Auschwitz: A History

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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. 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.

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. Auschwitz prisoners were even "sold" to the Bayer company, part of the 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 conditions. 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." 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. Others have complained about some aspects of this book - specifically, that much of it focuses on details which are not at first glance, directly related to Aushwitz, such as what happened to the Jewish people in Denmark, and details and accounts of the three death camps built in Poland, the names of which I, and I'm sure many others, had never heard before. 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."Even Hitler had to get to a point where he realised, after years of fulminating about smashing the Jews, crushing them, destroying them, that he could actually physically kill them all. He'd been trying to get them to disappear for years – ship them all to Madagascar was one ridiculous idea – but that hadn't meant actually killing them until 1941. Even when it was decriminalized, Seel said he felt so ashamed about it. He couldn’t talk to his family, his friends. He tried to get married, and had children with his wife even though he was gay. He eventually became an alcoholic, had a total breakdown, got divorced and then finally came out and said he had to speak about it. Ghastly and heart-rending though Delbo’s experiences are—and I have to admit the first time I read the book I was just in tears; I couldn’t bear it—I think we have to recognize that there were other experiences too, experiences that were awful in a wide variety of ways. There was a hierarchy of prisoners. At the bottom were the Jews considered unfit for work. They were killed. In the middle were the Jews, Russians and Poles who were considered fit for being worked to death. At the top were kapos and German prisoners who had specialist jobs. For these, Hoess set up a brothel in August 1943. The deniers have jumped on this bizarre fact – a death camp with a brothel? Come off it. Proves it was an okay place really. There were no gas chambers. And so on.

Yes, there’s another book that I could have put in, Rebecca Wittmann’s book on the Auschwitz trial, Beyond Justice. Both, in different ways, point up that the West German choice to use the ordinary criminal law definition of murder was totally inappropriate for trying people who had been involved in a genocide. Collective violence is different from individual violence. 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. The Factories of Death chapter describes the rapid ramp up of the killing capacities towards the end of 1943 and early 1944 as well as the fate of the 69000 French Jews (the 3rd largest number of murders committed during the Holocaust at Auschwitz after the Hungarians (~450k) and the Poles (300k)) and as someone living in France, this was particularly difficult to read for me. When German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously said that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” he meant that there was no way aesthetics—or art—could live up to the barbarism of the Holocaust. Maybe he was right. But here are 10 lesser-known texts that can, at the very least, increase our understanding—and our empathy. Badenheim 1939by Aharon AppelfeldI 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. It wasn’t ‘West Germany’ that decided to put Auschwitz on trial in 1963—it was a few committed individuals and particularly Fritz Bauer” Frankl looks more at the inner life and how the use of your mind can give meaning to life and give you a ray of hope in the darkness. He talks about, for example, the way in which he holds mental conversations with his young wife, who would have just turned 24 on the day after his arrival in Auschwitz. She didn’t survive, but through the rest of the war he didn’t know that. He had imagined conversations with her and mentally he took himself to another place. He took pleasure in what he could, like a ray of sunshine coming through the clouds, or thinking about light in the darkness and then suddenly seeing a farm house’s lights turn on as they were returning from work. He’s looking at how the inner life could assist in survival, which I think is extraordinarily interesting, although it’s not a sufficient explanation by any means.