I thought that guards at Nazi concentration/extermination camps were SS volunteers but now I’m not so sure. I just read that some members of the Einsatzgruppen (death squads) were there as punishment so it’s not a far stretch to think that maybe some guards were at the camps as punishment. What’s the straight dope?
Well, the SS was an all-volunteer unit, selected for “aryan-ness” & loyalty to Hitler.
As for camp guards, who can make sweeping statements?
Some might have been punished, other might, God help us, have asked for the assisgnment. It might have been a place to assign wounded SS personnel, who weren’t fit for the battlefield.
Or, they might just have been assigned.
I’d search, but my 5-month old illness has already studded my sleep with nightmares.
This might not be a very profound answer - some were more or less forced to do the job (stressing the “more or less”), yet most weren’t.
But maybe I do not quite get the point of the question. Is it about voluntarism vs. structural forces? Or am being just a wee bit adademical here, and you only meant : what was it like in those days, empirically speaking? (well, it was pretty much a mixed mess on the micro-level - as with all such matters; but that doesn’t explain too much, does is?)
And don’t forget about the kapos.
Not every death camp guard could be rightfully called a volunteer. My father grew up in the Ukraine and was still a little to young for induction to the red army when the Germans took his village. Because of his age and his size (he never grew over 5 foot 4) he was not deemed suitable for “security work” and spent the rest of the war working on a farm in what later became East Germany. Several years ago another Ukrainian living not far from here (John Demjanjuk)was deported and tired in Israel charged with being a particularly sadistic death camp guard called “Ivan the Terrible.” I must say I found considerable respect for the Israeli judicial system in that when the evidence was not found to conclusively prove Demjanjuk was the guard in question but only that he had been a death camp guard, and because Demjanjuk had been detained in prison for seven years (which I am led to believe is a typical sentence for having been a death camp guard) he was returned to his suburban Cleveland home.
Following his repatriation Demjanjuks home became the focus of protracted protest (in a manner I found while somewhat understandable, rather unfair and not to mention unkind). I discussed this at that time with my father who has always been quite reluctant to talk about that period in his life and for the first time he opened up. The nazi’s weren’t taking volunteers of their captive peoples, not in the sense we would think of it. He was too young and too small to walk a post so they made use of him as they could but he told me that with my size, 6 foot 3 (same genetics but I didn’t have Stalin around to starve me as a child) I would have been given a simple(sic) choice, which end of the rifle I would prefer to stand on.
I’m not saying that this was the case every where the Germans captured in W.W.II but this is the impression conveyed to me by someone who was actually there.