The Macabre Entertainment of the Nazis in the Concentration Camps

In the autumn of 1943, a group of SS guards surrounded a thin man inside the Auschwitz Monowitz camp. The man was 1.55 m tall. He weighed a little under 50 kilos. His cheekbones were sunken and his knuckles were marked by old blows and by recent neglect. One of the guards pointed at him and said his name out loud. The others nodded.

They had recognized him. That man had fought before enormous crowds. He had won the world flyweight title in front of 20,000 spectators in Paris. He had returned to Tunis as a hero and the crowd had waited for him in the streets, Arabic mixing with Hebrew, spice sellers with Yeshiva students, everyone pushing forward to see him pass.

 Now he was standing in the mud with his prisoner number sewn onto his chest, looking at the men who were about to force him into the ring again. His name was Victor Young Perez and what was about to begin had nothing to do with sport. When Heinrich Himmler began building the concentration camp apparatus, the logistical problem that worried him most was not hunger, nor disease, nor the moral collapse of his own men.

 It was boredom. The SS guards spent entire weeks in facilities far from the cities, surrounded by prisoners, with shifts  that stretched for hours without any notable incidents requiring sustained attention. Himmler knew it and he expressed it in several meetings with Hitler. To maintain the efficiency of his men, it was necessary to give them entertainment, not an occasional distraction, a systematic program of leisure that would function in parallel with extermination.

 What  followed from that decision was one of the most disturbing episodes of the Second World War, not because it involved more death than others, but because it revealed the inner mechanism of those who carried it out. The camps were not only places where people died, they were also places where others amused themselves.

 Victor Young Perez was born in Tunis in 1911  into a working-class Jewish family in the old quarter of the city. His father worked as a street vendor. His mother sold second-hand clothes for the neighbors. There were several children and little space, and Victor’s  childhood unfolded in the street, where size was not an advantage, but speed was.

 From childhood, he showed unusual quickness and endurance, and by the age of 14, he was already training at Maccabi, the boxing club founded by the Tunisian Jewish community, because local regulations prevented Jews from joining conventional sports associations. With his brother Benjamin, he developed a technique built on a simple principle, one exhausting for the opponent.

 Never stop. Continuous movement. Feet always active. Punches in short, repeated bursts. Perez did not hit hard. He was never a puncher in the classic boxing sense. What he did was refuse to stop, keep moving, accumulate impact after impact,  turn after turn, until the opponent collapsed from exhaustion, or simply could no longer see clearly.

By the age of 16, he was winning all his fights in North Africa. At 18, he crossed the Mediterranean with little money  and a leather bag, and settled in the Belleville district of Paris, where several thousand Jews from the Maghreb had made the same journey, searching for the same thing. In 1931, at the age of 20, he faced Frank Genaro, the American boxer who held the world flyweight title.

 The fight took place at the Palais des Sports in Paris, before a crowd that had paid to see the champion destroy the unknown Tunisian. 15 rounds later, Perez won on points. When he returned to Tunis, the city received him with a crowd that overflowed the streets of the Jewish quarter, and stretched into the Arab markets and the cafes of the Medina.

Jews and Muslims applauded together for a man 1 m 55 tall who had gone to Paris and brought back the world championship. He embroidered a Star of David on his fight trunks. He wore it in every bout that followed. It was not a calculated political gesture, nor a long-considered declaration of principle.

 It was simply what he was, and it seemed as natural to him as wearing his name  embroidered. The following years were the best of his career. He fought across Europe and North Africa in bouts the sports press referred to with the respect  reserved for those who had proven themselves better than everyone else.

His style remained the same, perpetual mobility, systematic attrition. Opponents who entered the ring believing that a man of his size could not truly hurt them understood their mistake in the fifth or sixth round when their arms began to feel heavy and their feet no longer responded with the necessary speed. Perez never stopped.

When the war began, he was once again living in Paris. The Germans entered in June 1940 and the machinery of anti-Jewish laws began to operate with a bureaucratic efficiency that surprised even some observers inside the Nazi apparatus itself. Within months came the confiscation of property, exclusion from the labor market, the prohibition on frequenting certain public spaces, and finally the yellow star sewn onto outer clothing, the visible sign that turned every person who wore it into an identifiable target on any street of the occupied

city. Perez refused to wear it. It was the world championship in reverse. In the ring, he had worn the star of David with pride. In the streets of Paris, the star imposed by decree reduced him to a category and he refused to accept it. It was a decision with predictable consequences and he very probably knew them.

 In September 1943, someone denounced him. He was arrested and transferred to the Drancy transit camp on the outskirts of Paris where thousands of Jews awaited transports to the East in overcrowded conditions that medical records described as incompatible with basic health. A few weeks later, he arrived at Auschwitz-Monowitz, the industrial subcamp located beside the synthetic rubber factories of IG Farben where the chemical company used slave labor for war production.

 The first days in Monowitz were always the most dangerous for any newly arrived prisoner. The initial selection determined who would go directly to the gas chambers and who would be assigned to forced labor. Those who passed that first selection faced a second problem, assignment to the hardest work details, the ones that consumed a body within a few weeks.

 A man who arrived reasonably strong could become incapacitated in 3 months if he was sent to carry sacks of cement for 12 hours a day on a diet of watery broth and a piece of black bread. Perez had the body of a flyweight. That meant he was not large, but it also meant that his body had been trained for 18 years with a discipline most other prisoners did not have.

 That mattered, although it would not have been enough on its own. What saved him was that several guards recognized him. They had seen his fights. They knew who he was. And instead of ignoring him, they made a decision that kept him alive for the next 15 months. They turned him into a spectacle. They gave him training days. They provided him with extra food rations so that he could regain some of the muscle tissue he had lost during the weeks in Drancy and during the transport.

 They assigned him a space where he could shadow box and strike a rudimentary bag. They prepared him the way a valuable animal is prepared before an exhibition. When they considered him presentable enough, they put him into the camp’s improvised ring and matched him against an SS soldier. The guard was more than 1 m 80 tall and weighed around 75 kilos, 20 more than Perez in his best days and probably 25 more than Perez at that moment. Perez won in three rounds.

