Extermination through labour

Gate in the Dachau concentration camp memorial.

Imprisonment in concentration camps aimed not merely to break, but to destroy inmates. The admission and registration of the new prisoners, the forced labour, the prisoner housing, the roll calls — all aspects of camp life — were accompanied by humiliation and harassment.[6]

Admission, registration and interrogation of the detainees was accompanied by scornful remarks from SS officials. The prisoners were stepped on and beaten during roll call. Forced labour partly consisted of pointless tasks and heavy labour, which aimed to wear down the prisoners.[3]

Many of the concentration camps channeled forced labour to benefit the German war machine. In these cases the SS saw excessive working hours as a means of maximizing output. Oswald Pohl, the leader of the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt ("SS Economy and Administration Main Bureau", or SS-WVHA), who oversaw the employment of forced labour at the concentration camps, ordered on April 30, 1942:[7]

The camp commander alone is responsible for the use of man power. This work must be exhausting in the true sense of the word in order to achieve maximum performance. […] There are no limits to working hours. […] Time consuming walks and mid-day breaks only for the purpose of eating are prohibited. […] He [the camp commander] must connect clear technical knowledge in military and economic matters with sound and wise leadership of groups of people, which he should bring together to achieve a high performance potential.[7]

Up to 25,000 of the 35,000 prisoners appointed to work for IG Farben in Auschwitz died. The average life-expectancy of a slave laborer on a work assignment amounted to less than four months.[8][9] The emaciated forced-labourers died from exhaustion or disease or they were deemed to be incapable of work and killed. About 30 percent of the forced labourers who were assigned to dig tunnels, which were constructed for weapon factories in the last months of the war, died.[10] In the satellite camps, which were established in the vicinity of mines and industrial firms, even higher death-rates occurred, since accommodations and supplies were often even less adequate there than in the main camps.

The phrase "Arbeit macht frei" ("work shall set you free"), which could be found in various places in some Nazi concentration camps (for example, on the entrance gates) seems particularly cynical in this context. The Buchenwald concentration camp was the only concentration camp with the motto "Jedem das Seine" ("To each what he deserves") on the entrance gate.

Some scholars refer to the slave trade as a Holocaust,[11] though many prefer the neologism Maafa which means 'great disaster'.[12][13][14]

The Arab slave trade is estimated to have killed between 4.4 and 19 million Africans, mostly in slave raids.[15]

Likewise, the Atlantic slave trade resulted in a vast and as yet still unknown loss of life for African captives both inside and outside America. Approximately 1.2 – 2.4 million Africans died during their transport to the New World.[16] More died soon after their arrival. The number of lives lost in the procurement of slaves remains a mystery, but it may equal or exceed the number of Africans who survived only to be enslaved.[17]

Estimates by Patrick Manning are that about 12 million slaves entered the Atlantic trade between the 16th and 19th century, but about 1.5 million died on board ship. About 10.5 million slaves arrived in the Americas. Besides the slaves who died on the Middle Passage, more Africans likely died during the slave raids in Africa and forced marches to ports. Manning estimates that 4 million died inside Africa after capture, and many more died young. Manning's estimate covers the 12 million who were originally destined for the Atlantic, as well as the 6 million destined for Asian slave markets and the 8 million destined for African markets.[18]

In the period from 1885 to 1908, a number of well-documented atrocities were perpetrated in the Congo Free State (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) which, at the time, was the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. These atrocities were sometimes collectively referred to by European contemporaries as the "Congo Horrors", and were particularly associated with the labour policies used to collect natural rubber for export. With the majority of the Free State's revenues derived from the export of rubber, a labour policy (known by critics as the "Red Rubber system") was created to maximise its extraction. Labour was demanded by the administration as taxation.[lower-alpha 1]

This created a "slave society", as companies became increasingly dependent on forcibly mobilising Congolese labour for their collection of rubber.[20] Workers who refused to supply their labour were coerced with "constraint and repression". Dissenters were beaten or whipped with the chicote, hostages were taken to ensure prompt collection and punitive expeditions were sent to destroy villages which refused.[19] The policy led to a collapse of Congolese economic and cultural life, as well as farming in some areas.[21] Together with epidemic disease, famine, and a falling birth rate caused by these disruptions, the atrocities contributed to a sharp decline in the Congolese population. The magnitude of the population fall over the period is disputed, but it is thought by multiple historians that 10 or more million[22][lower-alpha 2][23] Congolese perished during the period, mostly due to disease.[25]

One of the enduring images of the Free State was the severed hands which became "the most potent symbol of colonial brutality".[26] The practice of hacking the hands off corpses in the aftermath of punitive expeditions became common as evidence (pièces justificatives) that government supplies had not been misused.[27] When soldiers did misuse their equipment, they cut hands from living people to cover their activities.[28]

