Emotional Regimes and Refuges: Masculinity and Resistance in the Konzentrationslager

Abstract

This article explores the emotional regimes and refuges developed by male inmates in Nazi concentration camps (KL), focusing on Dachau, Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen. Drawing on survivor testimonies and memoirs, it argues that the SS imposed a top-down emotional regime designed to dehumanize and control prisoners through emotional repression and behavioural conformity. Inmates internalized and enforced these norms, not only to avoid punishment but also to reclaim agency and masculine identity in an emasculating environment. Emotional control became a survival strategy and a moral imperative, with stoicism and selective apathy valued over vulnerability. However, friendships offered emotional refuge, enabling inmates to express care, trust and pride – emotions otherwise suppressed in camp society. These relationships allowed prisoners to reassert individuality and moral decency, subtly resisting SS efforts to destroy their humanity. The article situates emotional regimes and refuges within broader debates on resistance, arguing that conformity to emotional norms and the cultivation of friendship constituted symbolic and defensive resistance. By examining the gendered dimensions of emotional expression and repression, this study contributes to our understanding of inmate society, survival strategies and the emotional lives of men under extreme conditions.

My desire to make people understand received much impetus from my need to comprehend better what had happened to me while in the camps … unconsciously my efforts were an attempt to master this shattering experience not just intellectually but also emotionally. ¹

In this quote famed memoirist and survivor of the concentration camps (Konzentrationslager; KL) Bruno Bettelheim captured a sentiment widely expressed by survivors; that their treatment in the camps had profound emotional consequences. While historians have turned to emotions as a subject of study in recent years, this trend has not made great strides in the historiography of the KL. As Nikolaus Wachsmann has said, studies of emotions in the camps, ‘have touched on the emotions … but overall, such references have been rather cursory and incidental’. ² This article aims to address this gap in the literature.

I will show that the SS waged a campaign of dehumanization and deindividualization against prisoners in the camps. This campaign, in combination with the horrific conditions inside the KL, incentivized prisoners to adopt extreme levels of emotional control and repression as a means of psychological and physical protection from SS cruelty and abuse. An ‘emotional regime’, according to William Reddy, is a set of top-down practices that establish emotional norms in society and which sanction those who do not conform. ³ Many prisoners responded to the SS creation of an emotional regime by endorsing and coopting it for a very different purpose. Male inmates adopted the practices of the emotional regime as a form of preserving one's masculine identity in an emasculating environment. The demands of the emotional regime were, however, heavy.

An ‘emotional refuge’, per Reddy, is a relationship, activity or organization that provides a safe release from prevailing emotional norms. ⁴ Friendships offered ‘emotional refuge’ by giving prisoners spaces in which they could display emotions more freely, and ‘re-personalize’ themselves by displaying care and affection for others. This had significant consequences for ‘inmate society’. The practices of inmates within the ‘emotional regimes and refuges’ in the KL should be considered subtle forms of resistance against the SS's efforts to strip male prisoners of their identities, emasculate them and ultimately to threaten their physical and emotional survival. Through these practices male inmates sought the emotional mastery over the conditions which Bettelheim still craved decades later.

In recent years, female inmates in the camps have rightly received more attention. These studies range across issues including forced labour, sexual abuse, female guards and survival strategies. ⁵ It has been claimed that women developed more intimate friendships than male inmates and thus were better able to emotionally and psychologically endure the camps. It has also been suggested that male inmates were more likely to eschew their familial responsibilities and adopt an individualist approach to survival. ⁶ This has been challenged in recent years. ⁷

Male inmate friendships and social relations have continued to receive little attention from historians of the camps. My research demonstrates that friendship formation in concentration camps followed a similar pattern to those outside of the KL. Inmates tended to be attracted to similarity, with nationality, language and, age being key characteristics. Ideology, particularly politics, was an important factor in social relationships, though it seems to have had a greater influence on a group level in fostering comradeship, than on dyadic and intimate friendships. There are indications that class was a significant factor, as there is evidence of class-based hostility toward both ‘low’ and ‘high-status’ inmates. Inmates were conscious of the social contract of friendship and took adherence to it very seriously. The breakdown of friendships in the camps was often the result of a failure of one party to live up to the social contract of friendship, often regarding the sharing of resources. Thus, many survivors depict their friendships as similar to the Socratic ‘virtue friendship’ ideal which states that friendship is only possible among the virtuous minority.