The guards applauded. Some laughed. The spectacle had worked. What followed was a routine that lasted for more than a year. Perez fought approximately 140 bouts inside the camp. His opponents were mostly other prisoners, although occasionally soldiers and non-commissioned officers also stepped into the ring convinced they would win.

He almost always fought against larger men. He almost always won. He lost only once in a fight against a prisoner named Paul Steinberg who had been one of the first to fall before him and who, somehow, >>  >> had learned how to counter his movement. That defeat did not change his situation.

 The guards still wanted him in the ring. His technique remained intact, and that was extraordinary. Perpetual movement, endurance, punches in series. The problem was that now he fought without months of preparation, with a body that barely received enough calories to function at the minimum required level. In an open-air ring surrounded by armed men who applauded or booed according to what they needed to see that afternoon.

The difference between the Palais des Sports in Paris and the ring  at Monowitz was the same difference that exists between a life and its negation, but the feet kept moving. The fists kept landing before the opponent could  cover up. The body remembered what the mind had to struggle to sustain.

He was not the only boxer the system used in that way. In Auschwitz-Birkenau,  a man named Tadeusz Pietrzykowski had arrived on one of the first transports in June 1940 as a political prisoner. He had been arrested in Warsaw for his activity in the resistance and arrived on the first transport of non-Jewish Poles, one of the initial groups that populated the camp  when it still functioned mainly as a camp for political prisoners before becoming the center of industrial extermination.

Before the war, he had been the Polish national bantamweight runner-up, which meant he had spent years of his life training to do exactly what the SS guards were looking for, to strike another human being systematically and efficiently. Pietrzykowski very quickly discovered his relative usefulness in the camp.

 The difference between a function that interested the system and one that did not was measured in concrete terms of survival. Those who had  nothing to offer beyond their capacity to carry loads were consumed by labor until they ceased to be useful. Those who had a specific skill the system valued lived, at least while that usefulness lasted.

 Being a boxer in Auschwitz was a skill the system valued. It was reason enough to keep breathing. Between 1,941 and 1,943, Pietrzykowski fought between 40  and 60 bouts inside the camp. He fought against German deportees of heavyweight size who were twice his build and who entered the ring convinced  that the difference in volume would be decisive. It was not.

 Pietrzykowski had fought against larger men all his life and he understood the mechanics of that apparent disadvantage better than any of his opponents. Big men hit hard, but they tired. Big men covered their flanks poorly if they were worked with lateral movement. Big men had a blind spot below the left eye if the opponent was southpaw and Pietrzykowski knew where that blind spot was.

 He reached it with a consistency his opponents could not counter. One day he faced his own capo, a man named Walter Dunning, who had beaten him on numerous occasions during work shifts for no reason beyond the authority granted by rank. Pietrzykowski defeated him clearly without strange gestures or unnecessary displays.

 He was simply better. Dunning, instead of taking revenge as the logic of the camp would have suggested, sent him a piece of bread and some meat that  night. It was the only currency that made sense in that place. The public defeat had been humiliating, but the alternative was to lose in front of his subordinates in a way that went unacknowledged and that would have been worse.

 At night, the same men who had beaten Pietrzykowski during the day stood and applauded him in the ring. That contradiction was the rule, not the exception. It was the very architecture of the system. In the Mauthausen camp, located on a hill above the Danube in Upper Austria, the star boxer was a man who had no professional boxing past before arriving at the camp.

 Segundo Espallargas, known there as Paulino, was a Spanish Republican arrested in France after the collapse of the Second Republic. The Spaniards had arrived at Mauthausen in large groups beginning in 1940, deported through the network of collaboration between the Gestapo and the Francoist authorities, which identified Republican exiles in France as common enemies.

 Many of them had fought in the Civil War and had accumulated a physical toughness that distinguished them from other prisoners.  Espalargas was one of them. He fought every Sunday at the express request of the SS commandant Franz Ziereis, who had turned boxing matches into the central entertainment of his weekends.

 No one defeated Espalargas. Not other prisoners and not German soldiers who stepped into the ring convinced they would win. Fein protected him with the same logic that protected Perez and Pietrzykowski. As long as he remained invincible, he was a profitable asset. The day he lost, the interest would end. Espalargas was known among the guards as the undefeated boxer of Mauthausen and he carried that title with the awareness that every fight was a negotiation, not a competition.

 He won in order to remain necessary. That awareness was shared by all the boxers who survived in the camps. They knew they were assets, that the system needed them to function as entertainment and that this usefulness was the only reason they received extra food, avoided the worst work details and slept in bunks instead of on the barrack floors. But usefulness had limits.

 A boxer who became injured, sick  or lost too many consecutive fights ceased to be useful and the moment that happened, the system treated him like any other prisoner. Several did not survive that transition back into invisibility. Some prisoners with no boxing training tried to take advantage of that system.

They lied during the initial registrations and declared themselves professional boxers. The deception lasted until the first fight. After that, the system returned them to the ordinary circuit, sometimes with an additional beating for having wasted the guards time and food with a fraudulent performance. While all this was happening inside the improvised rings of the concentration camp system, another form of entertainment had been installed in the camps from the very beginning.

A form that, on the surface, seemed incompatible with systematic extermination, but in reality complemented it with a perverse and documented logic. Music. Hitler was a megalomaniac, not casually or superficially. He had an obsessive relationship with the work of Richard Wagner, the German composer who had died decades before the rise of Nazism, but whose declared anti-Semitism and Germanic mythology, deeply rooted in the German national imagination, had left a mark on National Socialist ideology that went far beyond

aesthetic admiration. The historian James Kenneway described Wagner’s music as the soundtrack of megalomania. For Hitler, Wagner was not only a composer he liked. He was the sonic proof that there existed a German greatness the world had to recognize, a superiority that the chords of Lohengrin and Parsifal made audible.

 That conviction was transferred into the operation of the camps in a way that historians took years to document and understand in full. The first orchestras in the concentration camps appeared in 1933, the same year Hitler came to power. >>  >> They were small, informal groups used mainly to enliven the activities of the staff.

 But with the beginning of the war and the expansion of the concentration camp system, music acquired a more defined and darker function. It was no longer only entertainment  for the guards. It was an instrument for managing the victims. In February 1940, Nazi troops confiscated more than 300,000 sacred books of Judaism in Poland and  burned them in a square in front of the Yeshiva of Otwock.

