Europe

Auschwitz

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I suppose that Auschwitz is among the most infamous places in the world. 

All Nazi labour camps, concentration camps, are infamous but this is perhaps the worst because it became the principal Jewish and Roma extermination camp. 

The majority of labour camps outside of Poland were to provide slave labour essential to the war effort. 

A variety of people were rounded up and forced to work as slaves in the related factories: manufacturing bricks, chemicals and munitions or working on infrastructure projects such as autobahns.  Those incarcerated included actual criminals sentenced to hard labour, Communists and other political enemies of the Nazi regime, Russian prisoners of war, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies (Roma) and Jews.

Each camp bore the inscription on the gate 'ARBEIT MACHT FREI', literally, works makes one free, more poetically work ennobles. The phrase preceded the Nazis and was supposed to indicate that hard work is good for you.

On a previous visit the Berlin, Emily and I went to the site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, 30km north of Berlin. 

Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

At Sachsenhausen and similar work camps, Jews were generally in the minority. For example at its peak at the beginning of 1945 the Sachsenhausen complex, that had grown to include more than 40 sub-camps serving the manufacture of war materiel, had more than 65,000 labourers about 17% of whom were Jewish.

By May 1945 many prisoners and even the guards were starving as the economy collapsed under the Allied attack and food ran out.  Records on display in the museum there show that there were no Jews left at Sachsenhausen.  Those not already shipped to Auschwitz or shot had not been fed.

The Nazis had come to power on a popular anti-Semitic platform and the promise to eliminate the alleged subversive influence of  European Jewry. Their support came mostly from the working classes.  There were similar movements in other Countries.

The Nazi's initial agenda was to force Jews to leave Germany by means of intolerable social isolation and harassment at home; and by actively facilitating their departure. 

For example, during the Kristallnacht riots in November 1938, during which anti-Semitic mobs attacked Jewish businesses and homes across Germany, tens of thousands of Jews who resisted were arrested.  Around six thousand of these were sent to Sachsenhausen but most were immediately released when they undertook to emigrate.  So by the end of 1938 only 1,345 remained in custody.

In 1933 Nazi Germany had negotiated the Haavara 'transfer agreement' (Heskem Haavara) the with a Zionist agricultural company to facilitate the emigration of German Jews to Palestine. It is reported that despite some internal concerns about letting Jews escape, this program continued to have Hitler's support until the invasion of Poland in 1939.  British figures show that some 50,000 German and Austrian Jews joined the Zionists (Jews wishing to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine) in British Mandated Palestine, helping to precipitate 1936–1939 Arab revolt in that country.  Despite attempts by the US government to restrict the numbers of Jewish refugees, around 100 thousand successfully also entered the United States during this period.  Britain too received around 100 thousand Jewish refugees, some 40 thousand from Germany and Austria alone, before 1939. 

Those that were most successful in settling elsewhere were predominantly middle class Jews with sufficient means.  They included intellectuals like: Albert Einstein, Max Born, Henry Kissinger, André Previn and Ludwig Wittgenstein and family, mentioned elsewhere on this website. There are long lists of names in Wikipedia.

Unadvisedly, large numbers also fled to France and other Continental countries that would soon be occupied by Germany.  These unfortunate people would ultimately be rounded up, like Anne Frank, and sent to a Concentration camp. 

While some German Jews had an opportunity to leave, Poland was a different matter. Poland had been home to around 80% of Europe's Jews before war broke out and the majority were poor, with no means of escape before Germany and Russia invaded. So in Polish concentration camps around 90% of the prisoners were Jewish.

After the Americans entered the war in 1941 and the war with Russia on the Eastern Front was grinding to a stalemate it became obvious to the Nazi leadership that the Allies might win the war.  In January 1942 Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi Interior minister who had set up the Concentration Camps in the first place, proposed the: Endlösung der Judenfrage - Final Solution to the Jewish Problem - extermination. 

