What is the difference between a concentration camp and an extermination center?
Concentration camps were not designed as extermination centers. In a concentration camp like Dachau, the majority of people were brutalized in horrible circumstances, but the majority of people came out alive after about 18 months or so. So something extraordinary happens in the period we’re looking at. This place, Auschwitz, which is set up in the tradition of concentration camps, metamorphoses into a killing factory. And it’s the only place on this scale to do that. Elsewhere they set up localized killing factories-Treblinka’s the biggest of them-purely to kill people. But Auschwitz is the only one that forever combines these two functions. And it begins to evolve into a microcosm of the Nazi philosophy: As long as you’re useful to me, you can live; the second you’re not useful to me, I’ll kill you.
