Motivated now by a desire to speak out against those who denied the sights he personally had witnessed, Groening wrote down his own personal history for his family and eventually agreed to be interviewed by the BBC. Now well into his eighties, Groening has one simple message for the Holocaust deniers: “I would like you to believe me. I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematorium. I saw the open fires. I was on the ramp when the selections took place. I would like you to believe that these atrocities happened, because I was there.”
At the end of this tragic story, what are we left with? For certain, a world in which the majority of those who ran Auschwitz were not punished for any crime, and in which most of the inmates of the camp never received full restitution for the suffering endured. Far from it, because so many endured the consequences of more prejudice and victimization after the war was over. One naturally revolts against this conclusion. There is a deep human need to feel that life offers an element of justice—the sense that the innocent eventually receive recompense and the guilty are brought down.
This history, however, offers little of that comfort, for the most searing example of lack of redemption rests in the soil of Birkenau, the earth worked over for valuables by locals after the war, in the largest graveyard in the history of the world. This, together with the nearby Vistula River where many ashes were dumped, is the final resting place of more than a million people whose testimony we cannot listen to.
Nor does it appear, as a general rule, that those forced to endure Auschwitz could find solace or a sense of redemption in spiritual comfort. For every Else Abt who, as a Jehovah’s Witness, felt that God was with her in the camp, there are many more like Linda Breder who believe that “there was no God in Auschwitz. There were such horrible conditions that God decided not to go there. We didn’t pray because we knew it wouldn’t help. Many of us who survived are atheists. They simply don’t trust in God.” What a survivor like Linda Breder realizes is that she owes her life, to a large extent, to luck—and the belief that life can be governed by chance factors wholly outside of one’s control is hardly a firm basis for religious doctrine.
The current estimate is that of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million died there. A staggering one million of them were Jews—an important statistic for those few who still seek to follow the Communist line and characterize all who died there as collectively “victims of Fascism.” It always must be remembered that more than 90 percent of those who lost their lives at Auschwitz did so because the one “crime” they had committed in the Nazis’ eyes was to be born Jewish.
The majority of Jews from any one national group transported to Auschwitz31 (438,000) came from Hungary during the frenzied action of early summer 1944. The next largest number were from Poland (300,000), followed by France (69,114), the Netherlands (60,085), Greece (55,000), Czechoslovakia and Moravia (46,099), Germany and Austria (23,000), Slovakia (26,661), Belgium (24,906), Yugoslavia (10,000), and Italy (7422). Of course, we also must never forget the non-Jews who perished in the camp: the 70,000 Polish political prisoners; the more than 20,000 gypsies; the 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war; the hundreds of Jehovah’s Witnesses; the homosexuals; nor any of the others sent to the camp for myriad warped reasons—and sometimes for no reason at all.
Soon the last survivor and the last perpetrator from Auschwitz will have joined those who were murdered at the camp. There will be no one on this earth left alive who has personal experience of the place. When that happens, there is a danger that this history will merge into the distant past and become just one terrible event among many. There have been horrific atrocities before, from Richard the Lionheart’s massacre of the Muslims of Acre during the Crusades, to Genghis Khan’s genocide in Persia. Maybe future generations will see Auschwitz the same way—as just another bad thing that happened in the past, before living memory. But that should not be allowed to happen.
We must judge behavior by the context of the times, and judged by the context of mid-twentieth-century, sophisticated European culture, Auschwitz and the Nazis’ “Final Solution” represent the lowest act in all history. Through their crime, the Nazis brought into the world an awareness of what educated, technologically advanced human beings can do—as long as they possess a cold heart. Once allowed into the world, knowledge of what they did must not be unlearned. It lies there—ugly, inert, waiting to be rediscovered by each new generation. A warning for us, and for those who will come after.
NOTES
Introduction
1 This assumption is based partly on a BBC audience survey conducted in 2004 to test public knowledge and perception of Auschwitz. The research demonstrated that the vast majority of people who had heard of the camp thought it had been built to exterminate the Jews.