Anna Hajkova, in her work on Teresienstadt, defined society as ‘as a large social field where people are connected by a place, structural conditions … and mutual communication’. ⁸ To this definition I would add an caveat from Maja Suderlands study of prisoner society, in which she emphasizes ‘familiar ways of living either by reenacting routine practices’. ⁹ This definition of society is appropriate even within the context of the KL which were spaces riddled with inequality, discrimination and oppression. Inmate societies comprised a group of people within a delineated space who shared collective practices, customs, rules, norms of behaviour and expression required within said society, and what could and could not be expected of those who lived within it. Analysis of emotions, and friendship offers great insight into ‘prisoner society’ in the camps. This not only will benefit our understanding of the lived experience of prisoners and their emotional responses. It will also allow us to ask questions as to the role of emotions in shaping prisoner behaviours and actions, and thus on the functioning of the prisoner society within the KL with consequences for our understanding of survival strategies, agency, resistance and inmate networks. However, for the task to be fully realized historians of the KL must incorporate insights on gender from other disciplines and methodologies.

Focusing on the ideas of emotional regime and refuge has several advantages for a historian of the KL. Joanna Bourke has written that emotions must be ‘made visible’ in order for historians to analyse them. ¹⁰ Through a focus on the societal regulation of emotions, via emotional regimes and refuges, historians of the KL can make emotions ‘visible’. In turn, this visibility encourages consideration of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and religion as identity markers which play roles in which emotions one ought to feel, and how those emotions may, or may not, be expressed. Ultimately, emotional regimes focus us on how the SS impacted not only the behaviours of inmates but their emotional lives in ways that go beyond the more obvious fear-inducing conditions in the KL. However, the concept of emotional refuge, while acknowledging the importance of the role of the SS, recognizes the agency of inmates as subjects seeking refuge as a form of self-preservation or even resistance.

This article is based on the study of hundreds of published and unpublished memoirs, and video interviews of survivors of Dachau, Mauthausen and Auschwitz. These camps were chosen as they were of comparable size and functioned primarily as punitive labour camps and not death camps. ¹¹ Auschwitz was unique in many respects, being both a concentration and an extermination camp. Therefore, inclusion of testimonies of survivors of Auschwitz offers a point of contrast, and the opportunity to assess if broad trends existed between camps of significantly distinct functions.

It is, however, vital to stress that the treatment of prisoners varied wildly according to camp, timeframe, the dispositions of the commandant and guards, and perhaps most crucially per the individual's position in prisoner society. The most important factor in that regard was the inmate's ethnic background. Jews were always treated worse than other groups by the SS. One might expect in light of that fact, that Jews in the KL would manifest friendship behaviours and norms particular to them as a group. However, this study is not primarily focused on Jewish survivors, and therefore it was not possible to assess the extent to which the friendships of male Jews in those camps were distinct from other national groups.

This article, is focused primarily on German, Austrian, Dutch, and Spanish inmates, who comprised a large sample pool of survivors, with varying national backgrounds including but not limited to Jewish men, whose testimonies could be studied in the original languages. Primacy was given to the testimonies of survivors who had reached at least sixteen years of age as the importance of masculinity in the study made it preferable to focus on those with a more fully developed sense of ‘manhood’. The article deals primarily with the later war years (1942–5), and while I contend that emotional regimes will be found in the camps in the prewar years also, the KL system was a fluid and changing one. Therefore, comparative work on the particularities of emotional regimes in the KL across time periods are likely to be fruitful in nuancing our understanding of life in the camps.

A factor of great importance in this article is the gendering of the performance of emotions. In Western societies, research indicates that gender differences are larger for expression of emotion than experience. ¹² men and women tend to self-report the same emotions in relation to the same stimulus. How those emotions are displayed, or not, is where the variance typically lies. ¹³ Women, research indicates, are more likely to show their emotions openly and via explicit verbal statements. Women also seem more prone to express prosocial emotions (empathy, joy, enthusiasm) and emotions that express powerlessness or vulnerability (fear, sadness, shame). ¹⁴ This is likely due to cultural norms around emotions, particularly those associated with intimacy or vulnerability, which many Western societies ‘code’ as feminine. ¹⁵ As a result, men are socially disincentivized from displaying these emotions, or into expressing them in different forms than do women. ¹⁶ These gendered differences of expression are vital for historians as we only have access emotions as they are reported, or as we interpret in behaviours and statements. My contention is that our subjects can (and I the case of male KL survivors, often do) report emotions in ways which are subtle and easy to miss as they are not explicit or direct descriptions of emotion; Rather, emotions can be reported in portrayals of behaviours which are consistent with societal expressions of particular emotions. Resultantly, to analyse the emotions of men it is extremely helpful to have an understanding of typical behavioural or verbal patterns of expression among males which is only attainable with the aid of specialist research.

