The Horrific Entertainment of the Nazis in Concentration Camps

In certain concentration camps of the Nazi system, cruelty was not always a tool of control, but rather a resource to fill the voids of routine. The SS guards, surrounded by death and absolute obedience, developed forms of entertainment that turned violence into a game. In other camps, the female guards carried out everything that their sexual desires demanded with the prisoners. Among the most disturbing practices was the organization of sadistic games with prisoners. These were not punishments motivated by an infraction, nor forms of interrogation. They were shows staged for the pleasure of the guards with arbitrary rules, useless purposes, and lethal consequences. The horrific entertainments of the Nazis in the concentration camps. In winter, when forced labor became difficult due to ice or snow and the camp was paralyzed by the weather, the guards did not always endure the boredom. Not all of them were bureaucrats or desk officers. Many were young, hardened by war or ideology, men who had lived through the brutalization of the front and the impunity of the uniform.

Some of them organized physical competitions among the prisoners, forcing them to undress and run around the camp over the frozen mud or directly on the snow. It was about watching who fell first, who could endure the longest. They bet among themselves, shouted contradictory orders, and when one fell, they kicked him until he died or dragged him back to his barrack if he was still breathing. These games did not follow a routine established by the regulations, but arose spontaneously as energy discharges from those who lived in a system where they could do whatever they wanted without consequences. Sometimes groups of inmates were made to form and were ordered to perform improvised plays, always humiliating, where Jews had to parody their own religion, communists had to act out ridiculous speeches or homosexuals were forced to dance amid laughter. The same guards who had previously fired shots or supervised executions now laughed, bottles in hand, watching shows staged with bodies trembling from fear and cold.

One of the most common games consisted of making the prisoners sing. But not just any song they were forced to sing Nazi hymns, German folk songs, or military marches while marching in a circle or while being beaten. If someone sang out of tune or if his voice was weak, the punishment came immediately. Some more sadistic guards, if they saw a particularly weak prisoner, ordered him to sing alone in front of the others as if it were a recital. Sometimes they gave him a cap or a cane, forced him to dance, and when his body no longer responded, they all beat him. It was not an interrogation or an execution. It was entertainment. Strength games were also played. Groups of three or four prisoners were formed who had to push each other, lift stones, carry comrades on their shoulders, or maintain an uncomfortable posture for hours like a statue. The one who fell first was beaten. The one who lasted longer was forced to repeat it. Sometimes they were made to dig holes and then fill them back in over and over again. The goal was not to create a pit or move useful soil. It was to observe the desperation.

Cigarettes or bottles were wagered on how long each one would last before collapsing. The officers who participated knew perfectly well that these men were hungry, sick, wounded, but that made the game more interesting. It was about witnessing the exact moment the body gave out. Sadism combined with routine in absurd exercises repeated for hours. There was a game that consisted of making the prisoners jump like frogs across the yard from one end to the other without being allowed to stand up or stop. Another involved throwing objects into the mud and forcing the prisoners to retrieve them with their mouths. Occasionally, real food was placed among the trash as a form of mockery. Those who rushed to grab it were beaten. There were no written rules. The only constant was humiliation. Sometimes the guards involved the capos or privileged prisoners who were in charge of executing the logistics of the game, choosing the weakest, pushing them forward, keeping the line orderly, selecting who would sing, who would run, who would dance. This allowed the SS officers to maintain some distance, watching from the background with their arms crossed as if they were judges of a grotesque show.

From that position they commented, laughed, evaluated who seemed most broken, who cried first, who rebelled. If anyone raised his voice, the game ended in a public execution, and the others returned to their places trembling. Macabra humor was present. Sometimes they staged fictitious trials where one prisoner had to act as judge and another as the accused, charged with stealing a potato or conspiring. The rest of the group had to act as the jury and deliver verdicts which were always guilty. In the end, a ridiculous sentence was read and an execution was simulated which more than once ended up being real. The line between parody and death was thin, and the prisoners never knew if they would come out of one of those games alive. In other cases, the guards played among themselves, betting how many prisoners could die of cold during a night if they were left naked in the open, or if they could cross the camp, running between two rows of armed soldiers without being shot. It was a macabra sport, not made for camp control, but to break the prisoner’s spirit and amuse the jailer. There was no other logic. The rules were improvised according to the mood of the officer on duty. The only constant was dehumanization.

Sometimes even guards from other camps were invited as if they were special performances. The funniest prisoners, the thinnest or the clumsiest were saved for these occasions. They were displayed as clowns. They were given ridiculous hats, torn uniforms made to sing and dance in front of an audience that laughed while eating. These events were sometimes called camp cabarets, although there was no music or stage. Only exhausted bodies trembling with fear trying to survive one more day. The guards applauded. Some took photographs. Others wrote down names for the next performance. Sexual abuse. In the concentration camps of the Third Reich, the body of the prisoners no longer belonged to the individual, but to the system that had reduced it to a number, to a productive function, to an object. This physical and symbolic dispossession found one of its most atrocious forms in the sexual violence exercised by the SS guards. Far from being a marginal or clandestine practice, sexual abuse was institutionalized in multiple forms, especially in the camps where women were concentrated, such as Ravensbrook, but also in subcamps linked to factories where there was female labor.

The abuse was not only an outlet for impulses, but also an affirmation of power, another form of domination, a degrading spectacle for the prisoners and a normalized routine for the perpetrators. Relationships between guards and female prisoners could never be considered consensual. The imbalance of power was absolute. A single glance was enough to decide the fate of a woman, an extra portion of bread, permission to shower, one more day of life. In exchange, submission was demanded. Many of these relationships were seen within the camp as privileges, both by the aggressors and by the prisoners themselves, who often marginalized or despised the victims. But none could say no without risking punishments, transfers to punishment blocks, or even summary executions. In industrial camps such as Bukinvald or Avitz Monovitz, where women were used for textile or assembly tasks, the female barracks were generally isolated but accessible to the SS officers who patrolled or supervised production. The black uniform was enough as a key to enter any barrack, and many times the pretext was an inspection.

Once inside, one would be chosen, made to leave, and what happened afterward was rarely recorded. If the woman returned, she did so in silence. If not, the doubt remained whether she had been sent to another camp, punished, or killed. But everyone knew that none of this was exceptional. In Ravensbrook, the main women’s camp, the practices of sexual abuse were combined with medical experiments. Some officers selected prisoners for gynecological studies that were in reality mutilations or tests of resistance to pain, but others were taken aside for more personal reasons. They were considered appropriate for their appearance, their youth, their ethnic origin. Several survivors recounted how they were taken to the officer’s rooms where they were expected to show themselves grateful in exchange for minimal favors, a coat, a hot meal, a less exhausting task. Some were kept as sexual slaves for days or weeks. They were given clean clothes, allowed to sleep on mattresses, and used as a symbol of power among the guards. Others were rotated among different men in a dynamic that imitated the logic of consumption of goods.