 Thousands of Jews gathered around the bonfire crying. The screams and weeping could be heard in the adjacent streets. The SS called in an orchestra and ordered it to play cheerful music directly over the screams. The music was not there to celebrate. It was there to cover the sound of pain  and to demonstrate, before the perpetrators themselves and before the victims, that the system could continue undisturbed by by emotional reactions it generated.

Something similar happened in September 1941 at the ravine of Babi Yar on the outskirts of Kyiv. The SS gathered more than 33,000 Jews  in 2 days and shot them in groups at the edge of the ravine. The executions went on for hours with the methodical machinery that characterized the Einsatzgruppen.

 While the lines advanced toward the edge, loudspeakers installed by the SS played waltzes and popular German songs among the forest trees. The music was not accidental atmosphere. It was a mechanism for managing panic. It reduced the victims’ resistance, made the process more fluid, and allowed the executioners to work with greater mechanical efficiency because the sound environment interrupted  the emotional connection between what they were seeing and what they were doing.

In the six extermination camps of the Holocaust, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Chelmno, there were prisoner orchestras in all except the last, which functioned as a mobile camp where victims were gassed  almost immediately after arrival without any prior procedure requiring music.

 In the other five, musical groups were a constant that remained for months or years with variations in size and composition depending on the resources available and the preferences of the local commandants. In Treblinka, there were three different orchestras throughout its operation. One of them was directed by Arthur Gold, a Polish composer who before the war had been a central figure in Warsaw’s jazz and tango circuit.

 Gold had performed in the best salons of the city, had recorded albums that circulated  throughout Poland, and his name appeared on the posters of the capital’s finest entertainment venues. In Treblinka, he conducted his musicians while German soldiers ate in the camp dining room and looked out the window.

 The musicians wore special uniforms that distinguished them from the rest of the prisoners. The repertoire included what the Germans requested: popular songs, marches, chamber pieces, and sometimes jazz when the staff’s mood allowed it. Auschwitz had a more elaborate musical structure than any other camp in the system.

 In Auschwitz, the first there was a mixed orchestra and a choir. In Auschwitz II Birkenau, the mass extermination camp, there were two orchestras. In Auschwitz III Monowitz, where Victor Young Perez was forced to box, there were also two active musical groups. The musicians were required to play twice a day, in the morning when the columns of prisoners left for the work sites, >>  >> and in the afternoon when they returned exhausted.

 The repertoire included anti-Semitic marches, Nazi party hymns, and pieces by Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner. The prisoners marched to the rhythm of music composed by the same geniuses taught in schools across Europe as the summit of Western civilization. Primo Levi, the Italian writer and chemist who survived Auschwitz >>  >> and documented it with a precision few works have equaled, wrote that this music made the prisoners’ bodies function as if they were marching machines.

 Without it, they would have needed far more time to cover the distance  between the barracks and the work sites, because exhaustion would have broken the collective rhythm. The beat moved them. The cadence organized them. That was exactly what the SS needed. The musicians who formed part of those orchestras lived in conditions slightly different from the rest of the prisoners.

 They had access to straw mattresses instead of sleeping crammed into the common bunks. Their sheets were changed every 7 days, while the rest of the prisoners slept for weeks on the same unwashed fabrics. They had a guaranteed weekly shower and received one loaf of bread for four people, a better proportion than what the average camp laborer received.

 They were exempt from forced labor, could rehearse indoors instead of outside, and had schedules with a certain predictable structure. Those privileges were not a gesture of humanity toward artists. They were a functional investment. A physically deteriorated musician played badly, and an orchestra that played badly was of no use for the purposes for which it had been created.

 The logic was the same as with the boxers. The body was preserved because the system needed it in operating condition. Louis Bannet, a Dutch violinist who before the war was known in Amsterdam entertainment circles as the Dutch Benny Goodman, was one of the conductors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau orchestra. He survived. Of the 40 musicians who made up the orchestra during the period when he conducted it, 38 reached the end of the war alive.

 The survival rate was extraordinary compared with the general camp population where the life expectancy of an ordinary prisoner was measured in weeks or months. Music had been their shield, although the price of that shield was playing while the crematorium chimneys burned a few hundred meters away. Alma Rosé arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in July 1943.

She was 37 years old. She was the niece of the composer Gustav Mahler, the niece of the conductor Bruno Walter, and a violinist trained in some of the best conservatories in Europe. She had fled Vienna with the arrival of Nazism, had tried to escape to Switzerland, and had been arrested at the Belgian border.

When she arrived in Birkenau, the SS immediately identified her as a first-rate musical asset. She was appointed conductor of the women’s orchestra of the camp, a group that until then had been informal and technically deficient. Rosé turned it into an ensemble of daily rehearsals, professional discipline, and standards of quality that surprised even her own musicians.

 In the camp where death was the norm, Rosé insisted on correct tuning, precise entrances, and proper dynamics. Not because she was indifferent to what surrounded her, but because musical quality was the only thing that could protect her musicians. A bad orchestra was not useful. A bad orchestra could be discarded.

 Rosé died in the camp in April 1944 from causes that later records never clarified with certainty. One week she had a high fever, and the next she was dead. Poisoning, some survivors said. The camp archives did not confirm it. In the Majdanek  camp in August 1943, a truck arrived with 200 Jewish orphans. There were babies in the arms of 6-year-old children who had carried them during transport because no adults were available.

 There were children up to 12 years old who did not understand where they were. The German troops ordered the camp orchestra to play Yiddish lullabies while the children were led from the truck into the interior of the camp. The lullabies were songs several of those children would have heard from their mothers before everything began.

 The musicians played. The children calmed down. It was what the system needed. In the Janowska camp in Lviv, the Nazi authorities had built a high-level orchestra composed of musicians who before the war had performed in the best theaters of Poland and Ukraine. It was an ensemble of real quality with instrumentalists who had studied at the conservatories of Vienna and Warsaw and who could have performed in any concert hall in Europe.

 In 1943, when the decision was made to liquidate the Jewish population of the region, the musicians were summoned to the camp courtyard. They were ordered to line up with their instruments. They played. The SS shot them one by one as they played, methodically, without haste. The last to fall was the conductor. He had been playing until the moment the bullet arrived.

