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 First US edition | |
| Author | Erich Maria Remarque |
|---|---|
| Country | Germany |
| Language | German |
| Series | N/A |
| Subject | Holocaust |
| Publisher | Kiepenheuer & Witsch |
Publication date | 1952 |
Published in English | 1952 Hutchinson (UK) Appleton-Century-Crofts (US) |
| Media type | |
| ISBN | 978-0-449-91251-5 |
Spark of Life is a concentration camp novel, written by Erich Maria Remarque in the year 1952.
The novel has 25 chapters and tells the story of inmates and watchmen of the "Little Camp" of the fictional concentration camp Mellern, a few months before the end of World War II. The Little Camp is a part of the concentration camp, which prisoners who are unable to work are sent to. In the recurring bombardments of the nearby city, a group of inmates of the Little Camp, called veterans for their years of stay, begin to organize themselves as they see signs of possible liberation. This begins with disobeying orders, hiding other prisoners in order to escape the grasp of the guards, obtaining weapons and finally culminates in an armed struggle to liberate the camp. Both the inhumane conditions of the camp, such as humiliations, shootings, unsanitary conditions and hunger, as well as criminals of middle-class background are displayed. An additional element is the conflict with the communistic part of the resistance group and their goals.
Shortly after Remarque in June 1946 learned of the death of Elfriede Scholz, his youngest sister, who had been beheaded after a trial of the People's Court in 1943, he began work on the novel, which he had dedicated to her. [1] The novel is based on the books and conversations with survivors, such as Edgar Kupfer and Toto Koopman. Among the books were Willi Bredel's The Trial, the novel The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers, and the analysis The SS-State, written by Eugen Kogon, which Remarque did not read until 1950. In addition, he was motivated by the lack of denazification and reassessment of history in postwar of Germany and Austria. The idea and details dragged on until 1950, because he lacked materials and had to rely on information from third parties. He had to restart the novel three times, and contracts with publishers had to be rewritten. Against his inner conviction as an authentic author, Remarque felt himself compelled to explain his project in various prefaces and drafts.
Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees.
Erich Maria Remarque was a German-born novelist. His landmark novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), based on his experience in the Imperial German Army during World War I, an international bestseller which created a new literary genre of veterans writing about conflict. The book was adapted to film several times. Remarque's anti-war themes led to his condemnation by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as "unpatriotic." He was able to use his literary success and fame, to relocate to Switzerland as refugee, and to the United States, where he became a Naturalized citizen.
Aufseherin was the position title for a female guard in Nazi concentration camps. Of the 50,000 guards who served in the concentration camps, training records indicate that approximately 3,500 were women. In 1942, the first female guards arrived at Auschwitz and Majdanek from Ravensbrück. The year after, the Nazis began conscripting women because of a shortage of male guards. In the context of these camps, the German position title of Aufseherin translates to (female) "overseer" or "attendant". Later female guards were dispersed to Bolzano (1944–1945), Kaiserwald-Riga (1943–44), Mauthausen, Stutthof (1942–1945), Vaivara (1943–1944), Vught (1943–1944), and at Nazi concentration camps, subcamps, work camps, detention camps and other posts.
Mittelbau-Dora was a Nazi concentration camp located near Nordhausen in Thuringia, Germany. It was established in late summer 1943 as a subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp, supplying slave labour from many Eastern countries occupied by Germany, for extending the nearby tunnels in the Kohnstein and for manufacturing the V-2 rocket and the V-1 flying bomb. In the summer of 1944, Mittelbau became an independent concentration camp with numerous subcamps of its own. In 1945, most of the surviving inmates were sent on death marches or crammed in trains of box-cars by the SS. On 11 April 1945, US troops freed the remaining prisoners.
Sachsenhausen or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a German Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used from 1936 until April 1945, shortly before the defeat of Nazi Germany in May later that year. It mainly held political prisoners throughout World War II. Prominent prisoners included Joseph Stalin's oldest son, Yakov Dzhugashvili; assassin Herschel Grynszpan; Paul Reynaud, the penultimate prime minister of the French Third Republic; Francisco Largo Caballero, prime minister of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War; the wife and children of the crown prince of Bavaria; Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera; and several enemy soldiers and political dissidents.
Johanna Langefeld was a Nazi German guard and supervisor at three Nazi concentration camps: Lichtenburg, Ravensbrück, and Auschwitz. She was arrested and imprisoned for her role in the Holocaust, but she escaped prison and was never tried.
The Hamburg Ravensbrück trials were seven trials for war crimes during the Holocaust against camp officials from the Ravensbrück concentration camp that the British authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany in Hamburg after the end of World War II. These trials were heard before a military tribunal; the three to five judges at these trials were British officers, assisted by a lawyer. The defendants included concentration camp personnel of all levels: SS officers, camp doctors, male guards, female guards (Aufseherinnen), and a few former prisoner-functionaries who had tortured or mistreated other inmates. In total, 38 defendants were tried in these seven trials; 21 of the defendants were women. One of the defendants died during the trial. Twenty of the defendants received death sentences. One defendant was reprieved while two others committed suicide before they could be executed. The remaining 17 death sentences relating to these trials were carried out on the gallows at Hamelin Prison by British hangman Albert Pierrepoint.