The prisoners thus became informal rewards within the internal hierarchy of the SS. They were not registered as such. They did not appear in the documents, but they were known by everyone. There were those who even boasted of their conquests in the nighttime conversations in the guard’s quarters. Women were spoken of as one would speak of a motorcycle or a dog. They were described, compared, their reactions evaluated. The horror lay not only in the act, but in the benality with which it was recounted. Some of the abusers did not consider themselves as such. For them, it was a routine within the context of the camp, an available leisure activity, a prerogative acquired by the uniform and ideology. In some sub camps, such as those associated with munitions factories or textile workshops, there existed the figure of the stallm girls who were assigned to the personal service of the officers. In practice, they were sexual servants. They were selected among the youngest, often barely adolescents, who were quickly indoctrinated with threats, beatings, or false promises of release.

They slept in small rooms near the officer’s barracks, could not speak with other prisoners, and were watched even during moments of hygiene. Some were replaced every few days. Others disappeared without a trace. In Mount Housen and its sub camps of the Gusen system, where women worked in infernal conditions, similar abuses were also recorded. There even some capos, prisoners with authority delegated by the SS, participated in the system of abuse, acting as intermediaries between the officers and the victims. The chain of complicity was extensive. It was not necessary to use open physical force. A promise, a veiled threat, a gesture was enough. The entire system revolved around radical inequality. When life depends on the other, everything can become currency of exchange. It was not uncommon for pregnancies to be brutally interrupted. The women who became pregnant as a result of these rapes were often taken to medical blocks where abortions were performed without anesthesia. Others were executed along with the fetus. There were those who were transferred to extermination camps without further procedure.

On some occasions, the same abusers ordered their elimination to avoid internal conflicts or simply because they were no longer useful. The body of the female prisoner was not only desecrated but discarded like a worn out tool. On the rare occasions when these practices came to light through internal reports, the aggressor was not punished. The punishment fell on the woman accused of seducing the guard or of causing disorder among the staff. The file was closed. Humiliation became guilt and guilt became punishment. The circle was complete. Some prisoners tried to selfharm or disfigure themselves so as not to be chosen. Others sought absolute anonymity, but in a space where every movement was observed, escaping the oppressor’s gaze was impossible. Sexual violence also functioned as collective punishment. In retaliation for supposed group offenses, a woman was chosen at random, displayed in front of everyone, and raped as an example. Sometimes there were several, sometimes they were made to parade naked, while the officers decided aloud which one they liked the most. The language was brutal, the gesture mechanical, the feeling was of absolute impunity.

For the guards, the camp was a lawless space where they answered to no authority other than their will and desire. This impunity generated a culture of competition among some officers. Those who conquered more women, those who knew how to tame them, those who knew how to break the resistant ones were seen as virile, as exemplary. That idea of violent masculinity was nourished by the ideology of the SS as the embodiment of racial power. Abuse thus became a way of reaffirming that image of representing before their peers that they were worthy of the black uniform. The victim did not matter. The outbursts of violence. One of the most brutal pastimes was bursting into a barrack without warning and waking everyone up with blows or screams. The inmates were made to stand outside in the middle of the night in the mud or snow, sometimes naked, sometimes only with a blanket. The weather or the health of the men did not matter. Sometimes the guard read a madeup list of names and called them one by one, only to then laugh and say it had all been a mistake. Other times he forced them to march in circles or to sing until dawn. It was not a superior order. It was a solitary game of absolute power.

There were guards who walked the hallways between the barracks with a flashlight and a stick, hitting the doors or the sleeping bodies, looking for reactions. If someone woke up startled, it was a cause for mockery. If someone begged to be allowed to rest, he became a target. Sometimes that same guard returned minutes later looking for that same man. He would take him outside, force him to clean a non-existent ditch or to move stones back and forth in the rain. It did not matter if he was young or old. The only thing that mattered was that he could command and the other had to obey. Some preferred theatricality. They organized mock inspections with whistles, unloaded weapons, exaggerated military steps. They woke the entire block as if it were an escape or emergency and then with total calm said they wanted to check the condition of the beds or the cleanliness of the boots. If something was not as they wanted, the humiliations began. They forced the men to clean with their tongues, to undress and squat to imitate animals. These were gestures that had no disciplinary function. They were purely and simply scenes of humiliation to combat the executioner’s boredom.

One of the most frequent testimonies among survivors was that of the guard who hit for no reason, who randomly chose an inmate, asked him to come forward, asked for his number, and then hit him in the face. Sometimes he did it with his hand, sometimes with the butt of his rifle. There were no insults or accusations, only the blunt blow and the order to return to his place. That gesture, repeated hundreds of times in different camps, summarized the logic of gratuitous violence. It did not seek to correct or punish only to remind the prisoner that his body did not belong to him. The Karpos also participated in this dynamic. Some, to curry favor with the SS, reproduce these acts with greater cruelty. Others did it out of hatred, frustration, or the need to feel less weak. In many cases, the KPO became the executioner of his own block. He invented rules during the night, forbade talking, moving, coughing. If someone did it, he was forced to stand all night or to hold a bucket of water with his arms extended. If it fell, the beatings began. Sometimes small circles of prisoners were formed who had to beat each other on the Karpo’s order. The game was to see who could endure the longest without falling.

There was also the sport of hunting prisoners who moved at night. Sometimes an inmate went out looking for water or to the bathroom. The guards upon seeing movement pretended it was an escape attempt. Shots were fired into the air. A pursuit began. When they caught the man, they beat him among several. They dragged him to the center of the camp made him dig his own grave. Sometimes they did not kill him. They just left him kneeling in front of the hole all night. The spectacle was for them. The adrenaline of the mock hunt, the feeling that they were hunters in their territory. Other guards, more calculating, found amusement in slow torment. They chose a prisoner at random and kept him for weeks as the target of all their nightly visits. They hid his belongings, made him repeat senseless tasks, prevented him from sleeping. Sometimes they promised him something if he did a certain task, food, a transfer, a favor. When he fulfilled it, they laughed in his face and beat him. The goal was to break him. To see at what moment he stopped begging, at what moment his gaze no longer held hope. That transformation of the face was, for some the climax of their fun.