2 I acknowledge my great debt to the production teams with whom I have had the privilege of working on these past projects, in particular the brilliant research conducted by Tilman Remme, Detlef Siebert, Martina Balazova, and Sally Ann Kleibal.
3 See esp. Robert Galletely, The Gestapo and German Society (Clarendon Press 1990).
4 It was fascinating to discover from Jonathan Glover’s epic Humanity—A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (Pimlico 2000) that, in this regard, this distinguished philosopher, from a study of written sources, had reached the same broad conclusions.
5 For a detailed examination of Goebbels’ work, see Laurence Rees, Selling Politics (BBC Books 1992).
6 Rees, Selling Politics. See esp. Wilfred von Oven’s interview.
7 An expression first coined by Martin Broszart.
8 See p. 62, infra.
9 Quoted in Goetz Aly, Final Solution: Nazi Population and the Murder of the European Jews (Hodder Arnold 1999), 3.
10 See p. 211, infra.
11 Testimony of former prisoners Wanda Szaynok and Edward Blotnicki, quoted by Andrzej Strzelecki in “Plundering the Victims’ Property,” Auschwitz 1940–1945, Central Issues in the History of the Camp (Auschwitz State Museum 2000), 2:164.
Chapter 1: Surprising Beginnings
1 BBC interview.
2 It is right to be suspicious of broad psychological explanations for the behavior of Nazis; although Alice Miller, in For Your Own Good: The Roots of Violence in Child-Rearing (Virago Press 1987), does claim that all of the leading Nazis had rigid upbringings similar to those of Höss and Hitler. Even if that is so, however, there were many people who had such a childhood and did not go on to become Nazis.
3 Quoted in Concentration Camp Dachau 1933–1945 (Comitè International de Dachau, Brussels Lipp GmbH, Munich 1978), 20.
4 Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz (Phoenix Press 2000), 131.
5 Höss, Commandant, 131 (these page references have been given for ease of reference; the quotes used, for the most part, have been translated from the original manuscript held at the Auschwitz State Museum).
6 In the previous year, 1933, Höss had formed a troop of mounted SS on the Sallentin estate in Pomerania—effectively a “reserve force”—which he was involved with while still a farmer.
7 Höss, Commandant, 64.
8 BBC interview.
9 Of course, some of these politicians were Jewish; however that was not the reason for their arrests.
10 Höss, Commandant, 81.
11 Höss, Commandant, 70–71.
12 BBC interview.
13 Quoted in Danuta Czech, “The Auschwitz Prisoner Administration,” in The Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Indiana University Press 1998).
14 Laurence Rees, The Nazis: A Warning from History (BBC Books 1997), 36.
15 Quoted in Franciszek Piper, “The Methods of Mass Murder,” in Auschwitz 1940–1945 (Auschwitz State Museum 2000), 3:71.
16 Quoted in Jonathan Glover, Humanity—A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (Pimlico 2000), 44.
17 Quoted in Glover, Humanity, 361–62.
18 Höss, Commandant, 77.
19 Quoted in Aly, Final Solution, 19.
20 BBC interview
.
21 Aly, Final Solution, 17.
22 BBC interview.
23 Diary of Josef Goebbels, entry for Jan. 24, 1940.
24 Quoted in Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Holmes and Meier 1986), 50.
25 Quoted in Aly, Final Solution, 70.
26 BBC interview.
27 BBC interview.
28 Quoted in Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945 (Exeter University Press 1988), 3:933.
29 Quoted in Aly, Final Solution, 3.
30 German Foreign Office memorandum, July 3, 1940.
31 BBC interview.
32 BBC interview.
33 Höss, Commandant, 116.
34 Höss, Commandant, 116.
35 Höss, Commandant, 116.
36 BBC interview.
37 Remark made by Albert Speer, according to his brother Hermann, quoted in Michael Thad Allen, The Business of Genocide—The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps (University of North Carolina Press 2002), 59.