An ‘emotional regime’, according to William Reddy, is a set of top-down practices that establish emotional norms in society and which sanction those who do not conform. Multiple regimes can exist simultaneously, from general norms shared across society to the specificities of institutions such as workplaces, schools, etc. An emotional refuge, conversely, is a relationship, activity, or organization that provides a safe release from prevailing emotional norms. Emotional refuges can take many forms with different consequences and meanings. ¹⁷

I contend that there was an emotional regime extant in each of the KL studied. The SS imposed rules and conditions upon the inmates which incentivized the inmates to regulate their emotions, and therefore their behaviours, in ways which were more likely to aid survival . In regulating their emotions and behaviours as a ‘society’ inmates displayed agency, and resistance toward the agenda of the SS. The intense effort required to adhere to the emotional regime necessitated that the inmates seek ‘emotional refuge’ via friendship, which provided a space for inmates to turn away from their self-imposed emotional and behavioural repression.

By 1936, the process of arrival and registration of inmates was largely standardized across the camp system. ¹⁸ On arrival, inmates were subjected to a process of deliberate depersonalization. Shorn of all body hair, inmates were issued identical uniforms, with coloured triangles denoting the category of their ‘crime’. This process was intended to deindividualize inmates, and it was largely successful. Survivors frequently state that after this intake procedure, they had trouble identifying each other. ¹⁹ André Ferber, a Frenchman from Paris who survived Sachsenhausen, recalled his first impression of the camp in a 2001 interview, ‘It was kind of a – (laugh) kind of a shock. I mean, you really lose your complete identity, of course. That's the purpose’. ²⁰ Inmates were also assigned numbers which became their official identities. ²¹ Primo Levi describes the process of having one's name replaced with a number in his inimitable style, ‘He (the inmate) is Null Achtzehn (018) … As if everyone were aware that only a man is worthy of a name, and that Null Achtzehn is no longer a man’. ²²

Threats, intimidation, sexual humiliation, and religious-based humiliation were all common. As, of course, was systematic violence. Survivors often stress that guards and Kapos had free rein to use violence as a disciplinary measure, and survivor literature is replete with claims that inmates were beaten, sometimes killed, with little to no provocation. Not only would open resistance have carried an enormous risk of punishment, perhaps death, but it would have been frowned upon by one's fellow inmates. Chris Dillon again highlights this with acuity. The very real possibility of collective punishment would have made inmates view acts of open resistance as, not only foolhardy but a threat to the collective and thus, ‘reprehensible’. ²³ Max Groen, a Dutch Survivor of Dachau, provided an illustrative example in his testimony. Groen recalled his friend Dries becoming angry at the treatment of inmates by a Kapo. Dries voiced his opinion and received a severe beating as recompense. Perhaps surprisingly, to our sensibilities, Groen laid the responsibility at Dries’ door, ‘I could only say to him, what an idiot you are! Because it was his own fault’. ²⁴

Maja Suderland summarized the effect of these abuses which, ‘deliberately created conditions in the concentration camps which were so inhuman that it was difficult for the prisoners to continue to act like human beings … The prisoners perceived this situation to be beneath human dignity and therefore dehumanizing’. ²⁵ This perceived lack of human dignity, led many prisoners to develop a distorted perception of self as a lesser human being, as evidenced in the countless examples of survivors describing themselves and fellow prisoners in animalistic language. Hendryk Katz, a Polish Jew who survived Mauthausen, was asked in an interview, what effect the war and the camps had on him later in life. His reply was, ‘I was not thinking anything. I was like an animal in the jungle’. ²⁶ Arnold Blum, a Bavarian Jewish survivor of Dachau, stated in a 1997 interview that on arrival, the inmates were sent to the barber who had clippers, ‘like you’d use on a dog’. Thereafter, they were, not shaved like people, but, ‘sheared’ like animals. ²⁷ The procedures for inducting new arrivals into the KL reduced individuals to the ‘generic’ KL ‘Häftling’ (inmate) via a process of dehumanization and deindividualization. This was carried ourt by the SS to prevent widespread comradeship from emerging, and to ‘break’ the inmates mentally to make them easier to control. Inadvertently, the SS had laid the foundations of an emotional regime.