Laughter was an integral part of the ritual. The crulest acts were accompanied by laughter. They were not silent or solemn gestures. They were festive acts. The guards commented among themselves on what they had done, what they planned to do, who was the funniest prisoner, the dumbest, the most obedient. It was a form of internal communication, a shared code. Gratuitous violence was a form of identity. Not everyone participated, but everyone knew, and whoever stayed silent gave consent. The human targets and prisoners used to train dogs. The use of prisoners as living targets or as instruments for training dogs was one of the most perverse expressions of the absolute power exercised by the SS guards. These were not functional punishments, nor acts of defense, nor reactions to escapes. They were exercises designed to strengthen the violent spirit of the guard, to train animals in aggression, and to turn the human being into a worthless object. The sinister nature of these practices lay not only in the brutality of the acts, but in the naturalness with which they were carried out, often in front of witnesses with laughter, detailed instructions, and an internal logic that made death into a methodical game. Most concentration camps had guard dogs, mostly German shepherds.

These animals were trained to attack without hesitation and to respond to their master’s commands with lethal precision, but training was not always carried out in separate areas, nor with mannequins or controlled techniques. Many guards preferred to train them directly with prisoners who were forced to participate without any possibility of defense. The victims were chosen at random. It could be a man who had not finished his task, someone who had been denounced by another prisoner, or simply whoever was closest when the guard decided to start the practice. In Avitz, the SS Unchar Arthur Shervitz was known for walking with his dog through the camp sectors while looking for any excuse to release it. The testimonies collected in the post-war trials state that he frequently gave his dog short commands such as fast, grab him, or loss, go and the animal would jump on the nearest prisoner. It did not matter whether it was a child, a woman, or an elderly man. If the prisoner tried to cover himself, he was accused of rebellion. If he screamed, the punishment was doubled. Those who survived were left disfigured with infected wounds, mutilations, and in many cases, permanent trauma, but most did not survive.

Shervitz, according to several witnesses, petted his dog after the attack, rewarded it with pieces of meat, and laughed while commenting on the effectiveness of his training. In Mount the training system was even more organized. Some guards turned certain areas of the camp into training tracks. A line of prisoners was formed and forced to run from one point to another while the dog, held on a short leash, was agitated with shouts and whips. Upon reaching a certain distance, the animal was released. The goal was for it to learn to knock the man down from behind to grab him by the neck or arm. If the prisoner ran too fast, he was shot in the leg. If the dog did not react aggressively enough, it was beaten until it attacked. Everything was part of a circuit where the punishment of the human and the animal reinforce the same lesson. Obey, attack, do not question. The victims were disposable. They were used once, and if they survived, they were rarely seen again. Some were sent to the camp infirmary where the SS doctors declared them unfit for work and sent them to the crematoria. Others were simply finished off on the spot. No report was written. No authority was informed. It was part of the routine. Dog training, just like that of the guards, was sustained on broken bodies and on a silence imposed by terror.

In Bookenvald, the guard Otto Fleps organized games with his dog named Rolf. According to several testimonies collected in the Darkau trial, he often gathered small groups of prisoners and forced them to simulate an escape. He promised them that if they reached the fence without the dog catching them, they would be rewarded with food or a day without work. It was a lie. He always released the dog when they were halfway. The animals trained to tear apart would jump directly at the throat or face. Sometimes fleed two dogs at the same time. Those who witnessed the scene from the camp could not intervene. If anyone covered their eyes or looked away, they were accused of disrespect. The punishment was the same. Beatings, isolation, public humiliation. It was not uncommon for some guards to also use dogs to watch inside the barracks. If they suspected someone was hiding food, talking at night, or forming bonds of solidarity, they brought the dog at night and released it inside the barrack. The animals smelled fear. The crowded, malnourished bodies, with no possibility of defense, were easy prey. The next morning, the SS inspected the results. Bites, blood, corpses, and they noted that order had been restored.

In some cases, the dogs were trained to respond to the salute Hile Hitler as a signal to attack. A prisoner who did not salute correctly or who did not do so with sufficient conviction became a target. They were also used to watch prisoners during forced tasks outside. If one of them stopped, the dog was released. The guards justified it by saying that the animals were more efficient than whips. Sometimes small competitions were even organized among the dogs, which one attacked faster, which one killed with greater precision, which one obeyed orders without hesitation better. The training was not improvised. There were internal manuals, regulations, even practical sessions where new guards learned to handle the dogs as living weapons. One of the survivors of the Stutoff camp, the Pol Roman Gorski, stated after the war that during the first weeks he saw how several new SS members were instructed in training techniques and how they were explicitly told that the use of the dogs was not only for surveillance, but also to maintain the necessary spirit of fear in the camp. The training was ideological. It was about transmitting to the animal the hatred of the system. In all cases, the scene was always the same.

A guard standing upright, shouting orders, a dog trained to kill, and a human being reduced to prey. The prisoners knew they could not run, could not fight, could not beg. The body was offered to fate as a way to shorten the pain. Some closed their eyes and waited for the impact. Others screamed. Some tried to look into the guard’s eyes, searching for a spark of compassion. They never found it. The devil’s rest. After long days marked by daily brutality, the SS guards returned to their barracks, their offices, or the exclusive pavilions where they had beds, heating, drinks, and hot food. It was the end of their workday, but not of the horror. Because in those spaces, far from the screams, the smell of gunpowder, and the sweat of dying bodies, the conversations began. And in those conversations, the crimes became stories. The tortures turned into anecdotes. The murders into episodes shared in a festive or mocking tone. The monstrous was not hidden. It was celebrated. Amid cigarettes, schnaps, and laughter, the guards exchanged stories from the day. At times, one of them would recount how he had disciplined a rebellious prisoner, imitating his voice, mocking his accent or his pleading.

Others listened and laughed. Sometimes one replied with an even bloodier, cruer, more elaborate story, as if it were a competition. In some camps, especially those with greater technical hierarchy, like Dora Mittba or Avitz Monovitz, where there were also engineers, technicians, and doctors, these conversations were even more structured. They shared production statistics, counts of fit and unfit prisoners. But among those numbers, phrases would emerge like, “Another one exploded in the quarry today,” or, “We had to clean up two more corpses in the tunnel.” There was no drama. It was workshop language. One testimony collected by the Allies during the Dark Trial tells how in the Bhanvald camp, officers would often gather at night in the Stuba, a room with long benches, thick curtains, and a cast iron stove. There they would sit to drink and comment on how the Jews screamed or how many lasted without confessing in interrogations. One of the most disturbing testimonies tells how an officer boasted about making a group of prisoners walk barefoot over a surface covered in nails. He said he made them sing while doing it. He imitated their faltering voices, exaggerated the gestures. His colleagues applauded and joked. One even commented, “That is art, not interrogation.”