 What they played that last time was a piece several survivors described as the Tango  of Death, a composition attributed to the conductor himself, a man whose name the camp records never preserved. That dual mechanism, entertainment and extermination operating in parallel and sometimes simultaneously in the same physical space, was what distinguished the Nazi camps from other historical atrocities.

 The normalization of violence did not occur only among the victims who learned to survive inside conditions that would have paralyzed anyone without that forced  adaptation. It also occurred, and perhaps more profoundly, among the executioners. A guard who spent the afternoon applauding a boxing match or listening to an orchestra perform Beethoven returned to his night time duties with the feeling of having had an ordinary day.

The rituals of leisure constructed normality where none should have existed. That was the darkest function of the entire entertainment system Himmler had requested and that each camp commandant had implemented. But there were other ways to pass the time that required neither musicians nor boxers. The most common, the most everyday, were also the most revealing for what they said about the psychology of the camp personnel.

 The commandants and higher ranking officers regularly sent requests to their superiors asking for board games. The archives captured after the war included those letters, lists of requests for dice, >>  >> playing cards, chess pieces, and strategy board games the officers wanted in order to pass the afternoons. One of the most requested was Fang den Hut, a circular board game with a central cross and pieces shaped like stackable hats.

 It had been introduced during the Weimar Republic and never stopped circulating in the barracks. The circular board with the central cross had something the camp players found familiar and comfortable. Chess was the most common among the board games that appeared in the commandant’s requests. German soldiers played among themselves regularly.

Occasionally, to break the monotony of games between equals, they challenged prisoners. There something occurred that the Nazi system had not foreseen and that generated a specific and recurrent  tension. Ukrainian prisoners, in particular, were extraordinary chess players. Chess had a deep tradition in Eastern Europe where school championships were community events and where playing well  was a publicly recognized sign of intelligence.

 Several Ukrainian prisoners defeated their guards with a consistency the SS did not know how to manage. Losing to the enemy racially classified as inferior in a direct test  of strategic intelligence was a contradiction Nazi ideology could not assimilate. The reactions were systematic. The losing guard ordered a beating that same night or reduced the winning prisoners’ rations or simply sent him the following day to the worst available work details.

The prisoners understood quickly. They learned to lose convincingly when the opponent was someone who had a weapon and a character inclined toward violence. The technique required subtlety. Lose by a little, not by a lot. Make mistakes that seemed casual, not obvious. Allow the guard to believe the victory had been fair.

Those who mastered that performance survived the games. Those who did not manage it convincingly enough, those who won too clearly, or made the guard perceive that they were deliberately letting him win, paid an immediate physical It was a form of violence generated by chess in that context, an extension of the ordinary sadism of the camp projected onto a board of 64 squares.

 Playing cards were equally common. The guards had access to several  types of decks with different rules, and nighttime games were a regular practice in the staff  quarters. Among the most popular card games was tarot, which was paradoxical given that Nazism publicly presented  itself as an ideology of rational order, racial scientism, and Germanic cultural roots with pretensions of intellectual rigor.

But the attraction of the Nazi leadership to esotericism was real and documented in multiple sources. Himmler had an obsessive interest in astrology, alchemy, Kabbalah, and theosophy. Rudolf Hess consulted horoscopes before making important decisions. Astrology circulated through the upper ranks of the party with a fluidity that violently contrasted with the public discourse of racial science and biological superiority.

That duality between declared rationalism and practiced esotericism was one of the clearest symptoms of the internal incoherence of a system built on contradictions it had never needed to resolve. Among all the games and sports the Nazis practiced in the camps, football occupied a special place, not only because it was Europe’s most popular mass sport, but because its presence in the camps revealed aspects of the concentration camp machinery that other forms of entertainment did not show as clearly.

Football required space, teams, and a minimum level of physical condition in the participants. And those requirements generated situations that exposed the logic of the system in ways the archives recorded with disturbing neutrality. Before Hitler came to power, German Jews had their own sports clubs. The regulations that excluded them from general sports associations, which in Germany dated back decades before Nazism, and which the party simply radicalized and formalized, had led them to build their own institutions, which

functioned with enormous vitality and in some cases produced athletes of international level. The two best-known clubs were Shield from Frankfurt and Hakoah from Berlin. When the Nuremberg Laws definitively shut them down in 1935, thousands of Jews lost not only a sports club, but a social network, a place of belonging, and a physical practice that for many had been the axis of their leisure life for years.

Those who had been professional footballers found themselves without employment, without a league in which to compete, and gradually without a country. One of those footballers was Julius Hirsch, a winger for Karlsruher FV, known among German football fans of the early century for his technical power and for his left foot, which produced crosses the rest of the team awaited in anticipation.

 In 1909, at the age of 16, he debuted for the German national team at a time when selectors were guided exclusively by sporting criteria, and when a player’s Jewish ancestry was neither relevant nor visible in the context of international football. He played seven matches wearing the shirt of the country that would later consider him a biological enemy.

 The most remembered was the one he played against the Netherlands, in which he scored four goals in an afternoon that the sports newspapers of the time covered with adjectives reserved for performances no one forgot. Together with Gottfried Fuchs, he was one of the only two Jews in the history of German football up to to moment who had represented Germany in international competition.

 In 1925, he retired from active football and became a coach. He stayed in football because it was what he knew how to do. With the arrival of Nazism and the application of racial laws to every public and private institution in the country, Hirsch lost his job. The blow was so deep and the rupture with the life he had built so absolute that he tried to take his own life.

 He did not succeed and was confined for a time in a psychiatric institution. Years later, he was deported to the east. His exact fate was never documented with the precision with which other deportations were recorded. The records suggest that he died in Auschwitz, but the exact moment and circumstances remain unconfirmed in the archives.

 Eddy Hamel was Dutch, born in Amsterdam, and had been Ajax’s first great right winger during the 1920s. Ajax was already one of the most important clubs in the Netherlands and Hamel was its most recognizable player on the right flank. Fast, technically sophisticated, with a sense of positioning that set him apart from most of his contemporaries.

