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Title: Blessed is the Flame
Author: Serafinski
Date: 2016
Language: en
Topics: nihilist, nihilism, Little Black Cart, Pistols Drawn
Source: Reworked doc file from the OCR pdf of Archive.org
Notes: Taken from the original book: Running heads, body and italics set in Sabon, an old-style typeface designed by German typographer, suspected-communist and concentration camp survivor Jan Tschichold. Headers are set in DIN 1451, the iconic authoritarian typeface of the German state adopted during the Third Reich’s rein and still the face of German signage today. Pistols Drawn 2016. Contact for the author: undertow(A)riseup.net | *Blessed is the Flame* was originally published by Pistols Drawn and can be found https://littleblackcart.com/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=578][here]]. Book printed by [[https://the-tower.ca/the-tower-inprint/

Serafinski

Blessed is the Flame

—Hannah Senesh,

Jewish partisan fighter.

And may the flame that

burns inside us

burn everything around us.

—Panayiotis Argyrou,

Proud Member of the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire.

[Burning Treblinka perimeter during the prisoner uprising, in August

1945. This clandestine photograph was taken by Franciszck Znbecki.]

Introduction

We are being led to our slaughter. This has been theorized in a thousand

ways, described in environmental, social, and political terms, it has

been prophesied, abstracted, and narrated in real time, and still we are

unsure of what to do with it. The underlying point is that the progress

of society has nothing to offer us and everything to take away. Often it

feels like we are giving it away without a fight: when we sell our time

for money, allow our passions to be commodified, invest ourselves in the

betterment of society, or sustain ourselves on the spoils of ecological

destruction, we openly (though not consensually) participate in our own

destruction.

The question hangs in an ethereal and ghastly voice: Why do you let

yourselves be led to the slaughter like sheep? As Hermann Langbein

addresses in Against All Hope: Resistance in the Nazi Concentration

Camps, the survivors of those most explicit of human slaughter houses

have been plagued by that question for decades, to which some have

simply replied: we didn’t.[1]

What can stories of resistance inside of the Nazi concentration camps

teach us about our own situations? How can we relate to the resistance

of those immersed in “the most frightful and hopeless struggle the world

has ever witnessed?”[2]

Underneath the ubiquitous sheep-to-the-slaughter metaphor is buried a

profound historical possibility: wherever the Nazis sought to impose

domination and violence, people resisted. Behind the images of people

wearing armbands, boarding trains, and walking placidly into gas

chambers, lies a rich history of recalcitrance’ and insurrection.[3]

Inside of the Nazi concentration camps, places meticulously designed to

subjugate and exterminate human beings, people organized, conspired,

sabotaged, and reflexively fought back against their oppressors. Though

there are certainly lessons to be taken from World War II about the

potential for whole populations to be rendered docile, there are also

lessons about what it means to defy pacification in extraordinarily

bleak circumstances. When we forget these kinds of stories, we forget

about our own capacities for resistance. This text is about telling

those stories and letting them become part of our own struggles.

A different approach: We have already been led to our slaughter — it is

all around us. The world in which we exist is a protracted death, a sort

of economically-sustained limbo in which hearts are permitted to beat

only to the extent that they can facilitate the upward stream of

capital. The plague of domestication has reached into every wild space,

and the lines of colonization have crossed us more times than we can

count.[4] Every unproductive aspect of the biosphere has been flagged

for eradication, from the “beam-trawled ocean floors” to the “dynamited

reefs” to the “hollowed-out mountains,”’ the highest calibers of

technology are locked into a perpetual killing spree chugging along in a

“monotonous rhythm of death.”[5] We who still have air in our lungs are

the living dead, and struggle daily to remember what it feels like to be

alive, holding tightly to the “desire for wildness that the misery of a

paycheck cannot allay.”[6] We roam the desolate architecture of our

slaughter houses (“the prison of civilization we live in”) like ghosts

who feel but cannot quite understand the vapidity of our existence.[7]

To borrow some apt phrases from the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF):

we have become thoroughly integrated into “a system that crushes us on a

daily basis”, that “controls our thoughts and our desires through

screens” and “teaches us how to be happy slaves” while letting us

“consider ourselves free because we can vote and consume”, and all the

while, “we, like cheerful Sisyphus, are still carrying our slavery stone

and think this is life.”[8] As an American Iraq war

veteran-turned-strategy consultant wrote in the New York Times in 2013:

“The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that

this civilization is already dead.”[9] The extent to which we have

internalized the rhythms, values, and stories of this civilization “ties

our future to [this] undead and all-devouring system.”[10]

Then perhaps a better question might be: Why are we continuously being

led to our slaughter like sheep?, to which many of us simply reply: We

aren’t.

Anarcho-nihilism

A nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does

not accept any principle on faith, however much that principle may be

revered. —Ivan Turgenev

The anarcho-nihilist position is essentially that we are fucked.[11]

That the current manifestation of human society (civilization,

leviathan, industrial society, global capitalism, whatever) is beyond

salvation, and so our response to it should be one of unmitigated

hostility. There are no demands to be made, no utopic visions to be

upheld, no political programs to be followed — the path of resistance is

one of pure negation. In short, “that conditions in the social

organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own

sake independent of any constructive program or possibility.”[12]

Aragorn! traces the history of nihilism to 19^(th) century Russia, where

the “suffocating” environment of Tsarism created a breeding ground for a

purely negative strain of socialism. What started as a philosophical

rejection of conventional morality and aesthetics laid the groundwork

for a youth-driven counter-culture of hedonism, communalism, and

proto-hipster fashion.[13] This eventually birthed a revolutionary force

that sought the absolute destruction of “state traditions, social order,

and classes in Russia”, not as part of a program for social change, but

based on a “deeply-held belief that destruction was worthwhile for its

own sake”.[14]Though Russian nihilism was eventually squashed by the

state, the ideas spread and have recently seen a resurgence within

anarchist currents.

After two centuries of failed revolutions, nihilism has perhaps become

even more disinterested in conventional socialist programs and radical

milieus. It has also been armed with decades of anarchist and

post-structuralist theory that have helped to cultivate its critiques of

domination, meta-narratives, teleological structures, gender, and

civilization as a whole. Streams of communiques from anarcho-nihilist

groups detailing incendiary actions have been backed by a surge of

publications exploring nihilist approaches to the problem of domination

in today’s world, both of which have led to (occasionally useful) lines

of dialogue between nihilists and other anarchists. Though some strains

of nihilism certainly arrive at a place of paralysis, the strain that

collides with anarchism tends to be one of explosive creativity and

relentless action. On the path of negation, anarcho-nihilism spurns

positive programs for social change, challenges dominant modes of time,

and discovers a tactical freedom by disregarding inherited moralities

and political traditions, among other positions.

Collision

We are anarchists not by Bakunin or the CNT, but by our grandmothers.

—Julieta Paredes

I began thinking about this text in Toronto, where my 93 year old

grandmother lives on the seventh floor of a high-rise apartment

overlooking Highway 401.[15] Standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows in

her kitchen, the horizon is swallowed by twelve lanes of concrete and an

endless river of traffic, equal parts terrifying and hypnotic. How many

gruesome stories are written into this one landscape? The concrete road

tells the story of the colonization of Turtle Island, the commuter

traffic tells the story of mass domestication under the rhythms of

capitalism, the billowing smog tells a story of the future that’s almost

too frightening to believe. Drinking tea quietly, my grandmother is

clearly unfazed by this ominous procession — it is the world she now

knows and accepts. In a previous chapter of her life she confronted and

survived a very different infrastructure of death: as a young adult, the

bunkers, factories, and crematorium of Auschwitz defined nearly a year

of her life. Her experiences of the Nazi holocaust sit close with me as

I look out over this glowing ribbon of death and wrestle with the ideas

of nihilism.

To what extent do I remain attached to this society that I despise?

What would it mean to sever those attachments?

If this were Nazi Germany expanding out before me, how would I live my

life?

What if I were in my grandmother’s position in 1943?

What does it mean to resist against such a catastrophically extensive

and overwhelming system?

This collision of anarcho-nihilism and concentration camp resistance

came about primarily as a coincidence of literary indulgences. At the

same time as I pored my way through Bæden, a queer-nihilist journal

(still one of the best nihilist text I’ve encountered), I also stumbled

upon my first memoir of resistance from the Warsaw Ghetto. As so often

happens, connections began to jump off the page, and it seemed ideal to

pursue these two subjects simultaneously. Since then, I have found that

they speak poignantly to one another, and when held together seem to

create a stereoscopic depth that has helped me to grapple with the

weight of both topics simultaneously.

I’ll admit from the outset that I have low ambitions for this project.

My intention is not to comprehensively explain, reinvent, or critique

nihilism or anarchism more generally. Rather, I want to feel out these

ideas and see how far they can take me. Like the authors of the nihilist

journal Attentat, I am interested in finding “tools, not answers, with

an emphasis on building.”[16] Similarly, I have no aspirations to shed

new light on the Nazi holocaust, or offer any startling new

interpretations — despite all of my research, the subject still feels

somewhat untouchable: an end to a conversation rather than a beginning.

If nothing else, I would like to unearth some stories of resistance that

do not often get told, and in doing so, to bring the holocaust into the

realm of anarchist thought in a meaningful way so that at least we have

something to say about it. I hope to open the doors to other anarchists

who have a personal connection to these histories, or who share an

interest, so that we might incorporate them into our lives in productive

ways.

At heart, this book is about tapping into the instinctual rebelliousness

that resides underneath of every organization, affinity group, project,

and action that we participate in; that reflexive spirit of resistance

rooted in the basic existential understanding that recalcitrance is

simply a more meaningful and joyous form of existence than docility. Too

often our insurrectionary urges get bogged down in ideological costume,

rhetorical mandate, and hobbyist paradigms. We channel our energies into

dubious conduits of prefabricated dogma and inevitably burn out or

become listless at the very mention of Revolution.[17] Forms of

resistance rooted in social obligations and lifestyle choices all too

often fade into lives of despondency, alienation, boredom, or material

comfort. It speaks to the very nature of our domestication that we only

choose resistance so long as it feels like something we can win.

That’s where nihilism enters the picture. I am interested in the sort of

resistance we pursue, not because we necessarily believe it will produce

desired changes or lead us into a brighter future, but because it is the

most meaningful response to this world we can imagine. Because we simply

can’t stomach the idea of being passive in the face of a system this

brutal, regardless of how far we may be from our dreams. Nihilism urges

anarchists to embrace our feelings of cynicism around radical milieus,

our feelings of boredom with prescribed methods of resistance, our

feelings of hopelessness in the current landscape of domination, and to

engage in forms of revolt that cultivate immediate joy and moments of

liberation.

And that’s where the Nazi holocaust becomes particularly interesting.

Concentration camp resistance challenges nihilism to consider just how

bleak it is willing to get. The resistance of those in the Lagers[18]

who were deprived of every vestige of hope, every morsel of inspiration,

and every shred of comfort, poses rich questions about how much

hopelessness we are willing to wade through for a chance to fight back.

It reminds us that resistance is not just about getting results, but

about our reflexive reactions to oppressive situations. Whether we

succeed in overthrowing our oppressors and bringing about a brighter

future can only be secondary to the visceral need to rebel against the

shitty conditions of our lives.

Both topics — anarcho-nihilism and concentration camp resistance —

challenge anarchists to realize a spirit of resistance that can endure

horrific conditions, that can weather the storms of absolute futility,

and that can still muster an exuberant desire to rebel.

The Ceaseless Lager

“The Holocaust experience is a very condensed version of most of what

life is all about.” —Dori Laub

This is not a book about happy endings. Almost every story ends with

mass torture, slaughter, and enslavement. When the liberation of the

camps occurred it was not because internal resistance had brought the

Nazis to their knees, but because of the arrival of a different team of

imperial state armies.[19] A typical leftist approach to this topic

might try to emphasize the effectiveness of concentration camp

resistance, to paint portraits of heroes who hastened the end of the

war, or to only celebrate the moments of successful escape. A nihilist

approach might be just as content to emphasize all of the times that

action accomplished nothing, all of the times that rebel strategies

failed, all of the acts of resistance that did not even survive for us

to hear about them — to stand back with all of that information and to

still be able to say: that’s great! From a nihilistic approach, we can

celebrate the “failures” of resistance, because in them we find a sort

of resiliency and substance that may serve us better in our current

situations than mere stories of triumph.

Though it would be ludicrous to over-pronounce a comparison between our

situations today and the concentration camps of World War II, the

institutionalized brutality and the systematic disempowerment many of us

feel certainly resonates. Many of us who experience or at least

recognize the horrors of modern society can relate to those before us

who were “turned into numbers, deprived of the last vestiges of human

dignity, and transformed into totally submissive objects”.[20] Most of

us alive today experience nothing near the brutality of Treblinka;

however the mechanisms that were used to subjugate Häftlinge,[21] the

prisons that were used to contain them, and the underlying logic of Nazi

Germany that made the camps possible all persist in abundance. Those who

have survived the (ongoing) five hundred year colonization of Turtle

Island will surely recognize many of these as the same methods used to

displace and eradicate their people, and that continue to serve colonial

states at their expense. The colonization of this land was, after all,

of great personal inspiration to Hitler himself.[22]

For a variety of reasons history has exceptionalized this particular

genocide, but I’ve come to understand it as part of an unbroken

continuum of domination that neither began nor ended with Hitler. It’s

important to remember that the Nazis didn’t have to build all of their

own camps (some of that work was done by the Social Democratic

governments prior), nor did they have to decommission all of them after

the war (the Soviets put a couple of them to good use).[23] Let’s also

remember that the post-war trials of Nazi doctors were conducted under

the explicit understanding that most governments of the world are guilty

of perverse, unconsensual human experimentation. Most notably, the

United States, from where many of the Nuremberg judges came, had been

involved in this kind of brutal scientific experimentation throughout

much of the 20^(th) century, infecting prisoners with malaria plasmodia,

infecting death row prisoners with pellagra, or testing the effects of

nuclear radiation on general populations.[24] The Nazis were only found

(or remembered as) guilty because they lost the war. Their camps were

not fundamentally unique, though they certainly brought a devastating

industrial flair to the whole concept. Giorgio Agamben has aptly argued

that the concentration camp is the defining feature of modern politics,

as it represents a “site of exception” from the enlightened facade of

civilized society.[25] Indeed, everywhere we look today we see Nazi

machinations at work, though these parallels are often too controversial

to utter. And yet for those willing to see it, from the Gaza strip to

the Toronto Immigration Holding Centre, from the factory farms to the

Alberta Tar Sands, the logic of this civilization continues to show its

true colors. In order for some to live safely, others must be declared

Ballastexistenzen[26] and be shackled, violated, and killed. In order

for humans to thrive, the earth and all of its other inhabitants must be

subjugated and ravaged. Although the uniforms have changed and the

tactics have evolved, the same basic struggle against domination

continues. The phrase “never again”, repeated often by victims and

descendants of the Nazi holocaust, rings more and more hollow with every

passing moment.[27]

Introduction to concentration camp resistance

Nobody knows themselves. Sometimes when somebody is really nice to me I

find myself thinking, “How will he be in Sobibór?” —Toivi Blatt

Absolute Subjugation

To provide a quick overview of the Nazi concentration camps is an

overwhelming challenge, and so I will limit my scope here to the topic

at hand: resistance, and specifically the conditions for its emergence.

This approach is important for understanding the context in which

resistance happened, but also for understanding the context in which so

much resistance didn’t happen. As mentioned earlier, debates around

passivity and “sheep-like” obedience have dominated discussions of the

Nazi holocaust. An essay on resistance within the camps risks playing

into a narrative that once again casts shame or criticism on those who

did not fight back, a narrative I refuse to indulge.[28] Of those who

were able to survive abduction, transport, and arrival in the camps, a

deftly-designed universe of extreme demoralization, physical duress, and

social alienation awaited them. The camps were “designed to break the

will of the inmate”,[29] to “shatter the adversaries’ capacity to

resist”,[30] and as one survivor of Auschwitz wrote: “it would have been

impossible to create worse conditions for resistance, a more perverse

and brutal system.”[31] The camps were so ordered against resistance

that merely to lift one’s hand in defense of an incoming blow was

considered a grievous act of defiance, worthy of torturous

execution.[32] Nazi methodology was deftly crafted to reduce humans to

sheep-like creatures, an experiment most explicitly pursued in their

laboratories where scientists busied themselves with the task of

physically rendering Jews into a race of sterile, “animal-like creatures

who would be adapted solely for work”.[33] Though these experiments

largely failed (with grisly results), the broader experiment in the

camps of creating the conditions for absolute subjugation was

disturbingly successful.

So successful were these techniques that even in the most aggravating

circumstances imaginable, people often found themselves totally

incapable of resistance. The totality of this subjugation is conveyed in

the crushing testimonies of those who experienced it: Auschwitz survivor

Elie Wiesel listened to his own father cry out for him while being

beaten to death, yet was unable to muster a response.[34] Filip Müller

painfully watched as 4,000 Auschwitz inmates knowingly walked into the

gas chambers despite the prolonged efforts of some to agitate them into

resistance.[35] Tadeusz Borowski recalls working alongside 10,000

workers when a truck full of naked women slowly rolled by calling out

for help: “‘Save us! We are going to the gas chambers! Save us!’... Not

one of us made a move, not one of us lifted a hand.”[36] These

testimonies are powerful gestures towards the depravity of the

“concentration universe” and the extent to which it violently precluded

the potential for defiance. These are not stories of individual

passivity — they are stories of systematic disempowerment.