Hans Wilhelm Münch, also known as The Good Man of Auschwitz, was a German Nazi Party member who worked as an SS physician during World War II at the Auschwitz concentration camp from 1943 to 1945 in German occupied Poland. He was acquitted of war crimes at a 1947 trial in Kraków.
Paul Robert Schneider was a German pastor of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union who was the first Protestant minister to be martyred by the Nazis. He was murdered with a strophanthin injection at the concentration camp of Buchenwald.
Siegfried Einstein was a German-Jewish poet, novelist, essayist and journalist.
Approximately three million German prisoners of war were captured by the Soviet Union during World War II, most of them during the great advances of the Red Army in the last year of the war. The POWs were employed as forced labor in the Soviet wartime economy and post-war reconstruction. By 1950 almost all surviving POWs had been released, with the last prisoner returning from the USSR in 1956. According to Soviet records 381,067 German Wehrmacht POWs died in NKVD camps. A commission set up by the West German government found that 3,060,000 German military personnel were taken prisoner by the USSR and that 1,094,250 died in captivity. According to German historian Rüdiger Overmans ca. 3,000,000 POWs were taken by the USSR; he put the "maximum" number of German POW deaths in Soviet hands at 1.0 million. Based on his research, Overmans believes that the deaths of 363,000 POWs in Soviet captivity can be confirmed by the files of Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt), and additionally maintains that "It seems entirely plausible, while not provable, that 700,000 German military personnel listed as missing actually died in Soviet custody."
NKVD special camps were NKVD-run late and post-World War II internment camps in the Soviet-occupied parts of Germany from May 1945 to January 6, 1950. They were set up by the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) and run by the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs MVD. On 8 August 1948, the camps were made subordinate to the Gulag. Because the camp inmates were permitted no contact with the outside world, the special camps were also known as silence camps.
August Perk was a German Resistance fighter against the National Socialism. His brief friendship with Erich Maria Remarque influenced Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front.
The Hartheim killing centre was a killing facility involved in the Nazi programme known as Aktion T4, in which German citizens deemed mentally or physically unfit were systematically murdered with poison gas. Often, these patients were transferred from other killing facilities such as the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna. This was initially a programme of "involuntary euthanasia" permitted under the law ostensibly to enable the lawful and painless killing of incurably ill patients; these murders continued even after the law was rescinded in 1942. Other victims included Jews, Communists and those considered undesirable by the state. Concentration camp inmates who were unfit for work, or otherwise deemed troublesome, were also executed here. The facility was housed in Hartheim Castle in the municipality of Alkoven, near Linz, Austria, which now is a memorial site and documentation centre.
Ravensbrück was a Nazi concentration camp exclusively for women from 1939 to 1945, located in northern Germany, 90 km (56 mi) north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück. The camp memorial's estimated figure of 132,000 women who were in the camp during the war includes about 48,500 from Poland, 28,000 from the Soviet Union, almost 24,000 from Germany and Austria, nearly 8,000 from France, and thousands from other countries including a few from the United Kingdom and the United States. More than 20,000 of the total were Jewish. Eighty-five percent were from other races and cultures. More than 80 percent were political prisoners. Many prisoners were employed as slave laborer by Siemens & Halske. From 1942 to 1945, the Nazis undertook medical experiments on Ravensbrück prisoners to test the effectiveness of sulfonamides.
Arthur Dietzsch was a German KZ trustee (Funktionshäftling) and Kapo as well as an inmate nurse (KZ-Häftlingspfleger) in Block 46 of KZ Buchenwald.
Matthias Laurenz Gräff is an Austrian academic painter, private historian, politician, political activist and co-founder and organizer of the non-partisan platform Dialog im Kamptal. Since 2013 Gräff has served as chairman of the worldwide Family Association Gräff-Graeff and since 2024 as the official Representative of the NEOS parliamentary party for Greece.
Erwin Dold was a fighter pilot in the Luftwaffe, despite the fact that he was not a Nazi Party member, then sergeant-major in the Luftwaffe ground staff, Commandant of the Concentration Camp Dautmergen, and director of the lumber company Dold Holzwerke in Buchenbach.
Dachau is a 72-page investigation report by the 7th US Army on Dachau, one of the concentration camps established by Nazi Germany. The report details the mass murder and mass atrocities committed at Dachau by the SS and other personnel. Following the liberation of the camp by the 7th US Army on 29 April 1945, the report was prepared during the following one or two weeks and published in May. In addition to a preface, the report contains three independent reports which partly overlap thematically. Although it contains some errors, the report is considered one of the first studies on the Nazi concentration camps.
The Ladelund concentration camp, located 20 km north-east of Niebüll on the German-Danish border, was set up as a satellite camp of Neuengamme concentration camp on November 1, 1944, as part of the construction of the so-called Friesenwall. The Friesenwall was a planned but only partially completed fortification that was to be built on the German North Sea coast towards the end of World War II. The concentration camp near Ladelund was responsible for the construction of trenches and gun emplacements for a militarily pointless "blocking position" south of the Danish border. The camp was disbanded on December the 16th, 1944. Within the month and a half that it existed, 300 out of over 2,000 prisoners died.
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