'Kapo': Nazi Camp Prisoner- Supervisor/Admin.; Carmen Mory, Swiss Nazi SS Spy - Kapo

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Last edited Mon Mar 28, 2022, 05:29 PM - Edit history (3)

- Carmen Mory SS Nazi Spy and Kapo committed suicide before Execution Mory was a Swiss-Nazi German spy and kapo in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was sentenced to death in the Hamburg Ravensbrück trials in 1947.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Mory
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- A kapo or prisoner functionary was a prisoner in a Nazi camp who was assigned by the Schutzstaffel (SS) guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks. Also called "prisoner self-administration", the prisoner functionary system minimized costs by allowing camps to function with fewer SS personnel. The system was designed to turn victim against victim, as the prisoner functionaries were pitted against their fellow prisoners in order to maintain the favor of their SS overseers. If they neglected their duties, they would be demoted to ordinary prisoners and be subject to other kapos.

Many prisoner functionaries were recruited from the ranks of violent criminal gangs rather than from the more numerous political, religious, and racial prisoners; such criminal convicts were known for their brutality toward other prisoners. This brutality was tolerated by the SS and was an integral part of the camp system. Prisoner functionaries were spared physical abuse and hard labor, provided they performed their duties to the satisfaction of the SS functionaries. They also had access to certain privileges, such as civilian clothes and a private room. While the Germans commonly called them kapos, the official government term for prisoner functionaries was Funktionshäftling.



- A kapo leader at Salaspils concentration camp, Latvia, wearing a yellow badge & a Lagerpolizist (camp police officer) armband.
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After WW2 the term was reused as an insult; according to The Jewish Chronicle, it is "the worst insult a Jew can give another Jew".

- Etymology: The word "kapo" could have come from the Italian word for "head" & "boss", capo. According to the Duden, it is derived from the French word for "Corporal" (caporal). Journalist Robt. D. McFadden believes that the word "kapo" is derived from the German word Lagercapo, meaning camp captain. - System of thrift & manipulation: Camps were controlled by the SS, but day-to-day organization was supplemented by the system of functionary prisoners, a 2nd hierarchy that made it easier for the Nazis to control the camps. These prisoners made it possible for the camps to function with fewer SS personnel. The prisoner functionaries sometimes numbered as high as 10% of the inmates. The Nazis were able to keep the number of paid staff who had direct contact with the prisoners very low in comparison to normal prisons today.

Without the functionary prisoners, the SS camp administrations would not have been able to keep the day-to-day operations of the camps running smoothly.

The kapos often did this work for extra food, cigarettes, alcohol or other privileges. At Buchenwald, these tasks were originally assigned to criminal prisoners, but after 1939, political prisoners began to displace the criminal prisoners, though criminals were preferred by the SS. At Mauthausen, on the other hand, functionary positions remained dominated by criminal prisoners until just before liberation. - The system & hierarchy also inhibited solidarity among the prisoners. There were tensions between the various nationalities & prisoner groups, who were distinguished by different Nazi concentration camp badges. Jews wore yellow stars; other prisoners wore colored triangles pointed downward. - Prisoner functionaries were often hated by other prisoners & spat upon as Nazi henchmen... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapo
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- THE SS: The SS (Schutzstaffel, or Protection Squads) was originally established as Adolf Hitler’s personal bodyguard unit. It would later become both the elite guard of the Nazi Reich and Hitler’s executive force prepared to carry out all security-related duties, without regard for legal restraint.

