Auschwitz: A History

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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. You go to bed and you are alive, and by the morning you are dead. It was death, death, death. Death at night, death in the morning, death in the afternoon. There was death all the time." I think another reason why it looms so large is because so much of it remains still and can be seen. It’s close to good transport links; it’s on the tourist trail from Kraków. 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.

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). Out of more than 140,000 people investigated, fewer than 6,660 were actually found guilty—and of these, nearly 5,000 received lenient sentences of less than two years. Only 164 were found guilty of the crime of murder”Durlacher, like Otto Dov Kulka, talks about seeing the American airplanes flying across the blue skies above Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 . . . both boys saw them almost like little toys in the air” What were the sort of compromises that he made that perhaps led to his survival? I know one of the books that didn’t make your shortlist was Filip Müller’s Eyewitness Auschwitz. He actually helped to run the gas chambers. Frankl obviously wasn’t doing that, but does he talk about the moral compromises within the prisoner community that went on in a fight to survive? 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)

When I did it I felt very good. I mean not at the moment of the killing, but during that [overall] period of time. I can't say that I feel bad about it now. you can tell me I murdered people, but I know who I killed. So I'm not proud and I'm not guilty about it. I don't wake up at night with bad dreams or anything. I sleep well. I eat well. I live." January 27, 2020 marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi concentration camp, by the Red Army. Laurence Rees, a British historian, documentary filmmaker, and creative director of history programs for the BBC, has written this book as a companion volume to a six-hour documentary series that was aired on PBS and the BBC in 2005. While the largest mass murder in human history took place at Auschwitz, its story has not been fully known. In this new history of the Nazis’ most notorious death camp, Rees gives a complete history of the camp—how it was turned from a concentration camp into a death factory. But this is more than an anecdotal account of Nazi brutality; this groundbreaking work is based on impeccable scholarship and more than 100 original interviews with both survivors and Nazi perpetrators. Their testimonies provide a picture of the inner workings of the camp in unmatched detail. The inclusion of insights gathered from interviews with the Nazi officials and soldiers gives the reader an unprecedented glimpse into the mindset of these perpetrators. In addition, Rees mines a wealth of new information about Auschwitz that includes Himmler’s desk diary—discovered in Russia fifty years after they were thought to have been burned in an SS furnace. Through these new sources, this incredible narrative history of the most notorious concentration camp preserves the authentic voices of those who suffered and those who caused their suffering. Judged purely as a history, this book is good but not superlative. Rees does an admirable job of covering the broad sweep of the camp’s history, including many unexpected (and usually quite disturbing) details. However, the book’s brevity precludes any detailed examination, and I was often left wanting to learn more about certain aspects of the camp. Curiously, Rees also includes many stories that are outside the purported purview of the book—such as the story of how the citizens of Britain’s Channel Islands reacted to the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews—stories that are usually quite compelling, but which seem difficult to justify including in a book of this size. There were gruesome stories of the roundups, the one from Izbica in Poland where Janek denounces his friend Toivi saying "He's a Jew. Take him." Janek then said goodbye to me in a way that is difficult even now for me to repeat...he said, "Goodbye Toivi. I will see you on a shelf in a soap store." (p. 255). One needs to realize that the remains of cremated prisoners were not actually used for soap, but they were used as fertilizer and the ash fell in the river, so the Nazis were eating and drinking the dead Jews quite literally. That in addition to sleeping on mattresses filled with Jewish women's hair, wearing clothes woven from that same hair, etc. etc. The industrial nature of converting literally millions of humans into compost and industrial products is just appalling and terrifying in this reader's view. It's ironic that as I write this, my boy is watching "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" at school today, as part of their learning about the World War. It makes me sad that he is watching it, as despite being well made, the film is so utterly depressing, but on the other hand, I think he's at the age where he needs to know exactly what humans were capable of.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”. I chose this for several reasons. She was a quite remarkable female resistance fighter in France, who was transported to Auschwitz after having to witness the murder of her husband. (The men were shot; the women were taken to Auschwitz.) She was on a convoy of 230 women sent there. They entered the camp supposedly singing the Marseillaise. As she looked up from breaking the ice on the surface of the river, she saw a little girl about her own age on the other side of the bank. She was dressed in beautiful clothes, with carefully braided hair decorated with ribbons, and carried a school bag. It was an ‘almost unbelievable’ sight to Eva, wearing rags and swarming with lice, who stood and stared at her. ‘This was my first realization since we arrived in Auschwitz,’ she says, ‘that there was a world out there with children who looked like children, and who went to school." Only in West Germany did they refuse to adopt Nuremburg principles. In East Germany, they adopted a much broader definition which had to do with the fact that somebody was dead at the end of a process. In East Germany, former Nazis were six or seven times more likely to be prosecuted and convicted as in West Germany.