Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Slave Labor in Nazi Concentration Camps, by Marc Buggeln. 2014. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Auschwitz Survivorship Low in the Long-Term. Gas Chambers for Non-Jews. No Nazi Picking on Jewish Forced Laborers

This book is packed with detail. A number of its findings challenge standard Holocaust orthodoxies, and I focus on this.

AUSCHWITZ SURVIVORSHIP LOW IN LONG-TERM

Holocaust supremacists make a big deal about the difference involving Jews (who were usually gassed on arrival) and the arriving Poles (who usually were not). But no matter. Few Poles who were “only” incarcerated at Auschwitz survived more than a few years. The death just took longer than that of the gassed Jews but was almost as certain. The author focuses on the exception that proves the rule about survivorship: a rare long-term Polish inmate survivor, “Wieslaw Kielar…is one of the few prisoners interned in Auschwitz for more than four years and survived the end of the war.” (p. 166. Emphasis added).

PASSIVE GENOCIDE

The Nazi concentration camp experience can be expanded, “The majority of prisoners killed in the concentration camps did not fall victim to physical violence, but rather starved to death, or died as a result of the many illnesses that took a deadly turn among the exhausted and emaciated men and women.” (p. 78).

JEWS NOT JUST “TEMPORARILY DIVERTED FROM THE GAS CHAMBERS”

Those Jews who survived the “selection” at the doors of the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau did not all just die a lingering death at that camp. Buggeln describes a group of Auschwitz Jews who were given a new life by being transferred to the Neuengamme labor complex in northern Germany. Notwithstanding their earlier harsh treatment at Auschwitz, more than half of these Jews lived to see the end of the war. He writes, “Of the 1,000 Jewish prisoners who were transferred from Auschwitz in September [1944], 452 (45%) died by the end of the war…” (p. 110).

For more on how the Nazi use of forced laborers contradicts their professed goal of exterminating all Jews, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2025/08/02/introducing-jewish-forced-laborers-a-stunning-holocaust-contradiction/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2026/07/01/jewish-laborers-dispensable-nazis-did-pay-jewish-laborers/

AS AUSCHWITZ CLOSED, THE NAZIS STEPPED UP GASSING OF NON-JEWS

Ironic to the usual mystification of Nazi gas chambers and Jews, the Germans not only gassed non-Jews, but also substantially increased their gassing of non-Jews just as they were discontinuing their gassing of Jews. Buggeln writes, “With the looming loss of Auschwitz, the SS began to plan and build gas chambers in other camps to murder a large number of prisoners in anticipation of the influx of detainees evacuated from Eastern Europe. In the fall of 1944, new gas chambers were built in the main camps of Sachsenhausen, Ravensbruck, and Mauthausen.” (p. 60).

The author adds that, “To keep the camps from filling up too quickly with sick prisoners, the SS often resorted to direct killings. In addition to Stutthof, this occurred on a large scale in Mauthausen, Ravensbruck, and Sachsenhausen. Starting in the winter of 1944/45, prisoners were shot, gassed, and murdered in mass via lethal injection in the dying zones at Ravensbruck. Experienced killing specialists transferred directly from Auschwitz carried out much of the slaughter, which indicates that this was a centrally planned mass murder.” (p. 61).

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A clear distinction must be made about concentration camps, and labor camps. I now focus exclusively on the latter, specifically Buggeln’s analysis of the Neuengamme complex in northern Germany, which consisted of 85 subcamps and approximately 50,000 toiling inmates. (p. 2).

NO OVERALL NAZI GERMAN POLICY SINGLING OUT JEWISH LABORERS FOR HASTENED DEATH

Author Buggeln questions if the Nazis ever had a comprehensive “extermination through labor” policy for either Jews or non-Jews. (pp. 1-2, 63). This flies in the face of successful Jewish claims, for extra compensation, that had asserted that Jewish laborers were worse off than other laborers, and were “less than slaves”. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2022/09/05/benjamin-ferencz-forced-laborers-jews-get-paid-and-other-victims-of-nazi-genocide-do-not/

Nor, according to Buggeln, did the Nazis purposely send Jews to the most life-threatening occupations. If anything, the opposite was closer to the truth. The author comments, “Jewish prisoners at Neuengamme were not dispatched to work in particularly demanding construction brigades. Instead, they labored primarily in production camps that tended to have better working conditions…It should thus be noted that the Neuengamme Labor Deployment Department evidently did not purposely transfer Jewish prisoners to particularly appalling subcamps.” (pp. 90-91).

HOLOCAUST NARRATIVES SHATTERED: JEWISH FORCED LABORERS DID NOT CONSISTENTLY DIE AT HIGHER RATES THAT DID NON-JEWISH FORCED LABORERS

Buggeln writes, “The mortality rate for male Western European prisoners was roughly as high as it was for Jewish detainees, and thus significantly higher than it was for Eastern Europeans. The consistently lower mortality rate among female Jewish prisoners also runs contrary to widely-held assumptions.” (p. 283. Emphasis added).

He elaborates, “In view of the significantly lower mortality rates among Jewish female prisoners in comparison, for example, to male Dutch prisoners, it is clear that other factors need to be given more weight than what is suggested by researchers who posit an unaltered primacy in Nazi ideology, and presume that prisoners were consistently treated according to their nationality and criteria for incarceration.” (p. 117).

NAZI IDEOLOGY DID NOT GOVERN THE TREATMENT OF JEWS!

The author analyzes this counter-intuitive finding, “Indeed, there were relatively few deaths in the women’s subcamps with non-Jewish prisoners as well as in camps with Jewish prisoners.” (p. 135). He concludes that, “This is an astonishing discovery, especially in view of the fact that the Nazi ideology of eliminating enemies of the state, above all Jews, actually made no distinction between the two sexes.” (p. 136).

Author Buggeln speculates on the cause of these trends, but the facts are clear: Something other than being Jewish determined if one was likely to die in Nazi captivity! Clearly, the Nazis never planned to kill their Jewish forced laborers. Moreover, the Nazis never had any enforceable policy, in either theory or in practice, which would have disproportionately caused Jewish laborers to die.

JEWS WERE NOT CONSISTENTLY SPECIAL ENEMIES OF THE THIRD REICH

The implications are obvious. If the Nazis were obsessed with Jews as existential enemies, or were animated by redemptive antisemitism, as we are often told, then their actions towards Jewish forced laborers sure don’t show it. And actions speak louder than words. The elevation of the victimhood of Jews, above all the other victims of the Nazis, takes another fall.