Precluding Resistance

Perhaps more than anything else, the physical conditions of the Lagers

played a role in the suppression of defiance. An explication of this

sort could be long and brutal, but suffice it to say that being kept

forever on the brink of starvation, worked beyond the capacities of the

human body, exposed daily to wanton acts of cruelty, subjected to

year-round elemental onslaught, and being perpetually enveloped in

pestilence and disease, has the capacity to turn human bodies into

emaciated shells devoid of will power or physical strength. Throughout

survivor testimonies, starvation is the most frequently cited obstacle

to resistance. One survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, Marek Edelman, annoyed

with perpetual questions about the passivity of those who boarded trains

bound for death camps, explained to his interviewer: “Listen... do you

have any idea what bread meant at the time in the Ghetto? Because if you

don’t, you will never understand how thousands of people could

voluntarily come for the bread and go on to the camp at Treblinka.

Nobody has understood thus far.”[37] Vera Laska, a survivor of Auschwitz

and editor of Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust, reflects on

the significance of bread in the camps:

I have seen with my own eyes in Auschwitz an SS man enter the barracks

of 1,450 women, throw chunks of bread into their midst and then step

back in a fit of laughter as hundreds of women pushed and shoved, clawed

and fought for the crumbs. Within minutes, three women were trampled to

death and dozens injured.[38]

Though we may recoil learning about situations like this, most of us

will never really know what it feels like to be so systematically

deprived of food; thus our exploration of this topic must always be

guided by the deepest humility for the hunger that we can read about but

never truly know.

Another central aspect of the camps that devastated potential for

resistance was the Nazi strategy of cultivating social alienation,

intended “to reduce all inmates to monads.”[39] By creating conditions

that demanded brute self-interest, where groups and individuals were

pitted against each other for scraps of privilege, where the pain of

isolation was preferable to the weight of empathy, the Nazis were able

to preclude the capacity for solidarity, and thus the capacity for much

resistance. One of the primary tools in this endeavor was a deeply

divisive social structure that pitted inmates against each other. Upon

entry into the camps, inmates were put into an identity category

demarcated by a colored triangle (“winkel”), that would henceforth

impact every moment of their existence. Criminal prisoners (mainly

Germans) wore green winkels, political prisoners (e.g. communists,

anarchists, etc.) wore red, Jehovah’s Witnesses wore violet, male

homosexuals wore pink, “anti-socials” (e.g. Romas, mentally ill,

lesbians, etc.) wore black, and Jews wore the dreaded yellow star.[40]

These triangles were sometimes elaborated by marked letters indicating a

person’s country of origin, which also had deep implications for how one

would be treated in the camp. The arbitrary organization of these

identity categories into a violently enforced hierarchy defined social

life in the Lagers, and served to undermine solidarity between inmates.

Hannah Arendt observed that in the camps, “the gruesome and grotesque

part of it was that the inmates identified themselves with these

categories, as though they represented a last authentic remnant of their

juridical person.”[41] Because these identity categories came to be so

internalized and cherished by the inmates, connections between inmates

were inherently governed by Nazi strategy.

The differential treatment of these artificial groupings created deep

fissures between prisoners. “Greens” were often tasked with running the

camps as Senior Inmates (responsible for the operation of a particular

section of the camp) and Capos (heads of labour crews).[42] Because an

ordinary prisoner was “completely at the mercy of his Capo and senior

block inmate”, the character traits of these functionaries often

determined one’s chances for both survival and resistance.[43] Beneath

these in the hierarchy were other “prominent” positions that offered

opportunities for non-lethal labor, extra food rations, or other

privileges. Competition for prominent positions was fierce (literally

life or death), and such assignments could only be kept by appeasing the

SS officers who appointed them. Those who attained prominent positions

held them tenaciously, which under the gaze of Nazi officers tended to

evoke a certain level of sadism. Overall, the internal hierarchy of the

camp fostered an atmosphere of brutal mistrust, competition, and

resentment. New-comers were usually met with outright hostility by

fellow inmates, alongside the physical and verbal abuse of the

guards.[44] Primo Levi describes how debilitating his first encounter

with this atmosphere of prisoner hostility was: “This brusque

revelation, which became manifest from the very first hours of

imprisonment... was so harsh as to cause the immediate collapse of one’s

capacity to resist.”[45]

While some echelons of this social hierarchy had hopes of survival

and/or upward mobility, others had none. Across the entire system of

camps it was universally true that Jews held the lowest rung. For them

there were generally no prominent positions available or privileges to

be earned; for them there was only death and the hostility and

resentment of those around them for the space they occupied, the food

they consumed, and the hopelessness they represented.[46] As Joseph

Garlinski describes the Jews’ situation in Auschwitz, their horrid and

short lives within the camps combined with their multilingual,

multinational makeup as a group, “limited any possibility of clandestine

work among [them] and decreased the chances of their forming a strong

underground group in the camp.”[47] Russians generally occupied the

second lowest rung of the camp, and in situations where they weren’t

immediately killed, were rarely able to gain prominent positions or form

lasting networks.[48] Men marked with a pink triangle were often the

subject of sexual violence, and thus occupied their own unique and

vicious echelon of the camp hierarchy — to even speak with a “pink” was

a risky affair, which meant they faced an added layer of isolation.[49]

Thus we can begin to see that enormous disparity existed in the

privilege of different inmates, and had substantial implications for the

capacity and willingness of different prisoners to resist.

These assaults on the body and mind were combined with a relentless war

on the spirit; demoralization was a daily responsibility of the Capos

and the SS, who used humiliation, misinformation, and extreme isolation

to obliterate any sense of agency. The Nazis intentionally crafted a

universe that was severed from the rest of the world and that was deeply

shrouded in the myth of the Thousand-Year Reich. To even speak about the

war in some camps was a grievous crime, and so Nazi propaganda about the

“blitzkrieg” (lightning-fast war) reigned supreme.[50] Inmates had no

reliable reason to believe that anyone knew where they were, that anyone

was coming to help, or that anyone would ever find out what had happened

to them in these terrible places. (We should always remember the Nazis

in fact came astonishingly close to covering up many aspects of their

extermination project, and it is only because of the committed work of

rebellious inmates that the world learned details of what transpired in

the camps.[51] Organizers quickly learned that “people are more likely

to transcend themselves if they know that the public will be informed of

their actions”, and as a result, establishing lines of communication

with the outside world was often a central priority.[52]

Lastly, daily life within the camps was intended to overwhelm and

disempower the inmates with cruel, often bizarre and inscrutable laws

and practices. Primo Levi informs us that the rules governing life in

the camps were “infinite and senseless,” in addition to the guidelines

around work, which were themselves “a Gordian knot of laws, taboos, and

problems.”[53] These irrational elements of Nazi control created an

environment in which, as one German guard explained to Levi: “hier ist

kein warum” — there is no why here.[54] This was a universe in which the

SS would often provide costly health care to one of their torture

victims only to send them to the gas chambers upon recovery, and in

which workers would be ordered to carry bricks up stairs in an assembly

line and then jump out of a window to gather more bricks (whoever broke

bones would be hospitalized, healed, and then sent to the gas

chambers).[55] This was a universe in which the number of buttons on

one’s jacket must always be five, beds (made mostly of wood and lice)

had to be perfectly made every morning, and in which one’s capacity to

choose an appropriately fitting wooden shoe at an “eye’s glance” might

determine chances for another day of survival.[56] The innumerable

strange and contradictory aspects of camp life reinforced the

absoluteness of Nazi control, and further obliterated the agency and

morale of the inmates.

The Conditions for Resistance

From all lairs of meanness and insidiousness the depraved vermin comes

crawling and cozies up to the SS, blissfully betraying their

acquaintances and friends, opponents, and human dignity itself. The

golden age of unprincipled persons has dawned. —Pierre Gregoire (who

fell victim to an informant in Sachsenhausen).

For those few individuals who were able (and lucky enough) to survive

these conditions and maintain both the will and physical capacity to

resist, an entirely new world of complications and obstacles awaited.

One of the most debilitating mechanisms employed by the SS to discourage

resistance was a policy of “collective responsibility,” whereby any act

of revolt, sabotage, or escape was met with brutal punishment, not only

for those involved, but for an arbitrary selection of other inmates.

Witold Pilecki, who established the first resistance organization in

Auschwitz, learned this system of collective responsibility harshly upon

his entry into the camp: Before entering the front gates, a prisoner was

chosen at random and told to run to a post at the side of the road —

“Ten men were then dragged out of the ranks at random and shot with

pistols as ‘collective responsibility’ for the ‘escape,’ which the SS

themselves has staged.”[57] This lesson was further reinforced when, a

month after Pilecki arrived at the camp, one prisoner was absent from a

morning roll call, which sparked an SS commander to order a “penal

stand-at-attention” for the entire camp that lasted eighteen hours on a

bitterly cold, sleeting day, and involved relentless beatings from the

SS.[58] This punishment killed approximately two hundred inmates, and

several hundred more were hospitalized.[59] Standard policy in Aushwitz

would later become that for every escapee, ten prisoners would be locked

in dark cells without food or water until they died or the escapee

returned.[60] Sometimes the fugitive’s family would be arrested and

brought into the camp. These policies deeply complicated any acts of

resistance for obvious ethical reasons, and resulted in some resistance

groups implementing a ‘no-escape’ policy to prevent such outlandish

retributions.[61] Outside of Auschwitz, partisan fighters enacted a

‘no-shoot’ policy in the vicinity of the camp for the same reasons.[62]

Another impediment that awaited would-be resisters was the Nazi’s prized

networks of informants. The Political Department of the SS maintained

elaborate webs of snitches (called “Special Commissions”) throughout

each camp, which were all too easy to establish within the internally

hostile and competitive social fabric. Starving, isolated, and petrified

inmates were often faced with a choice between cooperation or torturous

execution. Garlinski explains:

In such a brutal struggle for life, with no quarter given, where for

many any trick was legitimate if it were to one’s own advantage, the

average level of honesty and comradeship was bound to be low. The

informers were recruited from various nationalities; they were on every

Block, almost in every Kommando.[63]

Other inmates became snitches of their own initiative in hopes of

currying favour or privilege. These networks of informants were tasked

not only with weeding out members of resistance organizations, but also

with aggravating existing tensions between groups, or with agitating

existing ideological differences within groups.[64] The SS even went as

far as to set up a “snitch-box” in the middle of Auschwitz where inmates

could anonymously rat each other out.[65] This intense concentration of

informants in the camps, combined with the policy of collective

responsibility, crushed some resistance activities and dissuaded others

from even trying.

And still...

In spite of these and a host of other factors that destroyed almost any

possibility of resistance, we are nevertheless faced with a rich history

of sabotage, insurrection, mutual aid, escape, spontaneous defiance, and

underground organization within the camps. Inmates overcame social

isolation to form deep bonds and endured unfathomable material

conditions to bear witness to what they had seen. They rebelled despite

the brutal repercussions and orchestrated escapes against all odds.

Resistance organizations even managed to mitigate the impacts of the

Special Commissions by developing security cultures that were nearly

impenetrable. They functioned in such secrecy that “even in camps where

a resistance organization was active for years, the overwhelming

majority of prisoners knew nothing about it.”[66] Informants were

frequently killed by rebels, through mock trials in hidden rooms, swift

force, or covert assassination. In one case, castor oil was put into an

informant’s soup, and when admitted to the hospital he was given a

lethal injection by a doctor who was part of the resistance.[67] In

another case, an informant’s x-ray plates were secretly switched with

those of a tuberculosis patient, which meant that he was soon given

lethal injection by the SS themselves.[68] The best-known Gestapo

informer in Auschwitz was given a sweater containing typhus-infected

lice that killed him within weeks.[69] Sometimes the organizations were

able to use social manipulation to have the informant stripped of their

privileges and removed from the special commissions.[70] In Auschwitz,

resisters quickly gained access to the snitch-box by making an imprint

of the key on a loaf of bread and forging a replica, allowing them to

manipulate what information the SS had access to and to uncover

informants in their midst.[71] And, despite the most brutal torture

methods employed by the SS, members of the resistance seem to have

rarely snitched on each other after being caught: phrases such as

“however, he gave no one away,” and “the interrogation proved fruitless”

are repeated frequently throughout the literature.[72]

Rather than dwell on the question of passivity during the holocaust, I

am inclined to celebrate the fact that any resistance happened at all!

Alongside the deeply misanthropic and depressing insights we might gleam

from the camps, there is also a great deal for us to cherish. For all of

us who have witnessed our own resistance networks stifled by state

surveillance, interpersonal conflict, hopelessness, and the material

strain of keeping food on the table, the Lagers provide proof that even

in the most overwhelming situations people can still find creative and

sustained ways to fight back. Just as Häftlinge were marked with badges

to create artificial echelons within the camps, we too carry badges of

imposed social division in such forms as gender, race, and class that

function to keep us squabbling over scraps of privilege. That people

were able to overcome those violently-imposed divisions and move beyond

struggles for better representation within the camp hierarchy should

speak volumes to our own lives. And just as organizers in the camps were

able to defy the Special Commissions and develop tight security cultures

to keep themselves safe, so too can we find ways to combat the unending

policies of infiltration and COINTELPRO-style neutralization tactics

that we are up against.

While much could be said on specific definitions of resistance, in the

realm of concentration camps, I tend to agree with the broadest

definitions offered: “Everything could be treated as resistance because

everything was prohibited. Any activity which created the impression

that the prisoner had retained some of his former personality and

individuality was an act of resistance.”[73] Activities such as mutual

aid, individual escape, charity, friendship, medical aid, cultural

contributions (religious gatherings, education, sports, music, etc.),

refusal of work, saving lives, and communication with the outside world

all represent invaluable acts of resistance in a situation that fostered

selfishness and subjugation. Rochelle Saidel, in her book The Jewish

Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, spends five pages discussing

the importance of sharing recipes as a clandestine activity, and another

three pages discussing the importance of poetry and song — forms of

resistance that allowed inmates to persevere through unimaginable

trauma. More than anything, to survive and to bear witness to the camps

was perhaps the most significant act of resistance against a system that

worked so fiendishly to cover its own tracks. Nevertheless, this text

focuses on those acts that were geared towards the negation of the

camps, rather than the innumerable efforts that allowed people, in one

way or another, to survive them. In keeping with the anarcho-nihilist

tendency, this essay is about those who attacked. In each of the

following sections, one form of concentration camp resistance will be

paired with an exploration of anarcho-nihilist ideas: Acts of sabotage

are paired with an introduction to nihilism and the concepts of negation

and jouissance; spontaneous acts of resistance are paired with a

discussion of time; and mass uprisings are paired with a critique of

anarchist organizing. These pairings are meant to complement, though

certainly not define, each other. I approached them as juxtapositions

more than dialogues, though where relevant I have made space for

cross-chatter between the two subjects. Once again, this project is

intended as an introduction to two topics that I feel resonate very

strongly, and is less focused on explicating those connections. In that

spirit, my own analysis has largely taken a back seat to the task of

untangling and organizing a wide range of materials on two difficult

subjects. It is my hope that within each act of concentration camp

resistance, we can find a simmering spirit of anarcho-nihilism and an

opportunity to deepen our understanding of what it might mean for us to

resist despite overwhelming feelings of futility.

Sabotage and pure negation

Sabotage is like wine! —Slogan among Polish women in Ravensbrück

Of all the methods of resistance employed by inmates of concentration

camps throughout World War II, my favourite to read about are the

relentless acts of sabotage that plagued Hitler’s war efforts. While

much of the work assigned to inmates early in the war was intended

solely as punishment (e.g. moving bags of sand back and forth), after

the spring of 1942, the camps became a prime source of slave labour for

nearby factories that supplied Germany’s army.[74] Descriptions of the

work that occurred within these factories paints a picture of an

international circus of neglect, ineptitude, laziness, and outright

stupidity — masks for what were in fact outrageously brave acts of

sabotage against the Nazi war machine. Using a wide array of creative

approaches, some more blunt than others, the inmates were able to botch

their jobs, demonstrating to the Germans that slavery is simply not a

reliable source of quality labor. Many of these acts were spontaneous,

while others were part of organized campaigns; all were geared towards

the pure negation of Nazism. Although sabotage certainly caused

headaches for the Nazis and may have even hastened the end of the war,

for Häftlinge whose lives were dominated by a second-to-second battle

for survival, these acts brought only a heightened level of danger and

little personal hope of survival. It is not the outcome of the act, but

the moment of action itself that speaks loudest here. For many, the

opportunity to step outside of the role of victim for even a fleeting

moment, the chance to hit back in whatever way possible, outweighed the

risks of such actions. After providing a broad overview of some of the

sabotage that took place, this book will take ITS first detailed look at

anarcho-nihilism. The nihilist concepts of negation and jouissance

resonate deeply with these acts of sabotage, offering a framework

through which we might think about acts of resistance not as a means of

liberation, but as acts of liberation in themselves. Like any act of

resistance, sabotage within the camps and factories was an incredibly

risky venture. The SS pursued a number of strategies to prevent and

dissuade anything that would get in the way of seamless production and

orderly labour lines. The crudest strategy was of course blunt violence:

anyone who even raised suspicions of sabotage was met with swift and

brutal repercussions. In some situations, saboteurs “pretended to be

slow on the uptake” and were spared their lives, though even

well-feigned stupidity usually resulted in being beaten almost to death

or being hung outside of the factory.[75] On the other end of the

spectrum, the Nazis experimented with “premiums,” petty benefits offered

to inmates who showed high productivity.[76] To aid in these

anti-saboteur efforts, the Political Department developed intense

networks of informants throughout the factories to expose and dissuade

saboteurs, turning the factories into “a jungle of stool pigeons and

agent provocateurs” that led to countless executions.[77] When these

tactics failed to produce the desired results, Hitler himself

implemented a desperate measure that replicated the tactics of “shared

responsibility” against his own valuable workforce: wherever production

lines lagged to a suspicious degree, and wherever defective products

were found in suspicious quantities, every tenth prisoner in that

factory would be shot.[78] Despite these bloody efforts, there were

“reports from practically all camps about acts of sabotage by inmates

forced to work on the production of weapons, and it is certain that many

acts went unrecorded.”[79] Fliers spread throughout occupied Europe with

the phrase “Work Slow” tagged across an image of a turtle, while slogans

were developed within camps to further spread this mentality, such as

Buchenwald’s, “Whoever works more slowly will reach peace more quickly,”

or Sachsenhausen’s less catchy, “Work slowly, produce substandard

articles, waste materials, cause machines to break down.”[80] In short,

sabotage became an ingrained part of the work ethic of concentration

camps.