Attracting the attention of the SS guards or Kapos was dangerous. Max Groen, a Dutchman arrested on political charges and confined to Mauthausen recorded in his memoir an inmate named Thomas Wagenaar, whose friend died. ‘From then on, Thomas Wagenaar let his head hang down…Was always picked out. Kapos and SS men were like lions. They preyed on the sick and weak. In a few weeks, it was over with him’. ²⁸ Nico Rost, a Dutch survivor of Dachau, recorded in his diary on 12 January 1945, that his friend Gijs had died early that morning. ‘here we cannot mourn for anyone. One day, at most two days’. ²⁹ In essence, grief and its consequent behaviours, were in Rost's view not compatible with survival. Inmates therefore sought safety from the sanctions of the emotional regime through cultivated anonymity. Simon Gutter, a prisoner in Sachsenhausen, made this point in an interview with the VHA Shoah Foundation, ‘the main rule is make yourself invisible. Make yourself small. Don't attract anybody to you’. ³⁰ This desire for anonymity required strong emotional regulation, and signals the inmates adoption of, and adaptation to, the SS created emotional regime.

We often find in survivor testimonies the assertion that inmates became more stoic and less empathetic or ‘numb’ to the suffering of others. What psychologists call ‘selective apathy’. Stanislaw Grzesiuk, a Polish survivor of Mauthausen, recalled seeing an acquaintance with which he once shared a barrack, laughing hysterically and screaming unintelligibly. Stan, ‘felt…nothing more than normal curiosity’, as he had become, ‘accustomed to the sight of crazy people and the dead, to the point that it made no impression at all’. ³¹ The extremity of conditions made inmates priorities their own survival, while the depersonalization campaign disincentivized inmates from feeling sympathy for other men who, at times, blended into a faceless nameless mass.

Inmates were incentivized to repress their emotions to protect themselves. Feelings of shame and frustration in the face of their powerlessness were acute for male inmates, as their masculine agency, honour, and ability to physically protect themselves, and others, were undermined. ³² Primo Levi provides an example of this in his memoir, ‘If this is a Man’. Shortly after the Sonderkommando (inmates who were tasked with working in the crematorium) uprising in Auschwitz, a man was hanged in the camp as an accomplice of the rebels. Levi felt ashamed of the cowardice of himself, and the wider inmate population, for not also having risen up. The condemned man was the ‘last strong man’ among them, ‘made of a different metal’. The rest of the inmates, in contrast, were ‘worn-out slaves’. Levi and his best friend Alberto could not look each other in the eye for several hours afterward. ³³ This is a fascinating example, not only of shame manifesting so boldly and explicitly but also of masculine emotional distancing in the avoidance of eye contact. Levi and Alberto remained, ‘oppressed by shame’. ³⁴ It was precisely situations such as that experienced by Levi and Alberto that led to inmates enforcing emotional regimes within inmate society.

Inmates themselves would punish those who failed to comply, including via social ostracization and mockery. Kim Wünschmann described this process,

The conditions of the camp meant that inmates could not behave in an orthodox masculine way and therefore they developed new codes for masculine behaviour. It was understood that one could not and should not try to physically defend himself. Therefore what determined one's masculinity was the way he took his beating. A masculine inmate shouldn’t cry, or wail, but should accept his beating silently and stoically, ‘both before, during, and after the beating’. ³⁵

Wünschmann further cites the example of Ernst Heilmann, a prominent left-wing politician. He was singled out as a Jewish ‘bigwig’ and brutalized by the SS. Heilmann didn’t ‘take it like a man’ and was ostracized by some members of the political prisoner population as a result. ³⁶ Those who could not control their emotions, were liable to stand out, drawing attention to themselves and those around them. If one did not abide by the rules of emotional regulation he put himself and others in physical danger by drawing the wrath of the guards or Kapos. Therefore, compliance with said rules was deemed right; Emotional and behavioural control had become a moral and therefore, gendered issue. ³⁷ We might consider the adoption of the emotional regime by inmates to encompass a display of hegemonic masculinity. The concept of hegemonic masculinity is not without flaws; One of which being that historians often use the concept uncritically to describe general masculine norms within a society. ³⁸ However, the emotional regimes practised in the camps offer a rather text book example of the concept in practice. The SS imposed behavioural requirements on the inmate populations, which required strict emotional control. Inmates in turn interpreted their successful adoption of said repressive emotional measures to be evidence of masculine strength and in doing so established normative gender behaviours which the society at large was incentivized to emulate. Those who could not do so were marginalized.