The repetition of these stories reinforced a bond of camaraderie among the guards. They were not simply acts of venting. They were moments of collective affirmation where the group’s values were reproduced and strengthened. Telling an act of cruelty did not generate discomfort. On the contrary, the one who recounted with more detail, who showed more creativity in the suffering inflicted was praised. Some even adopted theatrical gestures, did imitations, used voices. It was dark humor in the most literal and repulsive sense of the word. Horror was celebrated as an everyday feat. In camps like Gross Rosen, it was known that certain officers had a reputation for being good storytellers. They were awaited at the end of the day to hear what they had done with the polls or how they had made the Russians run. The language was always dehumanizing. The prisoners were not people. They were categories, animals, technical problems. They were spoken of as one would speak of a water leak or a rusted machine. And yet, by narrating the humiliation, the guards recovered a degree of pleasure that the bureaucracy of extermination took from them during the day.

There they were not cogs, they were protagonists. On days when there were public executions, the evening gathering became a sort of afterparty. They would talk about how the hanging went, whether anyone cried, whether anyone spat before dying, whether the hood covered the face properly or not. The prisoners gestures were analyzed as if it were a theatrical performance. Sometimes they discussed the best way to ensure the rope would not loosen or who had the best aim for shooting in the back of the neck. The more seasoned ones corrected the younger. You must not look them in the eyes. Do not think they are people. The collective memory of horror was built that way, not with documents, but with shared stories. A newly arrived young officer could learn more in one night of conversations than in a month of regulations. He learned what was expected of him, how he should speak, what he should keep silent. He learned to laugh. He learned to applaud. He learned that the distance between the executioner and the spectator could be erased with a well-timed laugh. At times, even more formal gatherings were organized.

In certain camps, especially those with highranking personnel or frequent visits, there were dinners, celebrations, even film screenings. News reels and propaganda films were shown and then the feats of the day were discussed. On one occasion, according to testimonies gathered at Flossenberg, an officer screened a film he had made himself showing scenes of a collective punishment. The background music was by Vagnner. At the end, the officers made a toast. Not everyone participated with equal enthusiasm. Some listened in silence, nodded, limited themselves to smiling. But silence was also part of the consensus. No one denounced, no one said enough. The one who did not speak approved. And the one who spoke with the most detail earned respect. The competition for cruelty was subtle but present. And in that ecosystem, sensitivity was a nuisance. The one who showed discomfort or avoided listening became a target of mockery. Does it make you feel sorry, comrade? then you are not ready. There was a specific language to talk about suffering. Dominatives, euphemisms and nicknames were used. They said we sent him flying instead of we executed him.

They said we gave him a special performance to refer to a torture. They spoke of freshly baked loaves to refer to the corpses coming out of the crerematoria. That shared lexicon allowed the horror to be normalized without naming it directly. It turned crime into routine and routine into rule. In the cabins where the non-commissioned officers slept, it was common to find written notes, drawings, lists with prisoner numbers highlighted for funny behavior, noteworthy crying, or insolent gaze. Some officers even kept personal diaries where they recorded their activities of the day, but mixed with ironic comments or anecdotes full of sarcasm. In one of these diaries found after the liberation of the Noyengama camp, an officer wrote, “Today one tried to escape. We caught him. I shot him in the leg. He crawled a few meters, then cried. Incredible scene. It looked like a silent film. All that was missing was the music.” Psychological manipulation and public punishments. One of the most commonly used resources was the psychological manipulation of the vulnerable prisoner. The weakest, whether because of their age, health, language, isolation, or simply their expression of fear, were selected with special attention.

A simple gesture, a lowered gaze, a stammer, a trembling reaction was enough to mark someone as a target. These prisoners were not beaten immediately. They were observed. They were called regularly. They were used as examples. The guards approached with a friendly tone, questioned them calmly, promised vague rewards if they informed on their companions, if they reported rumors, if they confessed to non-existent crimes. They spoke to them as if they were allies. We want to help you. We know you are different. We do not want to hurt you, but we need your cooperation. The prisoner, cornered by fear and by the illusion of a possible way out, began to doubt, to waver. Some spoke, others remained silent and were left alone for several days only to be approached again. The pressure was exerted in silence. There was no need to shout. At times the officers simulated gestures of compassion. They gave the prisoner a blanket, an extra ration, allowed them to stay a few more minutes in the dining hall, but it was all part of the game. The next day, that same person was exposed before the others as a traitor without evidence or explanation.

Their food was taken away, their blanket torn. They were pushed to the center of the camp for everyone to see. The goal was to isolate them, erode their place in the community, and show them that they had no possible refuge, not even in submission. One of the most representative examples of this tactic occurred in the Flossenberg camp. According to testimonies collected by Polish researchers after the war, there a young Ukrainian barely 16 years old was chosen by an officer as the target of this type of harassment. They called him daily to ask him meaningless questions, treated him with false sympathy, made him translate phrases between German and Russian. Then when he made a minimal mistake, they ridiculed him in front of the block. By the end of the week, the young man had stopped speaking. He walked hunched over looking at the ground. One morning, he was forced to read an imaginary letter in front of the others. “My mother forgives me,” said the letter. “I am happy to serve the Reich.” When he finished, the guards applauded. The following night, the boy hanged himself with his own belt. No one stopped him.

Psychological manipulation was more effective when combined with public punishments. These were not simple sanctions for disobedience. They were rituals of calculated humiliation designed to show everyone that there was no redemption. Prisoners were gathered in the central square, lined up in silence, forced to witness how one of them was exposed, beaten, stripped, or simply ridiculed. Sometimes a false reason was read aloud, pretended to be sick, spoke with a Jewish woman, stole bread. There was no need to verify it. The scene mattered more than the truth. One of the most frequent punishments was that of the endless squats. The prisoner was forced to squat with arms outstretched and remain like that for hours under the sun or snow. If they fell, they were kicked. If they cried, they were lifted back up. The goal was not to cause irreversible physical harm, but to display their degradation. Sometimes they were forced to sing while doing it, or to recount their crime as if it were a farce. The audience had to laugh. If they did not, they were accused of complicity. There were also punishments that simulated games.

In Gross Rosen, according to the testimony of a former capo, in 1947, what the SS called the parade of pigs was organized. A weak prisoner was chosen and forced to walk on all fours, grunting while the guards threw pieces of bread at him. If he caught them with his mouth, he was beaten. If he did not catch them, he was accused of disobedience. The scene could last an hour or more. The other prisoners could not look away. If they did, they were called to participate. Public punishments also included whippings. These were not simple lashings. They were complete ceremonies. The prisoner was tied to a bench. The officers read a list of rules. The number of blows was decided according to the degree of the offense. Sometimes it was 25, sometimes 50, sometimes 100. The blows were given with wet straps, sticks, wires, and in many cases it was not the guards who carried them out, but the prisoners themselves. This was called pedagogical discipline, forcing one to punish another and then making the punished one thank for the lesson. An episode that occurred in Saxonhausen in 1943 summarizes this logic with chilling clarity.