KEY FACTS: 1 From the beginning of the Nazi regime, Hitler entrusted the SS first and foremost with the removal and eventual murder of political and so-called racial enemies of the regime. 2 The SS became a virtual state within a state in Nazi Germany, staffed by men who perceived themselves as the “racial elite” of the Nazi future. 3 The SS was specifically charged with the leadership of the “Final Solution,” the murder of European Jews... https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ss

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1. Warning- Graphic Images. Nazi SS Guards Attacked by Prisoners

- Liberation of Dachau Concentration Camp, April 19, 1945. The BRUTAL Reaction of US Soldiers after Discovering a HORRIFYING Death Camp in WWII.
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and US Troops at the Liberation of Dachau concentration camp on April 19, 1945. The actual number of SS Guards killed that day is unknown but estimates range from 30-100. The count varies based on reports made by US officials and the later accounts of American soldiers-witnesses.
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- More, https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1942-1945/liberation-of-dachau

- DACHAU LIBERATION REPRISALS. During the Dachau liberation reprisals, German SS troops were killed by U.S. soldiers and concentration camp internees at the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945, during World War II. It is unclear how many SS men were killed in the incident, but most estimates place the number killed at around 35–50. In the days before the camp's liberation, SS guards at the camp had forced 7,000 inmates on a death march that resulted in the death of many from exposure and shooting. When Allied soldiers liberated Dachau, they were variously shocked, horrified, disturbed, and angered at finding the massed corpses of internees, and by the combativeness of some of the remaining guards who allegedly fired on them.

.. Killings by the inmates: Walenty Lenarczyk, a prisoner at Dachau, stated that following the camp's liberation "prisoners swarmed over the wire and grabbed the Americans and lifted them to their shoulders... other prisoners caught the SS men... The first SS man elbowed one or two prisoners out of his way, but the courage of the prisoners mounted, they knocked them down and nobody could see whether they were stomped or what, but they were killed."
> Elsewhere in the camp SS men, Kapos and informers were beaten badly with fists, sticks and shovels. There was at least one incident where US soldiers looked away as two prisoners beat a German guard to death with a shovel, and Lt. Bill Walsh witnessed one such beating. Another soldier witnessed an inmate stomping on an SS trooper's face until "there wasn't much left." When the soldier said to him, "You've got a lot of hate in your heart," he simply nodded.

An American chaplain was told by three young Jewish men, who had left the camp during liberation, that they had beaten to death one of the more sadistic SS guards when they discovered him hiding in a barn, dressed as a peasant.

- United States Army investigation: Lt. Col. Joseph Whitaker, the Seventh Army's Assistant Inspector General, was ordered to investigate after witnesses came forward testifying about the killings. He issued a report on June 8, 1945, called the Investigation of Alleged Mistreatment of German Guards at Dachau, also known as The I.G. Report. In 1991, an archived copy was found in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and made public. Whitaker reported that close to the back entrance to the camp, Lt. William P. Walsh, commander of Company "I", 157th Infantry, shot four German soldiers in a boxcar who had surrendered to him. Pvt. Albert C. Pruitt then climbed into the boxcar and performed a coup de grâce on the wounded men.

After he had entered the camp, Walsh, along with Lt. Jack Bushyhead, the executive officer of Company "I", organized the segregation of POWs into those who were members of the Wehrmacht and those who were in the SS. The SS were marched into a separate enclosure and shot by members of "I" Company with several different types of weapons. The investigation resulted in the U.S. military considering courts-martial against those involved, including battalion commander Lt. Col. Felix Sparks, while Lt. Howard Buechner was cited in the report for dereliction of duty for not giving medical aid to the wounded SS men in the coal yard. However, Gen. George S. Patton, recently appointed military governor of Bavaria, chose to dismiss the charges. Therefore, the witnesses to the killings were never cross-examined in court. Col. Charles L. Decker, an acting deputy judge advocate, concluded in late 1945 that, while there had probably been a violation of international law, "in the light of the conditions which greeted the eyes of the first combat troops, it is not believed that justice or equity demand that the difficult and perhaps impossible task of fixing individual responsibility now be undertaken"...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_liberation_reprisals



- Soldiers of the U.S. Seventh Army guard SS prisoners in a coal yard at Dachau concentration camp during its liberation. April 29, 1945 (U.S. Army photograph).