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The Chosun Journal
Comparative Analysis of Concentration
Camps in Nazi Germany, the Former Soviet Union and North Korea
Presented at The 1st International Conference on North Korean
Human Rights and Refugees (Seoul, 1999)
by
Pierre Rigoulot
Editor, Social History Commentary, France;
contributing writer of the
NK section in The Black Book of Communism (Harvard Univ. Press, 1999)
I. Introduction
This
paper aims to compare North Korean prison camps with Nazi and Soviet camps to
analyze their similarities and differences. Such a comparison in Europe at
least is a daring venture, for our knowledge of North Korean camps is new and
still very limited. The source of our limited information is in the effort of
some people, including the organizers of this symposium, and in the
testimonies of a small number of those who defected in the past ten years:
Chul-hwan KANG and Hyuk AHN on Yodok Camp No. 15, Myung-chul AHN on several
camps and Dong-chul CHOI on Camp No. 11. In contrast, hundreds of books have
been published about the Soviet and Nazi camps, and numerous archives are
available for the study of these camps. Despite this imbalance, some points
of comparison are worth making for they enable us to consider North Korea
free from particularism and, I dare say, from exoticism.
The North Korean case is, in the first
place, the problem and tragedy of the Korean people. If, however, we can
build a bridge between the Soviet and Nazi camps that have so preoccupied the
Europeans and the North Korean camps, it will help to raise concern in Europe
for the latter as well.
Before going into the main body of my
presentation, I would like to make a brief clarification on the methodology
used in this paper. I have focused on only one among many facets of
repression namely, concentration camps. Famine as in USSR in the past and in
North Korea today, massacres that occur outside concentration camps (for
example, the massacre in the ghetto of Warsaw, or the activities of the
special Nazis groups, massacres carried out by Soviets in Vinitaza and
Katyn), and the horror in the North Korean prisons are all important issues
of themselves. Recently, the French media featured Soon-ok LEE's account of
her experiences in the political prison, and it was appalling to say the
least.
Among these important issues, I have
chosen to deal only with the concentration camps in North Korea, i.e. a
system of concentration camps comprising ten large camps (eleven, according
to Mr. Dong-chul CHOI who was an officer in the North Korean State Security
Department in the 1980s) that house between 150,000 to 200,000 inmates. This
comparative study is composed of four parts. In the first two sections, I
will draw some analogies between North Korean camps and the Soviet and Nazi
camps. In the latter two, I will focus on their differences. The four
sections may be summarized as follows:
1.
North Korean camps, as are Nazi camps and Soviet gulags,
constitute an element of the totalitarian system, which is made up of: single
and compulsory ideology, one-party dictatorship, Fuhrerprinzip, trend towards
the absorption of civil society by the political sector, use of terror, and
most importantly, a permanent camp system.
2.
North Korean camps are a component of the International
Communist system. North Korean leaders have been trained, supported and armed
by communist states for decades.
3.
North Korean camps are within the Asiatic cultural sphere
and exhibit strong Chinese influence.
4.
Finally, North Korean camps show their own specific features
that we must underline.
II.
North Korean Camps Are Camps of Totalitarianism
A)
Like Soviet and Nazi camps, North Korean camps form a system, that is to say
a standing reality, organically linked with political power. It appears and
disappears with the regime, and builds a body with its own rules and economy.
The first Soviet camps were set up by
Lenin and Trotski in 1918. The first Nazi camps were inaugurated immediately
after the seizure of power by Hitler in 1933. I have no evidence of the
existence of camps in 1948-1950 period in North Korea, but there is no doubt
that camps were filled up just after the 1950-1953 war with real or supposed
enemies of the regime; and these camps are still in operation.
From this point of view, Nazi, Soviet and
North Korean camps have no relation with the temporary camps that arose in
wartimes, for example, during the so-called Spanish
"reconcentration" in Cuba in 1896, or in the beginning of the 20th
century when the British forces imprisoned the Dutch in South Africa.
Moreover, these camps are completely different from the strategic hamlets
built by Americans and South-Vietnamese in the 1960s.
B)
North Korean camps have developed in a course similar to those of the Nazi
and Soviet camps, in that they have shown a trend toward increasing the
number of prisoners from more diversified classes.
North Korea first started with
imprisoning pro-South Korea sympathizers and political foes purged by KIM Il-sung.