A Polish prisoner was accused of having shared bread with another sick prisoner. He was made to stand in front of the entire camp. The commander announced that as punishment, he should receive 50 lashes from his best friend in the block. If the executive did not do it with enough force, both would be executed. The friend in tears obeyed. After the punishment, the punished prisoner had to stand up, salute the officer and say, “Dunker hair lagafura.” Then he collapsed. He died the next morning. Public punishments were not sporadic. They were structural. They were designed to create an atmosphere of horizontal surveillance. The prisoner had to fear not only the SS, but also the KPO, the companion, the bunk neighbor. No one knew who would be next. The message was clear. Humiliation could come at any moment, even if you were innocent, especially if you were innocent. Because that demonstrated that there was no logic, that punishment was not a response, but a warning. In Ravensbrook, a women’s camp, public punishments took specific forms. Female prisoners who spoke loudly, helped others, or menstruated out of control were made to stand naked on a platform while the others had to watch them.

Sometimes their heads were shaved. They were forced to sing children’s songs or to recite absurd phrases like, “I am happy to be useful to the Reich.” Some women were forced to dress in men’s clothing and imitate their partners in front of the crowd in humiliating spectacles that combined misogyny, sexualization, and psychological cruelty. In all these acts, the laughter of the SS was the measure of success. If the guards laughed, the punishment had worked. If the prisoner cried, even better. If they fainted, better still. If they tried to remain upright, they were knocked down again. The balance between pain and resistance was adjusted so that the victim lasted long enough to be exhibited, but not so long as to become an example of dignity. It was necessary to break them at the right moment. These punishments also served a purpose among the SS themselves. They were exercises of internal cohesion. By participating, the guards reaffirmed their belonging. By executing, they trained themselves. By laughing, they shielded themselves emotionally. The public punishment was as much a message for the prisoners as a right of passage for the young officers.

They learned to look without blinking, to hear the screams without interrupting their coffee, to see someone crumble and instead of feeling distress, feel pride, because that was the pedagogy of the camp. Not only to destroy bodies, but to disintegrate souls. In the end, punishment and manipulation were two sides of the same coin. One was applied to the body, the other to the mind. Both sought the same thing, to erase all notion of resistance. And when the prisoners began to compete among themselves for one more minute of rest for a piece of bread, to avoid being chosen in the next punishment ceremony, the executioners knew they had triumphed. They no longer needed to touch the whip. They no longer needed to threaten. The camp functioned on its own. Humiliation was permanent, collective, internalized. Surveillance as spectacle, the game of watching, pointing, and punishing. Watching in the camps also meant choosing, provoking, challenging. Every glance could be a veiled threat or a silent sentence. In that environment where all prisoners were stripped of their names and reduced to numbers, the simple act of being looked at by an SS carried unbearable weight.

Because in the economy of humiliation and terror, the control of the gaze was also a form of entertainment. They watched them from the towers with binoculars, searching for mistakes in marching posture in how they carried a tool or how they stood during roll call. They watched them from the edge of the morning formations, scanning the exhausted lines with attentive eyes, looking for a prisoner who trembled, who closed his eyes for a second, who scratched his face without permission. Any minimal gesture was interpreted as an act of insubordination. And when someone was found breaking, even for an instant, the image of perfect submission, then the game began. One of the most common pastimes among the SS was to walk during the morning along the rows of formed prisoners and point at random without saying a word. Sometimes they pointed with a finger, other times with a baton. When the one pointed at did not react immediately out of fear, confusion or not knowing whether to speak or remain still, he was beaten. If he reacted too quickly, he was also beaten. The game was to make him doubt every movement, to turn obedience into a trap.

It did not matter if the prisoner understood the language or not. What was tested was his ability to interpret the gesture to read the gaze. Failing meant pain. In the barracks, surveillance continued. Officers strolled among the bunks and stopped without reason in front of one prisoner or another. They examined his clothing, his posture, his silence. Sometimes they asked how many buttons were on his shirt or what number his neighbor had. If the answer was slow or incorrect, it was cause for punishment. If it was quick, it was suspected he had been talking forbidden between bunks. Contradiction was part of the logic. There was no correct way to behave. One just had to guess the guard’s mood, and that too was part of the spectacle. The prisoners knew it. They knew they were being watched even when it did not seem so. They knew that walking hunched over, looking at the ground, looking at the sky, yawning, scratching, or moving too quickly could mean a beating. Some learned not to move for hours. Others trained themselves to smile the moment they were looked at as a reflex gesture of submission, a gesture that became grotesque because that smile was never enough.

Sometimes the guards would approach just to say, “What are you laughing at?” And they beat them for that. In the larger camps like Awitz or Dhau, the SS turned surveillance into a form of hunting. They gathered small groups of prisoners and watched them walk clean or carry weight. Along the route, an officer, often accompanied by a dog, watched in silence. He wrote numbers in a notebook. He did not say what was wrong. He just wrote. At night, the recorded numbers were called. Sometimes for interrogation, sometimes for execution, sometimes simply to be forced into meaningless tasks. The message was clear. You can be doing everything right and still be punished because you are being watched always. Surveillance became especially perverse during inspections. These were announced at the last minute and caused panic among the prisoners. They were forced to line up their personal items, their shoes, their blanket. Everything had to be perfect. But the guards searched for the mistake. Not what was missing, but what was extra. One spoon too many. A button of another color, a poorly sewn label. When they found it, or even when they did not, but claimed they had, and at a see, the entire block was lined up.

The culprit had to step forward. If he did, he was beaten. If he did not, they beat everyone. The gays did not just punish. It forced betrayal. Collective punishments for individual errors were frequent in Saxonhausen. According to the testimony of a former French prisoner, one morning a guard saw that one prisoner had the collar of his coat poorly folded. He did not correct him. He stared at him throughout the formation without speaking. At the end he ordered the entire block to stand for 3 hours without moving. Then he slowly walked through the rows, pointing at those who trembled the most. One by one he made them step forward. He did not explain the reason. He only looked at them and sent them to harder labor. Some did not return. The act of observing was also a weapon of progressive destruction. Prisoners learned to distrust everything, even their own bodies. They doubted how they walked, how they breathed, how they lay down. Some developed nervous ticks. Others shut down completely, eyes fixed on the ground. But looking down could also be interpreted as insolence. Total surveillance was in essence a way to annihilate individuality.

