A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #41 - January 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day: Have we really liberated ourselves from the concentration camps? - Carmine Valente (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

To stigmatize the immense tragedy of the Shoah and the scientific 
extermination of "gypsies", people with disabilities, homosexuals, 
prisoners of war and political opponents we could have used harsh words 
of execration or reported the stories of the survivors, but as often 
happens the coldness of the numbers allows us to grasp the events in 
their harsh reality, sweeping away any guilty denialism.

Jewish Victims Method of Killing

Approximately 2,700,000 Extermination camps, in gas chambers; for 
concentration camp:

Approximately 1 000 000 Auschwitz-Birkenau

Approximately 925,000 Treblinka

Approximately 435,000 Belzec

At least 167,000 Chelmno

At least 167,000 Sobibor

Approximately 2,000,000 Mass shootings and other massacres

Between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Arbitrary violence in ghettos, labor camps 
and concentration camps

At least 250,000 Other killings outside camps and ghettos

In total, based on Nazi documents and demographic data from before and 
after the Holocaust, it is estimated that the Nazis, their allies, and 
their collaborators murdered 6 million Jews. As the data above shows, 
not only in the five extermination camps established specifically to 
kill Jews by gassing them, but also through mass shootings and massacres 
in more than 1,500 occupied cities, towns, and villages throughout 
Eastern Europe; through deliberate deprivation of adequate means of 
subsistence, disease, brutal treatment, and acts of arbitrary violence 
in ghettos, labor camps, and concentration camps; and, finally, outside 
of ghettos and places of detention, through acts of violence and 
deprivation, such as killings during anti-Semitic protests, individual 
executions and executions of partisans, and deaths and killings during 
transfers to and from prison camps, whether during forced marches or on 
trains and ships. However, the ferocity of the Nazis and their allies, 
between 1933 and 1945, did not only strike the Jewish people, but also 
struck millions of non-Jews for biological, racial, 
political-ideological reasons.

Non-Jewish Victims Membership

Approximately 3,300,000 Soviet prisoners of war

Approximately 1,800,000 non-Jewish (ethnic) Poles

More than 310,000 Serb civilians killed by Ustasha authorities of the 
Independent State of Croatia

At least 250,000 (some estimates go as high as 500,000)

Roma men, women, children and other people derogatorily labeled "Gypsies"

Between 250,000 and 300,000 (of which at least 10,000 are children)

People with disabilities receiving care in public facilities and nursing 
homes

Tens of thousands

German political opponents and dissidents

Approximately 35,000 Germans imprisoned in concentration camps as 
"professional criminals" and "asocials"

Approximately 1,700 Jehovah's Witnesses who refused to serve in the military

Hundreds or thousands of homosexual or bisexual men, or those accused of 
homosexuality

Unknown number (estimated in the thousands) Black people in Germany

The numbers in their aseptic reality project us into a hellish 
pandemonium compared to which dystopian novels like Orwell's 1984 appear 
as bucolic representations.

Yet they don't tell us about the fears, the loneliness, the difficulty 
of describing the unspeakable that many survivors carried with them 
throughout their lives.

Yet these shadows of the past, which seemed buried in memory, return 
today and sow new hatred and new suffering.

So it's not a strange question to ask where so much "wickedness" comes 
from, which by today's standards seems inconceivable.

Before exploring the ideologies that, at the turn of the 19th and 20th 
centuries, provided the breeding ground for the Nazi aberration of the 
Final Solution, let's briefly examine the antecedents of this thought 
that has permeated human history.

Artificial selection of humans has been suggested at least as far back 
as ancient Greece, where it was known as a common practice (through the 
exposure of unhealthy newborns); any newborn child could be abandoned by 
its parents according to their own free will.

According to Plutarch, in ancient Sparta this fact was an institutional 
practice regulated by the State with the aim of selecting from birth 
future citizens, who would have to be healthy and strong to be able to 
defend the polis .

Although contemporary scholars believe that Plutarch exaggerated these 
claims and that the exposure of newborns was tolerated but not 
institutionalized, Sparta's myth of strength and discipline negatively 
impacted the Western world.

But such an idea of selecting the unborn had among its supporters 
learned and wise philosophers who are universally recognized as the 
fathers of Western culture.