Many male survivors, for example, state that they were verbally/physically assaulted by an SS man or a Kapo, yet chose not to react as they knew it would make things worse. Valentin Sacharow, a Soviet inmate of war in Mauthausen, narrated an illustrative episode in his memoir. Sacharow recalled an SS man entering the Soviet Pow barrack. This was an unusual occurrence as guards tended to avoid entering the barracks unless absolutely necessary. This SS guard began questioning Sacharow and his friend Nikolai about their activities (they had been making items out of wood for the ‘blockführer’, or Barrack Leader). In Nikolai's pocket, the SS man found a stone, apparently for sharpening the tools that the inmates were using for their task. The SS man grew suspicious and repeatedly threatened to beat Nikolai with the stone. Sacharow, in admiring terms and evidently proud of his friend, emphasizes that Nikolai did not flinch, nor tremble. He stood tall and looked directly ahead, until the third time that the guard threatened to hit him. Nikolai later explained to Sacharow, that he made a calculated decision to look away upon being threatened for a third time as he recognized that the guard needed to be appeased before he could walk away. ³⁹ Thus, Nikolai did not flinch out of fear but rather used his cunning to take control of the situation. Masculine narratives such as these betray the survivor's self-perceived need to explain and justify their inaction to the reader; they know that their behaviour is inconsistent with the their societal ideals of courage, power, physical strength ⁴⁰ Therefore, they explain how the emotional regime within the camp led them into a different, and in that particular context, appropriate course of action.

Another such example, was the stripping of male inmates of their ability to protect their families and friends. The ability to protect and provide for one's family was, and remains, an important normative masculine ideal. ⁴¹ Generally, male and female prisoners were held in separate camps, or within single-sex compounds within a camp; Young children would typically stay with their mothers. ⁴² Moreover, many men would have been sent to the camps while their families remained at home, causing intense concern and grief, as evident in the following passage in which the survivor cries when thinking of his family. Thus, many male inmates would likely have felt guilt and shame at their inability to do what society says a man should for his loved ones. Therefore some male inmates, but by no means all, seem to have adopted a self-defence mechanism of trying to not become emotionally bonded with others for fear of the emotional pain of their inability to fulfil their societally assigned masculine responsibilities. Traces of this guilt are discernable in the sources.

Some male survivors state that having friends, relatives, or loved ones in the camps alongside oneself was a detriment, and made one's life harder. Some even go so far as to state that thinking about home at all was detrimental to one's mental state and therefore survival chances. Amek Adler, a Jewish Pole from Radom, spent ‘6 or 7’ months in Dachau before liberation in 1945. His VHA interview expresses this sentiment clearly, ‘in concentration camps you couldn’t make friends, and it's even harder to be with family…because in the morning, your next door neighbour in the bunk, you wake up in the morning and he's dead…so there was…..(long pause)…what I’m saying is, it's harder when your family is with you than with strangers’. ⁴³ In this example, we might suggest that the response of Adler, and others, to the emotional regime was to endorse and internalize it to such an extent that they tried to block out memories or thoughts which might lead to a lack of emotional control altogether.

Franciso Batiste Bayla, a Spanish survivor of Mauthausen, suggests in his testimony, that inmates were deliberately trying to protect their friends’ emotional state by navigating their way around sensitive subjects. Bayla recalled a friend, Augustine, who had a wife and young daughter at home. According to Bayla, these circumstances could lead an inmate into an emotionally ‘critical state’. Bayla continued, ‘To avoid this, we would try to make sure that our conversations touched on various topics’. ⁴⁴ Essentially, Bayla suggests, that inmates avoided subjects that might be emotionally painful or damaging. This process wasn’t entirely an unconscious one. One survivor later stated, ‘We talked together as friends about concrete things, not about feelings. I think all of the feelings were blocked; if you felt too much, you felt bad. To feel was to feel unpleasant, better not to feel at all, don't think about it’. ⁴⁵ This finding is consistent with the previously cited research which demonstrates that men tend to avoid public displays of emotion for fear of appearing less masculine. Further research, suggests that within the context of friendship, it is common for men to adopt problem-solving behaviours to aid friends. One such category of behaviours, is ‘avoidance’ behaviours, which minimize a problem, in this instance by trying to avoid the subject. ⁴⁶ It also, however, shows that these inmates were not uncaring, but quite the opposite. Bayla also noted that he still caught his friend, from time to time, trying to hide the tears in his eyes. ⁴⁷