Sabotage in the Lagers

To begin, some acts of sabotage were targeted directly at the modes of

production within the Nazi war economy: steel plates used for

constructing tanks were “mysteriously” buried under rubble, key

materials were “misplaced,” tools and bricks were “accidentally”

damaged, and perfectly good airplane motors were deemed damaged and sent

to the junk yard.[81] Entire stockpiles of ammunition were dumped into

lakes, shipments of fuel were poured out onto the ground, and salt was

added to gunpowder by the women of Ravensbrück, rendering it

useless.[82] In Flöha, French engineers constructed excessively-heavy

airplane wings that would pass inspection but certainly cause problems

in the air.[83] In Auschwitz, women sabotaged the production of

plant-based rubber by simply burning half of the harvested seeds.[84]

Ships coming out of the Jastram engine factory were improperly welded,

grenades coming out of a factory near Auschwitz failed to explode, and

machine guns produced by inmates of Mauthausen were completely

dysfunctional.[85] Rockets produced in Dora had inexplicable quantities

of urine in the electronic components, courtesy of the Russian

inmates.[86] In 1943, a Polish inmate named Jan Szot was able to

sabotage large quantities of anti-aircraft missiles by shifting the

precise alignment of the detonators ever so slightly, resulting in two

month’s worth of faulty weapons.[87]

The website

degob.org

documents testimonials from Hungarians who survived the Nazi holocaust,

and includes the otherwise-unpublished stories of at least a dozen

survivors who engaged in sabotage while in the camps. Mária Jakobovics

recalls her crew’s habitual sabotage of the production of oil-bombs: “We

sabotaged whenever we could by simply not inserting the fuses into the

bombs. When they realized it we of course got twenty five blows with a

club, but we would still do it nonetheless.”[88] One woman who was put

to work in Auschwitz fixing the piles of clothes taken from incoming

Jews reports: “We sabotaged work in a way that we made clothes unusable

on purpose.”[89] A woman at Bolzenburg who was put to work in an

airplane factory reports: “We sabotaged work in whatever ways we could.

We broke the drills, presses, and everything that could appear to have

happened by accident.”[90]

Because some inmates were put to work as bureaucrats, a great deal of

sabotage could be accomplished from behind a desk with nothing more than

the stroke of a pen. With this method unskilled workers were deemed

experts and sent to do important work on the factory line, while those

with valuable skills were sent to dig trenches.[91] On the other hand,

skilled workers who could be trusted to do sabotage work were handpicked

for specific jobs in which they could cause maximum damage.[92] A third

tactic involved fudging roll-call numbers such that some inmates were

simply overlooked by the SS and spared from work for days at a time.[93]

In at least one situation, a doctor falsely diagnosed an entire work

crew with typhus in order to have them all put on quarantine and delay

the delivery of an urgent order of weapons.[94]

Organized sabotage efforts often united people of different

nationalities and political ideologies towards a common goal. In one

case, two dozen inmates who established a Polish-Russian-German sabotage

group at a mine in Jaszowice, “tore the conveyor belts, hid the tips of

mining drills, and, instead of coal, loaded stones.”[95] In another

case, four hundred Russian and German political prisoners working at the

Heinkel-Werke aircraft plant conspired to use magnetized wires to

disorient plane navigation systems. The workers were able to sabotage an

entire fleet of aircraft without the inspectors finding any faults: “out

of a total of one hundred twenty aircraft assembled, not a single one

was fit for use.[96] In some cases, organized sabotage efforts were

successful in creating larger-scale disruptions by undermining entire

infrastructure projects. In the spring of 1942, when the crematorium at

Dachau was deemed unfit, the camp management ordered a larger one to be

built complete with its own ovens and gas chamber. The German Capo in

charge of the project was a communist, and intent on hindering the

construction effort. His instruction to the workers was to the tune of:

“Comrades, the gas chamber through which all of us may be intended to

march must never be finished! Work slowly? No, sabotage whatever you

can!”[97] Though they did complete the crematorium, the “cement did not

bond properly, the foundation turned out to be too weak, and the mortar

in the brickwork crumbled so that the whole unit had to be torn down and

put up again.”[98] The second construction was rushed, and the SS were

forced to abandon the extra gas chamber.

Pure Negation

The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too! —Mikhail Bakunin

It is ridiculous to even contemplate co-existing with this fascist

apparatus. It all has to be destroyed to start afresh. We will taste the

fruits from the trees we’ve grown ourselves in the ashes of their

empire. —Anonymous, Incitement to Burn

The call from Bakunin to embrace the destructive urge forms the backbone

of both anarchist and anarcho-nihilist thought. The latter takes this

axiom and runs with it, arguing that in the face of global systems of

domination our sole aim should be to destroy all that constitutes those

systems. This stands in direct contrast to other anarchist tendencies

that place at least some emphasis on “positive programs” — aspirations

to construct something ideal in the present world or to craft plans in

preparation for the downfall of the current system. Anarcho-nihilism

understands the positive program as “one that confuses desire with

reality and extends that confusion into the future” by either making

promises about what a revolutionary future might hold, or attempting to

bring those conditions about from within the existing order.[99] Such

positive aspirations offer nothing more than a dangling carrot for us to

pursue in a situation in which the stick, string, and prize all need to

be destroyed. The example of those living under Nazi rule illustrates a

situation in which, for those deemed Ballastexistenzen, positive visions

were unfathomable: establishing long-term projects or alternative

infrastructure would be ludicrous, except to the extent that they

facilitated the destruction of the existing order. So long as Hitler

reigned, no Jewish commune would be tolerated, no anarchist child-care

collective could ever hope to thrive. To be immersed in a social order

as violent and controlling as Nazi Germany warranted a reaction of

absolute hostility, attacks aimed at every level of society — pure

negation. So too does anarcho-nihilism understand the existing order of

today as without potential for a positive agenda. Whatever we build

within its bounds will be co-opted, destroyed, or turned against us: “We

understand that only when all that remains of the dominant

techno-industrial-capitalist system is smouldering ruins, is it feasible

to ask what next?”[100] According to this line of thought, our situation

today is similar to the Lagers to the extent that positive projects,

attempts to create a new world in the shell of the old, are simply out

of place. Aragorn! writes: “Nihilism states that it is not useful to

talk about the society you ‘hold in your stomach’, the things you would

do ‘if only you got power’...What is useful is the negation of the

existing world.”[101] Similarly, imprisoned members of the CCF write:

We anarcho-nihilists ...don’t talk about ‘transformation of social

relations’ towards a more liberated view, we promulgate their total

destruction and absolute annihilation. Only through total destruction of

the current world of power... will it be possible to build something

new. The deeper we destroy, the more freely will we be able to

build.[102]

The visions that rebels tend to entertain about what life will be like

After The Revolution are not only unproductive, they are dangerous

because they presume that a unified vision of life is desirable. Such

forward-looking conversations attempt to herd an infinite spectrum of

possibilities onto an ideal anarchist path. The CCF write:

Very often, even in anarchist circles, the future organization of

‘anarchist’ society is discussed along with the role of work,

self-management of the means of production, direct democracy, etc.

According to us, this kind of debate and proposal looks like the

construction of a dam that tries to control the impetus of the abundant

stream of Anarchy.[103]

Even resisters in the concentration camps sometimes concerned themselves

with this kind of political fantasizing: In Buchenwald, for instance,

three underground political organizations banded together in 1944 to

plan out the future governance of Germany, at a time when other

organizations in the camp were focused on saving lives and staging

coordinated resistance.[104] Nihilism urges us to consider the fact that

such forward planning is simply unnecessary and that it obfuscates our

more urgent goal of negation: “There’s no need to know what’s happening

tomorrow to destroy a today that makes you bleed.”[105]

From the foundation of this critique, nihilism identifies a common trap

experienced by anarchists: the magnetic compulsion to identify ourselves

positively within society even though we strive for its destruction. In

my local context, this often looks like anarchists responding to critics

of property destruction with reminders of all that we contribute to

society (when we are not rioting, we are community organizers, Food Not

Bombs chefs, musicians, etc.).

Negation, however, is justified by the existence of a ruling order, not

by our credentials as activists. Our riots are justified not because we

contribute, but because we exist under the heel of a monstrous society.

Positive projects are the means of surviving within that order; negation

is the project of destroying it completely. As Alejandro de Acosta

reminds us, we must not be tempted to “frame destructive action as

having any particular goal beyond destruction of the existent.”[106]

Bæden too rails against this tendency, insisting that we have nothing to

gain from hiding our true intentions:

We understand destruction to be necessary and we desire it in abundance.

We have nothing to gain through shame or lack of confidence in these

desires. This world... must be annihilated in every instance, all at

once. To shy away from this task, to assure our enemies of our good

intentions, is the most crass dishonesty.[107]

When we call ourselves anarchists, or even “anti-capitalists,” we are

implying a commitment to the destruction of systems of domination — why

do we so often shy away from this? Nihilism unabashedly embraces

negation as being at the core of such positions.

Jouissance

Despite its gloomy connotations, the commitment to pure negation finds

its most interesting manifestations as a joyful, creative, and limitless

project. Most notably, Bæden utilizes the French word jouissance,[108]

which directly translates to “enjoyment,” but takes on a variety of

connotations related to “uncivilized desire,” those aspects of our

existence which “escape representation,” a “shattering of identity and

law,” and that which “shatters our subjective enslavement to capitalist

civilization.[109] Jouissance is an ecstatic energy, felt but never

captured, that pushes us away from any form of domination,

representation, or restraint, and compels us towards fierce wildness and

unmitigated recalcitrance. It is “the process that momentarily sets us

free from our fear of death” and which manifests as a “blissful

enjoyment of the present,” or a “joy which we cannot name.”[110]

Jouissance is the richness of life evoked by resistance, the spirit that

allowed Mária Jakobovics to continue her acts of sabotage despite the

sting of the club or the threat of the noose, and the spirit that

perhaps allows many of us to lead lives of resistance in absolutely

overwhelming circumstances. It is the visceral experience of negation as

ecstatic liberation.

Although the spirit of jouissance animates many anarchist texts,

nihilism seems to approach it with the most naked embrace; for many

nihilists, jouissance is the core of anarchism. Without expectations of

the world to come, without deference to moral code, and without

adherence to a right way to do things, nihilism embraces the act of

resistance as a goal in itself. Through this lens, the joy of pissing in

a Nazi rocket cannot easily be measured against its risks or results —

in jouissance, we find a richness of life unattainable under the status

quo. Without using the word explicitly, some imprisoned members of the

CCF describe jouissance perfectly: “Neither victory nor defeat is

important, but only the beautiful shining of our eyes in combat.”[111]

This emphasis on the act, without attachment to its outcomes, is one of

the aspects of nihilism that has made it such a puzzling force for other

anarchists. Critics of nihilism see this sort of emphasis on jouissance

and negation as simply a form of indulgent retreat into the realm of

personal experience, “because it hurts too much to hope for the

improbable, to imagine a future we can’t believe in.”[112] While this

critique has some merit, I think it largely misses the strength of the

nihilist position and the beauty of jouissance. Whatever we may chose to

do with it, however strategic, ambitious, or optimistic we may feel, our

understanding of why we resist can still be solidly rooted in a place of

jouissance. I think the nihilist position leaves space for victories,

while still recognizing that our capacity to win is quite different from

our commitment to liberatory action. Even when we run out of optimistic

rhetoric and inspiring stories, our lives can still be oriented against

the grain of society. Even from a place of utter hopelessness, we can

still find the jouissance in our bodies to attack. Once again, the CCF

insist that

what really counts is the strength we feel every time we don’t bow our

heads, every time we destroy the false idols of civilization, every time

our eyes meet those of our comrades along illegal paths, every time that

our hands set fire to the symbols of Power. In those moments we don’t

ask ourselves: ‘Will we win? Will we lose?’ In those moments we just

fight.[113]

Jouissance is that which animates resistance for its own sake so that

even if we have no future, we can still find life today.

Spontaneous resistance & Time

Do you know how one says ‘never’ in camp slang? ‘Morgen früh’, tomorrow

morning. —Primo Levi

Nihilism allows for the possibility that there is no future. —Aragorn!

One of the connections that jumped out at me early on in my research was

a continuous reference to time in both anarcho-nihilist and holocaust

literature. While Häftlinge describe horrific experiences of the

obliteration of time, nihilists often call for unmitigated attacks

against time itself (No Future has become something of a dark

motto[114]). This section will set out to explore this connection and to

understand what is meant by the anarcho-nihilist ambition to “stop

time.”[115] The concept of ‘futurity,’ the sense that one has a future

under the existing order, threads these subjects together and provokes a

discussion about the radical possibilities of chronological rupture.

Those who experienced a complete rupture of futurity in the camps (e.g.

realized what the chimneys were for, gave up on allied liberation, etc.)

often sunk into a grim and catatonic state, but in some instances they

reacted ferociously. Though the most well-known acts of physical

resistance against the Nazis were planned and coordinated actions, there

were also countless unplanned attacks that plagued the Nazi thirst for

order and obedience. Of the stories that have been passed down to us,

scant details survive. Some of these stories are patched together from

multiple, partial witnesses, while others are merely inferred from the

silences they created. These act of spontaneous resistance resonate

deeply with anarcho-nihilism, for nowhere else does the rallying cry of

No Future apply as well as to those who responded to utterly hopeless

situations with acts of fierce abandon. Inmates who physically

confronted their oppressors were not engaged in a “rational political

struggle for a better future,” but rather understood the futility of

their situations and chose to fight back regardless.[116] These moments

can help us to understand what is at stake in our rethinking of time and

what it might mean for us to sever ourselves from oppressive

chronological modes.

Spontaneous Resistance in the Lagers

We are entering the time of wordless revolts, the time of illogical

revolts, which must in turn be massacred. —Silence and Beyond

In Treblinka, on August 36, 1942, when a young Jewish man wasn’t

permitted to say goodbye to his mother, he wrestled a knife from a

Ukrainian guard and stabbed him. The man and everyone else on his

transport was shot.[117]

On September 11, 1942, after watching his wife and child be selected for

the gas chambers in Treblinka, Meir Berliner attacked an SS man with a

knife, stabbing him to death and leaving the knife protruding from his

back. Berliner and over a hundred of his fellow inmates were “cruelly

killed.”[118]

In 1942, as fifteen hundred Polish Jews were being escorted off a train

at Auschwitz, a Jewish Capo named Morris discreetly informed some of

them that they were being led to their death. Unrest spread throughout

the crowd and eventually turned into an attack against the SS guards.

Forty members of Morris’s Kommando joined in the fight. The entire

transport and Kommando were killed.[119]

On October 17, 1944, Hanna Lévy-Hass, an inmate of Bergen-Belsen whose

diary survived the war, recorded that her camp was put on severe

lockdown and that rumors had circulated about a women’s rebellion in the

neighboring camp. The only evidence of this rebellion for Levy-Hass was

the cessation of all regular camp activity and the glow of the

crematorium, which operated nonstop throughout the night.[120]

On the night of February 1, 1945, a group of Russian and British POWs,

as well as nineteen Luxembourg policemen who refused to join the SS,

rebelled as they were being led out of Sachsenhausen to be executed in a

surrounding forest. One inmate managed to wrestle a gun away from a

guard and fatally shoot him. All of the inmates were subsequently killed

by SS machine gun fire.[121]

In late 1942 at Treblinka, a transport of around two thousand Jews

refused to enter the gas chamber. Those who yelled out invocations of

resistance were beaten, but the call was heard and no one budged. At one

point some of them rushed the SS, and, fighting with knives and bottles,

injured three guards. Somehow during this scuffle, a hand grenade

exploded that also injured a guard. The entire transport was shot.[122]

Twice in 1943 the train station at Sobibór saw spontaneous rebellions by

inmates, who fought with stones, pots, and bottles against armed guards;

one of these scuffles saw several guards injured. In both cases, all

inmates involved were killed.[123] Also in Sobibór, Richard Rashke

informs us that a group of women (many of whom held children) realized

that they weren’t being taken to a normal shower and became unruly,

attacking the guards with bare hands. The SS sprayed them with machine

guns. Those they missed were stuffed into the gas chambers.”[124]

Filip Müller tells a deeply disturbing story of a small group of Jewish

families who, after hiding in dug-outs in southern Poland for four

months, were discovered and brought to Birkenau to be killed. As in many

other stories, one mother dedicated her final moments to comforting her

infant daughter, even as they were led to a wall to be shot by a Nazi

named Voss. Müller watched as the two performed a macabre dance: Voss

circling trying to figure out where best to shoot the infant, while the

mother reflexively turned to keep her daughter away from the barrel of

the gun. Eventually Voss grew frustrated and shot the child three times.