 In a city with a Jewish community as old and rooted as Amsterdam’s, being Ajax’s only Jewish player carried a symbolic weight the fans recognized with a mixture of pride and awareness that he represented something more than football. With the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940, Dutch Jews were quickly subjected to the same measures that had already been implemented in Germany and in previously occupied territories.

Hamel was arrested. He was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He died in one of the gas chambers without the camp records preserving any additional detail about the exact moment or circumstances. He was a number in the statistics  of extermination who had also been, years before, a man who played football better than almost anyone else in his country.

 Saturnino Navazo was Spanish, Republican. He had fought in the civil war on the side loyal to the Republic and had crossed the Pyrenees on foot in February 1939, along with the hundreds of thousands of Spaniards who fled to France when Franco’s army took Catalonia. The refugee camps of southern France were miserable installations built on beaches and open wasteland where mortality from respiratory diseases during that winter was high.

Navazo survived that winter and was detained by the French authorities who collaborated with the German occupation administration in identifying and handing over Spanish Republicans to the Gestapo. He arrived at Mauthausen on one of the transports of Spaniards that reached the camp in 1940. When the SS discovered he was a footballer, they applied the same logic they had applied with Perez in boxing.

The body had an entertainment value that was more efficient to preserve than to destroy. Instead of assigning him to the hardest labor, they sent him to the camp kitchens. There he had access to real food. In exchange, he trained in front of the soldiers, performed dribbles and strikes  that the guards watched with the fascination produced by seeing someone do well, something they themselves could not do.

It was the most transparent exchange  in the system. I feed you, you entertain me. Navazo understood it without needing anyone to explain it to him. He complied. He survived. The case of Antoni Wiko was different in nature  and consequence and is probably the best documented of all those involving footballers in the Nazi camps.

Wiko had been one of the best footballers in Poland in the second half of the 1930s. He played for Wisła Kraków, the city’s most important club, and had developed a reputation as a forward of exceptional technical quality and competitive temperament, which sports journalists of the time described as inflammable.

He had been called up for the 1938 World Cup in France. The tournament Poland reached at one of the best moments in its football history up to that point, although an untimely injury in the preceding months prevented him from participating. With the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Wiko was arrested by the Gestapo, accused of having links to the Polish armed resistance, and sent to Auschwitz on one of the early transports of 1941.

On June 2 of that year, Wiecko took part in one of the matches periodically organized in the camp between prisoners and members of the SS or Kapos. Prisoners experienced in that system knew what was at stake. Visibility was dangerous. Scoring goals that were too good could be interpreted as a challenge.

 Running too fast was an implicit provocation. Those who knew the camp’s unwritten rules held themselves back or pretended to hold themselves back, moving well enough to be entertaining, but not so well as to humiliate anyone with authority. Wiecko did not make that calculation. He scored two goals in a match in which the Polish prisoners defeated their guards by five goals to three.

 The next day he was summoned before the camp authority. The formal accusation was resistance to state power, a charge vague enough to apply to almost anything the system needed. He was taken with a group that included some of the camp’s most prominent prisoners  in terms of education, doctors, engineers, lawyers, politicians, and university students.

 They were led to a gravel pit located outside the official perimeter of the camp. The executions were held as a social event with formal invitations circulated among officers and non-commissioned officers and their wives, >>  >> presided over by Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritz. It was a mass execution presented in the outward form of a community event.

 The guests arrived in uniform or civilian clothes, depending on rank and preference. Fritz placed himself in the central position. According to testimonies that emerged in the post-war trials, Wiecko resisted. He tried to escape twice while being led from the truck to the edge of the pit. The first time, they immobilized him.

 The second time as well. Fritz personally executed him with a shot to the back of the neck from his regulation pistol in the same place where, minutes before or minutes after, he executed the other prisoners in the group. The remains of Wieco and those of his 80 fellow victims were transferred to the Auschwitz crematorium that same afternoon.

 The camp archives recorded the event with the same neutral bureaucracy  with which they recorded everything else. Football matches in the camps did not always follow the conventional 11 against 11 format. The Germans preferred to organize teams according to categories that reflected the camp’s work structure.

 Teams of carpenters, cooks, cleaning staff, electricians, or plumbers. The taxonomy was that of the camp itself transferred onto the playing field. Matches between Germans, in which prisoners were forced to sit in improvised stands and applaud the winners, were frequent. But the spectacle most sought after by the guard personnel was another.

 Watching hungry and physically exhausted prisoners  play. Prisoners who had spent weeks or months in conditions of progressive deterioration, who had lost between 10 and 20 kilos since their arrival at the camp, whose feet were raw from shoes without socks, and 12-hour work days. Some fainted on the field during the match.

 The SS watched from outside the improvised pitch. The game continued.  Those who fell were dragged to one side so the spectacle would not be unnecessarily interrupted. All that architecture of entertainment, boxing, music, football, and board games had been built with men in mind. But there was also a dimension of leisure in the camps that operated on a different level and that for decades occupied a marginal space in the historiography of the Holocaust.

 It was the story of women who exercised authority within the concentration camp system and in particular that of a woman whose name became, after the war, synonymous with female sadism in the context of Nazi extermination. A figure whom the post-war trials inadvertently turned into the point of condensation for all the unanswered questions about how a person can come to do what she did.

 Ilse Koch was born in Dresden in 1906 into a middle-class family that gave her a childhood without notable incidents. Her school teachers described her as a responsible student, well-behaved and popular among her classmates. At 15, she left school to work in a factory. Later, she found employment as a clerk in a bookstore.

 It was there that she began coming into contact with the political literature of the Nazi Party, which in the 1920s distributed its publications in bookstores across Germany with an efficiency that anticipated the bureaucratic effectiveness of the extermination apparatus that would come later. She became a party secretary, then a member.

 In 1932,  at 26, she had the attention of important men. It was Heinrich Himmler who chose her as a wife for one of his favorite collaborators, Karl Otto Koch, an ambitious, violent, and unscrupulous SS official whom those who knew him consistently described as a man who recognized no limits. They married in 1936. In 1939, Karl Koch was appointed commandant of Buchenwald, one of the largest camps in the Nazi concentration camp system located in the wooded hills of Thuringia, a few kilometers from Weimar. Weimar was the city of Goethe

and Schiller, the intellectual center of classical Germany, the place that had given its name to the democratic republic the Nazis had destroyed. From the hills of Buchenwald, on a clear day, the city could be seen. The Kochs arrived at the camp in the autumn of 1939 with their three children and took possession of the residence assigned to the commandant.

