Towards a society where everyone contributes

The Norwegian Camps were labour-and extermination camps, similar to those found in Germany and Poland. In the Summer of 1942, the first prison camps were established. The largest one - given the nickname "the Serbian camp" - was situated south of the city of Narvik, in Northern Norway. The German cargo ship "Kerkplein" arrived in Narvik with 900 Jugoslavian prisoners of war. When the Serbian camp was closed down later the same year, there were only 152 survivors who could be transferred to other camps. In the course of 4 months, 748 prisoners had died either of exhaustion or had been killed by the prison guards.. 

It was a shock for Norwegian society to get the knowledge that the enemy had not only been German, but the fact that attrocities had been committed by ordinary Norwegian citizens.

To see the other as a human being

”I talked with both prison guards who had been convicted for war crimes, and with guards who had not been sentenced for crimes against prisoners” Christie informs me.

- There was an important fact which struck me – among the prison guards who had been convicted solely for being prison guards, but not for committing attrocities to the prisoners, told stories about prisoners they had spoken to and who had showed them photographs from their home country. Among those tho had been convicted for maltreatment and killing - I met no one with such contact with the prisoners. One of the prisoners I talked to was a teacher. On the road to the concentration camp in Narvik he had found a German-Norwegian dictionary, and had taught himself enough Norwegian as to be able to communicate. One day when they were led to the area where they worked, one of the prison guards asked the other prison guard: ”Do you have a match?”. The other did not have a match, but then the Jugoslavian teacher said in Norwegian: ”But I have a match.” The teacher believed this sentence had saved his life. With this answer he left the position of being something non-human and entered the community of human beings. Thereby he was transformed to a person the ordinary prison guards could relate to. If you are close and if you see the other as a human being the chances for using torture or the chances to perform terrible acts towards an other will be considerably diminished. 
 

That which makes us human

Professor Willy Pedersen, head of the committee for The Norwegian Sociological Canon, states the following about ”Prison Guards in Concentration Camps”:

- … is an original and groundbreaking work. In a fearless manner, the author shed lights on a topic which had received scant attention in Norway - and for that matter, few people knew about. Nils Christie writes about an unpleasant subject, a subject which at the time had not been the object of much scholarly attention. He provides a solid empirical analysis with great many sources… His work shows how ordinary people put in extreme cicumstances can be driven to heinous acts. Nils Christie preceeds for instance Stanley Milgrams experiments on obedience towards authority, and in many ways provides a more indepth explanation than Miltgrams study. If the book had been published in English there are reasons to believe it would have had a great international impact.

According to Christie, "Prison Guards in Concentration Camps" was in the beginning not well received by the Norwegian public. Christies argument that attrocities in concentration camps was not specifically German, but a specific sociological phenomenon seemed difficult to accept, and was an understanding which would not gain support in academia for many decades. 

- Most people are good, but each and every one of us brought to our limit in terrible systems can do the most horrible things."Prison Guards in Concentration Camps" is the most important book I have ever written, and it has  profoundly influenced my life. The experiences and insights I made conducting this research can be found in my later works such as ”How tightly knit a community?”, ”Limits to Pain” and even in my last book published in 2009 ”Small words for big questions". Initially, when I started working on ”Prison Guards in Concentration Camps” the intention was also to include a psychologist in this prohect - this luckily did not happen. Words can obfuscate. If I should have played the role of the diagnostician, I might easily have been led astray and not seen that which is all too human. It is important to not be too overly socialized in how one sees the world, but to hold onto a childish gaze when looking at the world around us.

Christie became professor emeriti in 1998, but is still pursuing his research interests and travelling around the world giving lectures. Christie is a vital part of the academic environment at the Department. The Head of the Department, professor Kristian Andenæs, when congratulating Christie prior to the award ceremony, made the following remark:

- We are fortunate to have had at our department such towering intellectuals from the so-called golden age of Norwegian social research such as Vilhelm Aubert, Nils Christie and Thomas Mathiesen. The fields of criminology and sociology of law are indebted to these three scholars. 

Despite the fact that "Prison Guards in Concentration Camps" has never been translated into English, the lessons Christie learned from this study can be found as key themes throughout his later research which have been translated into Swedish, Danish, Finnish, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portugese, Polish, Russian, Mandarin and Arabic to mention a few of the languages.

According to professor Zygmunt Bauman,:

- "Almost single-handedly, Nils Christie revolutionized the social-scientific thinking of evil and guilt, punishment and penitence, stigma and correction. He blazed new trails in many scholars’ and numerous practitioners’ understanding of the ways in which good people are led to do evil and perpetrators of evil deeds are guided to reform. He pioneered a penitentiary philosophy and practice that, uniquely, manages to be simultaneously unprecedentedly humane and extraorinarily effective. He did all that long years before scores of other criminologists saw the light and joined the ranks to make Christie’s heresy into the canon of all progressive criminology; they would hardly have done it, were it not for Christie’s life-long struggle for truth and against human suffering caused by its denial. There are few people who did as much as Nils Christie did for the cause of justice and humanity."

Nonetheless that Christies international renoun most often is seen in relation to his work on alternative conflict resolution - he is also a pioneer when it comes to the study of human attrocities.

Towards a society where everyone contributes 

Even though "Prison Guards in Concentration Camps" was written almost 60 years ago - it still addresses issues and questions all too relevant and familiar.

Instead of travelling with White busses to visit concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau – rather than travelling outside the borders of Norway - Christie suggeste that new generations will have much to learn by travelling with White busses to see the concentration camps in Northern Norway. This to gain the important recognition that horrible war crimes did not only happen in countries and places far away - but close to home. In ”Prison Guards in Concentration Camps" is found the conception of one of the most important themes in Christies later research: what is a society, and how can we create a society where everyone contributes and participates? How can we create a society where such horrible events will not happen again?
 

By Per Jørgen Ystehede