As he turned his gun on the mother, “she lost all self-control and flung

her daughter straight at her murderer’s head.”[125] Stunned, Voss wiped

the blood off of his face and dropped his gun, clearly unable to carry

on. Another guard quickly took over and finished the job.

Marla Zimetbaum, who became a well-known name in Birkenau for her

selfless organizing in the camp and for her spectacular escape with a

Polish lover, cemented her legendary status when, after being captured

and brought back to the camp, she used her last moments under the

gallows to defy the Nazis: Before the SS could put the noose around her

neck, she cut her own vein with a small razor and, “in the presence of

all her fellow inmates, hit an SS man in the face with her bleeding

hand.”[126] Olga Lengyel, who worked covertly during her time in

Birkenau smuggling parcels for a resistance organization, has a

different recollection of what is undoubtedly the same incident. She

recalls that a woman had escaped with her Polish lover using stolen SS

uniforms, but was recaptured and brought back to the camp. When the

Nazis tried to parade her around the camp (wearing a placard labeling

her as an escapee) as part of her punishment, she resisted and was

beaten severely, though was able to land at least one punch on a guards

face. In addition to this astonsihing show of defiance, Lengyel recalls

that as the woman near-lifeless body was being loaded onto a truck to be

taken to the gas chambers, she yelled: “Courage friends! They will pay!

Liberation is near!”[127]

On October 23 1943, seventeen hundred Jews transported from Warsaw to

Auschwitz were escorted to the gas chambers. When about two-thirds of

them had already been taken into the chamber, a rebellion broke out

among the remaining several hundred who were in the undressing room. Of

what unfolded only foggy, sometimes contradictory details survive: four

armed SS officers entered the undressing room, one of them was disarmed

by a woman and fatally shot, the other inmates were spurred to action.

They cut the electric wires and attacked the other guards, a shootout

ensued between the guards at the door and the inmates, and ultimately

all of the remaining inmates were led out and shot.[128] In one version

of this story, the woman was an actress named Katerina Horowitzová, and

she retaliated after SS man Josef Schillinger told her to remove her

bra: “she whipped off her garment and startled him by hitting him with

it in his eyes. While he was blinded by pain, she grabbed his revolver

and shot him and another guard.”[129] In another version, her

retaliation came after Schillinger told her to dance naked.[130] In

another, the woman was named Franceska Mann, and she retaliated when

Schillinger snatched the bra off of her body.[131] In yet another

telling, the woman was an unnamed dancer who intentionally seduced the

SS men while she was undressing, and while they ogled her she smashed

one of them in the forehead with her high heel and then disarmed and

shot Schillinger and one other guard.[132] The incident “gave rise to

legends” and reminded inmates that SS men “were also mortal”.[133]

Rumors about this rebellion quickly spread throughout the camp and

inspired another act of resistance later that same day, of which even

less is known. The sole witness to this incident was privy only to the

aftermath: the sight of strewn corpses in front of crematorium IV. The

fact that the bodies were still clothed implies that a group of inmates

hadn’t allowed themselves to be taken into the undressing room and were

massacred.[134]

Lager-time, Despondency, and Timelessness

One day of insurrection is worth a thousand centuries of normality

—Wolves of Solidarity, Pacific Column

Each of these moments reflects a shattering of illusion, a fierce

visceral reaction to oppression, a desperate act in a totally hopeless

situation. Liberation in these moments was not necessarily a material

gain, but a fleeting lived experience; an existential reorientation from

a relationship of domination to one of recalcitrance. Pure jouissance.

Some of these attacks resonated widely outside of their perimeter and

punctured holes in the Nazi facade of invulnerability, perhaps even

inspiring others to fight back. Other attacks simply dissipated in a

hail of gunfire. Regardless, each of them seem to defy any notion of

hope or strategy, and the very fact that each story ends with a mass

slaughter gestures towards a spirit of resistance that prioritized lived

revolt over futurity.

In the concentration universe as in the nihilist framework, conceptions

of time become extremely important. How we understand time, its

movement, and our place within it, shapes how we understand the existing

order and the potentials for resistance. While some anarchists have

attempted to imagine “how free people have conceived of different shapes

of time itself,” here we will solely be concerned with how oppressive

modes of time are ruptured.[135] For Häftlinge, this rupture involved

breaking free from three states of chronological awareness: despondency,

futurity, and a paralyzing suspension in the present. For

anarcho-nihilists, focus has centered largely on breaking free from

progressive conceptions of time and false senses of futurity. In both

realms, we find an insurrectionary potential that exists outside of

dominant modes of time. Walter Benjamin’s concept of “messianic time”

will offer us a vocabulary to describe this transgression.

We begin in the concentration camps, where experiences of time were

precarious and fraught with implications. In one sense, inmates were

beckoned towards what we will call “Lager-time,” which is the series of

hoops and tribulations through which Nazis created the illusion of

futurity, the promise of survival best encapsulated in the Auschwitz

slogan “Freedom Through Work.” People were told that they were being

taken to Sweden, but stepped out of the trains into Auschwitz; they were

told they were being taken for delousing, but never left the

crematorium; they were told that work would set them free, but they were

literally worked to death. This ongoing promise of futurity kept many

inmates docile in a system that ultimately produced only two things —

German wealth and corpses. While the shattering of Lager-time was

seemingly the first step to resistance, such a rupture did not

necessarily carry insurgent possibilities. For many, the abandonment of

futurity simply meant despondency; many souls were broken when the

illusion of Lager-time was peeled back to reveal an assembly line of

death. For countless inmates, the alternative to futurity was the

suicidal allure of the electric fence, which offered an immediate escape

from the horror of despondency. Others experienced a complete

disintegration of the mind and body. Such living-dead creatures, those

whose hearts still beat but for whom death was a foregone conclusion,

even had a name within the camps: Muselmann. [136] While the Nazis

actively fostered a myth of futurity through work and obedience, they

simultaneously created the conditions of hopelessness, which for some

was akin to death.

For those who did not succumb to despair, the key to survival lay within

the tension between Lager-time and suicidal despondency. Throughout

holocaust memoirs, there is a sense of total immersion in the present,

something we will call “suspension.” This experience involved the

violent eradication of past and future, resulting in an unblinking

commitment to survival in the present moment. From the Warsaw ghetto we

hear: “Everything taking place outside the Ghetto walls became more and

more foggy, distant, strange. Only the present day really

mattered.”[137] From Auschwitz:

Why worry oneself trying to read into the future when no action, no word

of ours could have the minimum influence?... our wisdom lay in ‘not

trying to understand,’ not imagining the future, not tormenting

ourselves as to how and when it would all be over; not asking others or

ourselves any questions.[138]

Survival meant forgetting about your past life, abandoning thoughts of

future liberation, and sinking deeply into the eternal present:

“Survival meant thinking of today.”[139] In her diary from

Bergen-Belsen, Hannah Lévy-Hass reflects on her inability to remember

anything about her life before the camps: “The horror that surrounds us

is so great that the brain becomes paralyzed and completely incapable of

reacting to anything that doesn’t stem directly from the nightmare we

are presently living through and this is constantly before our

eyes.”[140] Soma Morgenstern, writing on the psychological impacts of

the Lagers, concludes that the “key issue was the tyranny of the present

— a tyranny that arose from the total uncertainty about the future and

led to a destruction of ‘the softest tissue of life’: memory.”[141] This

experience of suspension, a total immersion in the present moment,

seemed to be the key to enduring the horrors of everyday life. In this

state of suspension, however, resistance was still an impossibility.

Imagine yourself walking a tightrope five hundred feet in the air with a

powerful strobe light held in front of your face. Are you worried about

the future? Try remembering the past. Can you waste seconds thinking

about the person who put you in this situation or how you might fight

back against them? To survive even a moment in such a situation would

require an intense, unblinking focus on the immediate present. This is

the spell of suspension. This is how people endured the camps.

That being said, a few managed to break this spell and enter into

something much more fierce, as exemplified by the stories above. For

those Häftlinge who saw their deaths as a foregone conclusion, who had

already seen their cities raided, their families gassed, and their

culture obliterated, retaliation against the Nazi regime became the only

experience left. Rose Meth, one of the women who assisted in the

Auschwitz uprising, speaks to this liberatory space when she reflects on

her incredibly risky decision to smuggle gunpowder out of a munitions

factory: “Of course I agreed right away because it gave me a way to

fight back. I felt very good about it, and I didn’t care about the

danger.”[142] Though some might simply read this as bravery, in this

context we can perhaps read it as an expression of jouissance, and

perhaps even glimpse the experience of someone who inhabited an entirely

different chronological mode. Rose was not holding onto hope for the

future or sinking into despair, nor was she suspended in the “tyranny of

the present” — from the spectrum of despondency, suspension, and

futurity, a rupture forms and reveals a space of insurrectionary

possibilities, which Walter Benjamin calls “messianic time.”[143] Before

expanding on this idea, we will first explore the anarcho-nihilist

critique of progressivism and reproductive futurity.

Anarcho-Nihilism, Progressivism, and Futurity

The reality is that the future never comes, but is rather the

ideological justification for the suppression of our desires and

revolutionary change today. Tomorrow becomes just the romantic notion of

accepting subjugation today. —Bryan Hill

Anarcho-nihilism is interested in the extent to which severing ourselves

from dominant modes of time can open up incendiary possibilities. This

involves dispelling the myth of progressivism, the idea that history is

a linear story of progress, as well as the myth of reproductive

futurity, the idea that what is best for future generations is the

continuance of the existing order. Because of the way these ideologies

frame our relationship to time, they both prevent meaningful

opportunities for negation now.

The first issue of Bæden takes as one of its central concerns a critique

of progressivism; that is, the conception of time that frames history as

a narrative of progress (i.e. things are getting better over time and we

are rapidly moving towards a brighter future). We feel this progress in

our bodies as the excitement of technological advancement and

architectural achievements; we embrace it as we watch our petitions and

protests and riots get bigger and bigger; we fall victim to it every

time we express “amazement that the [terrible] things we are

experiencing are still possible” in the 21^(st) century.[144] Many

anarcho-nihilist thinkers point towards Marxism as the source of

progressivism in anarchist thought. The chronology offered by Marxism

depicts the present moment as part of a steady historical progression

from feudalism to socialism (albeit with a couple terrifying pit stops

along the way). Aragorn! writes:

The conception of history that came out of the Marxist tradition

(dialectical materialism) dictated that the transformation of society

would pass through capitalism... to transform into socialism and

eventually communism. This meant that progressivism was embedded within

this (the dominant) branch of socialism.[145]

The myth that we are somehow moving forward forms the backbone of the

socialist tradition.

Many anarchists have argued that this teleological framework is both

ludicrous in its prophetic optimism, and stifling in its programmatic

assertions (i.e. that our job is to find ways to advance society into a

state of socialism). The progress of society is an illusion created by

clever historians and propagandists, and the idea that somehow this

historical train is locked into a track that leads to our shared

liberation is both intoxicating and toxic. The “progress of society”

might be better described as the “evolution of systems of power,” and as

Bæden reminds us: “any progressive development can only mean a more

sophisticated system of misery and exploitation.”[146] In its refusal of

Marxist teleology, Bæden takes up the ideas of Walter Benjamin to call

for an attack on this kind of progressivism: “Marx says that revolutions

are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise.

Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train... to

activate the emergency break.”[147] Anarcho-nihilism replaces the

program of historical acceleration with one of negation. Rather than

moving ourselves quickly along the train tracks of history towards a

socialist utopia, we must derail the train and rupture history

altogether.

Like the trains bound for Auschwitz, this movement of history is heading

nowhere good and needs to be sabotaged at every possible turn.

Whereas once this progressivism was the domain of bright-eyed

revolutionaries, capitalism has seized the tradition, meaning that we

are now assaulted with it from all angles — whether through austerity

and democratic participation or through patient and restrained “movement

building,” we are constantly being asked to tolerate intolerable

conditions today in order to work towards a brighter future. Using Lee

Edelman’s queer theory text No Future as a frame work, Bæden sets out to

explore how progressivism is used by mainstream society to keep us

attached to the existing order. They argue that futurity is ubiquitously

packaged with the image of The Child, the ultimate symbol of our

commitment to the future — we must work now, we must compromise now, we

must be patient now, in order to secure the well being of the next

generation. The unspoken and dubious premise of this reasoning is that

what is best for future generations is the preservation of the existing

order. Through this lens, the widely-felt social pressure to have

children is actually an obligation to reproduce society and capitalism.

The term “reproductive futurity” refers to the way in which the very

concept of reproduction becomes imbued with a commitment to the existing

order. Bæden writes: “The ideology of reproductive futurism ensures the

sacrifice of all vital energy for the pure abstraction of the idealized

continuation of society.”[148] Because this emphasis on securing a

future for The Child prevents us from negating our present conditions,

Bæden asks us to sever once and for all our attachment to reproductive

futurity. The futures that are being dangled in front of our faces are a

mirage that will continuously retreat as we move closer, and the cute,

sacred image of The Child is often what prevents us from questioning

that mirage. Instead, nihilism asks us to cut ourselves from any

attachment to reproductive futurity, and instead “fight, hopeless, to

tear our lives away from that expanding horizon and to erupt with wild

enjoyment now.”[149] What nihilism glimpses outside of progressivism and

reproductive futurity is perhaps similar to what Rose Meth saw when she

chose to resist despite a lack of hope: the insurrectionary mode of

messianic time.

Messianic Time

What is to be gained by shattering the progressive conception of time or

by abandoning our attachment to futurity? How can we conceive of the

chronological mode embodied by those inmates who escaped Lager-time,

despair, and suspension, and fought back? Bæden once again turns to

Benjamin and the concept of messianic time, which is an “irrational

now-time,” an “interruption of linear time,” and which exists as

“splinters diffused through the empty fabric of capitalist time.”[150]

As a rupture from oppressive chronological modes, it contains “unlimited

possibilities” and “threatens to interrupt the continuum of

history.”[151] The Invisible Committee,[152] also taking inspiration

from Benjamin, applies this concept to resistance generally: “Every

attempt to block the global system, every movement, every revolt, every

uprising should be seen as a vertical attempt to stop time.”[153] Here

we might remember those rebels who spent the first evening of the July

revolution of 1830 shooting out clock towers in Paris,[154] or the

(semi-mythical) anarchist Biofilo Panclasta who, in the final days of

his life, is said to have escaped from an old folks’ home and climbed to

the top of a clock tower where he “arrested the movement of the clock’s

hands, which so carefully marked the passage of time.”[155] When the

monotonous rhythms of society’s clocks have ceased and the death march

of progress has been brought to a halt, messianic time is the space

where new forms of life can be birthed. The CCF looks for this

historical rupture in the moment of an attack against a system, and in

the precious moments afterwards, before the system has turned its

switches back on (e.g. after the riot, before the cleanup); these

moments of “unstuck time” are where our desires for the impossible come

to the surface, and “in these holes, negations against this world can be

born.”[156] This project of stopping time is an attempt to break free

from the ideologies of progressivism and the spell of reproductive

futurity, and to enter into combat with the existing order. Those in the

camps who spontaneously fought back knowing that death would be the

immediate consequence erupted out of oppressive, paralyzing, and

illusory concepts of time, and entered into this space of messianic

time.

Here I do not mean to argue that those who fought back in the Lagers

experienced some mystical chronological transcendence that granted them

supernatural bravery. Rather, I am pointing towards the possibilities

that exist when we confront our own futurelessness and find the will to

act: When we don’t believe the lies about where we’re heading, when we

don’t sink into absolute despair about how fucked we are, and when we

don’t just keep our heads down and think about the present moment — when

we step out of that debilitating sequence and act against the existing

order, no matter the odds. This often means confronting death,

imprisonment, alienation, and a variety of other dangers. For the

anarcho-nihilists, it also means opening oneself up to new possibilities

of being alive. These cries to “stop time” and to discover jouissance

are essentially asking us to sever any attachments we have to the

existing order, and to position ourselves outside of and against its

progress. So long as Häftlinge saw a future for themselves in the camps,

or remained suspended in the present moment, or gave up on living

completely, the Nazis would never have to deal with a moment of

defiance. By shattering those chronological modes, some inmates broke

with the rhythms of the camp and carved out a different fabric of time.

Similarly, so long as we believe that this society is making progress,

and so long as we can glimpse a future for ourselves within it or a

future for our children, we will remain in some way wed to it. When

anarcho-nihilism urges us to abandon those chronological modes, it is in

essence asking us to sever all ties to the continuation of society and

work instead to negate its existence. In this rupture of time we find a

richness of life unimaginable within the existing order. Messianic time

is the chronological awareness in which jouissance can flourish, for

rather than deferring our rage to the future we can finally realize that

now is the time we’ve been waiting for.

Organizations and Major Uprisings

Overview of Organizations in Lagers

Expect nothing from organizations. Defy all the existing milieus, and

above all, refuse to become one. —The Invisible Committee

While the thoughts of a sustained resistance organization existing

inside of a concentration camp seemed ludicrous to me when I began this

project, the fact is that most camps saw the emergence of not one but

several formal, long-term organizations. Even in camps where organizing

was next to impossible — because of particularly high death and transfer

rates, low numbers of political prisoners, or a dominance of “greens”

(German prisoners) in prominent positions, — resistance groups still

formed and, to various degrees, were able to impact life in the camps.