38 Allen, Business of Genocide. See esp. chap. 2, ”A Political Economy of Misery.”
39 Höss, Commandant, 283.
40 BBC interview.
41 Quoted in Irena Strzelecka, “Punishments and Torture,” Auschwitz 1940–1945 (Auschwitz State Museum 2000), 3:389.
42 KL Auschwitz as Seen by the SS (Auschwitz State Museum 1998), 117.
43 BBC interview.
44 Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology—I.G. Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge University Press 1987), 347–64.
45 “Ambros document,” quoted in Hayes, Industry, 349.
46 Franciszek Piper, “The Exploitation of Prison Labour,” in Auschwitz 1940–1945 (Auschwitz State Museum 2000), 2:104.
47 Höss, Commandant, 390; Höss interrogation by Jan Sehn, Krakow, Nov. 7–8, 1946, Instytut Pamieci Narodowej, Warsaw NTN 103.
48 Minutes of founding meeting of I.G. Farben-Auschwitz, Apr. 7, 1941. Quoted in Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (Norton 1996), 211.
49 I.G. Farben, “Report of meeting with commander of the concentration camp near Auschwitz on 27.3.1941 at 3 p.m.” Nuremberg Trial Files Document 15148; and SS report of the same meeting.
50 Minutes of meeting on May 2, 1941, Nuremberg Trial Files, 31:84, Document 2718-PS.
51 “Political-Economic Guidelines,” Nuremberg Trial Files, 36:135–37.
52 Goetz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 2002), 63–64.
53 Quoted in Aly and Heim, Annihilation, 237.
54 Quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler (Penguin Press 2000), 2:127.
55 Quoted in Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, Those Were the Days (Hamish Hamilton 1991), 179.
56 Quoted in Henryk Swiebocki, “Escapes from the Camp,” Auschwitz 1940–1945 (Auschwitz State Museum 2000), 5:233.
57 Quoted in Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors (Basic Books 1986), 63.
58 BBC interview.
59 For a full discussion of the new evidence for Pavel Sudoplatov’s approach see Laurence Rees, War of the Century (BBC Books 1999), 53–55.
60 Quoted in Ulrich Herbert (ed.), National Socialist Extermination Policies (Berghahn Books 2000), 257.
61 BBC interview.
62 In the 1960s, Friedrich was the subject of a police investigation about his actions during the war but he was not prosecuted. In our interview, he admitted taking part in the shooting of Jews although he did not name the exact places where he had committed the crimes. At such a distance of time, and without personal identification from eyewitnesses, it seems unlikely that a criminal prosecution proving his guilt “beyond reasonable doubt” would succeed.
63 BBC interview.
64 BBC interview.
65 Quoted in Goetz Aly, “Jewish Resettlement,” Herbert (ed.), Extermination Policies, 71.
66 BBC interview.
67 Quoted in Glover, Humanity, 345.
68 Testimony of Wilhelm Jaschke in Widmann trial, Schwurgericht Stuttgart 1967, 62–63, Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg EL 317 III, Bu 53.
69 Testimony of Wilhelm Jaschke, Vilsbiburg, Apr. 5, 1960, Budesarchiv Ludwigsburg 202 AR-Z 152/159.
70 Gilbert witness statement in Dwork and van Pelt, Auschwitz, 278.
Chapter 2: Orders and Initiatives
1 Quoted in Gustave Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (Farrar 1947).
2 Quoted in Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy September 1939–March 1942 (William Heinemann 2004), 318.
3 BBC interview.
4 BBC interview.
5 Quoted in Ian Kershaw, “The Persecution of the Jews and German Public Opinion in the Third Reich,” in Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute (1981), 26:284.
6 Russian State Military Archive 502K/1/218.
7 Peter Witte et al. (eds.), Himmler’s Dienstkalender 1941/2 (Hamburg 1999), 123, n.2; Sybille Steinbacher, Musterstadt Auschwitz (Munich 2000), 238–39.
8 BBC interview.
9 BBC interview.
10 Irena Strzelecka and Piotr Setkiewicz, “The Construction, Expansion and Development of the Camp and Its Branches,” in Auschwitz 1940–1945 (Auschwitz State Museum 2000), 1:78.
11 Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz (Phoenix Press 2000), 123.