It was not what one did that was punished. It was what one was. The younger guards often adopted these practices as part of their training. They learned to observe with contempt, to provoke fear with a single look. Some did it as a test. They stood in front of a new prisoner and stared at him for several minutes. They said nothing. They just waited. If the prisoner cried, his number was noted. If he stood firm, he was tested with harder tasks. The goal was to break the mask to see at what moment he cracked and to return later again and again until they succeeded. In certain camps like Maidanic or Placo, officers used surveillance as a pretext for public executions. It was said that a certain prisoner had been caught in suspicious behavior. The phrase was vague, intentionally ambiguous. It was enough to have been seen talking to another or to have taken a second too long to return to his post. The execution was swift, without trial, without defense. But before that, the prisoner was shown to the rest. He was made to walk through the rows. His number was read aloud, and it was said, “This is the face of disobedience.”

Thus the act of observing became a sentence, and the entire camp lived under that logic. There was no corner that could not be seen, no instant that could not be judged. It was not necessary for all SS to be violent. It was enough that they looked, because that gaze, loaded with power, contempt, and total impunity could be more devastating than a blow. And when the punishment finally came, the victim knew it had begun much earlier. It had begun when the guard’s eyes landed on him. The sexual entertainments of the female gods. The sexual entertainments of the female guards in Maidanic were part of a daily life permeated by ambiguity, power, and violence that overflowed the official boundaries of duty. These women known as offerinan were members of the female auxiliary corps of the SS directly responsible for the surveillance and control of the female prisoners. They wore uniforms, carried whips, had the authority to punish, and in many cases enjoyed wide margins of impunity. Despite the strict regulations of the SS HTamp regarding the coexistence of men and women in the camp, sexual relations between Alerinan and male SS members were frequent, often clandestine, and at other times openly known, even provocative.

The forced coexistence in a militarized environment, the numerical imbalance between sexes, and the geographical isolation of the camp created an ecosystem where repression and sexual freedom coexisted, contaminated by the ideology of absolute power over the lives of others. The guards were not passive victims of their environment. In many cases, they used their bodies, their positions, or their proximity to certain officers as a tool for affirmation or symbolic ascent in the hierarchy. Later testimonies and disciplinary records reveal a network of sexual relationships that ranged from stable emotional bonds to multiple simultaneous relationships. An offseerin could have a lover in the administration, another in the dog kennel, and another in the infirmary, as documented in the case of a guard who was involved both with the person in charge of the gas chamber and with an SS member of the canine team. The motives behind these relationships were varied. Desire, boredom, ambition, revenge, need for protection, or even simple pastime. But there are also testimonies that reveal the emotional burden involved. In one documented case, an SS member in charge of the gas chamber attempted to take his own life in that same place after a breakup with the guard Annie David.

Another testimony recounts how an offser helped her married lover obtain an apartment in Lublin so that he could bring his wife and thus maintain the double relationship. The camp authorities tried to maintain a veneer of moral order. The internal rules expressly prohibited officers from entering the female barracks and stipulated punishments for the guards who allowed access without authorization. But these regulations were constantly transgressed. On many occasions, the punishment did not fall for the relationship itself, but for the disciplinary conflicts they provoked, jealousy, rivalries, unwanted pregnancies, or prolonged absences. Intimate relationships could trigger personal vendettas between colleagues or with superiors and many of these tensions were channeled into mistreatment of the prisoners. Pregnancies were another sign of these relationships. Hildigard Lacert, one of the most feared guards of Majdan, gave birth to her third child in April of 1944. She refused to reveal the name of the father, but confirmed that he was a member of the SS. Other guards were transferred or discharged for being pregnant. A sign that sexual relations, although tolerated in practice, contradicted the official policy and the image of racial purity and institutional discipline that the SS tried to project.

Beyond romantic relationships, there were also insinuations of the sexualization of power within the repressive system itself. Some post-war testimonies recount how the guards were the object of obscene comments or propositions from officers, showing that while they had authority over the female prisoners, they were still subordinate in the male hierarchy of the camp. Others, on the other hand, adopted an active attitude, defying the codes of submission. Luzy H for example proudly remembered how in the Deutsches House social club the musicians would play her favorite song Altera Camaraden as soon as she entered the hall. There she took the initiative, bought rounds of drinks and behaved with a confidence typically attributed to men knowing that she occupied a dominant position both inside and outside the camp. This type of female self-affirmation through seduction or the symbolic enjoyment of power generates a moral conflict that is difficult to resolve. That tension between the intimate and the institutional in Maidanic reached an especially raw expression in the way the offseran lived and manipulated sexuality in an environment designed to strip others of all rights over their own bodies.

Theirs, on the other hand, was not only protected by the structure of power, but was exalted, feared, desired, and at the same time used as an instrument to affirm hierarchy within the concentration camp space. They were not mere cogs. Some of them shaped that power through desire, sex, affection, and humiliation. While organizing the work columns, selecting the weakest prisoners, or distributing physical punishments with whips and boots, many of Saharinan also maintained sexual relationships with SS members or with other camp employees. Some were discreet, others open and provocative. The relationship between authority, violence, and eroticism became blurred. In more than one case, a guard could go from the prisoner’s barrack to an officer’s bed without any emotional transition. There, between sheets smelling of tobacco, dampness, and leather, they recounted what they had done during the day, how many Jewish women cried, how many fainted, how many needed help to finish their work. Sex did not erase cruelty. It reinforced it. They were not purely functional relationships. Some of herinan had married lovers, others several at once, whom they controlled or manipulated according to their mood or convenience. Notes were exchanged, gifts were given, secret messages were written in routine reports.

In Maj, one guard was known for alternating sexual encounters with two rival non-commissioned officers who patrolled opposite zones of the camp. She played with their jealousy, provoked confrontations, and then used that tension to gain favors, a better schedule, access to supplies, or permission to be absent during the afternoons. The female body of the offserin wrapped in the uniform of the female SS became an ambivalent symbol, desired by some, feared by all. Her mere presence in the women’s blocks could provoke panic, but also at certain moments it was used as bait. Some guards publicly humiliated prisoners who, according to them, looked at them too much, insinuating attraction. They accused them of being lesbians, deviants, degenerates. Sometimes this was nothing more than a pretext to beat them. But in others, coercive sexual relationships between Alsaharinan and prisoners are implied. Relationships marked by blackmail, by the total asymmetry of power. An extra piece of bread, a lighter task, or a day without being beaten could depend on submitting to the desire of a woman who held in her hands the power to decide life or death. Control over the prisoner’s bodies was not just administrative or disciplinary. It was sexual.