The Soviet Gulag is sometimes presented as a system of death camps,[29][30][31][32] particularly in post-Communist Eastern European politics.[33] This controversial position has been criticized, considering that with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive.[34] Alexander Solzhenitsyn introduced the expression camps of extermination by labour in his non-fiction work The Gulag Archipelago.[35] According to him, the system eradicated opponents by forcing them to work as prisoners on big state-run projects (for example the White Sea-Baltic Canal, quarries, remote railroads and urban development projects) under inhumane conditions. Roy Medvedev comments: "The penal system in the Kolyma and in the camps in the north was deliberately designed for the extermination of people."[32] Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev expands upon this, claiming that Stalin was the "architect of the gulag system for totally destroying human life".[36] Writer Stephen Wheatcroft argues that the scale and nature of the Soviet Gulag repressions need to be looked at through the perspective of the greater populations of the USSR.[37]

Hannah Arendt argued that although the Soviet government deemed them all "forced labor" camps, this in fact highlighted that the work in the camps was deliberately pointless, since "forced labor is the normal condition of all Russian workers, who have no freedom of movement and can be arbitrarily drafted for work at any place and at any time."[38] The only real economic purpose they typically served was financing the cost of supervision. Otherwise the work performed was generally useless, either by design or made that way through extremely poor planning and execution; some workers even preferred more difficult work if it was actually productive. She differentiated between "authentic" forced-labor camps, concentration camps, and "annihilation camps". In authentic labor camps, inmates worked in "relative freedom and are sentenced for limited periods." Concentration camps had extremely high mortality rates and but were still "essentially organized for labor purposes." Annihilation camps were those where the inmates were "systematically wiped out through starvation and neglect." She criticizes other commentators' conclusion that the purpose of the camps was a supply of cheap labor. According to her, the Soviets were able to liquidate the camp system without serious economic consequences, showing that the camps were not an important source of labor and were overall economically irrelevant.[39]

According to formerly secret internal Gulag documents, some 1.6 million people must have died in the period between 1930 and 1956 in Soviet forced labour camps and colonies (excluding prisoner-of-war camps), though these figures only include the deaths in the colonies beginning in 1935. The majority (about 900,000) of these deaths therefore fall between 1941 and 1945,[40] coinciding with the period of the German-Soviet War when food supply levels were low in the entire country.

These figures are consistent with the archived documents that Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk presents and analyzes in his study The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, according to which some 500,000 people died in the camps and colonies from 1930 to 1941.[41] Khlevniuk points out that these figures don't take into account any deaths that occurred during transport.[42] Also excluded are those who died shortly after their release owing to the harsh treatment in the camps,[43] who, according to both archives and memoirs, were numerous.[44] The historian J. Otto Pohl estimates that some 2,749,163 prisoners perished in the labour camps, colonies and special settlements, although stresses that this is an incomplete figure.[45] Though the death toll is still widely debated, no state or national institution has recognized the Gulag system as a genocide.

Like the Soviet system, Mao Zedong's rule of China also installed an extremely deadly forced labor and prison system known as the Laogai or "reform through labour". According to Jean-Louis Margolin during the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the harshness of the official prison system reached unprecedented levels, and the mortality rate until 1952 was "certainly in excess" of 5 percent per year, and reached 50 percent during six months in Guangxi.[46] In Shanxi, more than 300 people died per day in one mine.[46] Torture was commonplace and the suppression of revolts, which were quite numerous, resulted in "veritable massacres".[46] One Chinese priest died after being interrogated for over 100 hours. Of the 20,000 inmates who worked in the oilfields of Yanchang, several thousand were executed.[46]

In Mao: The Unknown Story, the Mao biographer Jung Chang and historian Jon Halliday estimate that perhaps 27 million people died in prisons and labor camps during Mao Zedong's rule.[47] They claim that inmates were subjected to back-breaking labor in the most hostile wastelands, and that executions and suicides by any means (like diving into a wheat chopper) were commonplace.[47] Frank Dikötter estimates that 1 to 3 million Chinese citizens committed suicide[48] during the Great Leap Forward, likely referring in part to suicides in the labor camps.

Writing in The Black Book of Communism, which describes the history of repressions by Communist states, Jean-Louis Margolin claims that perhaps 20 million died in the prison system.[49] Professor Rudolph Rummel puts the number of forced labor "democides" at 15,720,000, excluding "all those collectivized, ill-fed and clothed peasants who would be worked to death in the fields."[50] Harry Wu puts the death toll at 15 million.[51]