Lots of good points made upthread, but event the fact that the conversation here revolves around concentration camps is already missing the point. Most Jews who were killed in the Holocaust never even saw a concentration camp. They were shot in open pits (as in Babyn Yar, Paneriai, and many, many other sites of various sizes) or killed in death factories like Treblinka, Belzec or Sobibor. Timothy Snyder makes the distinction in “Bloodlands”:
Some of those people had been previously forced to work in ghettos, but that was just a means to stretch time, not an alternative to death, regardless of anyone’s “usefulness.”
The public understanding of the Holocaust is skewed by Auschwitz, which is a very unusual place in that it was both a concentration and an extermination camp: others were generally one or the other. It is also very unusual in that it left behind thousands of survivors: other death factories were built, fulfilled their purpose and were dismantled leaving hardly any innocent witnesses.
