Auschwitz: A History

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In Auschwitz chaos and efficiency were fused together. It was never one thing, not even one camp. It was originally a labour camp for Polish political prisoners and some German criminals; then came the Russian prisoners of war. And it grew and grew. Eventually "Auschwitz" was an area of about 25 square miles. There were two big camps, Auschwitz I and Birkenau, then there were 43 sub-camps which appeared as industries such as I G Farben and Bayer moved in and constructed nearby factories and paid the SS for slave labour. (Bayer is one of the companies I now indirectly work for, it's one of our big pharma clients). Then some low level gassing experiments began, which in time led to huge purpose-built crematoriums with built-in gas chambers being constructed in Birkenau, and we arrive at this summary : Now let’s move on to the books, which I found fascinating. You gave me a longer list initially, which I’m glad about because the ones you left off seem equally worthy of attention. I can see why you had trouble getting it down to five. I found the book to have presented a good picture of Auschwitz. I thought the author made a good case towards his major premise. I also manage to learn some new things about the Nazis’ “Final Solution” and the involvement of Auschwitz in it. Indeed, if there is one general takeaway from this history, it is that only the most strong-willed of individuals can rise above their moral climate. Most people (and I am thinking of perpetrators, not victims here) simply go along with prevailing attitudes. There were plenty of ideologically committed Nazis, such as Höss; and there were probably many Groenings, who just wanted a stable job. But there is no record of a single SS officer deserting or refusing to serve at Auschwitz on moral grounds. Indeed, the most disturbing thing of all is that, without exception, none of the former perpetrators interviewed by Rees feel much, if any, remorse. Groening was finally motivated to speak about his experiences, in his old age, not because of lingering guilt, but because he encountered some Holocaust deniers (he wanted to assure them that it was real). A towering book by a towering figure, theorist and critic, Arendt’s most famous work chronicles Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem. Famous for the coining of the phrase “the banality of evil,” which refers to the moral and emotional detachment Eichmann displayed, this book is so much more: a dense, exploratory treatise on the nature of humanity. Five Chimneys byOlga Lengyel

That the Germans killed so many people like 10,000 per day. This coined the term Death Factories. It is really barbaric and I could not put down the book and sleep at the height of anger. I ended up light headed in the office for a couple of days because of few hours of sleep.

We have many stories of ghettos, but even there, we sometimes see a kind of implicit hierarchy of suffering or heroism. We also have an implicit view of ‘survivor’, meaning someone who survived the camps. But I think we have to try to understand the full range and impact of experiences of Nazi persecution, including for those who managed to get out before the war. Sadly, too few were able to emigrate in time. It was as if the Nazis knew they had committed a crime and they were hiding it. In the same way they always wreathed their official documents about the final solution in euphemism and opaque bureaucracy. Why? In exactly the same way that a psychopath like Ted Bundy or Peter Sutcliffe would carefully cover up their murders. Neither the Nazis, Ted Bundy or Peter Sutcliffe believed for a moment that what they had done was wrong. Not at all. But they knew that other less enlightened people did think it was wrong**. In the Nazis case, even other Germans might think it was wrong. Because they just hadn't had enough time to come to the understanding of this awful necessity, as Himmler might have put it. For somebody surviving in hiding, it could be absolutely, terrifyingly difficult, but if you had the fortune to survive, you probably had a sense of a coherent self afterwards, in contrast to the experience Delbo describes of this sharp break with the past. I'm not sure I can do a book like this justice in a review other than to say it was an excellent compliment to other readings I've done to this point. Auschwitz prisoners were even ‘sold’ to the Bayer company, part of I.G. Farben, as human guinea pigs for the testing of new drugs. One of the communications from Bayer to the Auschwitz authorities states that: ‘The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price."

Lobstergirl wrote: "Jarmila wrote: "Hi,can anyone recommend me the books that are dealing with the problem of post traumatic stress of holocaust survivor? tx" The Kapos favored hiring Jehova's Witnesses as they are very honest and hardworking. These people believe that God was still with them inside the camp which was unlike the Jews that abandoned their faith. Most Jews who survived said that they just went through the motion and learned to be "numbed." Lengyel was a surgical assistant in Transylvania when she was deported to Auschwitz; she was able to secure work in an infirmary, a job that ultimately saved her life. This 1946 memoir is an unflinching account of her time in that area, her interactions with Dr. Josef Mengeleand her observations of the medical experiments performed on inmates. A deeply uncomfortable read, Lengyel’s memoir is a necessary living, breathing document. King of the Jews byLeslie Epstein

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In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Allies and other governments—the Polish state for example—sought to bring perpetrators to trial. In the late 1940s, you can find a lot of perpetrators on trial and get a comprehensive view of the horrific scale of the atrocities and the multiplicity of different organizations that were involved in making this machinery of mass murder possible. So, there was a very distinctive attempt to deal with it in a judicial way in the late 1940s.

