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Auschwitz: A History

Auschwitz: A History

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Yes, it’s a good read. I think it’s an important read. What it also brings out well is the public reactions to, and the wider significance of, the Auschwitz trial. We’ve made a big deal of it and that’s in part because there was massive media coverage, largely because of the way Fritz Bauer mounted the trial. Bauer was determined to ensure there was media coverage. He was determined to ensure that victims and survivors were brought from all around the world to give evidence, a bit like the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. 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” I learned many things about Auschwitz I didn't know before. Well written, intensely researched, intricately detailed, I learned about concentration camps, work camps, and death camps. I saw how European countries were culpable in the detention and transport of Jews to Auschwitz, and how many (not all) looked on as their neighbors were taken away. I thought perhaps Germans, Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, French, etc., really weren't aware of the mass extermination of human beings, and I found out that I was wrong. Everyone knew. I see now how it happened, and given the political climate in the U.S., I can see it happening again. It doesn’t make sense to use the individual crime of murder as the basis for prosecution when what you’re dealing with is mass murder, which is part of a system of collective violence.”

There's a huge, huge debate about whether the Allies could have ameliorated the suffering of the Jews by bombing Auschwitz. Books, essays, letters to the editor, this has been going on a while. It's the hectic part of a wider debate about what did the Allies know about the Holocaust and when did they know it. Rees slashes through the nonsense. He says – 1) the Allies knew about the final solution by late 42/early 43; 2) there was nothing they could have done which would have changed anything, either for Auschwitz specifically or anywhere else. But what about this damning quote from Anthony Eden during discussions in Washington in March 1943 about Hungarian Jews (all of whom were later murdered in Auschwitz) – he said it was important 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. By 1943 Hitler had decided on physical liquidation, but if the offer to take all Jews had been made in 1941, then – maybe, maybe – Hitler would have agreed. You know, I don't want to think about that. 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.As I mentioned, the SS found that shepherding the Jews to the gas chambers worked much better than brutality, and one nice touch, I think you'll agree, was that someone had the idea of putting windowboxes full of geraniums outside the crematoriums. There weren't any flowers anywhere else in Auschwitz, but here, where the Jews were killed, there were lots of windowboxes full of geraniums. 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. Another issue that I think is really, really important and can’t be emphasized enough is that it wasn’t ‘West Germany’ that decided to put Auschwitz on trial in 1963—it was a few committed individuals and particularly Fritz Bauer, the district attorney of the State of Hessen, who was himself Jewish and a socialist and had to flee into exile to escape Nazi persecution. The West Germans chose to resort to the old German criminal law; they didn’t want to adopt the Nuremberg principles. They didn’t want anything that was retroactive, punishing crimes that weren’t defined at the time. But the problem with the West German definition of murder was that it entailed showing individual intent and excess brutality. This meant, effectively, that if you couldn’t show that an individual was subjectively motivated to kill, they couldn’t be convicted of murder.

It’s easy enough to think that the Holocaust is simply a relic of the past; that it belongs only in history textbooks or in museum displays. Yet, the devastation and destruction it caused lives on today, which is why remembering it is so important. 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 wasn’t ‘West Germany’ that decided to put Auschwitz on trial in 1963—it was a few committed individuals and particularly Fritz Bauer” Well, I was supposed to find five books on Auschwitz. I’m wilfully choosing one which isn’t about Auschwitz, but rather about evading it.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 : One of the reasons why it’s become so incredibly significant in the public imagination is that it was the largest single camp that combined both an extermination camp and a labour camp. It had the largest single number of murders in the Holocaust—more than a million people were murdered there—but also an enormous number of survivors, because of this huge complex of labour camps and subcamps that it ran. So it combined the two functions. What changes then is this terrible period, the 1950s. From the late 1940s onwards, the Cold War takes precedence for the Western Allies. They start seeing former Nazis as useful in the fight against Communism, and West Germany as useful in the fight against Communism. So from then on, Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of West Germany, and his government prioritized the rehabilitation of former Nazis and granted amnesties, early releases and cut sentences. The Allies—the Americans particularly—and West Germany were wholly of one mind on this.

Leslie Epstein’s greatest novel, this 1979 book gives a fictional account of Chaim Rumkowski, the Polish Jew appointed by the Nazis as the head of the Council of Elders (known as the Judenrat) in the Łódź Ghetto during the occupation of Poland. Rumkowski was seen as a villain, famous for his role in delivering children to the Nazis for extermination. Ponary Diary, 1941-1943 by Kazimierz Sakowicz Therefore, from the purist Nazi point of view, Auschwitz and the other death camps were an exercise in health management - facilitating the removal of people who were a burden or a threat to the wellbeing of the state. (p. 229)

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One of the things I found difficult about choosing books that are still in print is that many don’t convey the experiences of those who never wrote—those who were much less successful, or less literate, or didn’t have the means or the wherewithal to publish. The Washington Post has this to say about the British Award Winning author and filmmaker Laurence Rees on his book "Auschwitz:" At the same time, the political parties in Austria were concerned to rehabilitate and integrate former Nazis. A lot of political pressure was put on judges, prosecutors and defence attorneys to ensure acquittals. From 1955 onwards, there were very few cases indeed in Austria. Those that were brought tended to end in acquittals; then from the mid-1970s the trials simply dried up entirely. There was no one in the German Reich in the 1930s who did not know that the Jews were being humiliated, ousted from their professions, ousted from their homes. After Kristallnacht in 1938 it was impossible for Jews to make a life in Germany anymore. And then to just reduce everything to the gas chambers of Auschwitz just seems to me so patently absurd.



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