12 Michael Thad Allen, “The Devil in the Details: the Gas Chambers of Birkenau, October 1941,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 16, no. 2 (2002).
13 Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (Macmillan, New York), 2:902.
14 BBC interview.
15 BBC interview.
16 Christopher Browning, Path to Genocide (Cambridge University Press 1992), 28–56.
17 From testimony of Walter Burmeister, Jan. 24, 1961, 303 AR-Z 69/59, Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg, 3.
18 Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944 (Phoenix Press 2000).
19 Quoted in Peter Longerich, The Unwritten Order (Tempus 2001), 78.
20 Gerhard Weinberg, “The Allies and the Holocaust,” in Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum (eds.), Allies and the Holocaust in the Bombing of Auschwitz (St. Martin’s Press 2000), 20.
21 Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945 (Exeter University Press 1988), 3:1126.
22 Quoted in Longerich, Unwritten Order, 92.
23 BBC interview.
24 Interrogation of Kurt Moebius, Nov. 8, 1961, pp.5–6 2 StL 203 AR–2 69/59 Bd3.
25 Quoted in Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess (eds.), The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (Schöne Zeiten), trans. Deborah Burnstone(Free Press 1988), 255.
26 BBC interview.
27 Perry Broad arrived at Auschwitz in April 1942.
28 KL Auschwitz as Seen by the SS (Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum 1998), 129.
29 KL Auschwitz as Seen by the SS, 130.
30 Majdanek, established as a camp for Soviet POWs near Lublin in October 1941, later held some Jews and developed a small Zyklon B gassing facility. It had neither the capacity nor the scale to become conceptually the same as Auschwitz, however, nor did it initially function as a concentration camp.
31 BBC interview.
32 BBC interview.
33 BBC interview.
34 Based on Wisliceny’s post-war testimony in Slovakia on May 6 and 7, 1946 (Statny oblastny archive v Bratislave, Fond Ludovy sud, 10/48); and Aug. 12, 1946 (Statny oblastny archive v Bratislave, Fond Ludovy sud, 13/48); and Koso’s testimony on Apr. 11, 1947 (Statny oblastny archive v Bratislave, Fond Ludovy sud, 13/48).
35 BBC interview.
36 BBC interview.
37 Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present (Norton 1996), 302.
38 KL Auschwitz as Seen by the SS, 105.
39 Höss, Commandant, 150.
40 BBC interview.
Chapter 3: Factories of Death
1 Quoted in Ulrich Herbert, “The German Military Command in Paris and the Deportation of the French
Jews,” in National Socialist Extermination Policies , 139. For a full discussion and analysis of this issue see the pioneering research contained in this article.
2 Wolodymyr Kosyk, The Third Reich and Ukraine (Peter Lang 1993), 621.
3 Timothy Patrick Mulligan, The Politics of Illusion and Empire (Praeger 1988), 139.
4 Quoted in Herbert, “The German Military Command,” 140.
5 Quoted in Herbert, “The German Military Command,” 142.
6 Figures taken from Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French and the Jews (Basic Books 1993), 89.
7 Quoted in Herbert, “The German Military Command,” 152. Recollection of meeting by Balz, head of the Justice Division.
8 Quoted in Serge Klarsfeld, French Children of the Holocaust (New York University Press 1996), 34.
9 Quoted in Zuccotti, Holocaust, 99.
10 Quoted in Zuccotti, Holocaust, 99.
11 Klarsfeld, French Children, 35.
12 BBC interview.
13 BBC interview.
14 Quoted in Klarsfeld, French Children, 45.
15 Quoted in Klarsfeld, French Children, 45.
16 Klarsfeld, French Children, 45.
17 BBC interview.
18 BBC interview.
19 BBC interview.
20 Aleksander Lasik, “Historical-Sociological Profile of the SS,” in Yisreal Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Indiana University Press 1994), 278.
21 These figures are taken from Lasik, “Historical-Sociological Profile of the SS.”
22 Quoted in Frederick Cohen, The Jews in the Channel Islands During the German Occupation 1940–1945 (Jersey Heritage Trust 2000) 26.
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