the meaning of the words: A killing center
A killing center...
Is considered as a place to which populations are transported in order to carry out their assassination upon their arrival on site.
When and how did the expression appear?
In History of the Destruction of the Jews of Europe (1961), Raul Hilberg, at the origin of this expression, gives a definition of this notion favoring the technical and geographical dimension. It limits the acceptance to six centers located on Polish territory whose specificity is to carry out gassing operations to assassinate the 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. Several are indeed distinguished by the regrouping and the planned murder of the Jews.
In Lithuania, in Ponar, nearly 80,000 Jews from Vilnius were killed from December 1942 to the spring of 1944; in Babi Yar, in 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 in 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 supposes a regrouping of populations inscribed in a duration – as short as it is – 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 the implementation of operation T4 (1939-1941).
A killing center, it’s not...
A concentration camp. The Nazi concentration camp system, marked by the opening of the Dachau camp in March 1933, does not fit into a logic of immediate assassination of the populations. Concentration camps are tools for re-education through forced labour. The victims of the Holocaust constitute a minority to be interned in concentration camps. They are indeed assassinated during mass shootings in the East, in the killing centers – after their selection as was the case during the arrival at Auschwitz – or victims of the ghettoization policy of the Nazis.