In the case of the Nazis, they first interned political enemies such as
communists and democrats and proceeded to expand the scope and to intensify
the force of repression. As a result, even those groups that posed little
threat to the state including Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and diverse asocial
groups were forcefully detained in these camps. The Soviets, on the other
hand, commenced with the imprisonment of tzarists and open opponents to their
regime before striking reformist socialists, anarchists, trotskists, and
finally, diverse suspects and millions of the so-called foes, kulaks, who
were the wealthier peasants.
C)
Nazi, Soviet and North Korean powers share the willingness to deprive inmates
of their moral, political and legal identity.
1) Legal identity:
People who are arrested are usually sent to camps by a simple administrative
decision.
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USSR: the role of the "special conference" (OSSO)
and the flexibility of the sentencing.
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Nazi Germany: Arrest is made of the targeted group as a
whole, without trial and upon political decision.
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North Korea: Security agents arrest people without trial and
without informing them of the length of their sentence.
2) Political
identity:
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Notwithstanding some slight variations, the internment in
Soviet Camps means loss of civil rights, and renewed or prolonged penalties
in the form of assigned residence.
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The case of Nazi camps is similar where the victim is
deprived of civil rights and subjected to arbitrary decisions.
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In the North Korean concentration camps, the deprivation of
civil rights also exists but in a more complete and definitive form. The
exception is Yodok Camp No. 15, where the families of the
"criminals", especially those who are deemed
"recoverable" are confined.
3) Moral identity:
The negation of the individual's legal and political identity is accompanied
by the negation of the individual as a moral being. In the three kinds of
camps we found:
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efforts to compromise the victims with their executioners
(use of prisoners as chiefs of work brigades or chiefs of huts in Soviet
Union or Nazi Germany, and as chiefs of working groups in North Korea);
surveillance by informants and obligatory pledge of loyalty.
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degrading standards of living (constant hunger, low grade of
sanitary conditions, lack of medical supplies). One may do a comparative
study on the varying conditions of food supply in the different concentration
camps. The conditions of low hygiene and malnutrition in today's North Korea
may be comparable to what Margarete Buber-Neumann experienced in Karaganda
(Kazakhstan) in 1938-1939. When Buber-Neumann entered the Ravensbr?k camp,
after being delivered by Stalin to Hitler, she was offered a towel, a soap
and a toothbrush!
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isolation - usually more complete in Nazi and North Korean
camps - from the outside world and even from their beloved family also under
arrest (Here, some contrasts favorable in the case of North Korea must be
made regarding Yodok Camp 15). Compulsory abortion, disappearance of newborn
children, separation of mother and baby can be observed everywhere.
Generally speaking, negation of
individuality and humanity has reached critical levels in concentration
camps. This does not refer only to the kind of dehumanization exhibited by a
guard in Yodok Camp who admonished a pregnant woman, "How can a
counter-revolutionary and an enemy of the people such as yourself dare to
bear a child?" Such brutalities as the use of inmates as targets for
shooting practices in North Korea or in medical experiments in Nazi Germany
are only part of the story. Testimonies on the three types of camps usually
confirm the growth of inhumanity and insensitivity among the inmates
themselves. Chul-hwan KANG spoke to me about fathers driven by hunger to
steal food from their own children. Robert Antelme in his famous book about
Gandersheim camp under Nazi Germany described the inmates stealing pieces of
bread and potato peelings from one another. In his Memories from Kolyma, Varlam Chalamov, a long-term inmate, also
depicted the loss of humanity in the concentration camp.
D)
Finally, the three camps share the same functions that are simultaneously
found only in the camps of totalitarian countries: to punish, to isolate, to
use, to eliminate and to exterminate.
Elimination is achieved by the very low
conditions of work, nutrition and hygiene. Mortality rate can be different
depending on time periods and even among camps in the same country. It is
always important and necessary that we be cautious about the classical
distinction between extermination - something wanted, conceived, and
organized for itself - and elimination. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in his Gulag Archipelago that the only thing
that the gulag lacked from looking like Nazi extermination centers was poison
gas.