 The first months were relatively ordinary within what the standards of  the camp could offer as ordinary. But Ilse Koch did not fit the profile of a commandant’s wife who kept away from camp affairs, managed the household, and raised the children while her husband took care of extermination. From very early on, she began involving herself in ways her female colleagues normally avoided.

 And she did so with a personal initiative that required no orders from anyone. She ordered the construction of an outdoor swimming pool for the exclusive use of SS personnel and their families using forced labor from the camp prisoners. She ordered the prisoners to build a riding arena measuring 40 by 100 m and 20 m high located a few meters from the barracks where the prisoners slept.

Inside the riding arena, there was a room whose walls were completely lined with mirrors. Koch used it for group encounters, first with the wives of the camp officers and later with her husband’s subordinates when the wives were no longer interesting enough. The prisoners in the adjacent barracks could hear exactly what was happening inside the riding arena with  the same precision with which they could hear the blows and screams from the punishment yard on winter nights.

Ilse Koch had a morning protocol that several survivors described with a consistency that post-war  investigators found revealing. She dressed before dawn, mounted a horse, and rode through the camp grounds. She always carried a long riding crop. When she passed by columns of prisoners marching toward the work sites, she struck them for no apparent reason, choosing at random or following some criterion only she knew.

 There were days when, before mounting, she released trained dogs on groups of pregnant women. The animals attacked them. Koch watched from her horse with the same neutral expression she might have had while looking over the camp from the hills. She also had a specific obsession with tattoos, which several survivors documented in enough detail for post-war prosecutors to bring her trial with concrete material.

 Tattoos had been common in working class, sailor, and prison circles in many European countries  during the decades before the war, and prisoners arrived in the camps with their bodies covered in designs ranging from the most rudimentary to the most elaborate. Koch selected them during inspections. She was interested in the most elaborate tattoos, those that covered large stretches of skin with designs of animals, human figures, or complex geometric patterns.

She ordered those prisoners injected with phenol directly into the heart to kill them  without damaging the surface of the skin. Then she ordered the fragments of tattooed skin torn from them and taken to her private laboratory inside the villa, where she treated them with chemicals to tan, fix, and preserve them.

 She used them to bind books so that the cover had the texture and design of the original tattoo, to make lampshades that she placed on her bedside table and on the villa’s desks, to make gloves, and to create tablecloths with which she decorated the dining room table. Objects made from human skin were, for Koch, ordinary decorative pieces distributed throughout the house with the same aesthetic judgment with which anyone else might place a vase or a painting.

 The collection of heads was an additional practice documented by multiple survivors who worked in or near the Koch villa during the period of the camp’s operation. Koch ordered that the heads of certain executed prisoners be treated with chemical solutions that reduced their volume while keeping their features recognizable.

 The shrunken heads were displayed in the dining room of the villa, arranged on furniture and shelves in deliberate order. Testimonies from people who entered that house after the liberation of the camp describe between eight and 12 heads in the dining room, alongside the ordinary porcelain and glassware of a middle-class German family.

Koch also sent them as gifts to members of the Nazi hierarchy, wrapped and presented with the same protocol with which any other gift object circulated among the upper ranks of the system. Albert Kremin owski, a Polish Jew forced to work in the camp’s pathology laboratory, testified in the post-war trials that Koch had even worn underwear decorated with fragments of tattooed prisoner skin.

 It was a detail investigators recorded with difficulty because it tended to produce disbelief even among those who had already intellectually accepted the general scale of the crimes of the Holocaust. But the testimonies were multiple, independent, and consistent in the details, and the objects confiscated in the villa after liberation confirmed enough of what the survivors described.

The system ended for the Kochs before it ended for the camp itself. Karl Otto Koch was arrested by the SS themselves in 1943, accused by the Nazi internal justice apparatus of corruption and embezzlement of camp funds for personal use. The same regime that had authorized his atrocities prosecuted him for keeping money that did not belong to him.

He was tried by an SS court and executed in Buchenwald in April 1945, days before the American army liberated the camp. Ilse was detained by the Americans shortly after liberation. Her trial began in 1951 in Augsburg. The proceedings attracted international media attention with an intensity that surpassed that of many higher ranking war criminals trials, partly because Koch was a woman and partly because what the witnesses described during the sessions exceeded what the European public was willing to believe without direct documentation.

After listening to 240 witnesses over months, Koch spoke the words no one expected. “I am guilty. I am a sinner.” The initial sentence was life imprisonment. It was reduced  to 4 years by the appeals court, which generated protest throughout Europe and the United States. In 1967, at the age of 61, she hanged herself with her bedsheets  in the prison of Aichach in Bavaria.

 On the note she left, she wrote that there was no other way out and that death was the only liberation. It was the last autonomous decision of her life. While all that architecture of violence and entertainment operated on the upper levels of the concentration camp system, there was another dimension that operated in a more deliberate way and was more systematically ignored after the war.

A dimension Himmler had designed with a specific purpose and that involved women in a completely different way from Ilse Koch. The network of brothels in the Nazi concentration camps was one of the most deliberately marginalized episodes of the post-war period for decades, partly because the surviving victims refused to speak out of shame, partly because investigators preferred to focus on other dimensions of the Holocaust, and partly because post-war European governments had no interest in opening that archive at a time when the

objective was to rebuild social normality. Himmler’s argument for building the network had an internal coherence that makes it even more disturbing. SS soldiers spent prolonged periods in the camps, far from the cities, in conditions of relative isolation that Himmler identified as a risk to group cohesion and operational discipline.

 The danger that specifically worried him was that the constant proximity between German personnel and prisoners would end up generating sexual relations between Germans and Jews, which, from the perspective  of the Nuremberg Laws, constituted a racial crime of the highest order. The solution Himmler found was of impeccable administrative  logic, to provide controlled sexual access to women from racially acceptable categories, distributed in regulated facilities with medical and security protocols. It was

the rationalization of sexual slavery through the language of human resource management. The first brothel for soldiers in a concentration camp was established in Mauthausen, in barrack number one of a sub-building of the Gusen subcamp, located a few kilometers from the main camp. It housed 35 women in a building of individual rooms separated by thin wooden partitions.

