I get that prisoners were forced to work hard in poor conditions. Germans could have as many people in there as they would like. So in order too gain the most, guards were forcing prisoners to hard work in poor conditions because even if someone would die due to those conditions (which took usually few months) they could replace this prisoner with a new worker. I get that.
But my tour guide said at first there weren't even much work to do, so guards forced prisoners to do meaningless work, like transporting stones and rocks from one place to the other and back.
I asked her - why did they do that? What they could gain from forcing people to do Sisyphus's work?
This is how i see it: If they would torture people without purpose (with labor) they would make people die sooner = more bodies to dispose = more problem. Why couldn't they just keep prisoners in baracks untill there was an actual work to be done? If in this case they couldn't fit new prisoners - why didin't they dispose those prisoners right away, since there were no work be done and they only waste food on them? It just doesn't add up.
Her answer was "because they were just cruel, and they wanted to humiliate and torture them". What the hell? I refuse to belive that's true. There's a war going on on every front, and am I suppose to belive they held random prisoners only to mess with them to finally kill them? This is poor strategy, poor planning and lots of money wasted. It even wasn't about making people scared of nazis, since we all know nazis put much effort to make auchwitz look like an awesome prison to be in.
So my question is this - why did they do it?
tl;dr: Why nazis sometimes forced prisoners to do meaningless work instead of something where they could gain more?
Her answer was perfectly accurate. The primary point of having the inmates work at Concentration Camps (as opposed to Extermination camps like Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek or Treblinka, where the only type of work was disposing of the hundreds of thousands of murdered victims) was 'extinction through work', Vernichtung durch Arbeit. Economic considerations took a back seat to this.
Her answer was "because they were just cruel, and they wanted to humiliate and torture them". What the hell? I refuse to belive that's true. There's a war going on on every front, and am I suppose to belive they held random prisoners only to mess with them to finally kill them? This is poor strategy, poor planning and lots of money wasted.
The answer of the tour guide may have been a little short and may have sounded dismissive, but it is correct in the larger picture. Concentration camps did not get assigned 'random' prisoners, they were there to be worked (often to death), for being jewish, polish, russian, sinti, roma or otherwise 'subhuman' according to Nazi Ideology, for being communists, socialists or 'antisocial', or at least being kept in so appalling conditions of working and living that the inmate's death was approvingly accepted. This aspect was present from the very beginning:
...but it [the erection of KZs] wasn't primarily about economical exploitation. Work was cheap during that time, which is why the work done by inmates was not allowed to come into competition with the civil labour force. Even though, to cover some of the costs of the camps, the work being done there was allowed to be productive, its primary purpose was the 'education' of the inmates. In practice, this often meant nothing else that the inmates had to perform meaningless tasks, sometimes even repeating the same work over and over again. Work therefore served as chicane and to exhaust the (in the beginning mainly communist) enemies of the regime. [Wagner, I.G. Auschwitz, p. 209.]
The purpose of work in the KZs early on therefore was political, not economical. The war meant that leabour got more scarce, though, and the aspect of economic exploitation became more important, and this lead to an increasing cooperation between the SS and private companies to exploit the inmates slave labour as much as possible. It was still, however, not the most important aspect. From 1941 on, 'extinction through work' became one of the favourite pratices to enforce the 'final solution', and many liquidated Ghettoes in the east had their citizens brought into KZs to work them to death. The extent to which this was pursued differed from camp to camp, so the working and living conditions for the forced labourers did also and life expecation varied accordingly (the famous workers of Oskar Schindler that were living at a subsidiary camp of KZ Plaszow largely taken out of the SS's control are an example for an extreme at one end).
This comment on the womens-KZ Ravensbrück stands exemplary for all the others:
[Compared to the early, improvised KZs] they had the function, to exploit the cheap labour-force of the inmates for the SS's own economic companies, but to also have them perform senseless, physically exhausting tasks, of which the term labour can't even be used; and all this at bureaucratically determined hunger-rations, often below the existential minimum. [S. Jacobeit, Zur Arbeit weiblicher Häftlinge im Frauen-KZ Ravensbrück, p. 197; italics by me.]
Often this would include doing manually that for which tools were available, or carrying bricks or sacks of cement or shovel sand from one end of a camp or work site to the other and then back again. You can imagine that this would not only have been physically, but also psychically and eomotionally destructive. The hunger-rations and the constant terror of camp life meant also that the inmates were not the most productive workers one could hope for, and turnover was high because of death or sickness, life expectation even in those camps designed to 'work' the inmates like at Monowitz was never very high..
Wagner comes to this conclusion regarding the use of the inmates even for 'meaningful' work like at the I.G. Farben plant at Auschwitz-Monowitz:
Even under the conditions of the most modern capitalist large scale technology, the slave labour of the inmates in Auschwitz could not be profitably exploited. Even though economic motives for the use of inmates often superficially played a role, behind the large scale involvement of the I.G. [Farbenwerke] Auschwitz lay other motives against economic reason. [Wagner, I.G. Auschwitz, p. 275; italics by me].
It is a mistake to approach this from the angle of what would have made economic or strategic sense, because that was not the raison d'etre of the KZs and the work done there, either ordered by the SS or in cooperation with German companies like I.G. Farben. It is true, the inmates were exploited as much as possible, right down to the gold teeth broken out of their mouths and the hairs shaven from their head, but the point of it all was not to put them to work, but to work them to death. This makes no economic sense in and of itself, with malnutrition leading to subpar work performance and the living conditions and constant stress and terror exacerbating this and often encouraging sabotage. So they often did meaningless work, because working the inmates was what was the most important thing, not profiting from it.