Extreme physical weakness can spare prisoners the fate of those rounded up and shot.

Evidence

A final example is a heartrending story from the memoirs of Lieutenant Meyer Birnbaum, a Jewish officer who served in the U.S. Army during World War II. At the end of the war, his unit came to Ohrdruff, a concentration camp annexed to Buchenwald. At first they saw no sign of life. They were greeted by a pile of still-warm bodies machine-gunned by the retreating Germans “in a final spasm of hatred.” Birnbaum searched for survivors and found two in the typhus ward. They were so weakened they could barely move, and that is what saved them from the fate of their fellow prisoners. They had been far too sick to obey the order to gather in the courtyard, where the others were shot. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 636

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s overall claim that perpetrators’ choices, not victim weakness, are the moral center — here survival is a pure accident of incapacity. — connects to: Revolutionaries under defeat must endure long patient degradation rather than choose heroic death — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 237

Broader Connections

• Revolutionaries under defeat must endure long patient degradation rather than choose heroic death #complicates (0.75) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 237