The mandates of these organizations generally involved some combination

of the following: building networks within the camp; communication with

the outside world; boosting the morale of inmates; organizing escapes;

sabotage; mutual aid; weeding out informants; and getting members into

prominent positions. Communist organizations (which were the most common

throughout the camps) maintained educational programs, offering lectures

on dialectical materialism, political economy, and the history of the

worker’s movement from memory or with contraband textbooks.[157] In some

cases, resistance groups set themselves the ambitious task of preparing

for armed resistance against the Nazis by stockpiling arms and

organizing into specialized battle groups. This was more common in the

later years of the war as the camps became distended and as rumors

spread about impending liquidations (i.e. the mass murder of all

remaining inmates). At times, the various groups within the camps

coexisted with a great deal of friction, unwilling to work with one

another due to ideological differences, pre-war hostilities, or outright

prejudice; at other times, powerful solidarities across nationality,

language, and ideology were forged.

The Buchenwald camp had among the most developed and effective

underground networks of any camp, offering a glimpse into the

organizational capacities that existed. Within this one camp (which

housed a population ranging from 10,000 to 110,000 inmates during the

war), there were underground groups of Social Democrats, Christian

Democrats, Polish Communists, Soviet POWs, Belgians, Italians, Czechs,

Hungarians, Yugoslavs, and a Dutch group that had representatives of

Social Democrats, liberals, and Catholics.[158] German Communists were

the largest group in the camp with over seven hundred members all

arranged into cells of three to five people. The French group in

Buchenwald was lead by representatives of thirty-four regional and

political groups.[159] For many years there was a great deal of

infighting between organizations (particularly between Communists and

Social Democrats), and so in 1943, many of these groups came together to

form the “International Camp Committee”. This group met bimonthly to

“run an efficient military organization, to perform sabotage acts, and

to eliminate controversies and conflicts between different

nationalities.”[160] As mentioned earlier, some of these organizations

even had long-term aspirations: in the spring of 1944, the German

Popular Front Committee was formed with the intention of bringing

together German Communists, Social Democrats, and Christian Democrats to

plan out the future governance of Germany.[161] In that same year, the

Polish Communists, (which had 130 adult and 60 youth members in the

camp) joined with other Polish organizations to form the “Anti-Fascist

Committee” that would primarily concern itself with improving life in

the camp.[162] Obviously, each of these organizations risked brutal

consequences if their networks, meetings, or conspiracies were

discovered.

Within anarcho-nihilist literature, critiques of organizational models

appear frequently and lend themselves to an interesting (though

complicated) dialogue with stories of concentration camp resistance.

Here, I’ll offer stories of three of the most significant mass uprisings

to happen in the camps (in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibór), with an

eye to the question of organizations. These stories are incredible in

themselves, and also offer ample material to explore the reasons that so

many anarchists have severed themselves from conventional organizing

models. My purpose here is not to launch a scathing critique of

concentration camp organizations — such generalizations would be asinine

considering the complexities and nuances of the situations in which they

operated. Resistance organizations, even those rife with cronyism and

strategic flaws, had an enormously important role in the Lagers, from

the morale boost that helped get people through another day, to the

reorganization of camp life that put humane people into jobs formerly

occupied by sadistic thugs. That being said, within the history of mass

uprisings in concentration camps, formal organizations often had little

to offer.

We begin in Poland, where a military officer initiated a resistance

movement in some of the harshest conditions imaginable.

The Resistance Movement in Auschwitz & The Sonderkommando Uprising

It was necessary, in fact, to show Poles daily a mountain of Polish

corpses before they could be brought to agree together and to realize

that, above all their differences and hostile attitudes towards one

another in the outside world, there was a more important cause to be

served, namely that of a common front against the common enemy. —Witold

Pilecki

The history of organized resistance in Auschwitz begins with the

dramatic entry of Witold Pilecki, a Polish military officer who had gone

underground with the Home Army (AK) rather than acquiesce to the

invading Germans. Pilecki had spent the summer of 1940 petitioning his

superiors to send him into the newly-constructed camp in Auschwitz “in

order to organize the prisoners, look for means of resistance and mutual

assistance, and send reports to Warsaw.”[163] Eventually they agreed,

and on a brisk September morning Pilecki walked through a crowd of

people desperately fleeing a German round-up and into the hands of the

SS. After two days of being beaten, parched, and taught harsh lessons in

collective responsibility, he found himself at the front gates of

Auschwitz. Though Pilecki’s writing is generally terse and factual, this

particular moment of his report stands out with chilling affect: “I bade

farewell to everything I had hitherto known on this earth and entered

something seemingly no longer of it.”[164]

Inside the camp, Pilecki began work establishing the Union of Military

Organization (ZOW) by setting up his first “five,” a group of five

members who would function as an anonymous cell within a broader

network. Eventually there would be thousands of members of the ZOW,

largely comprised of Poles with some degree of military experience. The

other major group to emerge within Auschwitz was the Kampfgruppe

Auschwitz (the Fighting Group Auschwitz), a steadfastly Communist

organization started on May 1, 1943 with the intention of bringing

together groups of different nationalities. These two groups would

eventually collaborate despite deep tensions over leadership, national

allegiances, and political ideology. Smaller resistance groups within

the camp included Spanish anti-fascists, German Communists, Polish

Social Democrats, Austrians of all political affiliations, a right-wing

contingent of the National-Radical Camp, French Communists, and at least

two Yugoslavian groups in the women’s section of the camp.[165]

The various accomplishments of the Fighting Group and the ZOW are too

long to enumerate here, but suffice it to say they played a significant

role in the daily life of the camp, even for those oblivious to their

existence. One pivotal impact of the ZOW was its development and use of

the camp hospital as a place of refuge and resistance. Due in part to

the efforts of a sympathetic green named Flans Bock, who had been

appointed head of the sick bay in the early days of Auschwitz (despite

having no medical experience), the hospital was slowly established as a

place that was not only occasionally capable of healing people, but was

also one of the central pillars of the resistance movement. Underground

activities in the hospital included establishing contacts with patients,

saving lives by falsely diagnosing illness (to avoid selections or

work), executing informants on the grounds of falsified illness, and

most spectacularly, breeding lice infected with typhus to be used as

biological weapons — these lice were successfully used to kill or

disable informants, Capos, and even SS officers.[166] The general

reluctance of the SS to enter the disease-ridden hospital made it one of

the safer places for the organizations to operate.

Furthermore, both the ZOW and the Fighting Group were successful in

sustaining contact with the outside world and between sub-camps.[167]

Using a variety of ingenious methods, the organizations were able to

inform the outside world of what was happening in the camp, to receive

updates from the front lines, and to communicate about the possibilities

for joint military attacks on the camp. These methods included smuggling

mail through corrupt guards or villagers (on the marches between work

and the camp), sending messages with escapees (or with one of the few

prisoners to be officially granted release),[168] and sometimes simply

using the postal service (by bribing camp censors for pre-stamped

envelopes).[169] Perhaps the most stunning form of communication

utilized by the resistance movement was Alfred Stossel’s construction of

a radio transmitter, which he operated for seven months from the

hospital basement, broadcasting details of transports and mass

executions to the surrounding area.[170] Despite intense searches both

inside and outside the camp, the SS never located the source of the

broadcasts.

Near the end of the war, these channels of communication were used in a

way that potentially altered the course of Auschwitz’s history: In early

1944, sensing the dwindling morale and confidence of the Germans, the

Fighting Group (which was by now the camp’s dominant umbrella

organization) sent out the names of all SS men running the camp in hopes

of having them widely broadcast and so scaring the men out of committing

further atrocities. The plan worked, as Langbein writes: “the BBC in

London put those persons on notice that they would be held responsible

for their atrocities, and the effect of the broadcast was clearly

noticeable in the camp.”[171] A similar message later that year reached

the British government and informed them of an SS plan to liquidate the

camp: ��This statement was made public, and in the end the SS abandoned

its plan to liquidate Auschwitz.”[172]

Throughout the entirety of their existence, both the ZOW and the

Fighting Group Auschwitz had been patiently planning for a

militarily-supported overthrow of the camp. Neither the AK, the British,

the French, the Soviets, nor the partisans were ever able and/or willing

to lend such support, and the overthrow never took place. In spite of

this, Auschwitz did see one major revolt. It emerged not from within the

resistance movement but from the Sonderkommando, a special detail of

mostly Jewish inmates who were tasked with running the crematories and

gas chambers. Though these workers were given certain privileges (bigger

food rations, better bunks, etc.), their labour, which involved

facilitating the deaths of thousands of people every week, was among the

most murderous and psychologically strenuous. Filip Müller miraculously

survived three years in the Sonderkommando, which was mostly spent

frantically ushering trains of people into gas chambers, stripping the

corpses of valuables, and then shoveling them into industrial ovens.

When the ovens proved insufficient for the sheer quantities of human

flesh moving through the camp, he and his team were made to dig and

operate enormous burn-pits with built-in drain pipes that channeled

rivers of fat into buckets to be used as fuel for the next train. In due

fashion, the SS kept a high turnover rate of these positions in order to

prevent information about these assembly lines from getting out, and so

no member of the Sonderkommando could expect to live very long.

Resistance from the Sonderkommando was almost unfathomable because of

their level of isolation from other prisoners, the privileges they clung

to, and their short life expectancy.

Nevertheless, in 1944 some members of the Sonderkommando (which now

numbered almost one thousand workers) were spurred to action by the

onslaught of Hungarian Jews that were pouring into the gas chambers

faster than the infrastructure could handle.[173] This obscene

intensification of the killing operation, combined with the suspicion

that the extermination of the Hungarian Jews would surely be followed by

the liquidation of the Sonderkommando, caused some of the workers to

approach the Fighting Group and craft a plan for revolt.[174] The

response of the organization was one of reluctance — they felt that the

“time was not ripe for a general uprising.”[175] For the Sonderkommando,

who expected their imminent slaughter, such strategic tact was out of

the question. A document unearthed from Auschwitz in 1962 that had been

buried by a member of the Sonderkommando, Salmen Lewenthal, chronicles

the delays and tensions that existed between them and the Fighting

Group:

From the organization’s standpoint they were right, especially because

they did not feel they were in immediate danger of being exterminated...

we concluded that if we wanted to accomplish anything in life, we would

have to act sooner... but unfortunately they kept putting us off.[176]

By this point the Fighting Group was mostly fixated on the end of the

war, hoping that a joint attack on the SS could occur from inside and

outside simultaneously. While those Jews who had been working the

crematoria saw the end of the war as an inevitable death sentence, the

Fighting Group saw it as a moment of possible liberation. Each time that

the Sonderkommando contacted the Fighting Group they were told to

postpone their uprising until the front lines came closer, which they

eventually took to mean that “they stood alone.”[177] Although the

Fighting Group refused to participate in the revolt or to provide guns,

they did supply a small amount of explosives that had been painstakingly

smuggled out of a factory by female inmates over the course of many

months, which became pivotal in the Sonderkommando’s plan.

Because there are essentially no survivors of this revolt, our

understanding of the events are patchy. We know that the action was

initiated early, but whether this happened because of a drunk Russian

worker, a nosy German Capo, or because the SS began the liquidation

early remains unclear.[178] Whatever the prompt, on October 7, 1944, at

about 1:30pm, several hundred of the Sonderkommando in Crematorium IV

attacked the SS with hammers, axes, and stones, threw several home-made

grenades, and blew up the crematorium itself. Realizing that the revolt

had begun early, the workers in Crematorium II also launched an attack,

shoving a guard into an oven, lighting the building on fire, and then

attacking the SS.[179] A hole was cut in the fence leading to the

women’s camp, where several of the barracks were set to be drenched in

gasoline and lit on fire — this never transpired, largely due to the

uncoordinated timing.[180] Some inmates were able to cut through the

exterior fence and escape, though many of these escapees were later

cornered in a barn and killed.[181] Ultimately, Crematorium IV was

damaged beyond use, though how much impact this had on the killing

operation is debatable since the end of the war was so near. Everyone

who revolted that day, including those who briefly escaped the walls of

Auschwitz, was killed,[182] in addition to more than two hundred people

who were later accused of involvement.[183] The political department

spent weeks brutally interrogating all of the women who may have had

access to explosive material, beating them until “their bodies looked

like pieces of raw liver,” but it was unable to find anyone willing to

confess or snitch.[184] In the end, the SS settled on four women to hold

responsible, and on January 6, 1945, held the last public execution in

Auschwitz. Less than two weeks later the camp was evacuated — any inmate

able to walk participated in a death march through the snowy fields of

Poland, while the infirm and elderly were simply left behind. Whether

this decision to evacuate (rather than liquidate) the camp was based on

the Fighting Group’s dispatch to the BBC, or perhaps to the rebellion of

the Sonderkommando, remains a matter of speculation.

(One of the often overlooked outcomes of the uprising was that it spared

a group of women who had been brought to the camp that morning and

happened to be inside of the gas chambers in Crematorium V when the

rebellion broke out. After a short while waiting for their “shower”, the

door flung open and the women were hurriedly taken to a bunker due to

the chaos that had broken out. At least one woman from this group, Alice

Lok Cahana, went on to survive the camp.[185] Thus, if nothing else, we

know that the uprising did in fact save one life.)

In the end, the resistance organizations spent years organizing for a

general uprising that never happened.[186] Instead, a group of

desperate, informally-organized inmates staged what would be the only

coordinated insurrection in the history of Auschwitz. Unsurprisingly,

harsh criticisms of the organizations in Auschwitz have surfaced, not

solely around their tension with the Sonderkommando. Critics have

accused the organizations of cronyism, arguing that the members “helped

only one another and later boasted that they had engaged in resistance

activity.”[187] Some have accused the Fighting Group of rampant

anti-semitism, and pointed out that this prejudice played a role in

their tension with the mostly-Jewish Sonderkommando.[188] Similar

accusations have been levied against the Polish-dominated ZOW, who

allegedly organized to save the lives of Polish resistance fighters by

switching their identities with Jewish inmates.[189] Such critiques have

seemingly arisen from every camp in which organizations existed. The

Communists in Buchenwald, for instance, have been described as a “sworn

community” which unquestioningly looked out for its own members

(regardless of their brutality, anti-semitism, etc.), and whose

“cliquishness was the object of criticism by outsiders.”[190]

As well as being criticized for their cronyism and anti-semitism, camp

organizations have also come under fire for their tendency to advocate

restraint to those who sought immediate action, as seen in the case of

Auschwitz. Another example comes from Sachsenhausen, where a group of

Jewish Communists decided to resist transport to the gas chambers and

took a plan for open revolt and a request for arms to Communist leaders

of a resistance organization. They were met with deep reservations, for

those in the organization felt responsibilities to the entire camp and

feared collective responsibility. [191] The Jews fought back regardless,

and with bare hands knocked several SS men to the ground before being

contained. Yet another situation arose in Auschwitz, in which a group of

one hundred young boys, who had been orphans in the camp for many

months, were all taken to the hospital and killed by lethal injection,

sparking mass outrage. Garlinski writes:

...this pile of children’s bodies aroused such passions that the news

passed like lightning through all the Blocks and Kommandos and raised

tempers to boiling point. The leaders had great difficulty in

restraining their fellow-prisoners and underground soldiers from

uncoordinated reactions of rage and despair.

One survivor who experienced this frustrating tension with resistance

organizations in Auschwitz cynically concluded: “the Resistance in the

camp is not geared for an uprising but for the survival of the members

of the Resistance.”[192] This tension that existed in the camps between

individual desires and collective organizing touches on one of the core

nerves of anarcho-nihilist thought.

Anarcho-Nihilist Critique of Organizations

Organizations, legislative bodies, and unions: Churches for the

powerless. Pawnshops for the stingy and weak. —Renzo Novatore, 1920

By holding a stupid pistol, we have only taken one step in many for

escaping from the alienation of “Now is not the moment” and “The times

are not ripe.” —OLGA Cell FAI/IRF

The anarcho-nihilist critique of organizations stems from a common

frustration with the bureaucratic and managerial role of formal

organizations in radical spaces. Though this frustration is not new in

anarchism,[193] it has certainly seen a renewed, and perhaps more fierce

articulation in recent years from both insurrectionary and nihilist

voices.[194] Many contemporary anarchists have sought to sever

themselves completely from the model of formal organizations and to

orient themselves towards more wild and joyous forms of coordinated

action. One of the primary themes of this critique is the extent to

which organizations tend to defer action until the emergence of a mass

movement. Because nihilists seek the destruction of everything that

comprises society, and because that aspiration will never be shared by a

majority (or even a substantial portion) of the population, to wait for

mass consensus is tantamount to defeat. The UK chapter of the Informal

Anarchist Federation (FAI) writes: “With all the billions of people who

live in the world, there will never be a time when a particular act

against the State and Capital is felt by all or even the majority of

people to be appropriate, good, or desirable.”[195] Rather than spend

our lives preparing for a mass awakening that likely will not happen,

better to attack now and see where it takes us. (It is worth noting here

a difference between “deferred” action and “patient” action, for in

planning each of the bombings, shootings, and arsons that have defined

the nihilist stance, a great deal of patience has indeed been required —

let’s not mistake urgency for impatience.) A different cell of the FAI

writes: “We don’t even give a minute of our life in the hope that the

multitude will suddenly become aware and wake up! If the oppressed are

not ready to raise the hatchet, this is a problem of the

oppressed.”[196] Thus, nihilism represents a strong anti-social turn in

anarchism, whereby instead of working to mobilize the masses and build a

wide-based movement, it prioritizes immediate attack rooted in

individual desires. This “aristocratic contempt for the common people,”

as critics have labeled it, severs nihilists from the task of rousing

the “sheeple,” and allows for a different set of priorities.[197]

In its most basic expression, the anarcho-nihilist critique of

organizations boils down to a tension between the individual and the

collective, whereby the nihilist individual refuses to compromise any of

their insurrectionary desires for the sake of an imagined collective. To

understand this tension, we can think back to 2012 when the CEO of an

Italian nuclear power company was shot in the kneecap by two

anarcho-nihilists who claimed the attack under the banner of the FAI.

