AUSCHWITZ: A WARNING FROM HISTORY

I was at Auschwitz yesterday, there to witness the 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation by troops of the Sixtieth Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front.  Back then, Russians were bringing an end to the slaughter, although prisoners had been murdered or were dying right up to the very end.  Heinrich Himmler, the Head of the SS, had stopped all gassing operations the previous November but although the gas chambers had been blown up in the intervening period, the last of the killing installations had only been dismantled on the night of the 25/26 January, barely a day before the Red Army troops arrived. 

 

These Russians, well used to extreme violence, death and destruction, were none the less shocked to discover more than 7,000 evacuated and ill prisoners across the three main camps, some 600 dead bodies, and appalling signs of human suffering and degradation.  SS personnel had been furiously trying to destroy evidence of their crimes but the signs of the terrible slaughter and cruelty that had taken place here were everywhere.  Red Army troops discovered 370,000 men’s suits, 837,000 women’s dresses, 44,000 pairs of shoes.  And 7.7 tons of human hair.  Nor had the SS burned all the written evidence either.  Among the documents found – and these can still be seen – were tens of thousands of dockets carefully made out noting the teeth that had been extracted from the victims. 

 

At its height, in the summer of 1944, there had been 155,000 in the camps, although most who arrived were murdered almost immediately. Those not sent straight to the gas chambers were still intended to be killed, but more slowly, ‘extermination through work’.  Only a very few survived: those who had been admitted earlier in the war as ‘re-education’ prisoners, and  and who generally were there for fixed terms of several months, and those young and fit enough to work and who, as the war drew to an end, were sent back to the Reich as much-needed forced labourers.

 

It’s important to bear in mind a few things.  First, that as many as half of the six million victims of the Holocaust were murdered outside of the camp – mostly with bullets and disposed of in vast pits.  Mass graves litter Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states and Belarus.  Auschwitz has become the focus of the Holocaust because it remains: much of the original camp remains as does that of the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau.  There’s not much to see when it comes to mass burial pits, for example. 

 

Second, Auschwitz was not designed as an extermination camp, unlike Sobibor, Trbelinka Chelmon, Belzec and Majdanak.  Rather, it developed into one.  Initially, it had been for mostly Polish prisoners and Soviet POWs, using a former emigrant worker’s camp, later taken over by the Polish Army, and which became Auschwitz I.  This is the camp full of brick buildings and with the cynical ‘work makes you free’ sign over the front gates.  Later. Auschwitz-Birkenau was constructed and this was the site of the long, oppressive entrance building with the arch and where the four main gas chambers were built.  Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, was the extermination camp.  The railway line, which so hauntingly runs through the main archway, was added over the winter of 1943/44 in order to hasten the killing, particularly of the 438,000 Hungarian Jews that were murdered there over the summer of 1944.  The war was being lost and so the Nazis sped up the extermination of Europe’s Jews with a frenzy while they still had the chance.

Finally, there was Monowitz, or Auschwitz III, as well as more than 40 sub-camps, which was built to provide forced labour for the IG Farben factory, IG Auschwitz.  This was to create synthetic rubber, or buna, as it was known.  The collaboration of a private firm with the SS was key and the reason why Auschwitz grew so exponentially.  Its buna plant needed labour; Himmler had long wanted to use konzentrationslager inmates as a labour source but the SS did not have the know-how.  This was provided by private industry.  IG Farben also brought the construction skills to redeveloping Auschwitz town into a model urban centre of the Third Reich.  Here concepts of lebensraum and Germanization went hand-in-hand with the ideological mantra of clearing the east of Jews, Slavs and Bolsheviks.

 

And Auschwitz as a centre of human degradation and extermination was only possible with the collaboration of more than 7,000 SS guards and personnel but also the newly arriving German population, and those one-step removed but still implicit in its ghastly realisation.  There was a delay to the construction of the gas chambers for example – Cremtatorium III wasn’t finished until 24 June 1943 – not least because one of the companies providing the installations, Topf und Söhn, insisted on patenting their equipment first.  Meanwhile, locals continued their day-to-day lives unperturbed by the billowing chimneys on their doorsteps.  In fact, locals regularly enquired whether the belongings of the dead were available, either gratis or for sale.  As the film, Zone of Interest, showed, it was quite possible to be a loving father and husband in Auschwitz, but also a mass-murderer.

 

In fact, the development of Zyklon B as a means of mass extermination was not to create a painless death for the victims, but in part to spare the perpetrators from the grisly horrors of their crimes.  Even the shaving of hair from the dead, extraction of teeth and cutting of fingers to take rings was left to the Sonderkommando – mostly Jewish prisoners – so the SS did not have to do it themselves.  Death by Zyklon B was also extremely painful.  It burst the capillaries in the lungs and ultimately suffocated the victims, but while death could come in minutes, it could take as long as twenty.  Even two minutes is a very long time to feel extreme pain and contemplate a naked, panic-stricken death. 

 

I’ve been thinking a lot of Auschwitz in recent weeks, in part because of the anniversary but also because I have been preparing a podcast series on the subject.  Of course, the unspeakable cruelty of the perpetrators goes without saying.  But this is still within living memory.  Eighty years is nothing in the big scheme of things – a mere pinprick in time.  I’ve been struck by the extraordinary achievements of the German people before and since: their immense contributions to art, music, literature, their feats of engineering, and as scientific pioneers.  How could such sophisticated and culturally rich people have descended so dramatically into believing – and accepting – the cruelly warped ideology and mad fantasy world of the Nazis?  The narcissism of the leaders, the megalomania, the lies, the utter nonsense of their world-view; it remains incomprehensible and yet it happened. 

 

I’ve drawn a couple of conclusions: first, that the western world, and western democracy, is far more fragile than most of us complacently believe.  Second, there are plenty today both willing to believe the kind of nonsense the Nazis were peddling and who would subvert the democracy and liberalism that the majority of us in the west still continue to enjoy.  A recent UK poll suggests that 43% of Gen Z would rather a dictatorship than parliamentary democracy.  How worrying is that?  Meanwhile, deniers still profess the Holocaust to be a lie.  I was with the rather brilliant Karen Pollock yesterday, head of the Holocaust Education Trust.  She showed me a raft of social media comments flung at her claiming the murder of six million Jews during the war was a conspiracy and fake news.  How can any sane person really believe that?  Why would anyone choose to think that? 

 

We might look different – some tall, some small, some with dark hair, fair hair, straight hair, curly hair, ginger hair, and with different shaped eyes, ears, lips, and noses, but as one of the survivors pointed out yesterday, we are all Homo sapiens.  We are one, despite cultural and ethnic differences.  Complacency is a dirty word, however.  The majority of us on this planet want peace, health and happiness.  The vast majority.  It is the task of this majority to ensure the warped views of the minority do not take root and spread like a cancer.  An abomination like the Nazis was consigned to history eighty years ago.  We must ensure their type are never able to take hold again. Complacency and indifference: these, above all, allow the majority to lose ground to the evil minority. The anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz encourages us to contemplate afresh what happened in the still-recent past and consider one of the worst abominations in the world’s history. An it happened here, in Europe. In the western world.