Why didn't the Jews resist?

[dylans]

There is also the case of the sonterkommando. These were jews who disposed of the bodies of the dead. Their first job was always to dispose of the corpses of the last sonterKommando, so they knew their fate. Yet with one notable exception, they never rebelled.
The one exception was at Sobibor when with the heroic organisational skills of a soviet officer the camp rebelled and they managed to kill several SS men and lots of soldiers as well as burn down one of the crematoria. They were killed to the last man but they took some of the bastards with them and they died fighting

 

[FridgeMagnet]

I'm in the middle of reading this book Against All Hope: Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps 1938-1945. The author argues that in most camps the possibilities for resistance, and the form they might take was structured primarily by the conflicts between the criminals and the political - if the camp had been for the politicals first they normally managed to keep control when new prisoners were brought in (without too much opposition from the guards - in fact, in many places they preferred a political ran camp for their own reasons) - often not without murderous conflict though. If the criminals had been there first they often managed to draw the leading politicals into their ranks. That said though, he gives many examples of 'criminal' prisoners playing massively important roles in what resistance their was.

He also argues that the common picture of the kapos being nazi-stooges, selling people out for their own lifes was not necessarily true, though it was in many cases. Sometimes they were told to take on the job for specific reasons of resistance that are now lost (including situations where they did actually kill or help to kill others) - and that many were killed by the other camp members as their own form of (mistaken) resistance.

I'd guess that the general effect of both types of kapo would have been to demoralise and dissuade from open resistance in the one case and to leave resistance to the specialists in the other. On thing the book does make crystal clear is that all camps were different though. Drawing up a single 'law' (if you see what i mean) is impossible. Something that may well have been true for the external resistance groups as well,

Parallels with the gulags?

 

[butchersapron]

There certainly were some parallels in terms of the continued existence of political organisations in the gulags, but the different make-up of the prisoners might have made for a rather different situation. There really wasn't a large civilian competent - at least in the early period, which is the one i'm most familiar with. There were things like the Vorkuta and Kengir uprisings post-war, and continuous hunger strikes, work strikes and so on pre-war, but that was, from what i remember, mostly directly political or about specific local issues rather than part of a wider resistance, or even the despairing resistance that sometimes happened in the nazi death camps. The nature of the prisoners often meant they arrived organised and stayed organised.