Lists of prisoners by category in the museum/information area at Sachsenhausen show that the proportion of Jewish prisoners fell rapidly as a result of Himmler's Final Solution.  In 1942 a proportion were sent by train to Auschwitz.  Then, in 1943, a crematorium was built, the remains of which are still there, to dispose of the bodies of the dead.  These included the remaining Jewish and Roma prisoners who were shot in purpose built concrete pits that are still there.  Some may also have been gassed.

In the Polish extermination camps conditions were even more appalling than at Sachsenhausen.  In the most infamous of all Auschwitz, experiments began on chemical sterilisation, along with many other horrendous medical experiments that needed disposable human test subjects. 

The sign over the door says Extermination - this block was used for experiments - like gassing Russian soldiers.

Surprisingly, Auschwitz I is not terribly daunting.  Today with trees growing and spacious thoroughfares it seems quite pleasant. The original institution was obviously a well established military base or prison with around 30 well-built three storey brick blocks laid out in a grid, and it's not very big, a couple of hundred metres on a side.  It was converted to a concentration camp in 1941, initially to house Soviet prisoners of war, and it was they who were victims of the first experiments with poisonous gas.  The chambers in which they were gassed are now memorials to these Soviet soldiers. There is also a wall that was used by military firing squads.

Auschwitz I

The people sent to Auschwitz worked in the nearby factories and were marched there each day. The camp orchestra welcomed them back in the evening.

Initially, a small bunker at Auschwitz was converted as a gas chamber for the first mass killings and Himmler was so pleased with this that he ordered the construction of a larger facility.

The first gas chamber and the outer electric fences - a handful did manage to escape

Two and a half kilometres away and more horrific because of its scale and farm-like ambiance, is a vast area known as Birkenau (Auschwitz II) where around 124 hectares were covered in almost 300 primitive dormitory huts. Initially these were poorly constructed brick huts and latterly wooden farm sheds based on military horse stables.  Into these the predominantly Jewish workers were thrown like animals. 

At night they heaped together in communal beds in the most appalling conditions.  Many had dysentery. During the day they worked in a nearby chemical works as slave labour. 

As the Allies brought the Third Reich to its knees everyone was short of food.  But in the concentration camps inmates were deprived of sufficient food to sustain them and were thus worked to death, typically dying within months. 

Over a hundred hectares were covered in these farm-shed dormitories
Bottom right are the communal latrines:
form four lines - march in - turn - sit - stand (ready or not) - march out - next group...

Opposite to the entrance at Birkenau what amounted to an 'extermination factory' was constructed, consisting of a production line of linked stages: change rooms; showers/ gas chamber; and crematoria.  The ruins are there still. 

The ruins of the buildings pictured and the Memorial over the gas chamber

It was blown-up in an apparent attempt the destroy the evidence prior to the Russian army's arrival in 1945 and now it is a memorial with plaques in many languages repeating the same message:

Forever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to Humanity.
Where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women and children, mainly Jews
from various countries of Europe.   Auschwitz-Birkenau 1940-1945

Towards the end Jews were shipped in by train, to be processed through this death factory, not just from Poland now but from other concentration camps all over Europe. 

They came here from all over Europe

Around one and a half million people, mostly Jews, were systematically gassed and then cremated in this purpose-built facility.  As they arrived their personal possessions were confiscated and they were sorted.  Those able to work went through the gate into the camp.  All the rest, the sick and elderly and the children were sent to the showers.

Killing Factory

Our guide told of the horrors of forced work on limited food and literally being piled into huts at night. I imagined clinging to others, many with dysentery, for warmth until death came in a month or two.

It was then that I and others on the tour realised it was the lucky ones who were directed down the path that led to the showers.  They would experience a smell of almonds followed by death within a quarter of an hour if they struggled.  But if they had fallen to the floor or knew to pickup and swallow a Zyklon B pellet it would be over in under a minute. 