The youngest, the most attractive, or simply the most submissive, were set aside for special functions, washing personal clothes, cleaning the guards barracks, doing tasks near the officer’s quarters. They were visible. They were selected, examined, touched, watched. Some testimonies suggest that the olf’s herinan chose certain prisoners to care for. a protection that often implied a sexual dynamic of dominance disguised as favoritism or compassion. The others knew what was happening and remained silent out of fear or necessity. Jealousy among the offseer inan was common. If one had a closer relationship with a popular officer, the others spied on her, ridiculed her, ruined her tasks. Rumors circulated through the camp corridors, veiled insults, gestures of contempt. On one occasion recorded in the SS disciplinary archive, a guard smashed a chair against her colleagueu’s desk after discovering she shared a lover with her. She was not punished. She was temporarily transferred. Her lover remained in his position. In that closed, brutal, hyper surveiled world, sex was a resource, a privilege, a weapon, a release valve, but also a space where power was reshaped. Sometimes it was affectionate, other times violent, always imbued with the atmosphere of impunity.

Some of Searin wore fine lingerie under their uniform, not out of cockatry, but for control. They knew when to show it and to whom. They knew how to use their body as a tool for advancement or as a gesture of mockery. One of them forced prisoners to iron her underwear while she watched with a half smile. She told them, “This cotton is softer than you and cleaner.” Sexual leisure was not just a side phenomenon. It was an integral part of the symbolic universe of the camp, where the benality of evil blurred with tedium, boredom, militarized routine, and repressed desire. Some alsinan fell in love, others manipulated their lovers. Still others simply sought companionship in a world where violence was the everyday language. And in the meantime, each day they supervised forced labor, participated in selections, organized punishments, or beat women with their boots. The absolute power they held over the prisoners extended also into the realm of their own sexual life, shaping a daily existence that oscillated between institutional brutality and the intimate game of desire. Human pets absolute domination disguised as tenderness. In the distorted universe of the Nazi concentration camps, where terror became the norm and violence a routine, even gestures that might appear harmless or affectionate, were loaded with domination, mockery, and sadism.

Among these gestures, one of the most disturbing was the use of prisoners, especially children, as human pets. It was not a functional strategy, nor an administrative measure. It was purely and simply a form of personal entertainment for some members of the SS, their families or their closest collaborators. It was a practice that turned the human being into an object of companionship, display or domestic distraction, reinforcing the absolute hierarchy between master and subjugated, between executioner and objectified creature. The documented cases of this phenomenon are not numerous, but they are deeply revealing. In several camps of the concentration system, especially those that had female staff or permanent administrative structures such as Maidanic, Avitz or Stuto, there were situations in which Jewish, Roma or Slavic children were adopted informally by guards, administrators, or even by the wives of officers who dressed them, gave them new names, assigned them domestic tasks, and displayed them as if they were domesticated animals. These relationships were neither affectionate nor protective. They did not seek to save the child from the horror of the camp. On the contrary, they kept them close under total control as a living and silent possession that served to entertain, decorate, or fulfill orders.

The child pet had no rights nor any possibility of refusal. They were forced to live under the capricious rules of the adult who controlled them. In many cases, they slept in a corner of the barracks, had to speak German, smile when told, and performed tasks such as cleaning boots, heating water, fetching cigarettes, or simply staying still while the officers drank or conversed. Some were forced to dance, sing, or imitate animals. One of the harshest testimonies collected in Awitz recounts how a Roma boy was forced each night to perform in front of the guests of the officer’s block, dressed with a jester’s hat and an old cape. When his show failed to convince, he was whipped. When it did, he received hard bread as a reward. The relationship between the SS and their human pet was marked by total imbalance. The child was property, not a person, and that property could be destroyed at any moment. In some cases, when the children became ill, grew too much, or simply stopped entertaining, they were returned to the camp, executed, or abandoned. The bond had no emotional continuity. It only existed while it served a recreational function.

There are even testimonies of cases in which after the death of a child, the officers joked that he had been a good pet or a nice boy while it lasted. In Ravensbrook, a women’s camp, some offseeran also reproduced this pattern with female prisoners whom they used as personal helpers. One of them, according to a later disciplinary file, kept a Jewish girl of about 8 years old as an assistant, dressing her with pieces of uniform, teaching her German songs, and presenting her to other guards as my little wife. The girl had to wake her up, comb her hair, clean her cubicle, and then accompany her during inspections. When the girl broke a cup, the offseerin yelled that she was a pig with no future and sent her to work with the shovel in the yard. She died a few days later. The guard was never punished. This type of domestication of the minor prisoner also had a symbolic effect. It reaffirmed the absolute superiority of the SS. It was not enough to make them suffer. They had to be possessed. Even tenderness had to be controlled. The paternal gesture twisted into mockery. Affection turned into threat. In some cases, the officer’s own children participated in this scheme.

It is known that in camps such as Soibbor or Mountousausen, the children of some commanders briefly lived in areas away from the extermination center and played with prisoner children who were presented as friends or servants. The line between childish play and institutional violence dissolved. The camp was no longer just a machinery of death. It was also a place where the executioner’s children learned to play with another’s life. The presence of these human pets was neither official nor systematic. There was no regulation authorizing their use nor any rules regarding their treatment. But the system allowed and even encouraged these excesses by not punishing them and by integrating them into the deepest logic of the camp, the total availability of another’s body. In that sense, these episodes were not anomalies. They were logical consequences of an order that turned the human being into material. And if that material served to clean boots or make someone laugh during dinner, all the better. Some adult prisoners were also subjected to similar forms of domestication. Although less frequent, there are records of inmates forced to behave as personal servants of high SS officers, not as laborers, but as entertainment.

In Zaxonhousen, an officer forced a Polish prisoner to shave him every morning, but first he had to recite German poems aloud without mistakes. If he hesitated on a verse, he received a slap with the razor blade still in his hand. The prisoner had to continue shaving without dropping the razor. The officer boasted of domesticating the Slav. In all cases, what was at stake was not the usefulness of the prisoner, but their absolute availability. Turning them into a pet, a personal slave, a toy was a way of declaring that their life had no intrinsic value, that there were no limits in the relationship between master and dominated, and that even in moments of leisure, the executioner could continue exercising his control. Sometimes with laughter, sometimes with figned caresses, sometimes with a pat after a ridiculous order, always with contempt. The image of a child dressed in rags serving a cup of coffee to his executioner does not refer only to individual sadism. It is the representation of a system where even affection was instrumentalized, where childhood was neither saved nor respected but subjugated and exposed, where the most vulnerable was turned into an object, an ornament, a joke. And if at any moment the human pet showed a hint of sadness, fatigue, or rebellion, they were quickly replaced.