So much so that Plato proposes the same thing in the Statesman and in 
more detail in The Republic , where he establishes the guidelines for 
regulating marital and reproductive life with a concept of positive 
eugenics aimed at producing better human beings, suggesting selective 
mating to produce a class of "guardians".

The limits on reproduction in Plato's "republic" are decided only by the 
State; it believes that the procreation of children should occur only in 
the prime of life.

In his Politics , Aristotle, Plato's greatest disciple, also agrees with 
his master; in fact, he considers it perfectly natural that, regarding 
the killing or raising of children, the law should in any case prohibit 
the breeding of the "defective" and the "deformed." He also proposes 
that the state limit procreation, rather than property ownership, so 
that no more than a predetermined number of children are produced.

During the Renaissance, the Italian philosopher Tommaso Campanella, in 
his utopian vision of The City of the Sun , argued for the desirability 
of arranging marriages and controlling the sexual lives of citizens.

This makes us understand that in the path of philosophical thought there 
are no absolute and eternal moral values and this path is often imbued 
with ideas that appear less "human" than the common feeling of the 
average citizen today.

In more recent times, the premises of racial policies stem from that 
movement which aims to improve the genetic quality of a certain (human) 
population and which goes under the name of eugenics.

Charles Darwin played an unwilling role in his research on evolution and 
the origin of species, where he theorized natural selection and the 
survival of the fittest, that is, individuals with optimal 
characteristics for the environment in which they live.

A theory that crude Darwinism translates into extreme competition and 
the struggle for survival.

Our own Petr Kropotkin, in his work Mutual Aid, argues that cooperation 
and mutual aid are the fundamental factors in the evolution of species, 
opposing the idea of exclusive competition as the driving force of life. 
This theory is now widely supported by comparative studies in botany and 
biology, such as those of Stefano Mancuso, a plant neuroscientist who 
interprets cooperation between plants as an effective evolutionary 
strategy, in line with the principles developed by Petr Kropotkin.

Darwin described phenomena he deduced over many years of scientific 
observation of the plant and animal world, which form the basis of the 
theory of evolution. However, there were those who believed that these 
natural processes could somehow be guided and influenced according to 
well-defined purposes. This is not a new thought, but one that draws on 
what we have seen in the history of ideas to be a speculative legacy 
dating back to ancient Greece.

The responsibility for this transition from natural to artificial 
selection can be attributed to Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin who first 
coined the word eugenics in 1883.

From here it was thought that this natural selection could not only be 
supported but should be implemented with targeted selection policies 
guided by the States, both through positive selection, encouraging 
individuals deemed particularly suitable to reproduce, and through 
negative eugenics such as the prohibition of interracial marriages, 
sterilization of sick individuals and people deemed unsuitable such as 
individuals with mental or physical disabilities, those who obtained low 
scores on IQ tests, criminals, deviants and members of disadvantaged 
minority groups.

The social and health problems afflicting the proletariat (tuberculosis, 
syphilis, alcoholism), which multiplied in the United Kingdom of the 
time as a consequence of exploitation in the workplace aggravated by 
hunger and unhealthy housing, appeared to the wealthy classes as 
manifestations of a contamination of the human species by congenital 
defects produced by the poorest segments of the population.

Galton was no exception to the rule: the poorest people, conceived as 
"naturally inferior," seemed to him to be hopelessly overwhelmed by the 
representatives of the upper social classes, who combined the highest 
and most elevated physical, intellectual and moral characteristics.

For Galton, social classes possess qualities that can be inherited. 
Preserving the qualities of "good lineage" required avoiding blood 
mixing between different family groups, which could only lead to the 
disappearance of the best traits of the human race.

Politically, Galtonian eugenics appears to be a defensive theory whose 
primary purpose is to protect a defined social group from threats 
originating precisely from the lower strata of the population. Under the 
guise of a scientific nature, it seeks to preserve and maintain the 
existing social order, which requires severe limits on unions between 
individuals from different social backgrounds.

Artificial selection policies reached their peak in Nazi Germany, with 
characteristics of scientific brutality that in their peculiarity are 
unmatched in other times and places, but, albeit at different levels, 
they were practiced throughout Europe and in the United States even in 
the periods following the Second World War.