After the attack (which was partly inspired by the 2011 nuclear disaster

in Fukushima), the pair released a communique pointing to the various

atrocities committed in the name of nuclear power and calling for an

all-out attack on the nuclear industry.[198] In response to that action,

the Anarchist Federation in Italy (a formal Marxist organization with no

relationship to the FAI) issued a response that condemned such a

renegade action: “... we strongly criticize individualist and

vanguardist tactics that do not come out of a broad-based class-struggle

movement. We condemn actions that put workers in danger without their

knowledge...”[199] According to this perspective, the individual acting

without the validation of a formal collective, and without respect for

working class solidarity, has no place in an anarchist movement. In

counter-response to this (and other condemnations), insurrectionary and

nihilist keyboards ignited with scathing indictments of this breed of

“civil anarchism” that tries to restrain individual attacks behind the

“working class” banner. Venona Q, in one such essay titled “Scandalous

Thoughts: A Few Notes on Civil Anarchism”, writes: “The issue for me

here is the same denial of individuality that the State imposes — some

herding of unique human beings into some utilitarian category by

pedagogues and masters who find the individual unwieldy and dangerous,

but find an abstract ideological cage immensely comfortable.”[200]

Venona Q’s article diagnoses a long-term, cyclical process whereby every

so often a new generation of anarchists need to shed the constrictive

skin of the collective in order to reassert the role of the individual,

and thus manage the tension of “the patriarchal voice of ‘political

reason’ against the wild rebel spirit.”[201] Anarcho-nihilism is, in

this light, a fierce and unwavering shedding of that skin.

The way that this same tension played out in Auschwitz is fascinating,

and we can cautiously say it seems to bolster the nihilist critique. For

all intents and purposes, the statement issued by the Anarchist

Federation in Italy could have been written by the Fighting Group

Auschwitz, which saw the renegade actions of the Sonderkommando as being

reckless. Whereas the Fighting Group was working towards the liberation

of the whole camp (i.e. mass movement) and condemning anything that

might endanger the other inmates (i.e. class solidarity), the

Sonderkommando represented a smaller affinity group, which although not

inherently hostile towards the other inmates, could not wait for them or

the outside world to act. By refusing to defer their attacks until a

mass mobilization could be organized, by pushing back against a Marxist

organizing body, and by acting with a “wild rebel spirit” in a totally

hopeless situation, the actions of the Sonderkommando resonate deeply

with the anarcho-nihilist tendency.

One of the differences between the situation of the FAI and the

Sonderkommando is the degree of severity to which their actions would

implicate others. While the FAI uses incendiary methods knowing that

other anarchists will experience such repercussions as arrests, house

raids, and grand jury indictments, the Sonderkommando acted knowing that

it would result in the slaughter of hundreds of people. This remains a

real tension in contemporary nihilism and has led some people to a place

of paralysis. The authors of the journal Attentat (a word that refers to

political assassinations and similar violent acts) conclude that the

repercussions of political violence in today’s world are perhaps too

great to justify: “It is not our central proposition that attentats can,

will, or should be the way to confront the state. We are not capable of

the horror show that would require.”[202] Even without the constrictive

role of organizations, nihilism still wrestles with the implications of

collective responsibility.

The other two major uprisings to be discussed both happened in

extermination camps, where long-term political organizing was an

impossibility. These two events will lead us into an exploration of

nihilist forms of organizing.

The Sobibór Uprising

At Sobibór I am witnessing the tools of the modern age — trains,

assembly lines, and gas engines — used by the Germans to efficiently

murder thousands of people on any given day. And yet how new is this

really? The primitive whips used by the Germans are no different from

those used by brutal slave masters for thousands of years. —Philip

Bialowitz

On the surface, Sobibór resembled a quaint frontier town complete with a

pharmacist, tailor’s shop, mining cars, and cabins marked with names

like “Merry Flea” and “Swallow’s Nest.” Sunflowers and geraniums were

carefully planted everywhere, particularly along the trail that led to

the north end of the camp, which was signed as the “Road To

Heaven.”[203] Underneath this deceptive veneer (one specifically

designed to calm prisoners), was a nightmarish reality and a stunningly

efficient extermination camp. Unlike the concentration camps — such as

Ravensbrück, Dachau, and Buchenwald, which housed long-term prisoner

populations — to arrive at the doorsteps of an extermination camp like

Sobibór, Treblinka, or Chelmno meant that you were either being put into

the gas chambers or being put to work filling them (Auschwitz held the

unique position of operating as both a concentration camp and an

extermination camp for the later years of the war). At any given time

the SS had a crew of one hundred to seven hundred Jewish workers

operating every aspect of Sobibór; they were overseen by Capos from

their midst, who were in turn overseen by hundreds of Ukrainian guards,

who were themselves subservient to the German SS. Over the course of its

nineteen months of operation, these workers were made to facilitate the

deaths of over 250,000 Jews, while also tending to the daily needs of

their oppressors.[204] For the SS and Ukrainian guards overseeing this

operation, entertainment often took the most twisted forms: prisoners

would be force-fed sand until they couldn’t walk and then paraded around

the camp; forced to climb trees that were then chopped down; forced to

stand at attention while Barry the dog chewed off pieces of their

genitals and buttocks; forced to watch as living babies were held by

their legs and smashed around like pieces of meat before being tossed

into the mining cars for cremation.[205] Every train that rolled into

the station would bring a new transport of thousands of people who would

receive a cunningly reassuring welcome speech and then be marched

directly into the gas chambers. Those who worked at the train yard

unloading and preparing transports for gassing were the last faces that

these groups of (mostly unsuspecting) people would see. While lining

them up, shaving their heads, and sending them down the “Road to

Heaven,” they were to inform the newcomers: “This is a work camp. The

food is good and the work easy. There’s nothing to worry about.”[206]

Often, that would be the last words uttered before the chamber doors

closed and a canister of Zyklon B was dropped in from the ceiling.

By 1943, the desire for co-ordinated vengeance and escape had been

fomenting among workers at Sobibór for some time, and many connections

were formed based on mutual desires for revolt. While renegade escapes

had been attempted, few succeeded, and the toll of collective punishment

was vast. No one had conceived of a plan that could overthrow the camp

or allow for mass escape, until September when a transport arrived and

brought into the camp several Russian-Jewish workers who had both

military and partisan experience. The small network of camp conspirators

quickly developed contacts with one of the Russians, Aleksander “Sasha”

Pecherskii, whose recalcitrant attitude and strategic mind earned him a

great deal of respect and leadership among the rebels.[207] Sasha agreed

to offer leadership to the rebels, and after several highly secretive

meetings between fewer than a dozen conspirators, a plan was set in

motion to liberate all six hundred prisoners. After at least one delay

due to unpredictable conditions, the revolt was initiated on October 14,

1943. The first phase of the plan, which was relatively successful, was

to lure key German officers into private settings and discreetly kill

them. Upon entering the room where the “shoe fitting” or “valuable

leather jacket” was promised, the guard would be attacked with hand-made

axes and knives while others worked nearby to cover the sound of

screams. Eleven of Sobibór’s top functionaries were killed in this way

between 3:30 and 5:00 pm, and their weapons taken into rebel hands.[208]

During that time, an inmate with knowledge of electrical systems was

able to disconnect the lights and telephones to the whole camp.[209] The

second part of the plan required all inmates to assemble for the

afternoon roll call, gather into marching formation, and simply walk out

of the front gate with a sympathetic Capo at their helm. The idea was

that without the commanders around to give orders, a moment of confusion

would allow the inmates to get far enough past the gate so as to

scramble into the nearby forests and avoid the minefields all around the

camp. The roll call was initiated early, piquing the suspicions of some

guards. The plan quickly fell apart, and what ensued was a murderous

chaos.

Ukrainian guards fired from towers with heavy machine guns, while the

pistols that rebels had appropriated earlier in the day meekly fired

back. Some inmates set fires around the buildings hoping to burn the

camp to the ground, while others rushed towards the camp armory to find

more weapons.[210] Within minutes, the inmates were massively

overpowered and frantic escape became the only thinkable option. Inmates

rushed to climb, cut, or collapse the barbed wire fence (many died

tangled there) and flee across the heavily-mined field towards the

forest. Those who survived this mad dash did so only because a path had

been cleared of mines by those who ran before them. Upon reaching the

forest, the rebels faced a host of other challenges including starvation

and being ratted out by local farmers. Jewish partisan groups

represented an ideal opportunity to continue the battle against the

Nazis, while those who stumbled into the midst of Polish partisan groups

report being robbed and shot at.[211]

Of the roughly 650 inmates in the camp on the day of the revolt, about

365 tried to escape; those who remained in the camp were killed in the

days after. Of those who attempted to escape, 185 were killed by gunfire

or landmines. Within ten days, an additional 107 had been recaptured and

killed. Of the remaining one hundred at large, another twenty three were

killed by non-Germans before the war ended, and several others died of

illness.[212] Between forty and sixty participants in the uprising

survived the war, which along with four others who had escaped earlier,

are the only known survivors of Sobibór.[213] On the whole, this is

considered the “greatest success of inmates in open resistance,” both in

terms of the number of guards killed and the number of successful

escapees.[214] It also brought an end to the mass extermination at

Sobibór, as days later the SS demolished the buildings, cleaned the

site, and planted over the whole area with pine trees.

The Treblinka Uprising

The fiery glow that poured forth over Treblinka that night had a

different color, a different origin, and a different interpretation than

the one of all previous nights. —Richard Glazar

A similar insurrection was launched by the workers of Treblinka, another

extermination camp located only several hours north of Sobibór on the

Eastern edge of Poland. A gruesome glimpse of life inside this camp is

offered by the memoir of Chil Raichman, who spent nearly a year as a

worker in Treblinka before participating in the revolt. His book reads

like a strobe-lit horror show: a series of surreal, nightmarish images

separated only by the frenzied whips and shouts of SS and Ukrainian

guards (whom he simply refers to as “murderers”). His first job in the

camp is as a barber, chopping the hair off of naked women before they

are packed like sardines into the gas chamber; throughout his frenzied

workdays he is unable to respond to their desperate questions as he is

constantly under the supervision of a whip that cracks his spine if he

speaks or takes more than five snips to finish a job.[215] After weeks

in this role he is transferred to the other side of the camp, where he

is put to work wrenching bloated bodies out of the chambers, loading

them two at a time onto thin pallets, and dragging them to open pit

graves. He is then assigned work as a dentist, prying open the mouth of

each corpse to extract any valuable metals, filling suitcase after

suitcase with human teeth. In between these jobs he sorts victims’

clothes, hauls sand into the pits, and in the final months of the camp

is put to work unearthing and burning all of the corpses they had been

working so hard to bury.[216]

To report illness in Treblinka is to be tortured and shot, to display an

open wound is a death sentence, and to go to the bathroom requires being

mercifully granted a number by a guard and then reporting to the “Toilet

Supervisor” who is dressed like a clown and made to whip anyone who sits

longer than two minutes.[217] Needless to say, the opportunities for

resistance in this horrific situation are nil.

Though in the first year of Treblinka’s operation a worker couldn’t

expect to live more than one or two weeks, eventually the Nazis’ need

for productivity trumped their callous disregard for life and workers

were preserved for longer periods — this presented new opportunities to

resist.[218] Whispers about an uprising spread, and eventually a

conspiracy involving upwards of sixty members (organized into several

cells) developed.[219] Those responsible for recovering valuables from

the victims slowly started to stockpile money, while others worked on

acquiring arms through theft or bribery of corrupt Ukrainian

guards.[220] The search for weapons seemed futile, until a fourteen year

old named Edek put a sliver of metal into the lock of the camp armory;

when the lock was taken to be fixed, the Jewish locksmith was able to

make an impression and a copy of the key.[221] This access to arms,

alongside the morale boost offered by meeting some of the survivors of

the Warsaw ghetto uprising (who were being shipped to Treblinka), turned

revolt into a real possibility. Several dates were considered for an

attack, but unpredictable conditions continuously led to postponements,

and the more senior organizers had a “hard time persuading young fellow

conspirators to be patient.”[222] As transports started to slow, and

rumors of impending liquidation spread, a date was finally picked. One

of the organizers summarized the plan as such: “First catch and finish

off the chief slavedrivers; disarm the guards, cut the telephone

connections; burn and destroy all the equipment of the death factories

so they cannot be made operational anymore; liberate the penal camp for

Poles two kilometers away, join forces with them and make our way into

the forests to form a strong partisan group there.[223]

On the morning of August 2, 1943, the workers in Treblinka prepared

themselves: those who worked in the SS huts were rummaging through

belongings looking for weapons and smuggling them back to the garage

under cover of a garbage collection. Jacek, another fourteen year old

rebel, used the prized key to slip into the armory where he quietly cut

a hole in the rear window and began passing weapons out to be added to

the garbage collection. On the other side of the camp, a worker tasked

with cleaning buildings secretly replaced his disinfectant with

gasoline. Similar to each of the other camp uprisings, the plan in

Treblinka was initiated prematurely, meaning that not everyone had

received weapons, nor had the telephone lines been cut. After a signal

shot was fired, grenades and bullets began hailing down onto the

unsuspecting guards, while Molotov cocktails engulfed the barracks in

flames and prisoners rushed the fence. Estimates of the number of

escapees range from 150 to 600, while the death toll of SS and Ukrainian

guards ranges from zero to 200.[224] As in Sobibór, successful escape

meant the beginning of a new, even more dangerous mission: to survive

the hostile countryside. In the end, 52 of the rebels lived to see the

end of the war and tell the world about Treblinka.

Anarcho-Nihilism and Informal Organizing

An informal anarchist organization flows like water and takes new forms

according to the action it wants to carry out. —Conspiracy of Cells of

Fire, Imprisoned Members Cell

Because of the unique conditions of the extermination camps, long-term,

formal organizations were an impossibility. What arose instead were

informal conspiracies of inmates that had one shared ambition:

insurrection. What they accomplished was nothing short of miraculous:

the two most successful uprisings to occur in Nazi camps and the

liberation of some of the only eye witnesses to the horrors of

extermination camps. They did this without political allegiances,

without bureaucracy, and without deferring to history’s fabled “ripe

conditions.”[225] Although the conspiracies that formed in Sobibór and

Treblinka don’t necessarily reflect any sort of ‘ideal nihilist model’,

they do resonate with the approach that anarcho-nihilists have taken

toward organizing outside of conventional structures. Such organizations

as the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF), the Informal Anarchist

Federation (FAI), Wild Reaction (RS), and Individualists Tending Toward

the Wild (ITS)[226] have played a significant role in the emergence of

anarcho-nihilism as a widespread tendency, particularly in Europe, South

America, and Mexico.[227] Although this text will not be offering any

sweeping histories or critiques of these groups, I will attempt to use

their words to briefly explore how it is that anarcho-nihilists have set

about to organize themselves.

The CCF emerged in 2008 from a minority incendiary tendency in Greece:

anarchists who were interested in autonomously attacking symbols of

power but were dissatisfied with the lack of strategy, coherence,

development, and perspectives that this level of improvisation and

disorganization offered.[228] Without some degree of cohesion, they

found, the incendiary tendency “risks fading into the randomness of

events and limiting itself to occasional upsurges that lack planning and

perspective.”[229] This perennial observation has led many group-weary

radicals to rethink the concept of organizing. In one of their later

communiques, the CCF reflects on this process in their own formation:

As anarchists, we often distance ourselves from the concept of

organization because we equate it with hierarchy, roles, specialization,

‘you must,’ and obligations. However, words acquire the meanings given

by the people who use them. As the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, we

stormed into battle over the meaning of revolutionary anarchist

organization.[230]

To combat a lack of momentum and visibility in their tactics, they took

a new approach to organization and began launching attacks under the

banner of the CCF, a network of informally organized cells that could

conspire together and act with complete autonomy. From the beginning,

the CCF placed a high priority on communiques as a way to collectively

develop ideas and maintain momentum. Their initial wave of attacks on

January 21, 2008 involved twelve bombings and arsons targeted against

banks, car dealerships, and a state-run power company. A month later,

fifteen more attacks followed (including an arson attack on the

Associate Justice Minister’s office), which consolidated their presence

as a “stable and coherent collective that promotes the destruction of

power and society.”[231] In 2011, the CCF effectively merged with the

FAI, an “informal anarchist structure based on revolutionary solidarity

and direct action,” that had been working under a similar model since

the early 2000s.[232] By that point, the FAI had hundreds of actions

affiliated with its name, including the bombings of several European

Union buildings, a police headquarters in Genoa, and a courthouse in

Rome. Once again, communiques from each of these actions have served as

a central medium for the exchange and development of ideas within the

nihilist tendency.

