Blessed is the match consumed

in kindling flame.

Blessed is the flame that burns

in the secret fastness of the heart.

Blessed is the heart with strength to stop

its beating for honor’s sake.

Blessed is the match consumed

in kindling 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.

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.

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?”

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. 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. 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.” 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.” 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. 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.” 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.” 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.”

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. 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.” Aragorn! traces the history of nihilism to 19th 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. 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”. 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. 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.” 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. 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 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. 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”. Most of us alive today experience nothing near the brutality of Treblinka; however the mechanisms that were used to subjugate Häftlinge, 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.

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). 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 20th century, infecting prisoners with malaria plasmodia, infecting death row prisoners with pellagra, or testing the effects of nuclear radiation on general populations. 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. 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 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.

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. 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”, to “shatter the adversaries’ capacity to resist”, and as one survivor of Auschwitz wrote: “it would have been impossible to create worse conditions for resistance, a more perverse and brutal system.” 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. 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”. 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. 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. 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.” 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.” 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.

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.” 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. 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.” 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). 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. 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. 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.”

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. 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.” 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.” 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. 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). 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. 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.” 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. This punishment killed approximately two hundred inmates, and several hundred more were hospitalized. 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. 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. Outside of Auschwitz, partisan fighters enacted a ‘no-shoot’ policy in the vicinity of the camp for the same reasons.

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.

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. 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. 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.” 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. 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. The best-known Gestapo informer in Auschwitz was given a sweater containing typhus-infected lice that killed him within weeks. Sometimes the organizations were able to use social manipulation to have the informant stripped of their privileges and removed from the special commissions. 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. 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.

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.” 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. 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. On the other end of the spectrum, the Nazis experimented with “premiums,” petty benefits offered to inmates who showed high productivity. 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. 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. 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.” 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.” 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. 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. In Flöha, French engineers constructed excessively-heavy airplane wings that would pass inspection but certainly cause problems in the air. In Auschwitz, women sabotaged the production of plant-based rubber by simply burning half of the harvested seeds. 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. Rockets produced in Dora had inexplicable quantities of urine in the electronic components, courtesy of the Russian inmates. 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.

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.” 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.” 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.”

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. 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. 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. 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.

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.” 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. 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!” 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.” 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. 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?” 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.” 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.

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.

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. 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.”

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.” 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.

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, 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. 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.” 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.” 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.” 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.

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 ). This section will set out to explore this connection and to understand what is meant by the anarcho-nihilist ambition to “stop time.” 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. 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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.”

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.” 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.” 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!”

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. 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.” In another version, her retaliation came after Schillinger told her to dance naked. In another, the woman was named Franceska Mann, and she retaliated when Schillinger snatched the bra off of her body. 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. The incident “gave rise to legends” and reminded inmates that SS men “were also mortal”. 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.

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. 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. 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.” 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.

Survival meant forgetting about your past life, abandoning thoughts of future liberation, and sinking deeply into the eternal present: “Survival meant thinking of today.” 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.” 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.” 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.” 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.” 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 21st century. 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.

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.” 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.” 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.” 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.” 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.” As a rupture from oppressive chronological modes, it contains “unlimited possibilities” and “threatens to interrupt the continuum of history.” The Invisible Committee, 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.” Here we might remember those rebels who spent the first evening of the July revolution of 1830 shooting out clock towers in Paris, 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.” 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.” 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. 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. 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. 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.” 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. 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. 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.” 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.”

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.

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. 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. 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), and sometimes simply using the postal service (by bribing camp censors for pre-stamped envelopes). 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. 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.” 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.”

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. 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. The response of the organization was one of reluctance — they felt that the “time was not ripe for a general uprising.” 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.

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.” 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. Whatever the prompt, on October 7, 1944, at about 1:30pm, several h