Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pamar | Hacker News Reader

I just changed trains in Ludwiglust (I am in Germany but not German) and apparently it was a concentration camp site (and no more than 2 hours from Berlin by train)... So while I find the article interesting I am a bit dubious about the part where the historian says that "Jews could not be killed in situ and had to be deported first".

View on HN

Concentration camps were mainly in Poland, because at that time Poland had about as many Jews (~3 mil) as the rest of the Europe combined (~3.5 mil), and it was a fully controlled, occupied state. It was just an engineering optimisation, however dark this sounds.

No, concentration camps were distributed throughout Germany as well. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nazi_concentration_cam... If you are talking about extermination camps however, then you're more correct.

But I hope the author doesn't rest his claim solely on the fact on which side of the border a camp site was built: Borders between Germany and Poland were "fluent" to say the least until the end of WWII. Especially when he combines "Borders" with "ethnic homogeneity". Many Germans lived in inter-war-Poland, as did many Poles in inter-war-Germany. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_minority_in_Poland#/med...

This part sounded dubious to me too, but then I visited the wikipedia page which lists all the killing camps outside Germany (most were in Poland), while some labour camps were in Germany proper [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nazi_concentration_cam...

KZ Wöbbelin (near Ludwigslust) only existed for few months right before the end of the war. The systematic killing of jews happened predominantly outside of Germany (even though there were many KZ in Germany as well of course. But they were much more focused on slave-labor than mass killing.)

As others have pointed out, it's important to distinguish concentration camps, whose aim was to hold prisoners, from extermination camps, whose aim was to kill them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com