Here are the estimates regarding the cases of sterilizations in the 
twentieth century:

Germany (1933-41): over 400,000

United States (1899-1979): approximately 65,000

Sweden (1934-76): 62,888

Finland (1935-70): 58,000

Norway (1934-77): 40,891

Denmark (1929-67): 11,000

Canada (1928-72): approximately 3,000

Switzerland (1928-85): less than 1,000

Eugenics laws were passed by overwhelming majorities in many countries. 
Political forces of all persuasions agreed on the usefulness of 
sterilization practices, for racial improvement, or for demographic and 
economic reasons.

The first major eugenics movement developed in the United States. 
Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws 
based on eugenic principles, prohibiting marriage to anyone who was 
"epileptic, imbecile, or feeble-minded."

Some states sterilized "imbeciles" for much of the 20th century. The 
peak of eugenic sterilization occurred between 1927 and 1963, when 
approximately 64,000 people were forcibly sterilized under U.S. eugenics 
laws.

Harry Hamilton Laughlin, one of the most active figures in American 
eugenics policies, particularly in the implementation of compulsory 
sterilization, provides a list of the "socially unfit": the mentally 
retarded; the insane; the criminal (including delinquents and 
scoundrels); the drunkard; the sick (tubercular, syphilitic, etc.); the 
blind; the deaf; the deformed; the dependent (including orphans, tramps, 
the homeless, etc.).

So, in this very approximate frame of reference, the question we asked 
ourselves-where does such brutality come from?-begins to find its place.

But now let's look more closely at the years that preceded the abyss of 
National Socialism.

Gypsy legislation, which was supposed to address the so-called "Gypsy 
question," did not originate with National Socialism, but persisted as 
it did in other European countries, both in Wilhelmine Germany and in 
the Weimar Republic.

And the aberrations that found practical implementation in the Nazi 
concentration camps had as their precursors learned and esteemed men of 
science.

In his book In Praise of Biology , the Frenchman Richet, winner of the 
Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1913, referring to blacks, wrote, among 
other things: "Compared to us, these inferior brothers are barbarians, 
and on the other hand, from the anatomical point of view, they are much 
closer to apes than we are, in terms of their brains, their skeletons, 
and even their customs. The psychology of blacks is infantile, and they 
are almost incapable of artistic and scientific expression. They are 
certainly human beings and consequently deserve our respect and 
solidarity, but these feelings must not push us to the point of 
permitting profane unions that would debase our superior white race."

And again, Alexis Carrel, also French and also a Nobel Prize winner for 
medicine the year before, wrote explicitly in his book A Man, This 
Unknown: "Criminals and the mentally ill must be humanely and 
economically eliminated in small euthanasia institutions, supplied with 
suitable gases. Eugenics is indispensable for the perpetuation of 
force.[...]Eugenics can exercise a great influence on the destiny of 
civilized races; the spread of the insane and feeble-minded must be 
prevented because it is worse than any criminal factor. Eugenics demands 
the sacrifice of many individual human beings."

A man, this unknown, was born in 1935, and in 1936, Alexis Carrel was 
named a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The Catholic 
Church awarded him this important recognition after Carrel had 
unequivocally exposed his eugenic beliefs.

In the same period, the first concentration camps were set up in 
Germany; Dachau was opened in March 1933.

In the United States the cultural climate was not much different.

In the New World across the Atlantic, the same unhealthy atmosphere reigns.

In 1934, the California Eugenics Association prepared a presentation of 
the Nazi public health program at the annual meeting of the American 
Public Health Association, where it was described as "the best thing of 
its kind that has ever been produced."

U.S. attorney Madison Grant, who played an active role in drafting the 
United States' severe immigration restrictions and anti-miscegenation 
laws, argued that the United States, particularly its Nordic 
counterparts, was genetically endangered by the short, dark-skinned, and 
economically poor immigrants arriving in huge numbers from Eastern and 
Southern Europe. Therefore, the only way to save the United States was 
to enact laws to sterilize them and limit their access.

He advocated the elimination of the weak or maladjusted, "always 
beginning with criminals, the sick and the insane, then gradually moving 
on to[...]inferior racial types."

