Dublin Review of Books – Michael Cronin – Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps, by Michaela Wolf (ed), Bloomsbury, 192 pp, ISBN: 978-1501313257: “Many of the labour and extermination camps scattered across the Nazi Reich held up to thirty or forty different nationalities, most of them speaking different languages. For life and death to proceed as smoothly and as efficiently as possible, it was necessary that his master’s voice be clearly understood. Conversely, no resistance was possible without mutual intelligibility. Like the Nazis’ occupied territories the camps were inherently multinational and multilingual. There were three responses to the communicative challenge of terror. The first was to use or learn the language of the master. For Primo Levi, this was the primary means of survival in the bounded inferno of the death camps. In The Drowned and the Saved (1989) he recounts how knowing German in Auschwitz was a matter of life or death:

• The greater part of the prisoners who did not understand German – that is, almost all of the Italians – died during the first ten to fifteen days after their arrival: at first glance, from hunger, cold, fatigue, and disease, but after a more attentive examination, due to insufficient information….” [Note – This book helped me to understand another facet of how my family, members of the Jewish Community of Italy who spoke no Yiddish as they were not Ashkenazi Jews, were murdered so quickly after deportation to Auschwitz in 1943.]
• See also via The Atlantic – What America Taught the Nazis – In the 1930s, the Germans were fascinated by the global leader in codified racism—the United States.