The ITS, which emerged in Mexico in 2011 with a bombing targeted at a

university’s nanotechnology department, approached organizing in a

similar fashion: without “leaders nor commands,” ensuring that “the

cells enjoy total autonomy in the attack.”[233] So vitriolic were the

ITS against leftist organizations that in 2011 they sent an incendiary

package (i.e. letter-bomb) to a Mexican Greenpeace office, declaring war

against those who “only seek to reform the system and create

alternatives”; who wage “hypocritical campaigns in ‘favor’ of the

environment in order to gain public notoriety”; and who posture as being

oppositional even though “everything that they defend is invested in the

system.”[234] In contrast to the leftist approach, ITS insisted that

“the best option to slip away from the system continues to be informal

organization, meeting as individuals in affinity or alone, betting on

insurrectionalist immediatism and the quality of sabotage, [and]

rejecting formal organization.”[235] The ITS merged with a new

organization in 2014 called RS, which maintained this informal approach:

“RS does NOT have leaders or a fixed and absolute leader, we are NOT an

army or Marxist guerrilla group, RS is composed of groups of individuals

responsible for our own actions, who act according to their

possibilities.”[236] Without bureaucracy, without imposed uniformity,

and without appeals to public legibility, these informal organizations

have inspired incendiary attacks and networks of solidarity around the

world.

One of the aspects of anarcho-nihilism that makes this kind of informal

organizing possible is the tactical freedom afforded by its rejection of

all inherited programs, moralities, and expectations. It urges us to

take ethical decisions into our own hands rather than appealing to any

socially governed notions of right and wrong, thus opening up an

infinite spectrum of tactical thinking that can more meaningfully

interact with the particularities of our unique context.[237]

Experimentation, then, takes the place of formulaic thinking in

revolutionary struggle: “Rather than organization, then, in the present

we might simply speak of experimentation, as the willingness of small

groups of people to gamble on these admittedly slim possibilities with

absolutely no guarantee of success.”[238] What we hope to find when we

open up our field of vision like this is that anarchistic organizing

doesn’t have to be a soul-sucking, bureaucratic affair; on the contrary,

we might find that “we can organize ourselves, and that this capacity is

fundamentally joyful.”[239] An informal organization like the CCF or RS

allows space for individuals and affinity groups to act with

unrestrained ferocity against systems of domination, while still being

connected to a network of people who are interested in similar ideas and

who can act in solidarity with each others’ struggles.

The groups that emerged in Treblinka and Sobibór were able to act with

the sort of fluidity and tactical freedom that the Sonderkommando nearly

surrendered in the presence of a formal, communist organization. Like

the members of the FAI or the ITS, their unity as a group came solely

from their joint willingness to attack the existing order. Though there

is a great deal of nuance and complexity that should not be overlooked,

the fact remains that the two most successful uprisings to occur in Nazi

concentration camps happened in two of the only camps without formal

organizations. This in itself should challenge anarchists and other

radicals to deeply question the pragmatic function of organizations in

our lives. While formal and sustained organizational methods can be

useful for certain goals, we should remember that they are often

structurally incapable of working towards moments of complete rupture.

What they offer in terms of resources, visibility, and longevity, must

be measured against the hurdles they often create between people and

their insurrectionary desires. That being said, while the informal

organizational methods being experimented with by nihilists are exciting

and have clearly facilitated a great deal of incendiary action, they

also carry with them inevitable shortcomings and pitfalls, not least of

which is the sort of solipsism that results in a Greenpeace office

getting bombed. And though informal organizational models may be able to

mitigate the problem of collective responsibility, they will never be

able to fully solve the problem. Just as the authors of Attentat become

paralyzed by the “horror show” that would be required to violently

confront the state, so too did the Fighting Group Auschwitz and other

concentration camp organizations attempt to navigate the tension between

attacking a dominant order and the responses this would provoke.

Ultimately somebody along the line is going to have to make shady

ethical choices, regardless of organizational model. Thus, while I think

that stories of concentration camp uprisings can help us to develop a

healthy wariness around the role of organizations, we must also stay

vigilant to nuance. There are no easy answers to these questions.

Without dismissing (or attacking) every formal organization we

encounter, we can continue to experiment with non-hierarchical

organizational forms that might facilitate, rather than defer, moments

of liberatory rupture.

Reflections

Cruel Optimisms

The Machine has fabricated a landscape in which even at the depths of

suffering it is less unpleasant to choose among the officially proffered

options than to resist, to transgress, to fight back, to step out of

line. The lessons of the Holocaust were well learned. We will walk

through the very last door as long as it is the easiest of a well

managed set of choices. —Lev Zlodey & Jason Radegas

The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion

—Elie Wiesel

In her book Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant dissects some of the reasons

that human beings cling so tenaciously to hopeful ideas. She defines

“cruel optimism” as “a relation of attachment to compromised conditions

of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible,

sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic.”[240] What makes these

attachments cruel is not just the harmful impact of the object of

desire, but the sense in which the object comes to provide something of

“the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on

living on and to look forward to being in the world.”[241] Without the

object of our desire, we fall apart. Underneath of a cruel optimism is

an existential abyss, and yet severing ourselves from it poses the only

real possibility for growth. As Berlant writes: “Why do people stay

attached to conventional good-life fantasies — say, of the enduring

reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions,

markets, and at work — when the evidence of their instability,

fragility, and dear cost abounds?”[242] In the Nazi camps, these cruel

optimisms had a name: paroles, which referred to optimistic rumours that

spread through the camps, usually about the war nearing an end or the

partisans nearing the camp walls.[243] The false sense of hope that such

rumours offered was both a lifeline for desperate people, and a

perpetual deterrent for resistance. What cruel optimisms might we be

clinging to in our current situations?

Anarchism is fundamentally posed to challenge many cruel optimisms held

by society, and anarchism is in turn having its own cruel optimisms

challenged by nihilism. Nihilism is the incredulous voice whispering

impossible questions: Are we toxically attached to the idea that we can

build a new world in the shell of the old, despite overwhelming evidence

that points towards the impossibility of that happening? Are we stuck in

a model of time that binds us to the reproduction of society and

endlessly defers incendiary action? Have we inherited a set of stagnant

revolutionary models that serve only to limit the full spectrum of

tactics available to us and to manage the rebellious desires that course

through our bodies? Is all of our resistance predicated on the fantasy

that we can actually bring an end to global capitalism?

For those in the Lagers, the dissolution of cruel optimisms was the most

crucial step towards resistance. Immersed in a fog of misinformation,

insidious lies, and unbearable truths, very few inmates managed to come

to terms with the severity of their situations, and even fewer were able

to muster the will (or had the luck/privilege/physical ability, etc) to

act on those truths. Nihilism is the voice at the Warsaw Ghetto train

station whispering, these trains are bound for an extermination center;

it is the voice on the “Road to Freedom” whispering, these aren’t

showers; it is the voice in the Lagers definitively proclaiming, “no one

is going to save us”.[244] Some of the truths that nihilism asks us to

confront are almost as severe and unbelievable as the truth about the

camps. Groups like the CCF and the FAI ask us to accept the possibility

that the majority of human beings on this planet will never be motivated

to resist oppression. The zine Desert[245] asks us to accept that global

climate change is unstoppable, and that, despite our best efforts, it

will not result in the end of capitalism, patriarchy, or civilization as

a whole. The authors of Attentat confront the grotesque possibility that

meaningful social change is actually impossible in the current

landscape, and that action is not even necessarily justified:

Anything less complex than the spectacular, cybernetic, late capitalism

of this world is hopelessly naive and simplistic. It would necessitate

untold violence and brutality. It would tear asunder the illusions of

two hundred years of humanistic, rights-based social organization...

Practically, we don’t live in an era where utopian or even liberal (in

the broadest sense of the word) political change is possible.[246]

These are all grotesque ideas in that they force us to confront a

situation without hope. The problem for many of us is that these ideas

happen to resonate on a very deep level. We just don’t always know what

to do with them.

Though we are certainly not obliged to accept every nihilist position

that comes out of the woodwork (many of which are overly simplistic and

loaded with brawny machismo), some of them are just impossible to

ignore. Others, such as the idea that we should turn our backs on the

positivist projects that sustain us and give us joy, can be wrestled

with and taken for what they’re worth — perhaps a willingness to be

honest about the limits of such projects. In other words, this isn’t

about becoming a nihilist. Nihilism does not demand our allegiance,

because it is not a political ideology. I am more inclined to look at it

as a tendency in the true sense of the word, and to embrace it as a

fluid presence in our lives that constantly asks us to negate our own

ideologies, certainties, and optimistic attachments. I find any form of

nihilism that gets used as an excuse not to dream, not to act, and not

to engage earnestly with other people to be dull — I am interested in a

nihilism that ravenously digs below the surface of commonly accepted

ideas, and that can help us to ground our resistance in something more

meaningful than tired slogans and listless strategies. I am interested

in a nihilism that helps us to reorient our lives away from cruel

optimisms and towards jouissance.

Insurrectionary Memories

To remember the struggle in the present is to glimpse which road we have

walked upon, to help understand where to place our next steps — this is

to use insurrectionary memory to replant ourselves tactically and

strategically in combat against the oppressive reality. —Anonymous

Chilean Anarchists

Reading holocaust literature is not easy work and I don’t blame people

for turning away from it. Nearly every page of memoir brings with it a

new layer of hellish imagery, trauma, and misanthropic insight. I felt

called to these stories for a number of personal reasons, and was

motivated to keep reading when I started to glimpse the ways that they

might be interesting to other anarchists. My experience of these stories

became even richer when I started to realize that one of the most

widespread and crushing fears for those who entered the camps was of not

having their stories heard, of being forgotten by history. Primo Levi

observed that the most commonly reported nightmare in the Lagers was not

one of death or torture, but the alienation of clogged mouths and muted

words. “Why,” he asked, “is the pain of every day translated so

constantly into our dreams in the ever-repeated scene of the

unlistened-to story?”[247] With this in mind, reading diaries and

memoirs becomes less of a dry historical excavation, and more of an

interaction with those who staked their last shreds of energy on the

hopes that they would not be forgotten. Because the Nazis worked so

vigilantly to erase the Ballastexistenzen from history, to forget them

would be “akin to killing them a second time.”[248]

In remembering these voices, we also have the opportunity to carry on

past struggles and to turn the stories of those who came before us into

fodder against our oppressors. As we all know, history is written by the

victors, and so the narratives of Progress and Great Men offered to us

by society generally serve only to reinforce power. Benjamin warned that

“even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins” and that

“this enemy has not ceased to be victorious”.[249] The fact that the

Nazi holocaust has been consistently wielded to justify the murder and

oppression of the Palestinian people epitomizes how the dead can be

reanimated to perpetuate cycles of domination. Similarly, looking at all

the ways that historical revisionism has been used (occasionally by

anarchists) to minimize the holocaust and perpetuate anti-semitism in

the form of conspiracy theories reminds us that we simply don’t have the

option of letting history rest in its grave. By engaging ourselves in

this project called “history”, we can find ways to turn past struggles

against current forms of domination and to “ensure that the memory of

the dead continues to haunt the living.”[250] I see this happening all

around me with People’s History posters and Silvia Federici reading

groups, with land acknowledgments and Haymarket handbills. History does

not need to be neutral, but rather can fly in the face of domination and

help to sharpen and expand our conflicts against the powerful.[251] As

our Chilean friends have declared: “Insurrectionary memory is our

weapon!”[252] It is my hope that this text can contribute to this

ever-expanding arsenal.

It is worth noting here that not all history speaks loudly enough for us

to easily hear it. How many stories of concentration camp resistance

have been lost? Because of the sheer brutality of the Nazi regime and

the conditions of isolation in which much of this history unfolded, it

is safe to assume that most acts of resistance were captured only in the

fleeting wisps of gun smoke that silenced fast-beating, recalcitrant

hearts. In so many ways, our willingness to attend to the silences of

history may determine our ability to understand this world and how we

got to where we are.

The Void

The active nihilist sees in the unknown future and despair at our

current situation, a call to arms. Meaning is found in approaching the

void rather than in the false knowledge of what is on the other side of

it. —Attentat

We are nihilists regardless of whether we call ourselves by the name,

because we have no road out of this. We have only the starlit

wilderness... The first act of navigation is to set foot in the

wilderness. Only then can we put our hands against the bare earth,

feeling for the dim warmth of those fires still smoldering beneath.

—“Hic Nihil, Hic Salta! (A Critique of Bartlebyism)”

With every rebellious footstep we take, we are entering an unknowable

void. There are no reliable maps of the terrain that our struggles will

occupy. No one has a leg up on the question of liberation. So much has

been tried and so much has failed, let us finally admit that we don’t

know what is “right” or what will “work”.[253] Nobody knows how, why, or

if a dominant order will fall. We don’t know if there are enough

letterbombs in the world to bring an end to nuclear power, nor do we

know if a well-timed mass uprising in Auschwitz would have actually

succeeded in shutting down the camp. Despite what anyone tells us, there

is no guarantee that the workers of the world are going to rise up, nor

any assurances that such a thing would even lead to a desirable

situation.

Though we have inherited a great many ideas about how to confront

domination, we know that nothing is set in stone. From the shattered

tools and bones of our predecessors, we craft our own weapons. Nothing

is guaranteed to work, yet we attack regardless. We do so naked, having

shed the rags of morality, ideology, and politics that had accumulated

over time. We confront this world raw, in all its horrifying glory. We

negate every truth and rule and we proceed with a spirit of incendiary

experimentation. We dream big, expect little, and celebrate every moment

of rupture. We take every opportunity to ensure that those in power lose

sleep and that their functionaries have miserable jobs. We set our lives

to ripping up the geraniums that line the extermination camp paths,

pissing in the gears of society’s machinery, and when all else fails, we

will follow in the footsteps of those who spent their final minutes in

the gas chambers singing and fucking.[254]

May jouissance be the blessed flame that guides us into the void.

Glossary

AK: The Polish Home Army, a resistance army fighting Nazi occupation.

Ballastexistenzen: Hitler’s preferred term for the “undesirable and

unnecessary” members of society.

Capo: A prisoner appointed by the Nazis to be the head of a labour crew.

CCF: Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, an informal organization started in

2008 in Greece.

FAI: Informal Anarchist Federation, an informal anarchist organization

birthed in 2003 in Italy.

Futurity: the impression that one has a future within the existing

order.

Greens: German prisoners in the concentration camps, often given

functionary positions with the camp (e.g. Capo, Senior Camp Inmate,

etc.), named for the green badges they were made to wear.

Häftling: A prisoner in the Nazi concentration camp; plural — Häftlinge.

ITS: Individualists Tending Toward The Wild, an informal organization

started in Mexico in 2011.

Kommando: A labour crew.

Lager: A Nazi concentration camp (German word meaning “camp” or

“storehouse”).

RS: Reaccion Salvaje/Wild Reaction, an informal organization started in

2014 in Mexico.

Recalcitrance: resisting authority or control; not obedient; hard to

manage.

Reds: Political prisoners in the concentration camps, named for the red

badges they were made to wear.

Reproductive Futurity: The belief that the existing order is the safest

future for children in the abstract, and that sacrifices are to be made

in the name of this abstract Child.

SS: Schutzstaffel, a paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler that

was responsible for running the concentration camps.

Sonderkommando: A work detail of (mostly Jewish) camp inmates tasked

with operating the gas chambers, crematorium, and other processes of

extermination in the camps.

ZOW: The Zwiazek Organizacji Wojskowej, a Polish underground resistance

organization in Auschwitz, started by Witold Pilecki.

Afterthoughts

In writing an overview of both anarcho-nihilist thought and

concentration camp resistance, I have omitted much. The nihilist themes

of negation, time, and organization could have happily been joined by

conversations about identity abolishment, queerness, domestication, and

more. Stories of Häftlinge who lashed back against the camp systems

could have been elaborated by countless stories of escape, mutual aid,

and nonviolent civil disobedience, all of which played a part in the

broader story of resistance in the Lagers. There are many questions and

topics that still remain unexplored for me.

The experience of gender and genderlessness in the camps is a

particularly amazing topic that I’d like to think more about, and that

might contrast well with anarchist rhetoric about gender abolition.

Primo Levi remembers how disturbing it was to work next to female

prisoners who had lost all outwards demarcations of femininity, and also

how demoralizing and shameful it was for him to be put to work in a

German laboratory where he, in his genderless state, was forced to work

alongside outwardly presenting German women.[255] What insights about

gender and the desire to abolish it can we take from his and other

experiences of the violent eradication of gender within the camps?

The topic of Nazis and ecological destruction is also one that I feel

intrigued by. The Nazis, and particularly Himmler, had an obsession with

rendering wild spaces into agricultural utopias, which meant that many

camp inmates were put to work doing broadscale landscape architecture.

Auschwitz itself was right at the junction of two major rivers, a

well-known flood plain that required an enormous amount of destructive

landscaping to make hospitable for the camp. Filip Müller notes that

much of this water became grossly contaminated by a “black,

evil-smelling ooze” that seeped up from mass burial sites during hot

summer months. The Nazis’ relationship to nature is particularly

interesting considering news from the Hambach Forest where a small group

of land defenders are working to protect some of Germany’s last

old-growth forests against the largest, most sinister earth-eating

machines in the world. I’ve been recently informed that whole villages

around the mining site are being evicted under Nazi-era laws.

Lastly, I am very curious to know of the experiences of anarchists in

the camps — I know they were there, I just haven’t been able to find

any. If anyone knows of any memoirs or books that reference specific

anarchist Häftlinge, I would greatly appreciate the heads up.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to my parents for your support, my mom for being such a solid

research assistant, and to Amber for helping me find space in my life to

pursue this subject.

Big ups to Semo Distro for keeping me immersed in rad literature, and to

The Armando Del Moro Library for your patience with my overdue books.

