How Did The Nazi Concentration Camps Differ From The Soviet GULAG?

“Under the Nazis, I was a ‘political’. I knew I had an enemy. Under the Soviets, I was a ‘socially dangerous element’. It was like fighting fog.”
Margarete Buber-Neumann, prisoner of Stalin & Hitler

In the winter of 1940, on a windswept bridge spanning the River Bug at Brest-Litovsk, Margarete Buber-Neumann walked from one nightmare into another.

She was a German Communist who had fled to Moscow to escape Hitler, only to be swallowed by Stalin’s terror and sent to a labour camp in Kazakhstan.

Now, in a grotesque gesture of alliance under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin was handing her back to the Nazis.

She had survived the starvation and lice of the Gulag, only to be immediately thrown into the Ravensbrück concentration camp by the SS. She became history’s unwilling control group—a rare witness who looked into the eyes of both monsters and survived to tell the difference.

Her eventual conclusion in her memoir, ‘Under Two Dictators’, was chilling: while the methods varied, the disregard for human life was identical.

While Buber-Neumann provided the comparative anatomy of these systems, it was others who mapped their distinct souls for the public.

On the Nazi side, the chemist Primo Levi dissected the ‘Grey Zone’ of Auschwitz, alongside Elie Wiesel – survivor of Buchenwald and Auschwitz – whose ‘Night’ gave a voice to the spiritual void of the Holocaust.

Facing them from the frozen east were Varlam Shalamov, whose ‘Kolyma Tales’ captured the radioactive effect of the GULAG on the human spirit, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the archivist who compiled the screaming testimony of the entire Archipelago.

Through the lens of Buber-Neumann’s unique journey and the writings of these titans, we can at least hope to come close to better comprehend the function – the theory and practice of hell – in these penal facilities.