Zyklon B pellets

Zyklon B pellets release hydrogen cyanide when wet.  They are still manufactured for fumigation in some countries and were used in some states in the US for Capital Punishment (the Gas Chamber).   Cyanide is the fast acting poison preferred by secret agents to avoid interrogation.  Death is very fast if swallowed.

Maybe guards shouted to some to swallow a pellet if they wanted to avoid suffering?  It almost beggars the imagination to put oneself in either situation: panicking for breath; or as a guard.

Walking around with the official guide and imagining myself there I realised that someone like me would not have been sent here, except perhaps, as a guard.  So I found myself wondering what it would have been like to have been a young German man who had patriotically signed-up to defend his country but was insufficiently skilled or suitable to be sent to the front to fight. 

Instead he ended up as a guard in a concentration camp, bit by bit becoming inured human suffering and to his fate - working in a human abattoir.  Yet hundreds did as they were ordered to.  Could I have been one of the few who allegedly refused and were shot as mutineers?

I was asking our guide what she knew about the guards.  The officers were German but what of the guards, were they Poles or were they Germans?  How did they communicate with the workers and other prisoners?  Just then we came to the one small freight carriage that remains. 

People were railed here like cattle

I recalled the cattle and sheep wagons we watched passing endlessly on the railway behind our school as children. I imagined the terror of being herded into one of these wagons.  I imagined the complicity of fellow townsfolk and conservative working people who had been shocked at the new liberality in the big cities and had puritanically voted the Nazis into power. 

I recalled the Spanish Inquisition murdering tens of thousands of Jews; and the Russian Pogroms; and the good people of York who pulled all of the Jews out of their beds one night in 1190 and murdered them all.  I imagined generations of people calling out in indignation when the terror came:  'I'm not Jewish... but he/she is...' 

Now it's so easy to avoid the blame: 'The nasty Nazi bully did it.  I was an innocent bystander ...  Like the kids in a school yard, circling young combatants, yelling:  fight  fight!...  I might have voted for them but I didn't know they'd do that!'  

But then I remembered what an elderly Polish lady had, shocking, said when we sat in her kitchen in Castle Hill, in Australia, having a nice cup of tea and cake.  She was the only genuine survivor of a Nazi Concentration Camp I have ever talked to at length.  I listened with interest to her stories of hardship; how the food ran out; and people were dying of starvation; and how she and others had joined with their German guards to flee to the Americans away from the Russians; and how some of the guards had also died of starvation on the journey; and how her dead husband had suffered even more terribly at the hands of the Russians in a Gulag camp.  Finally I asked her if she had known that they were killing the Jews.  'Yes - But they deserved it!' she replied. 

The dreadful truth is that eliminating Jews was not unpopular among working class Poles like her; or Germans; or even in England.  It's been going on for over a thousand years - supposedly justified because the Jews killed Christ. 

The more immediate cause in the interwar period was that they were identified as the Pawn Brokers and lenders of last resort to the working classes.  At the other end of the social spectrum Hitler, agreed with Henry Ford and others in the US and Sir Oswald Mosley in the UK, that mainstream Jewish bankers were responsible for the first World War.  Hitler was at pains to point out that Karl Marx was Jewish and hence the Communists and Russian Bolsheviks were part of the Jewish plot to take over the World. 

When hyper-inflation hit the Weimar Republic and the economy collapsed in 1929, many tradesmen, shop owners and small land holders lost whatever little capital or savings they had and again the Jews got the blame.  It was on this popular wave of anti-Semitism that Hitler and the Nazi party road to power.

At Auschwitz today are rooms containing long showcases filled with the personal affects of civilians put to death, eyeglasses, luggage, shoes and so on.  These affect different people in different ways. 

Suitcases and shoes

I found most of these displays historically interesting, like cabinets in a museum - until I got to the huge display case, like the one with shoes above, filled with human hair.  I choked and tears spontaneously came to my eyes as they are doing now as I write.