made
every effort to use concentration camp inmates for labor. Prisoners of war
61
Cohen, 26-28.
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