These emotional trends seem to be those which were generalized across the camp society and the camps studied. They were not, however, uniform. For example, Kapos could display anger fairly freely toward less powerful prisoners, whereas inmates from lower down in the inmate hierarchy would have had to be selective in to whom they were willing to direct such emotions. Yet, broadly speaking, the emotional regimes in the camps studied led to a series of general rules respecting the acceptability and display of emotions. Due to special constraints not all of them can be addressed here. However, most pertinent to this article are the following: Inmates were incentivized toward stoicism in order to not attract unwanted attention from SS men, Kapos, block leaders, and other inmates. Relatedly, inmates were disincentivized from displays of anger towards guards or inmates in powerful positions. The repressive emotional regulation required by the KL emotional regimes increased the symbolic value placed upon certain characteristics that were prized due to their general absence; moral uprightness, virtue, trustworthiness, and honesty. In turn, behaviours and interactions which could be interpreted as displaying said virtues were emotionally significant to those involved as we shall now see.

By adopting strict emotional control the inmates, from their perspective, regained a degree of their masculinity and self-respect through ‘re-appraisal’: looking at a situation from a different perspective in order to regulate one's emotions. ⁴⁸ The inmates looked at their circumstances from a different perspective (renewed focus on emotional control and emotional strength as evidence of masculinity) and therefore experienced different emotions: pride in their emotional control, rather than (or at least alongside) their shame in there . physical vulnerability and lack of personal sovereignty.

Friendships offered emotional refuge from anonymity by giving inmates a relationship in which their individuality was important and valued. As Eugen Kogon, survivor of Buchenwald, wrote, through friendships ‘men again became human beings…they were able to look their fellows in the face, beholding the same sorrow and the same pride, and drawing renewed strength. Hope was revived’. ⁴⁹ Emotional refuges not only shaped the experiences of the inmates but were intertwined with the functioning of inmate society within the camp.

Inmates in the camps were able to participate in activities together, including card games, musical performances, poetry recitals, football matches, boxing matches, and so on. However, involvement in these activities was not available to all. One activity that virtually all inmates participated in was ‘organization’ (black market trading). This was of course primarily a survival strategy, aiming to acquire extra food and other resources. However, it is evident in the memoirs of survivors, that ‘organization’ activities provided male inmates opportunities to behave in ways which produced a great deal of pride. Aaron Salzman, for example, asked in an interview to talk about his friend Richard, replied, ‘we shared everything which we had … He used to have … a German who gave him every once in a while a little bit soup or a slice of bread … he brought it and we shared it’. ⁵⁰ In an environment in which survivors stress the lack of normalcy, care, affection, trust, and empathy, we can reasonably suggest that the functioning of a relationship in which these values are apparent when viewed through a Western view of friendship, with which these men were socialized, may have been a way of trying to recapture and experience these values and emotions.

As well as advancing one's survival chances, ‘organization’ allowed male inmates to perform classically masculine roles as providers and protectors. ‘Organization’ and friendship gave male inmates spaces to feel morally decent, caring, protective, and compassionate. In doing so, the consequences of ‘organization’ provided emotional refuge from the wider camps context in which those values were not common on a societal level.

There is a wide body of literature on resistance to the Nazi state and the Holocaust. ⁵¹ There is no consensus, however, on how to define the concept. In the postwar period, Jews were widely portrayed as having gone to the gas chambers meekly, ‘like lambs to the slaughter’. ⁵² This view provoked a backlash, among Jewish survivors, and historians, and led to a wave of scholarship both drawing attention to Jewish physical resistance and arguing for a broadening of the term to include non-violent activities. Saul Esh, identified a form of resistance among Jews as, ‘kiddush ha-hayyim’; the sanctification of life. Meir Dworzecki, meanwhile, thought resistance to be the maintenance of one's humanity via ‘good deeds’.

