Evacuated to Death: The Lexicon, Concept, and Practice of Mobility in the Nazi Deportation and Killing Machine

Abstract

Evacuation is a fairly empty and technical concept often used to describe moments of emergency governance when peoples are moved away from harm. It was also a key code word, though, within the Nazi deportation and killing of Europe’s Jews. How could evacuation be deployed in these contexts and for these purposes? What is so crucial here is not simply that the practices of the Holocaust were termed evacuations, however inappropriate, misleading, and murderous that is, but how and why evacuation was and still is “betrayed” as a term, concept, and practice of mobility. The article interrogates evacuation’s geographies and genealogies, pinpointing the Nazis’ abuse of the term as a key and catastrophic, expulsive, and ultimately destructive version of evacuation mobility. The article concludes that different versions of evacuation are able to coexist and reinforce one another. Key Words: emergency, evacuation, Holocaust, mobilities, Nazi geopolitics.

撤离是一个相当空洞且技术性的概念，经常用来描述将人们移出灾害现场的紧急情况治理时刻。但撤离却也同时是纳粹驱逐和杀戮欧洲犹太人的关键代称。撤离如何能够在这些脉络中为这些目的进行部署？此处相当关键的并非仅只是大屠杀行为被称为撤离——无论如何不适切、误导、以及残忍——而是撤离作为一个关乎移动的名称、概念与实践，在过去以及现在如何被“出卖”。本文探究撤离的地理与系谱学，标示出纳粹对该名称的滥用，作为撤离移动一种灾难性、驱逐，以及最终是毁灭性的说法。本文于结论中主张，不同的撤离说法能够同时存在并相互强化。关键词：紧急情况，撤离，大屠杀，纳粹地缘政治，移动。

La evacuación es un concepto un poco vano y técnico que a menudo se usa para describir momentos de emergencia en la gobernanza cuando la gente es desplazada lejos del peligro. Sin embargo, también fue palabra clave codificada, asociada con la deportación y matanza de los judíos de Europa por los nazis. ¿Cómo podría desplegarse la evacuación en estos contextos y para estos propósitos? Lo que es tan crucial aquí no es simplemente que las prácticas del Holocausto fuesen calificadas de evacuaciones, sin importar lo inapropiado, engañosas y homicidas que resultasen ser, sino cómo y porqué la evacuación era y todavía es “traicionada” como término, concepto y práctica de movilidad. Este artículo interroga las geografías y genealogías de la evacuación, precisando el abuso nazi del término como versión clave y catastrófica, expulsiva y en últimas destructiva de la movilidad de evacuación. El artículo concluye que las diferentes versiones del término evacuación pueden coexistir y reforzarse las unas con las otras. Palabras clave: emergencia, evacuación, geopolítica nazi, Holocausto, movilidades.

Acknowledgments

I thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their suggestions that improved this article. I am also grateful for the comments and advice from Klaus Dodds, Steve Graham, Noam Leshem, Mark Neocleous, Rachael Squire, and Pip Thornton. Early versions of the article were presented at seminars and conferences in Goldsmiths, Newcastle University, Paris, and Hamburg.

Notes

1 The Nazi geopolitics of evacuation are not quite unique, of course. For the urban population of Phnom Penh during the time of Democratic Kampuchea under the Khmer Rouge, the forced evacuations by foot, truck, and train, from the debauched metropolis, was a violent and murderous eviction (see the excellent work of Tyner 2014, 2017). Equally, evacuation became the name and process of internment in the United States and Canada for both Japanese Americans and Italians during World War II.

2 I am referring to the writings of Barnes and Minca (2012), Giaccaria and Minca (2016), and others who have focused on a combination of political thinkers who were influential in the Nazi regime and the banal administrative, bureaucratic, and technical machinery of the Nazi system of killing.

3 This quote is drawn from the translation made by Torrie (2010).

4 I am very grateful to Hartmut Behr for pushing me on this point in a previous version of this article.

5 Frontispiece, Gassschutz und Luftschultz 5 (1935).

6 The historiography of civilian defense in Germany has been relatively limited until recently (Klee 1999). Many still draw on, although they are wary of, the work of General Erich Hampe, who became president of the Federal Agency of Civil Defense. Despite some of the different terms used within civilian defense, interestingly, Hampe (1963) suggested that evacuation (Evakuierung) is taken to mean “all measures of relocating the civilian population, as there were no conceptual differences in this area during the war” ([Unter Evakuierung sind hier alle Maßnahmen der Umquartierung der Zivilbevölkerung verstanden, da begriffliche Unterschiede auf diesem Gebiete während des Krieges nicht bestanden], 417). I am grateful to Ian Klinke for leading the way to Hampe and checking my translation.

7 In Galenic medicine can be found ideas of evacuation as bodily regulation and protection, a normalizing spatiotemporal imagination at work in the drawing out of dangerous internal accumulations that need to be routinely expelled. The body is heretofore understood as a spatial system of temporally and geographically differentiated causes and symptoms (Grmek, Fantini, and Shugaar 2002, 251), an inner (bodily) space that must be ordered and emptied of dangers to preserve a system. In this model, evacuation is about the protection of the host body by expelling and regulating internal dangers outwardly.

8 My analysis draws on the documents, testimonies, and paper reports archived at the Vad Yashem Shoah Resource Centre, Jerusalem. See, in particular, Lozowick (1999).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Adey

PETER ADEY is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, Surrey TWO20 0EX, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests orbit around the relation between mobility, space, and security.