Part 1/2

Yes. The imagined racial hierarchies the Nazis were so keen on persisted in the Concentration Camp system. In fact, they were in a certain sense essential to its functioning because of the important position of the Kapos.

The way the Nazis operated the concentration camps was indeed extremely perfidious, especially in the respect of how they forced prisoners to take part in the system of administering and running these camps, settling certain prisoner groups with privileged positions within the camp and thereby creating an extremely difficult moral position for these prisoners because these positions opened the potential for organizing resistance and saving other prisoners (or using them for cruelty) while at the same time helping out running the camp in which one was imprisoned. The concentration camp system was a system of hierarchies and the SS was very, very adept in creating a system of "divide and rule" that co-opted their own prisoners and cogs in their brutal and inhuman machine.

These prisoners who held positions of privilege were called "Kapos" or Funktionshäftling (functionary prisoner) and German prisoners in the camps, especially German political prisoners, German criminal prisoners, and since 1941 Jehovah's Witnesses were the preferred groups for these positions within the camp system. Like with so many terms in the Lagerszpracha (the prisoner sociolect of the concentration camps), the origin of the term "Kapo" is unclear but stems most likely from the term Italian worker in German used for their foremen (il capo).

Himmler in 1944 told a group of German generals that this deployment of prisoners as surrogate guards and administrative assistants was the key to the success of the camp system; for, in his own words, "holding down the subhumans". And while this system was institutionalized during the war, when the camp system first saw the massive influx of non-German prisoners, it had its origins in the very beginning of the concentration camp system.

As Nicholaus Wachsmann writes in his book on the history of the concentration camps:

The origins of the Kapo system, however, were different from the airbrushed picture Himmler presented in 1944. To start with, there was nothing new about co-opting prisoners. In German prisons, inmates had long been appointed to menial positions as "trusties" [...]. Since many KL inmates had previously spent time inside Nazi prisons, they were already familiar with the idea of assuming influential postions. [...] What disntiguished the KL was not the deployment of prisoners as such, but the power some Kapos gained.

Wachsmann then goes on to write that Kapos can be divided into three functional groups: The first were work supervisors with many of the work details in the camps – that sometimes consisted of hundred of inmates – having Kapos serve as foremen with a chief Kapo. These had various duties like reporting delays of the work and preventing the escape of other prisoners. These Kapos had a lot of direct contact with other prisoners and because they ran the work details they were also the Kapos frequently remembered in a very, very negative light by other prisoners. "Slave drivers", one former inmate called them and in a an internal SS manual their position was summed up as: "The Kapo is responsible for the strictest implementation of all orders and for all incidents in the labor detail". Meaning they could be punished, even with death, if something went wrong there. I'll get to this subject a bit later but JWs were the most popular labor Kapos among other prisoners and in a certain sense among the SS because they would not flee but also would not be as violent as other Kapos.

The second group of Kapos were those who supervised prisoner life inside the quarters. Each block (barrack) was led by block elder and his subordinates (room elders, table elders) and had a couple of prisoners serving in administrative positions. In the absence of SS-guards, the block elder held authority within the barrack. They supervised morning routine and roll call, lead the prisoners to the roll call square, reported on those who died during the night, ensured the beds were made, sent prisoners to the sick barracks, controlled the distribution of food, initited new arrivals, and prepared for lights out at the end of the day.

The third group of Kapos were those who served within the camp administration. There were prisoners who served as orderlies in the infirmary in the very earliest camps and with the expansions of the camps and the camp system, prisoner functionaries filled other roles too. They worked in the prisoner kitchen, storeroom, and bunker, and as various clerks in the SS offices. On top of this hierarchy stood the camp elder who supervised the other Kapos and reported to the SS, "acting", as Wachsmann sums it up, "as the main conduit between oppressors and oppressed." While the camp elder had a lot of power in his internal decision, it was also an immensely dangerous post. Harry Naujoks, a communist prisoner, was the camp elder in Sachsenhausen. While he had initially resisted taking the post, he had become very adept at playing the SS and using his position to gain advantages for his fellow prisoners. His tenure would however not last. One day, the SS just threw him in the bunker, accused him of communist conspiracy and sent him off to another camp where he barely survived.

As already mentioned, these postions did exist since the very beginning of the camp systems and solidified themselves in the mid-30s as part of the system of administration of the camps. This naturally meant they remained part of the system, once the camps saw a huge influx of Jewish and non-German prisoners starting with the November pogrom in 1938 and the start of the war respectively. With the influx of these inmates, Kapo positions, especially those of great importance to running the camp, stayed in the hands of German political and criminal prisoners, not just because of their seniority within the camp system but also because the SS insisted on working only with those groups and only with Germans in important Kapo positions. A situation had already developed in the 1930s were a camp was in the hands of either German political prisoners or German criminal prisoners. These two groups had also no particular love lost for each other, given e.g. how German communist and social democrats resented being treated like criminals – seeing themselves as the "real victims" of Nazi oppression and so these two groups would often quarrel and battle for important Kapo positions in the camps.

One caveat that is important here is that we know very little about the criminal prisoners and how they organized, save what the political and other prisoners have written about them after the war. They often portrayed them in the worst terms possible and the stigmatization of criminal prisoners continued after the war (e.g. by the Allies who would re-imprison those who hadn't "served their term"). This is among the reasons why we have so little literature by them or knowledge about them. Outing oneself as a former criminal prisoner after the war invited discrimination and that despite the fact that most of the so-called criminal prisoners had been petty criminals, alcoholics and convicted homosexuals imprisoned in the camps because "they were likely to repeat their offense", according to the Nazis.

A third group that saw service as work detail Kapos disproportionate to their number were German Jehovah's Witnesses. The Nazis didn't just target JWs, but were focused on people they called "Ernste Bibelforscher", which included JWs, Seven Day Adventists, and the so-called Free Bible-Students, which were an offshoot of the JWs and Adventists. The main reasons these groups were persecuted was that they rejected that state and especially military service and that they continued to try to convert people to their religion that had been outlawed (because of the military service thing) in 1935. In the Nazi logic, refusing to join the military and to swear oaths on the Führer amounted basically to treason against your race and thus these groups, the Bible-Students, were considered a small but nonetheless serious problem. Those imprisoned in Concentration Camps were mostly those who continued missionary duty and who actively rejected military service. Little research has been done into this but it seems that there was a small number of JWs and Seven Day Adventists drafted into the Wehrmacht serving without weapons, so those who were persecuted were those who actively and publicly rejected serving.

General estimates say that of the 25.000 to 30.000 JWs in Germany, about 20.000 remained active in the Nazi period. The rest renounced their faith, fled Germany or found a way to arrange themselves with the regime. About 10.000 of those active were at one point or another sentenced and convicted by the Nazi state for "crimes" related to their faith. 2,000 to 2,500 were sent to concentration camps, as were a total of about 700 to 800 non-German Witnesses (200–250 Dutch, 200 Austrians, 100 Poles, and between 10 and 50 Belgians, French, Czechs, and Hungarians). The number of Jehovah's Witnesses who died in concentration camps and prisons during the Nazi era is estimated at 1,000 Germans and 400 from other countries, the latter's group higher mortality rate having to do with them being non-German.