In the United States, those sterilized were mostly those declared 
feeble-minded, insane, idiots, imbeciles, born criminals, or even 
epileptics, morally degenerate, or sexually perverted.

The United States Supreme Court struck down such laws only in 1967, 
declaring anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.

Nothing, however, justifies the horror of the system of systematic 
annihilation implemented by the Nazi criminals, but the world around 
that aberration cannot consider itself alien and absolved.

January 27, Remembrance Day

Reminding all of us and young people of the brutality of the 
concentration camps is a duty no one should shirk. It is also essential 
to emphasize that there can be no justification whatsoever, nor is it 
possible to draw parallels with other tragic events throughout history 
that have devastated entire populations.

This does not exempt us, especially now that eighty years have passed 
since those events, from revealing that what the Hitlerian regime 
implemented was culturally based on a widespread thought that crossed 
and crossed the world.

What's happening today?

At the end of the war in 1945, the world thought and hoped that never 
again would we witness the systematic extermination of entire 
populations, nor did the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide put a stop to 
such an aberration.

Let us mention only a few episodes which demonstrate that we have not 
yet emerged from prehistory:

Indonesia (October 1965-March 1966): The extermination of communists in 
Indonesia was one of the bloodiest mass massacres of the 20th century, 
with an estimated 500,000 to over 1 million people killed; in addition 
to the extermination, approximately 1.7 million people were imprisoned 
without trial;

Cambodia (1975-1979): Under the Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot, an 
estimated 1.7-2 million people (a quarter of the population) died from 
executions, starvation and forced labour;

Rwanda (1994): the systematic extermination of the Tutsi minority by the 
Hutu majority, who killed around 800 thousand people in just one hundred 
days.

Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995): the Srebrenica massacre, where over 8,000 
Bosnian Muslims were killed by Bosnian Serb forces.

Still a concentration camp

Concentration and detention camps are being used again and again in many 
parts of the world, always in complete conflict with respect for the 
rights and dignity of their inmates.

Middle East: In Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the 
United Nations has reported thousands of Palestinians held in arbitrary 
"administrative detention" without charge or trial. Palestinian 
prisoners are held in various Israeli prisons and detention centers, in 
conditions that, according to numerous international human rights 
organizations, systematically violate international law and human dignity.

United States: 2025 and early 2026 will see a historic spike in 
immigration detention under the Trump administration, with significant 
deaths and abuse. 2025 was classified as the deadliest year for ICE 
(Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detainees since 2004, with reports 
of degrading sanitary conditions, medical negligence, and overcrowding. 
Conditions in Arizona immigration detention centers in 2026 are the 
subject of serious complaints from human rights organizations, which 
describe a "deadly and dehumanizing" system.

Desire for detention camps in Italy too

In Italy, Repatriation Detention Centers (CPRs) are heavily criticized 
for their degrading conditions and violations of fundamental rights. 
Although they are designed for the administrative detention of foreign 
nationals awaiting expulsion, numerous reports document a prison-like 
situation, often exacerbated by lesser protections. In a neocolonial 
logic, border externalization policies are developing alongside 
repatriation detention centers as a new pillar of Italian and European 
migration policy, aimed at shifting control of migration flows and 
asylum procedures to third countries. Consider the agreement with 
Albania, which has so far proven to be a resounding flop, and the 
Memorandum of Understanding with Libya, renewed in November 2025, which 
provides for Libya's direct management of migrant detention centers on 
Italy's behalf. NGOs such as Amnesty International report abuses and 
human rights violations in these centers.

A series of tragic events and a series of instruments of limitation of 
freedom, of varying degrees and intensity, dot the history of the 
postwar period and remind us that hopes for a world free from processes 
of dehumanization have been quickly buried under the logic of economic, 
social, and political domination that still characterizes our societies, 
where the only supreme value guiding them is the valorization of capital 
and profit.

Note

Data on Holocaust victims are taken from the Holocaust Encyclopedia 
(https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/en).

Data on sterilizations around the world from the Virtual Museum of 
Intolerance and Extermination 
(https://www.istoreto.it/mostre/museo-virtuale-delle-intolleranze-e-degli-stermini/).

https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/wpAL/
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