They had been recruited from the women’s camp at Ravensbrück with the argument that if they agreed to participate voluntarily in the assigned function, they would be released before the end of the war. The argument was false. None of those who accepted under that promise was released.

 The selection mechanism was explicit in the system’s internal documents. The women were physically evaluated by SS personnel in charge of selection. Those who met the highest aesthetic standards were assigned to brothels for the exclusive use of SS officers and non-commissioned  officers, who paid two Reichsmarks for each session.

 Those who met intermediate physical standards went to lower ranking brothels available to enlisted soldiers and support personnel. Those in the worst physical condition,  whether due to previous illness, malnutrition, or the effects of camp conditions, were sent to the brothels intended for non-Jewish prisoners who had access to that privilege.

In no case did the money paid reach the women’s hands.  The two marks circulated within the system like any other administrative transaction. The Auschwitz brothel was established on the 30th of June 1943. Two weeks later, the same system was replicated in Birkenau.  In 1944, brothels were built in Neuengamme, Dachau, Dora-Mittelbau, and Flossenbürg.

 The network reached dozens of facilities distributed across Germany and occupied Europe before the end of the war. The internal operation followed a precise protocol documented in several archives captured after liberation. Soldiers who wanted access to the brothel submitted a formal request that included a medical examination to rule out venereal diseases.

Prisoners authorized by their superiors as a reward for outstanding work followed the same procedure. The women received between three and five men per day in 15-minute sessions. The rooms had peepholes  installed in the doors. SS members assigned to supervise the brothel watched through them >>  >> both to ensure that the usage protocols were followed and for motivations that later testimonies described without ambiguity.

  Prisoners authorized to access the brothel did not always do so by choice. Several testimonies collected after the war described pressure from Kapos  and non-commissioned officers who had issued the authorization. Rejecting it could be interpreted as ingratitude, and ingratitude in the camp had consequences. Some prisoners of communist or socialist ideology rejected access and argued before other prisoners that participating was equivalent to collaborating with the system of sexual slavery.

That the women in the brothel were victims of the same regime that held them imprisoned and that exploiting that situation was a betrayal of the basic solidarity the camp demanded of those who wanted to preserve some humanity. It was a minority position. Most men who received authorization used it, although later testimonies collected decades afterward when the silence was no longer so absolute described that what many sought was not so much sex as a moment of human company, a conversation, someone who looked at them as people

with names. The women in the brothels were replaced regularly. Physical exhaustion, sexually transmitted diseases, trauma from continuous assaults, and psychological deterioration left them unable to continue within weeks or months. When they could no longer fulfill the function, they were sent back into the general camp circuit, which in most cases was equivalent to a death sentence with an uncertain date.

 Many were subjected to forced abortions and sterilizations during their time in the brothels, procedures performed without sufficient anesthesia and in minimal sanitary conditions, leaving permanent physical consequences in those who survived. It is estimated that more than 20,000 women passed through the brothel network of the Mauthausen camp over the course of its operation between 1942 and 1945.

The global figures for the entire network have never been documented with sufficient precision. The Nazis destroyed part of the relevant archives before the liberations. Post-war European countries did not prioritize that investigation. The survivors, for the most part, chose silence because the societies to which they returned had no vocabulary to receive them except that of shame.

 The mark some of those women carried tattooed on their chests, the inscription Lagerhure, camp [ __ ] was the physical condensation of the entire system. It was the permanent identification engraved in the skin of a function the regime had assigned to them by force and that followed them for years after liberation, in the same European societies that preferred not to speak of what had happened to them.

 Some tried to remove the tattoo surgically with the few means available in the immediate post-war years. Those who could not covered it with clothing for decades. There was also a dimension of entertainment in the camps that directly affected children. Guards who had demonstrated their full capacity for cruelty toward adults found in children a specific field for the exercise of sadism, which the testimonies of adult survivors described as especially difficult to bear, not because of the scale, but because of the direction.

Seeing an adult suffer, someone who has lived a life and has the resistance built by experience, is one thing. Seeing a child suffer, a child who does not understand what is happening to them, is another. Josef Mengele arrived at the children’s barracks with chocolates in the pockets of his uniform. It was a detail survivors described consistently for decades, and one whose apparent innocence concentrates the perversity of the entire system.

 The man who was going to torture the children arrived with a gesture of a kind adult bringing them something sweet. The children approached. He selected them. He injected substances into their eyes in an attempt to alter the color of the iris, because he had the hypothesis that eye pigmentation was a biological marker of race.

And that altering it experimentally would demonstrate the plasticity of the traits Nazism declared fixed and immutable. He extracted blood from them in quantities that caused fainting. He exposed them to extreme temperatures for controlled periods to measure the body’s response speed. He subjected them to surgeries without sufficient anesthesia and stitched them up without the necessary post-operative care.

 He recorded the results in orderly folders that he kept with the care of an archivist. If one of the twins used in an experiment died, the other was killed that same day, so that the comparative autopsy could be performed immediately. The twins, >>  >> Eva and Miriam Moses Kor, arrived at Auschwitz with their family in 1944 at the age of 10.

 Their parents were immediately sent to the gas chambers. The girls were separated and taken to Mengele’s barracks. For months, they were subjected to experiments  whose exact nature was never fully documented. Miriam had episodes of unconsciousness after the injections. Eva had recurring high fevers. Years after liberation, when Eva Mozes Kor began to speak publicly about what she had lived through, she described Mengele leaving his laboratory whistling classical music after the most painful procedures.

That image was the hardest for her to articulate, not the procedures themselves, but the whistling. The man who did that and then walked out whistling. All that machinery, the boxing ring, the orchestra playing marches while prisoners advanced to work, the chess games that had to be lost on purpose, the football matches among the starving, the tarot cards in the guards’ quarters, the Koch Villa with its lamps and shrunken heads, the brothels with their 15-minute sessions and peepholes.

