Liveblogging World War II: April 14, 1945: How the Nazi Concentration Camps Worked

How the Nazi Concentration Camps Worked — The New Yorker:

One night in the autumn of 1944, two Frenchwomen — Loulou Le Porz, a doctor, and Violette Lecoq, a nurse — watched as a truck drove in through the main gates of Ravensbrück, the Nazi concentration camp for women. ‘There was a lorry,’ Le Porz recalled, ‘that suddenly arrives and it turns around and reverses towards us. And it lifts up and it tips out a whole pile of corpses.’ These were the bodies of Ravensbrück inmates who had died doing slave labor in the many satellite camps, and they were now being returned for cremation. Talking, decades later, to the historian and journalist Sarah Helm, whose new book, ‘Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women’ (Doubleday), recounts the stories of dozens of the camp’s inmates, Le Porz says that her reaction was simple disbelief. The sight of a truck full of dead bodies was so outrageous, so out of scale with ordinary experience, that ‘if we recount that one day, we said to each other, nobody would believe us.’ The only way to make the scene credible would be to record it: ‘If one day someone makes a film they must film this scene. This night. This moment.’

Le Porz’s remark was prophetic. The true extent of Nazi barbarity became known to the world in part through the documentary films made by Allied forces after the liberation of other German camps. There have been many atrocities committed before and since, yet to this day, thanks to those images, the Nazi concentration camp stands as the ultimate symbol of evil. The very names of the camps — Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz — have the sound of a malevolent incantation. They have ceased to be ordinary place names — Buchenwald, after all, means simply ‘beech wood’ — and become portals to a terrible other dimension…