The camp did not tolerate the weakness of its toys, only their obedience, only their silence. And so, amid the mud, the barbed wire, the smoke, and the shouted orders, there were also scenes of false calm. A child holding a tray, a guard combing her servant, a dog barking next to a child who had to smile. They were the most sinister scenes of the camp. Not because of their explicit violence, but because of the naturalness with which they turned domination into play and horror into habit. the other forms of sadistic leisure in the concentration camps. Behind the rigid organization and supposed technical efficiency of the Nazi concentration camps pulsed a brutally human space where the perpetrators idle time was filled with atrocious practices. If the most well-known texts and testimonies focus on productive violence, punishment, torture, murder as tools of discipline or extermination, there was a murkier, less systematized layer equally essential to the concentration camp ecosystem. Leisure, a corrupted, dark leisure that turned absolute power into amusement. And it is there that we find forms of entertainment barely recorded in official documentation, but which emerge forcefully in post-war accounts. Practices of humiliation, macab games, bets, mockeries, fares, horror without purpose, executed solely for pleasure, for laughter, or by habit.

One of these forms of entertainment was the competitions among guards to see who killed better. In camps like Soiibore or Belzac, where extermination was carried out at an industrial pace, some SS personnel turned death into a contest. Bets were made on who could shoot faster in the back of the neck without staining their clothes or who could clear a row of prisoners using less ammunition. In camps like Yanovska, according to witnesses, some officers bet on how long a prisoner would last if hanged by the wrists with feet barely touching the ground. Sadism merged with sport. Death became spectacle. When it was over, they drank, commented, and laughed. Forced musical performances also took on a playful dimension. In several camps, especially Yanovska, Saxonhausen, and some subcamps of Achvitz, prisoner musicians were forced to play during executions. Sometimes the ensemble had to play waltzes while bodies fell one after another. If they played out of tune, punishment was immediate, but at times music was used as part of sadistic games. Auditions were organized where musicians were forced to improvise and guards decided if they deserved to live another day based on their performance. In Bukinvald, a violinist was forced to play while another prisoner slowly died hanging by his arms.

The SS officer in charge remarked, “This is how a man dies. This is how Germany sounds.” Another perverse form of occupation was photography and drawing as personal entertainment. Some officers and non-commissioned officers had cameras with which they captured internal scenes of the camp. Although photography was technically restricted, it was allowed discreetly. Some guards organized impromptu sessions where they posed with humiliated wounded or dead prisoners. There are records of personal albums in which SS appear smiling next to hanging corpses or groups of inmates lined up like trophies. In other cases, prisoners with drawing talent were forced to illustrate daily scenes, formations, punishments, executions. One such prisoner reported that his guard requested comic caricatures of sick inmates and laughed for hours. If they were not funny, his bread ration was suspended. In certain contexts, cruelty took the form of ritualized psychological deceit. Fake ceremonies of liberation or transfers were staged. Some prisoners were told they would be rewarded for their good work. They were forced to shave, dress in clean clothes, sign documents. Then instead of being freed, they were led to the firing squad or were still forced to watch the execution of another while waiting their turn, knowing freedom would never come.

In Plazoo, Jews who spoke fluent German were used in these setups. They had to act as officers, simulate interviews, give false hope to those selected. Afterwards, they were beaten for having lied, even though it was all a forced far. Games of chance with human lives were common during rest periods. Some guards tossed coins, dice, or even cards to decide which prisoner would be executed, who would be beaten, or who had to carry out impossible tasks. Sometimes these random decisions served as an excuse to unleash violence. In Dhaka, according to the testimony of an SS member, an officer tossed a coin in front of two prisoners. Heads you live, tails you die. The first was shot in the temple. The second was forced to drag the body to the pit. Then he was executed anyway. Forced theatrical activities were another favorite form of entertainment for officers and guards. It was not about art or culture. It was about spectacles of humiliation. In mountousen, prisoners were forced to perform parodies of their own nationalities. Jews had to portray greedy and cowardly characters. Poles had to dance ridiculously. Communists recited distorted slogans. Sometimes full plays were staged with improvised scripts and props made from trash. The SS audience laughed, drank, shouted.

Sometimes they asked for encores. If the performance was not satisfactory, punishment was immediate. A mispronounced word could cost a life. The visual recording of death also took on an aesthetic dimension for some. In Trinka, certain guards watched mass executions from a lookout with binoculars as if it were a hunt. Others in camps with visible crerematoria timed how long it took for a body to disappear in the flames. In some cases, they discussed among themselves which type of body burned better, the obese, the children, the sick, using almost culinary language. They referred to the process as the camp’s digestion. The crerematorium was for many a recurring spectacle. Even the language of horror became part of the game. Nicknames were invented for prisoners. They were assigned ironic titles. The Jewish general, the Polish countess, the invisible doctor, and were forced to act according to these roles during meals or formations. In some camps, the SS wrote mocking signs that they hung around punished prisoners necks. I am a thief of air. I pretended to be hungry. I am not useful to the Reich. These signs were read aloud and then the prisoner was made to march under laughter and whistles. It was a carnival of contempt.

During calmer moments, especially at night or on weekends, films were shown in the personnel restrooms, private screenings of Nazi propaganda, German comedies, or in camps farther from the front, news reels about military advances. But in some cases, footage recorded by the SS themselves was also projected. Executions, punishments, explosions, stacked bodies. These images were commented on as if they were visual trophies. In Gusen, an officer collected images of shootings that he showed as slides to his colleagues. He titled them like postcards. The final smile of number 184, Spring in the Ravine, Fire in the Forest. The use of SS children in camp dynamics adds an even more sinister layer. In more rural camps or where staff lived nearby, officer children were occasionally brought to visit the camp. In these contexts, some prisoners, usually children or adolescents, were used as children’s entertainment. They were asked to perform tricks to play with the SS children to serve during snacks. If they made a mistake or if the German child got bored, punishment was immediate. Sometimes the punishment was carried out by the child himself under the indulgent gaze of his father.

It was the pedagogy of power from the cradle. None of these practices served a productive function. It was not about control, deterrence or punishment in the name of order. It was about pleasure, about laughter, about passing time, about reminding themselves that they could do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, and about inviting others to share in that pleasure. Violence without objective, play without consequence. The spectacle of suffering turned into habit. All of this coexisted with daily reports, with schedules, with transport lists. Thus in the margins of the bureaucracy of death a world of minor perversions flourished of private amusements of small ceremonies of sadism. Not all are recorded. Many were lost among the smoke and the fear. But those that survived in testimonies or documentary fragments reveal something essential that the machine of horror did not operate only with formal gears. It also ran on laughter, on bets, on whims, and on games. terrible games that did not end when the barracks lights were turned off. Because for them, the camp was never enough. There was always room to play a little more.