Mengele’s experiments entered through chocolates, operated with a central purpose that Himmler had formulated from  the beginning with the clarity of someone administering an industrial production system to keep his personnel in a condition to continue working. Entertainment was not a luxury granted to the guards as a reward for fulfilling their function.

 It was a tool of operational management without which the system would have suffered the effects of psychological exhaustion and the disintegration of group cohesion that any organization suffers when its members have no release valves for accumulated pressure. The same logic that assigned extra rations  to a boxer so he could enter the ring assigned music to columns of prisoners so they would march faster.

The same logic that built riding arenas with mirrors for the commandant’s wives built brothels with medical protocols for soldiers. Human beings as resources optimized for the function the system required of them at each moment with absolute indifference toward any other dimension of their existence.

 That was is distinguished entertainment in the Nazi camps from any other form of leisure in human history. In any other context,  entertainment exists for the benefit of the spectator and, in some way, also for that of the artist or athlete who produces it. In the camps, it existed exclusively for the spectator.

The artist, the athlete, the musician, and the woman in the brothel were consumable resources the system replaced when they were exhausted. The supply was inexhaustible as long as the system operated. When the Allies reached the camps in the spring of 1945, they found the rings dismantled, the instruments broken or abandoned on the floors of the barracks, the chess boards thrown into the guards’ quarters beside empty bottles and uniforms discarded during the flight.

 They also found the records, the lists of musicians with their instruments noted, the notebooks of boxing statistics with the names of opponents and the results, the medical files of the brothels with the records of each woman and the notes of the camp doctor. Those documents were the anatomy of the system, written by those who had operated it.

 The Nuremberg prosecutors used them. Historians continued using them for decades. Many of those directly responsible for the entertainment system were never tried. Mengele escaped to South America with his folders, lived for decades under false identities in Brazil and Argentina, and drowned on a Brazilian beach in 1979 at the age of 67 without ever being extradited or tried.

Franz Ziereis, the commandant of Mauthausen who organized the Sunday boxing matches, was mortally wounded by American soldiers during the liberation of the camp and died 3 days later without ever being prosecuted. Fritz, who personally executed Wiko, disappeared in the final days of the war and his fate was never confirmed with certainty by any record.

 Pietrzykowski survived Auschwitz and the death march of the winter of 1945. After liberation, he continued boxing in military tournaments organized by the Polish army in exile and in the displaced  persons camps of Western Europe. He won several of them. He never spoke extensively about what he had lived through in the camp.

 In one of the few interviews he gave decades later, he said that in the Auschwitz ring he never thought about winning. He only thought about not falling. Segundo Espallargas returned to Spain. The Franco dictatorship did not receive him as a survivor of the Nazi camps. It received him as a defeated red, a loser of the war, who also carried the stigma of having fought alongside the French and having been captured  by the Germans.

His story as the undefeated boxer of Mauthausen was not publicly told in Spain for decades. The country had other versions of history that were more convenient for it. Victor Young Perez survived Monowitz long enough to be part of the camp’s evacuation in January 1945. When Soviet troops were approaching from the east and the SS began moving the surviving prisoners in what would later be called the death marches.

 Thousands of men and women in a state of extreme deterioration were forced to walk hundreds of kilometers in temperatures several degrees below zero wearing summer clothing without enough food and with their feet wrapped in rags because their shoes had long since stopped functioning. Those who fell were executed by the side of the road or simply abandoned in the snow.

 Perez died at some point during those weeks on a date and in a place no record preserved. He was 33 years old. Many years after the war, the boxers of the camps became the subject of documentaries, books, and articles in the specialized press. The stories of Perez, Pietrzykowski, and Espallargas circulated through the world boxing circuit as accounts of resistance and dignity under extreme conditions.

That reading was not wrong, but it was incomplete because the system that had kept them alive  had not kept them alive out of respect for their dignity. It had kept them alive because they were useful. The difference between those two reasons for continuing to breathe was the difference between the world the camps had destroyed  and the world the camps represented.

Perez’s body disappeared in the snow of Silesia in January 1945 as the bodies of thousands of prisoners disappeared on those marches without a record, without coordinates, without a grave anyone could visit. The record of 140 bouts in 15 months remained in the camp archives written in the same neutral bureaucratic ink that recorded executions and transports to the gas chambers.

 The Star of David he had embroidered on his fight trunks in Tunis in 1931 did not survive the journey to Monowitz, but the man who had embroidered it with pride in his  best days and who had refused to wear the yellow one in his worst kept moving his feet and covering his flanks for 15 months longer than any rational calculation of probability would have suggested possible.

 The women’s orchestra of Auschwitz-Birkenau continued playing after Alma Rosé’s death until the camp’s final days. The musicians who had known her later described the period under her direction as the most demanding and also the most strangely vital of their years in the camp. Rosé had demanded of them the level of a conservatory under the conditions of hell and that demand had given them something to hold on to beyond immediate physical survival.

 She had given them music as their own territory, a space the camp did not completely control because it occurred inside them while they played, not only in the air between the barracks. When the camp was evacuated in January 1945, the musicians who survived walked with the rest of the prisoners toward the west.

 Some carried their instruments during the first hours of the march. Then they abandoned them in the snow because they weighed too much and extra weight killed. The violins of Auschwitz-Birkenau were left scattered along the roads of Silesia between January and February mixed with shoes, clothing, and the bodies of those who did not reach the next day.

Of the 40 musicians in the main orchestra, 38 survived the war. It is the statistic most often cited when speaking of the function music had as a mechanism of survival in the camps, but there is another statistic that rarely appears in the same paragraph. The Auschwitz camps as a whole processed between 1,100,000 and 1,500,000 people between 1940 and 1945.

Of them, between 1,100,000 and 1,300,000 died. The survival rate of the orchestras and the survival rate of the camp in general belong to orders of magnitude so different that the contrast says everything it needs  to say about the difference between being useful to the system and not being so. The guards who applauded Pietrzikowski in the ring at night and beat him in the yard during the  day did not experience that contradiction as an incoherence.

 They had normalized it with the same efficiency with which all behaviors are normalized when they are repeated for long enough in an environment that presents them as natural. Entertainment was the system’s most effective tool for producing that normalization because entertainment, unlike work or direct violence, required no conscious effort from the person consuming it.

 It only required sitting down to  watch.