The Nazi ghettos appeared gradually and not in German territory. At first, says Duneier, they were not “holding pens for subsequent extermination”, but a temporary solution that anticipated their expulsion. In fact, one of the options discussed by the Nazi high command for the so-called “Jewish question” was to deport the German Jews to Madagascar, then a French colony, since it had been Napoleon who had liberated them at the beginning of the 19th century (7.10).
Although the Nazis did not agree on how to get rid of the Jewish population, it was clear that they were to be marginalized from German society. Their movements in the cities were restricted, they could not go to public squares, beaches and theaters or share train cars with other Germans. Their children could not go to German schools. The aim of these decrees, Duneier asserts, was not simply segregation but exclusion and economic control at all costs. It was only when the Third Reich invaded Poland and then Czechoslovakia and Hungary, that ghettos such as Krakow and Warsaw became the predominant form of exclusion for Eastern European Jews.
Even if its original purpose was not to serve as a prelude to extermination, the idea of the Nazi ghetto has a clear continuity with the concentration and extermination camp. First, because the ghetto allowed to define a situation in which the Jew had no legal status at all—de facto for much of the 1930s and which became widespread and “formalized” within the concentration camp—and second, because both the ghetto and the camp are places were exception clearly rules (7.7). The total and inescapable segregation made possible by the Nazi ghetto led to a total and inescapable dehumanization. The separation of the other that began with hunting and domestication finds its culmination, in extremis, in the concentration camp (0.24, 0.25, 0.26, 0.27).
Whoever entered the camp, says Agamben,
moved about in a zone of indistinction between the outside and the inside, the exception and the rule, the licit and the illicit, in which every juridical protection had disappeared; moreover, if they were Jews, they had already been deprived of citizenship rights by the Nuremberg Laws and were later completely denationalized at the moment of the “final solution.”1
The denationalization and dehumanization that took place in the Nazi concentration camps—the consolidation of the figure of the other in modern times—reached such heights that many of them, like the Dora-Mittelbau camp in Thuringia, were used as forced labor camps that supplied slave labor for the construction of the V-2 rockets, the first long-range ballistic missile in the world. Approximately one in three of the camp’s 60,000 prisoners died from malnutrition, lack of hygiene and fourteen-hour workdays.
But beyond the marks of continuity between ghetto and the camp is the liminal topology that characterizes our terrible place. If for Agamben the concentration camp is not “a historical fact [...] but rather in some sense the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we still live,” the hunting park is the most general and coherent description of its topos.
- Agamben, Means Without End, 40-41. ↩︎
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