Such definitions risk broadening the definition of resistance to a degree to which the concept becomes intellectually unuseful. In Michael Marrus’ words, ‘some historians now argued for the inclusion of virtually all such activity in any concept of resistance’. ⁵³ Ruby Rohrlich, provides the ultimate example, in her assertion that ‘for Jews during the Holocaust, simply surviving can be considered a form of resistance to the German goal of Jewish extermination’. ⁵⁴ Isaiah Trunk lamented the ‘slightly apologetic air’ in the historiography of resistance to the Holocaust suggesting that broad definitions risked attributing to Jewish resistance a unique, and, thus de-historicizing, moral significance. ⁵⁵

In recent decades, resistance has become a major topic of debate in the historiographies of the Third Reich more broadly. German civilians handing out flyers, women protesting the arrest of their German husbands, and the suicide of Jews persecuted by the Nazi state have all been subject to debates on the nature of resistance. ⁵⁶ Alf Lüdtke's concept of Eigensinn (self-affirmation) has been very influential due to its focus on ordinary people and how they ‘try to retain a sense of self, relate to friends, and protect themselves from hierarchies and organizations’. ⁵⁷ An older, but still important concept in the histography of resistance is Martin Broszat's ‘rezistenz’. This concept aims to recognize the wide range of ways in which people tried to limit Nazi rule from civil disobedience, to, criticism of the regime, strikes, ‘or even in the mere internal preservation of principles opposed to National Socialism and the resulting immunity to National Socialist ideology and propaganda’. ⁵⁸

Within the KL, however, resistance seems to be still discussed primarily with reference to the armed uprisings in Sobibor (October 1943) and Auschwitz (October 1944). Wolf Gruner, has called attention to the importance of, ‘Expanding the definition to include individuals, not just groups’, as it, ‘fundamentally changes our perception’. ⁵⁹ To this statement I would add that approaching resistance with a view to emotions can provide an important perspective on a well-trodden theme. I suggest that the inmates’ cooption of the emotional regimes in the camps, and the practices of emotional refuge ought to be considered acts of resistance toward the SS. Eigensinn and resistenz are very useful for historians of the KL who wish to analyse the emotional lives of inmates, as the ‘inner’ life of our subjects are built into the concepts. Both ‘Eigensinn’ and ‘resistenz’ are very evident in the practices associated with emotional regimes and refuges in the camps. These two concepts may be read as encompassing a passive or unconscious form of resistance. Giorgio Agamben argued in that vein that, in Auschwitz, inmates enacted a ‘silent form of resistance’ by withdrawing into themselves and shutting out the detaching from the outside world. ⁶⁰ I disagree, however, with Agamben's claim that inmates simply withdrew into themselves. Rather, many male inmates actively sought to encourage adherence to the emotional regime via social incentivization.

As this article has shown, emotional regulation became seen by male inmates as a moral and gendered issue. Via the ‘re-appraisal’ of their circumstances, male inmates sough to preserve their masculine identities which the SS was actively and consciously attempting to destroy. ⁶¹ This can be clearly labelled an attempt to ‘retain a sense of self’, protect oneself from hostile hierarchies, or an internal preservation of moral principles.

The SS wished to create a prisoner body which was broken, dispirited and divided. They were largely successful. However, many male inmates sought, via emotional regulation, to behave in ways which ran contrary to the SS agenda; They retained pride in their treatment of friends, they demonstrated compassion for others, they displayed agency and gender. The sharing of food between friends in the KL, often though not exclusively conducted within an inmate's emotional refuge, can be seen as an expression of ‘resistenz’. Inmates were very aware of the barbarity of the camps, and the SS agenda to divide and rule via unequal treatment of inmates. ⁶² The primary purpose of sharing food was, of course, the pooling of resources for survival. The evident pride, however, with which many survivors talk about sharing food demonstrates the important emotional resonance of the action. From said pride we can infer perceived agency, deliberation, and on that basis conscious will to resist barbarization and behave morally. Adolf Maislinger, an Austrian inmate in Mauthausen, provided a relatively rare account of ‘organization’ from a Kapo's perspective. Maislinger stated that he behaved differently than his predecessor as Kapo, who had ‘organized everything for himself’. Maislinger, in contrast, claimed that he, ‘had completely clean hands’. During the winter ‘warm jumpers, warm socks…thick coats, and so on, we gave them all out to the comrades’. ⁶³ Survivor sources must be scrutinized like any other. Therefore, we must respectfully consider the possibility that Maislinger's comments were self-serving. However, were that so, it would remain the case that his chosen narrative displays an awareness of the symbolic importance of sharing in the KL context.

