THE HORRIBLE ENTERTAINMENT OF THE NAZIS IN THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS

 The HORRIFIC entertainment of the Nazis in the concentration camps

Perhaps the most disconcerting kind of performing arts to emerge from Nazi concentration camps was the concept of ‘human vivisection,’

 or the exhibition of prisoners as mere spectacles of entertainment for SS guards and men. Prisoners could be compelled to entertain in absurd and highly obscene spectacles, often exhibiting their near-starving bodies. 

It is often asked why Jews did not make greater attempts at resistance. Principally, they had no access to arms and were surrounded by native anti-Semitic populations who might collaborate with the Nazis or,

 even if they were opposed to German occupation, may have been willing to condone the elimination of the Jews and were reticent to put their own lives as risk.

 In essence, the Jews stood alone against a German war machine zealously determined to carry out the “final solution.” Moreover, the Nazis went to great lengths to disguise their ultimate plans. Because of the German policy of collective reprisal, Jews in the ghettos often hesitated to resist. 

This changed when the Germans ordered the final liquidation of the ghettos and residents recognized the imminence of their deaths.Jews resisted in the forests, in the ghettos, and even in the death camps. 

They fought alone and alongside resistance groups in France, Yugoslavia, and Russia. As a rule, full-scale uprisings occurred only at the end, when Jews realized the inevitability of impending death. 

On April 19, 1943, nine months after the massive deportations of Warsaw’s Jews to Treblinka had begun, the Jewish resistance, led by 24-year-old Mordecai Anielewicz, mounted the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

 In Vilna partisan leader Abba Kovner, recognizing the full intent of Nazi policy toward the Jews, called for resistance in December 1941 and organized an armed force that fought the Germans in September 1943.

 In March of that year, a resistance group led by Willem Arondeus, a homosexual artist and author, bombed a population registry in Amsterdam to destroy the records of Jews and others sought by the Nazis. 

At Treblinka and Sobibor, uprisings occurred just as the extermination process was slowing down, and the remaining prisoners were fearful that they would soon be killed. 

This was also true at Auschwitz, where the Sonderkommando (“Special Commando”), the prisoner unit that worked in the vicinity of the gas chambers, destroyed a crematorium just as the killing was coming to an end in 1944.

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