the meaning of the words: A killing center
A killing center...
Is considered a place to which people are directed in order to carry out their assassination upon arrival on site.
When and how did the expression appear?
In Histoire de la destruction des Juifs d'Europe (1961), Raul Hilberg, who coined this expression, gives a definition of the concept that emphasizes the technical and geographical dimension. It limits the acception to six centers located on Polish territory, whose specificity is to carry out gassing operations to assassinate populations:
-Auschwitz-Birkenau
-Belzec
-Chelmno
-Majdanek
-Sobibor
-Treblinka
Nearly 2.7 million Jews were murdered there, including nearly 1 million at Auschwitz-Birkenau where the vast majority of French Jews were deported.
A definition that has evolved
The most recent studies suggest taking into account a diversity of places that correspond to as many killing centers. Many are indeed distinguished by the regrouping and planned murder of Jews.
In Lithuania, in Ponar, nearly 80,000 Jews from Vilnius were killed from December 1942 to the spring of 1944; in Babi Yar, Ukraine, 33,771 Jews were massacred on 29 and 30 September 1941 by the Nazis and their collaborators; nearly 900 Jews from convoy 73 were transported to Fort IX in Kaunas, Lithuania and murdered; 22 survived.
Killing centers and extermination camps
These killing centers are sometimes referred to as "extermination camps". The use of this term can be confusing.
A camp presupposes a regrouping of populations over a period of time – however short it may be – and not an immediate assassination: this was, however, the case for the Jews of Europe within the framework of the "Final Solution" and the mentally and physically handicapped at the time of implementation of Operation T4 (1939-1941).
A killing center, that’s not...
A concentration camp. The Nazi concentration camp system, marked by the opening of the Dachau camp in March 1933, did not follow a logic of immediate assassination of the population. Concentration camps are tools of re-education through forced labor. The victims of the Holocaust are a minority to be interned in concentration camps. They are indeed murdered during mass shootings in the East, in killing centers – after their selection as was the case upon arrival at Auschwitz – or victims of the ghettoization policy of the Nazis.