Inmates in the KL sought to actively alter their emotional reactions to their environment and to enforce emotional control and conformity throughout inmate society, in order to gain mastery over their behaviours. In doing so, inmates sought to increase their chances of survival. While the emotional regime in the camp did to some degree protect inmates emotionally and psychologically, it also facilitated a lack of empathy and willingness to ‘other’ inmates from different ‘triangles’. Thus, this coping and resistance mechanism facilitated the SS plan to prevent the spread of a general sense of comradeship amongst the inmate population.

It has been accepted within the field of KL and Holocaust historiography that there was no widespread or universal sense of comradeship based upon shared suffering in the camps. ⁶⁴ I argue that this lack of generalized ‘solidarity’, was in part due to the consequences of this paradox of emotional regulation expressed in the emotional regimes and refuges. Inmates distanced themselves emotionally for protection, in doing so they became less empathetic towards fellow inmates (see earlier quote from Stanisław Grzesiuk). While inmates did seek emotional refuge, due to the nature of conditions in the camps and the necessity to compete for survival, such circles of refuge were necessarily kept small. Hermann Lein, an Austrian Catholic arrested for resistance activities in 1938 and incarcerated in Dachau, made the same point in his memoir, ‘Innitzergardist’. Lein posited that ‘solidarity was only practiced by the inmates in small groups’. ⁶⁵ As a result, a norm developed in the camps in which apathy and distance were directed toward the many, while emotional connection was preserved for the few. Therefore, the SS's aim to prevent generalized solidarity from developing was successful, in part due to the survival strategies chosen by inmates.

Though inmates conformed to the behavioural demands of the SS-led emotional regime, they did so in the attempt to reach distinct ends. The SS wanted to use repressive standards of emotional and behavioural repression to break the prisoners, which in time would make their survival less likely. The inmates on the other hand, through ‘re-appraisal’ of their circumstances, came to see their emotional and behavioural regulation as a sign of strength and masculinity, which allowed them to feel a degree of control over their circumstances. Jürgen Matthäus has called certain tactics employed by Jews to circumvent Nazi racial laws ‘evasion by compliance’. ⁶⁶ This term is also appropriate to the inmate's cooption of the emotional regime. This coping strategy was also in effect a form of resistance as rather than exclusively feeling broken, weak and powerless, inmates felt a degree of pride and agency and increased their survival chances (due to not attracting the wrath of guards) which was the opposite of the SS's aim. In the context of the camps, survival was the paramount concern of all inmates. However, we need to considered survival as encompassing not only the physical, but also the psychological, and the emotional. Inmates wanted to retain their lives above all, but they also wanted to retain their self-respect, and their dignity. One of the ways that they attempted to do so was through their navigation of the emotional paradoxes that we have been discussing.

The SS reigned over an environment which was dehumanizing, deindividualizing, and violent and in doing so created conditions which created the need for an oppressive emotional regime. In response to the emotional turmoil caused by circumstances in the KL, inmates coopted said ‘emotional regime’ as a survival strategy. This regime incentivized inmates to adopt more stoic and less empathetic dispositions and contributed to widespread selective apathy in the KL. Inmates were expected to demonstrate emotional control in order to retain sovereignty over their own behaviours. Those who could not do so, faced social sanctions by the inmate society, including shunning and ridicule.

This level of emotional control and repression could not be maintained perpetually. Thus inmates sought emotional refuge in the form of friendship. Within friendships, inmates could display emotions which were disincentivized in the general inmate society. Furthermore, they could experience positive emotions, such as pride, at their conduct within friendship groups. Such positive emotions were hard to come by in the KL as inmates were forced by the SS into behaviours which they would ordinarily abhor, including those relating to the reduction of empathy which the emotional regime encouraged. I suggest that the emotional regimes and refuges may be considered acts of resistance on the part of the inmate population as they embody the criteria of the concepts of Eigensinn and ‘Resistenz’. While the new social norms promoted by the regimes may not have had universally positive repercussions, the new social norms were enforced (not exclusively) by the inmates, for the benefit of the inmates, and in contrast to the of the SS.

The concepts of emotional regimes and refuges help us to better understand inmate society in terms of the emotional lives of the inmates while offering a schema with which we may be better able to interpret their behaviours; through trying to understand how they felt, we might get closer to understanding what they did. The concepts also provide an opportunity to further the study of gendered behaviour in the camps by shedding light on the significance of behaviours laden with emotional, moral, and gendered significance. By comparing and contrasting the emotional regimes sought out by male and female inmates were can develop our understanding of these issues even further, and better understand gender in extreme circumstances.