North Korean camps also lack gas, but
they are equal to Soviet camps in their severe restriction of food and
sanitary conditions and extremely demanding work quotas that induce the
deaths of the inmates. Elimination in the North Korean camps aims at the
inmates as a group rather than individuals, which is similar to the Nazi
extermination of the Jews as a racial group. Usually in Nazi, Soviet and
North Korean camps, the weakest are the first victims of such phenomenal and
arbitrary crimes. We must acknowledge that in North Korea, though global,
anonymous and phenomenal, the extermination is itself the goal. The open goal
of the North Korean authorities in the concentration camps detaining those
who are "beyond recovery" is to eradicate three generations of
their inmates. The verb used by North Korean authorities, myulhada, means 'to exterminate'.
Those who are "beyond recovery"
are exterminated gradually and over a lengthy term when compared to the case
of Jews, whose extermination by the Nazis was carried out on a short-term (at
least, from 1943, of those who were not selected to work).
E)
The last typical feature of the camps in the totalitarian states: The
detainees are crushed in the name of an ideology that puts a hierarchic order
among social, political or racial groups in relation to the group that is
considered the ideal or the superior one.
It is why one can find
"normal", "severe", and "special" camps in
USSR, fake camps (Theresinstadt), camps of internment (as Ravensbruck was for
German inmates), camps for elimination (Buchenwald, Struthof) and centers of
extermination (as Sobibor or Auschwitz-Birkenau) in Nazi Germany, centers of
forced labor (for detentions shorter than a year), one camp, namely Yodok,
for people who are recoverable and camps of life detention for people who are
beyond recovery, such as Seng-hori camp in North Korea.
III.
North Korean Camps Are Communist Camps
I
will now underline the analogies between North Korean camps and Soviet camps.
A)
Detainment is justified by a historicist ideology. It is in the name of the
People or of the working class fighting for socialism, and, of course, in one
name of the leader who symbolizes them, that the power is used to repress and
throw men and women into camps.
B)
Forced work is used in Soviet camps and in Yodok as a punishment as well as a
means of regeneration. In other words, it is through forced work that one can
come back to the proper practice of the popular class: a physical effort
aiming at a transformation of Nature. By adopting the working class behaviour
one can rediscover the social origin or political stand in accordance with
the Communist state will.
In addition, forced work is a way of
elimination in North Korean camps such as Yodok and especially in the camps
for those beyond recovery. But even from this point of view we do not depart
from communist conceptions. In Soviet or North Korean camps, forced labour
means the fulfillment of a norm. And the norm has to be conceived in a
planned and centralized system of production typical of all communist states.
Forced labour has not the same crucial
place in Nazi camp system. Dachau in the 1930s was not a forced labour camp.
It was the breakout of the war and the first difficulties of the German army,
that led to the use of the inmates' labour. In the view of the Nazis, the
labour was not a means of achieving redemption.
Thus, North Korean camps belong to a
communist tradition, like that of the Chinese Laogai or the Soviet gulag. In
Yodok, prisoners work in the fields; they fell trees or work in gold mines
and pug pits. Works that are more difficult and clandestine are open in other
camps: navvy work for military sites, for instance.
It seems, however, that I have to bring
out the differences of the North Korean historicist ideology (It will be a
good transition to my third and fourth parts on the specificity of North
Korean camps!). In North Korea, the so-called "good origin" has a
major significance. To be born in a "heroic family", i.e. a family
of which a member was marked out as a hero by the Communist Party (even if it
took place 50 years ago), is to have near genetic superiority. Chul-hwan
KANG's mother, for instance, was not sent to Yodok Camp with her children
(although she was, as they were, member of the family of a so-called
political criminal) because her father's family was marked out as a heroic
family. The children went to camp - at seven and nine years of age - and the
Party ordered the daughter of a hero to cut off the rotten branch which represented
her family and which was contaminated by an act of treason.
Such a point of view grazes a racial
conception, really at stake in North Korea - a confirmation being brought by
some eugenic practices. Here we are sent back, of course, to Nazism.
The next two parts will confirm
particularities of North Koreans camps in contrast with those of Hitler and
Stalin.
IV.
North Korean Camps Are Asiatic Camps
Guards
in Yodok Camp used to say: "There are only two medicines for the
complete eradication of influence of spoilt capitalist ideology: labor and
control." Here, "control" means more than the supervision by
guards, which can be found in Nazi and Soviet camps as well.
"Control" as commonly used by the Yodok guards includes ideological
control. In all communist camps in Asia, the transformation of the detainees
necessarily involves education of the detainees and their practice of
introspection. Such is the way to get rid of the "old man" as the
Scriptures would say.