This book is dedicated to my grandmother, whose tenacity and strength

brought me into this world, and who continues to inspire me daily.

And to all those living recalcitrant lives.

(And to K, for punching a Nazi in the face while I was busy writing

this.)

[1] Langbein 2

[2] Garlinski 158. The occasional use of superlatives throughout this

text, as well as my exclusive focus on the Nazi holocaust, is not meant

to exceptionalize this particular history above any other experiences of

suffering or genocide. History has tragically given us far too many

“frightful and hopeless” struggles to play such petty games.

[3] “Recalcitrance”: Resisting authority or control; not obedient or

compliant; hard to manage.

[4] Dark Mountain 23

[5] Goldstein 68. Here Goldstein is describing the endless stream of

corpses leaving the Warsaw Ghetto.

[6] Zlodey 213

[7] A Conversation Between Anarchists 15

[8] In Cold Blood 9

[9] To Our Friends 29

[10] Bæden Vol. II 8

[11] I have chosen the phrase anarcho-nihilism to specify the particular

collision of anarchist and nihilist thinking. Some believe that nihilism

is a strain of anarchism (Aragorn!), while others have argued that the

anti-capitalist position is inherently nihilist (Uncontrollable), both

of which render the phrase “anarcho-nihilist” redundant. Phrases like

“political nihilism”, “strategic nihilism”, “conscious nihilism”,

“anarchist nihilism”, “nihilist anarchism”, “active nihilism” and “black

anarchy” all seem to point towards the moment when nihilism emerges from

its ennui to take on the existent. Because I approached nihilism from an

anarchist lens, the phrase “anarcho-nihilism” seemed a good fit, though

at points, for ease of reading, I have simply referred to this tendency

as “nihilism”

[12] Nihilism, Anarchy, and the 21^(st) Century 19

[13] “‘Both sexes favoured blue-tinted spectacles and high boots. Other

common features were a heavy walking-stick and a rug flung over the

shoulders in cold weather; they called it a plaid, but it was not

necessarily a tartan.’ This, coupled with huge beards for men and bobs

for women, a voracious appetite for cigarettes, an unwashed dirty

appearance, and rude and outspoken behavior made the New People a sight

to behold.” (Nihilism, Anarchy, and the 21^(st) Century 7)

[14] Nihilism, Anarchy, and the 21^(st) Century 8, 12

[15] Which Wikipedia currently claims to be the busiest and widest

stretch of highway in the world!

[16] Attentat 150

[17] A word from which anarcho-nihilism has largely severed itself.

[18] “Lagers”: Nazi concentration camps.

[19] See Wayne Price’s The Meaning of World War II for a useful

anarchist interpretation of World War II.

[20] Langbein 2

[21] “Häftlinge”: German for “prisoners”, referring throughout this text

specifically to concentration camp inmates.

[22] Churchill 308

[23] Agamben 167

[24] Agamben 157–159

[25] Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

[26] Hitler’s preferred term for the “undesirable and unnecessary”

members of society.

[27] Huge respect to those holocaust survivors who have transformed

their experiences into solidarity with other oppressed peoples,

particularly with Palestinians. Reuven Moskovitz, who broke the Gaza

blockade, said: “It is a sacred duty for me as a survivor to protest

against the persecution, the oppression, and the imprisonment of so many

people in Gaza, including more than 800,000 children....I as a Holocaust

survivor cannot live with the fact that the State of Israel is

imprisoning an entire people behind fences.”

[28] I hold fast to Adelaide Hautval’s caution: “I don’t think anybody

in the world today has the right to judgment or decision as to what he

himself would have done in those completely improbable conditions with

which one stood face to face in places like Auschwitz.”

[29] Ress 6

[30] Jan van Pelt 564

[31] Garlinski 38

[32] Laska 212; Langbein 52

[33] Garlinksi 132

[34] Wiesel III

[35] Jan van Pelt 583–5

[36] Jan van Pelt 566

[37] Edelman 21

[38] Laska 186

[39] Jan van Pelt 567. “Monad”: a single-celled organism, a totally

separated entity.

[40] Garlinski 33

[41] Jan van Pelt 563

[42] Langbein 25

[43] Langbein 26

[44] Survival in Auschwitz 39

[45] The Drowned and The Saved 38

[46] Though in the later years of the war the sheer volume of inmates

and the heightened demand for workers resulted in some Jews attaining

prominent positions.

[47] Garlinski 171

[48] Langbein 159

[49] Meers 13; Müller 178. Müller makes reference to the piepels, or

Bum-boys, who “served the pleasures” of those above them.

[50] Langbein 81

[51] Rashke 2; Garlinski 219

[52] Langbein 53. Hannah Arendt applied this concept to totalitarian

states in general: “Totalitarian domination as a form of government...

bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the

world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences

of man,” (Jan van Pelt 560).

[53] Survival in Auschwitz 33–4

[54] Survival in Auschwitz 29. This interaction occurred when Levi,

parched and starving, reached his hand out of a transport train to grab

an icicle that might assuage his thirst. A guard ran over to knock the

icicle out of his hand for no explicable reason.

[55] Survival in Auschwitz 56

[56] Survival in Auschwitz 34

[57] Pilecki 14

[58] Pilecki 66. The missing prisoner was Tadeusz Wiejowski, who had

escaped from the then-primitive walls of Auschwitz, but was rearrested

the following year and shot.

[59] One of the prisoner doctors, who provided treatment to the

relentless barrows of inmates that day, recalls how terrible it was to

“see these men, comatose, half-conscious, crawling, reeling like drunks,

babbling incoherently and with difficulty, covered with spittle and

foaming at the mouth, dying, gasping out their last breath” (Garlinski

25).

[60] Langbein 89

[61] Garlinski 68; Langbein 89. In December 1942, due to the

overwhelming need for workers, the policy of collective responsibility

was eased and resistance groups began to organize escapes (Garlinski

141).

[62] Partisan fighters were bands of anti-Nazi militants who fought from

behind enemy lines and occasionally conspired with concentration camp

resistance organizations. Often those who escaped from the camps joined

the partisans.

[63] Garlinski 132

[64] Langbein 215.

[65] Garlinski 133

[66] Langbein 56

[67] Garlinski 135

[68] Garlinski 135. When word of this tactic caught on, the Political

Department instituted a new policy that all lethal injections be cleared

with them, so as to prevent assassination of their precious informants.

[69] Garlinski 135

[70] Langbein 216. In Sachsenhausen, for instance, one particularly

insidious informant named Kuhnke was tactically disempowered by the

resistance group, who were able to exploit disagreements among the SS in

such a way that Kuhnke was removed from his position and beaten

severely, ending the terrible period of the special commission in that

camp.

[71] Garlinski 133

[72] Wasowicz 98; Garlinski 240

[73] Wasowicz 52

[74] Wasowicz 243

[75] Langbein 307

[76] Langbein 303. At least two camps, Dora and Ravensbrück, saw mass

refusals of these premiums from inmates.

[77] Langbein 315

[78] Langebein 316

[79] Langbein 304

[80] Wasowicz 245; Langbein 307

[81] Langbein 304–5

[82] Wasowics 247, 250

[83] Langbein 305

[84] Wasowicz 246

[85] Langbein 306–308

[86] Langbein 312

[87] Wasowicz 246

[88] DEGOB: Protocol 588

[89] DEGOB: Protocol 407

[90] DEGOB Protocol 704

[91] Langbein 305

[92] Langbein 305

[93] Langbein 306

[94] Langbein 306

[95] Wasowicz 247

[96] Wasowicz 249

[97] Langbein 304

[98] Langbein 304

[99] Anarchy and Nihilism: Consequences 13

[100] 325: An Insurgent Zine of Social War and Anarchy 20

[101] Nihilism, Anarchy and the 21^(st) Century 18

[102] A Conversation Between Anarchists 23

[103] A Conversation Between Anarchists 22

[104] Wasowicz 119

[105] In Cold Blood 10

[106] De Acosta 9–10

[107] Bæden Vol. I 12–13

[108] A word that also has a strong history in Lacanian psychoanalysis,

poststructuralism, and feminist theory.

[109] Bæden Vol. I 66, 43, 44, 55

[110] Bæden Vol. I 44, 73, 53

[111] A Conversation Between Anarchists 11

[112] Zlodey 6

[113] A Conversation Between Anarchists 12

[114] Attentat 109

[115] The Invisible Committee 94

[116] Bæden Vol. I 45

[117] Langbein 289

[118] Langbein 289

[119] Garlinksi 237

[120] Lévy-Hass 69

[121] Langbein 279

[122] Langbein 289

[123] Langbein 295

[124] Rashke 62

[125] Müller 72

[126] Langbein 192

[127] Lengyel 112

[128] Jan Van Pelt 572; Wasiwicz 47; Garlinksi 237; Langbein 280

[129] Laska 180

[130] “Prayer for Katerina Horovitz”

[131] Langbein 280

[132] Müller 87

[133] Langbein 280

[134] Langbein 280

[135] Bæden Vol. II 41

[136] Survival in Auschwitz 88. “Musselman” is also the German word for

Muslim. Though there’s no certainty on the origins of this slang, one

theory poses that the physical symptoms of a person near death — unable

to stand, rocking back and forth, etc. — evokes images of a Muslim

praying. Problematic to be sure, and disturbing beyond belief.

[137] Edelman 39

[138] Levi 116

[139] Langbein 53

[140] Lévy-Hass 60

[141] Jan Van Pelt 557

[142] Gurewitsch 301

[143] Bæden Vol. I 109

[144] Benjamin 257

[145] Nihilism, Anarchy and the 21^(st) Century 14

[146] Bæden Vol. I 12

[147] Benjamin, qtd. in Bæden Vol. I 108

[148] Bæden Vol. I 24

[149] Bæden Vol. I 88

[150] Bæden Vol. I 109

[151] Bæden Vol. I 109

[152] Who often speak the same language as nihilists, but arrive at some

different conclusions.

[153] The Invisible Committee 94

[154] Benjamin 262

[155] Rolling Thunder 146

[156] In Cold Blood 10

[157] Wasowicz 121

[158] Wasowicz 119–120

[159] Langbein 172

[160] Wasowicz 122

[161] Wasowicz 119

[162] Wasowicz 119

[163] Garlinski 19

[164] Pilecki 13

[165] Wasowicz; Garlinski; Langbein

[166] Garlinski 57

[167] Auschwitz, Birkenau and Monowitz were sub-camps of the same

broader Auschwitz complex.

[168] Those very fortunate few who were ever granted a release from

Auschwitz were required to sign a release form stating that they had “no

complaints” about the camp and that they were “satisfied” with their

stay (Rees 30).

[169] Langbein 245; Garlinski 66

[170] Garlinski 97–98

[171] Langbein 58

[172] Langbein 59. Though no concrete links can be drawn between the

broadcast and the change of plan, many historians have deduced that it

played at least some role in the decision.

[173] “During the summer of 1944, nearly half a million Hungarian Jews

were transported to Auschwitz and gassed, shot, or thrown alive into the

ovens and burning pits of Birkenau” (Henry 178).

[174] Tec 135; Langbein 286. At around the time the revolt was being

planned, the SS did in fact begin the process of liquidating the

Sonderkommando by announcing that two hundred of them would be

transferred to a sub-camp. These two hundred were loaded onto a wagon

with food for the journey, and then taken directly to a gas chamber

nearby. Attempting to hide this slaughter from the rest of the

Sonderkommando, the SS men took the bodies to the crematoria at night

and for the first time in the history of Auschwitz burned the bodies

themselves (Langbein 286).

[175] Langbein 285

[176] Qtd. In Langbein 285

[177] Jan Van Pelt 588

[178] Gurewitsch 367; Langbein 285, Garlinski 238

[179] Rees 257

[180] Langbein 288

[181] Langbein 288; Garlinski 239

[182] Filip Müller was part of the Sonderkommando that revolted, but in

his memoir he recounts that he spent most of the uprising hiding inside

of a chimney, and was able to escape into the general population of

inmates later that day.

[183] Rees 257

[184] Gurewitsch 303

[185] Rees 253–257

[186] Garlinski 254

[187] Langbein 54

[188] Langbein 407 ff.44

[189] Langbein 407 ff.44

[190] Langbein 77. Nevertheless, even Eugen Kogon, one of the most vocal

critics of the Communist party in Buchenwald, emphasizes that “the

positive achievement of the Communists can hardly be overestimated.”

[191] Langbein 191

[192] Van Pelt 587

[193] Bakunin argued that “political and organizational forms had held

the social revolution back” and “that hierarchical and political means

could never be used to gain social revolutionary ends,” (Do or Die).

Malatesta argued: “in order to achieve their ends, anarchist

organizations must in their constitution and operation, remain in

harmony with the principles of anarchism; that is, they must know how to

blend the free action of individuals with the necessity and the joy of

co-operation which serve to develop the awareness and initiative of

their members,” (Do or Die). Renzo Novatore... well, he just hated

organizations.

[194] Often the critiques from these two tendencies are nearly

indistinguishable, though the results may differ drastically.

[195] 325 : An Insurgent Zine of Social War and Anarchy 25

[196] A Conversation Between Anarchists

[197] “Hic Nihil, Hic Salta!”

[198] “Against The Corporations of Death” 1–2.

[199] Anarchist Federation in Italy

[200] Venona Q 25

[201] Venona Q 25

[202] Attentat 146

[203] Bialowitz 32; Rashke 59

[204] Rashke vii

[205] Rashke 61, 62, 146, 98

[206] Rashke 59

[207] Rashke 162; Langbein 296. Sasha’s first week at the camp gave rise

to legends. During this week he led his fellow POWs in a sing-along of a

popular Russian resistance song, poured his ration of soup onto the

ground to display his horror at watching the callous beating of the cook

during its preparation, miraculously chopped through a tree in less than

two minutes as part of a life-or-death challenge from a Ukrainian guard,

and then refused the pack of cigarettes the guard offered him as a

prize. Any one of these defiant acts was of course grounds for execution

in the camp (Rashke 162–4).

[208] Bialowitz 113–115; Langbein 298

[209] Rashke 298

[210] At least one account states that the inmates were able to clear

out the armory (Langbein 70), while other seems to indicate that the

armory was never reached (Bialowitz).

[211] Bialowitz 140

[212] Bialowitz 194

[213] Bialowitz 194; Langbein 300

[214] Langbein 70

[215] Raichman reports witnessing the defiant last stand of one teenager

in the hair-cutting chamber, who upon seeing all of the naked women

crying, implored them to stop going to their deaths as cowards, and to

instead laugh in the faces of their murderers. “All stand as if frozen

to the spot. The murderers look around. They become even wilder and the

girl laughs in their faces until she leaves,” (Raichman 34).

[216] Much to the Nazis’ dismay, the blood had seeped its way up past

the layers of ash and sand, and so better methods of hiding their deeds

needed to be found. After the camp guards failed to devise a way to

adequately burn thousands of corpses per day, the SS called in a

specialist nicknamed “The Artist” who taught them the proper methodology

and supervised the construction of enormous ovens (Raichman 85–86).

[217] Raichman 112, 56, 121. To add to the insanity of Treblinka, the

camp even housed a zoo where wild bears and foxes from the surrounding

forests were caged for the entertainment of the guards.

[218] Langbein 290

[219] Langbein 291

[220] Julian Chorazycki, one of the original organizers of the revolt,

had managed to secure purchase of weapons from a corrupt Ukrainian

guard, but when an SS officer spotted the stack of money in his pocket

Chorazycki used a cover story to protect his conspirators and attacked

the officer with a hospital dissecting knife. (Langbein 290)

[221] Langbein 291

[222] Langbein 291

[223] Langbein 292

[224] Langbein 294

[225] Once again, a great deal of patience was required to strike at the

right moment. The difference between deferral and patience rests on

one’s proven commitment to action.

[226] ITS do not explicitly identify as nihilists, but certainly have a

nihilistic bent.

[227] Actualizing Collapse

[228] A Conversation Between Anarchists 4

[229] A Conversation Between Anarchists 5. A similar observation is made

by the Invisible Committee, who write: “Organizing is acting in

accordance with a common perception... without this binding agent,

gestures dissolve without a trace into nothingness, lives have the

texture of dreams, and uprisings end up in school-books,” (To our

friends 17).

[230] Sun Still Rises 1

[231] Sim Still Rises 10

[232] 325: An Insurgent Zine of Social War and Anarchy 23

[233] The Collected Communiques of Individualists Tending Toward the

Wild 25

[234] Ibid 71. In light of much criticism, ITS later reconsidered this

war on leftist organizations and opted instead for a policy of simply

ignoring them, while focusing attacks exclusively on the

“Techno-industrial System.”

[235] Ibid 25

[236] Actualizing Collapse 21. I have just learned that RS has declared

itself morte as of August 2015, and has divided into several smaller

informal organizations, some anonymous, others of which will make their

names known soon.

[237] Anarchy and Nihilism: Consequences

[238] “Hic Nihil Hic Salta!”

[239] The Invisible Committee 219

[240] Berlant 24

[241] Ibid

[242] Ibid 2

[243] Garlinski 70

[244] As Sasha did for the inmates of Sobibór when they asked about the

possibility of being rescued by partisans (Rashke 171)

[245] Once again, not explicitly nihilist, but certainly written with a

nihilistic critique.

[246] Attentat 149, 152

[247] Levi 60

[248] Wiesel xv

[249] Benjamin 255

[250] You Can’t Shoot Us All

[251] Bæden Vol. I 104

[252] Bæden Vol. I 105

[253] Venona Q 28

[254] Müller 151

[255] Levi 142