Austria is also a very significant comparison. There, it wasn’t the law that was a problem, it was the public culture. The law would have permitted prosecutions and convictions in a much broader way than in West Germany. The problem was that juries tended to acquit former Nazis and it was becoming embarrassing even to put them on trial, so they simply ceased prosecuting after too many embarrassing acquittals. How much does the politics that still bedevils this whole area of historical enquiry interfere with your work? Does it constrain you in any way? Is it something that you’re constantly dealing with, or is it an inevitable part of the work and something that you’re happy to embrace? It correlates with the student revolts of the 1960s—the beginning of an extra-parliamentary opposition that emerged in the 1960s, fed up with the Adenauer era. Adenauer ceases to be Chancellor in 1963. There’s a lot of student unrest developing in the 1960s; these are people in their 20s, born in the 1940s, suddenly exposed to the full horror of the crimes of their elders (and supposed betters), then galvanized into that generational conflict summarised as “1968”. Laurence Rees με σεβασμό, ευαισθησία, αμεροληψία, εντιμότητα και έχοντας κάνει μια άρτια επιστημονική έρευνα, αναλύει ένα από τα πιο ειδεχθή εγκλήματα της ανθρωπότητας, μια μάυρη κηλίδα της ανθρώπινης ιστορίας. Perhaps the most evil part of the book, the Frenzied Killing chapter, is where the Sonderkommando are described. These are the unfortunate prisoners - often Greeks or Ukranians - who were to strip the bodies of the dead in the gas chambers, search orifices for valuables, and cut off dead women's hair before transporting the bodies to elevators up to the crematoria. There were 900 of these workers in 1944. There was a special exhibit during my visit to Auschwitz in February 2020 about the Sonderkommando and I cannot describe how horrific the scenes and testimonies were. Here the revolt of the Sonderkommando on October 7, 1944 is described in which crematorium 3 was destroyed but at the cost of over 460 prisoners shot and executed.The fact that she was a member of a resistance group allowed for a sense of community on returning after the war. They returned singing as well as having entered singing. They could sing, and this was not possible for other survivors. I think she’s in striking contrast to somebody like Gilbert Michlin, for example, who I write about in my book, who was a Jewish French prisoner deported from France to Auschwitz. When he returned to France, he had to keep the fact that he was Jewish quiet and pretend he was just French because the myth of resistance was so big in post-war France and there was still a festering antisemitism. So, his return to France was much more miserable than Delbo’s.

We saw how bombs were dropped on Germany, and women and children died in firestorms. We saw this and said "This is a war that is being led in this way by both sides". Not at all. There were more trials of people who’d been involved in Auschwitz in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and there were several other major concentration camp trials in the 1960s and 1970s, going through to the Majdanek trial of 1975-1981 in West Germany. But all of them were bedevilled by this need to show subjective intent and excess brutality. In some of the interview testimonies gathered by the different foundations that are collecting them, you get a similar sort of reflection, where some people say that the self that lived on afterwards is not their ‘real’ self. They have a sense that their ‘authentic self’ died with the family and the friends who perished in the Holocaust, and the person living later is someone completely different, though they may appear to be alive and have a new family and a new life and so on. I think Charlotte Delbo was particularly successful in the way that she negotiated that.to move very cautiously about offering to take all the Jews out of a country – if we do that then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar efforts in Poland and Germany. Hitler may well take us up on any such offer and there are simply not enough ships and means of transportation to handle them. (p312) That leads me on very neatly to my next question. How will the memory of the Holocaust and its recollection change as the last survivors die in the next few years? Of course, in that same timeframe, the perpetrators will all be dead as well, which perhaps may be more significant. That’s one aspect that I think is extraordinary and extremely powerful: this very raw experience, particularly in the first part of the trilogy, which she wrote very soon after the war. The other thing I find fascinating is the way in which she tries to develop a notion of two selves: the disassociation of her post-war self from the Auschwitz-self, a complete disconnect (or attempted disconnect) between the self who experienced and lived through Auschwitz, and the self who survived and was recounting it. That captures what a lot of survivors try to convey in one form or another: this complete caesura in their lives between what they went through and how they live later. Different people deal with it in different ways, and come to terms with it in different ways.