Jean Pasqualini and Harry Wu gave a
complete view of these meetings of criticism and self-criticism, and of the
repeated autobiographies. These are found in the memoirs of detention in
camps of Vietnam and Laos as well. Many books were published in French about
the first Vietnam War (1945-1954) and about Vietnam after the seizure of
Saigon in 1975. A remarkable continuity can be noted in the way camp inmates
are dealt with. The communists of Vietnam used to organize many courses,
lectures, meetings with quizzes and songs. Complete with deadening labour, a
low-diet regime and promises of liberation contingent upon the
"ideological progress", they held a powerful weapon.
At Yodok Camp No. 15 - as well as in the
entire country - criticism and self-criticism meetings are organized twice a
week. A worship is owed to KIM Il-sung or KIM Jong-il. Lectures are given,
too, with daily reading of the Rodong
Shinmun and competition of reciting KIM Il-sung's New Year's Address by
heart.
It should also be noted that in Yodok,
sick, exhausted and starved inmates are given three big copybooks, one
pen-holder and one ink pot. The first notebook is named "Notebook for
Assessment of Life" used in criticism and self-criticism sessions. The
second one is titled "Notebook about the Party Policy" in which
speeches by KIM Il-sung are noted. The third is the "Notebook of the
Revolutionary History" of KIM Il-sung and KIM Jong-il.
V.
Specificities of North Korean Camps
A)
The most striking specificity is the familial disposition of the North Korean
concentration camps. This can be interpreted in many ways:
1)
There is a clear distinction between the so-called political
criminal and his family (defined as all people living with him): The criminal
is sent to a camp with severe rules, usually for a life-term detention from
which there is little chance of release. But his family is usually sent to
the "normal" detention center in Yodok.
2)
In this camp, the family is not broken up as in the camps of
Nazi Germany and former USSR. It can be said that the families are detained
as a whole (with noteworthy exception of the criminal). They live in
"villages" and their lives roughly resemble the ordinary lives of
the poor peasants.
B)
In fact, the real name of each village is "Work Group 1, 2, 3,
etc." which signifies that in North Korea the camp encompasses the place
where inmates work and study. In Soviet and Nazi camps, the prisoner is taken
out of a camp limited by barbed wires to a work site located outside. In this
regard, a camp such as in Yodok - about 40 kilometers in diameter,
encompassing fields, pits, mines, "work groups" (alias villages),
schools for children, rivers, mountains, etc. - resembles more of a vast
reserve than a Soviet or Nazi camp.
C)
The third specificity of North Korean camps is the clear distinction between
the "usual offenders" and "political offenders". Here,
one must be careful about the term "political offenders" because an
inopportune word or an attempt to leave the country can send someone to the
camp. The term "usual offenders" must also be employed with care
because many of the accusations have one political meaning and origin. Given
these precisions, it must be underlined that no usual offender goes to a camp
(He is sent to a prison). North Korean camps are reserved for political
offenders. The North Korean system thus spares their camps one of the worst
nuisances of the Soviet or Nazi camps, namely the confrontation with the
criminal underworld, so well described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
VI. Conclusion
I
had hoped to throw some bridges between North Korean camps, and Soviet and
Nazi camps to draw greater attention from the European people to the former.
I believe the attempt was successful.
I would like to conclude with the
following remarks:
l
Each network of camps is so specific that even if it
is useful to compare them, it is wrong to put these networks on top of each
other and to grade them.
l
The difficulties in comparing the networks become
more important when we think of factors like war or peace being at stake or
the duration of the political regime producing the camps. For instance, as
World War II progressed, the Nazi network became very different from what it
was in 1933-1940 and added to its usual system of centers of extermination.
l
The life spans of the three systems are very
different: 70 years for the Soviet camps, nearly 50 years for North Korean
camps and only 12 years (half of them during the war) for Nazi camps.
Last but not least, the gulag and the Nazi camps do not exist anymore.
North Korean camps, however, still do. Our studies on them cannot be coldly
scholastic. Our efforts to expand the knowledge of these camps and to unveil
their nature, simultaneously entail deep feelings of indignation and
willingness to enlighten our struggle against totalitarianism for democracy
and human rights. Such knowledge and struggle can be shared by all mankind.
In this regard, North Korean camps are the concern of all.
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