Auschwitz by Laurence Rees is a book published in 2005 that gives a comprehensive, detailed, disturbing, and horrifying account of a terrible genocide of human history, that of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. Auschwitz should be required reading for human beings, for it demonstrates the dangers of unbending, unthinking obedience, fanaticism, and bigotry.
Rees begins his book with an introduction that states that although the book is upsetting and heartbreaking, it should be analyzed, seeing its warnings concerning human nature. He writes that humans have tendencies to be xenophobic and cruel towards others whom they view as outsiders, which unfortunately also applies to anti-semitism, seeing how even after the Holocaust, many individuals believed the Nazis were justified in their genocide. Rees detailed that he conducted many interviews, some of which involved Nazis who had committed numerous atrocities. As expected, he came across many shameful elements of human nature: “I remember the woman at the Lithuanian check-in desk who, after learning the subject of the film we were making, said, ‘You’re interested in the Jews, are you? Well, just remember this—Marx was a Jew.’ Also in Lithuania, I recall an army officer in his mid-twenties showing me round the site of the 1941 Jewish massacres at a fort in Kaunas and saying, ‘You’re missing the big story, you know. The story isn’t what we did to the Jews. It’s what the Jews did to us.’ … that this kind of prejudice is openly expressed at all is disturbing.” (xii). Rees makes it clear that those responsible for the genocides of history, including the Holocaust, were frequently regular individuals: while some of the Nazis were indeed sadists, lunatics, and criminals, most of them weren’t, seeing how they believed that committing genocide was their duty to their country and future generations. Rees reveals that he has made books and films involving war criminals from Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union, the three prime instances of totalitarianism in world history. Rees details that the Soviet Union was different from Germany in how most Germans, so long as they didn't belong to a group the Nazis loathed, would feel relatively safe. On the other hand, the Soviet Union under Stalin was full of paranoia, as any person could be arrested, tortured, and executed, even senior officials. As he put it, “The description one former Soviet air force officer gave me of open meetings in the 1930s, when anyone could be denounced as an ‘enemy of the people,’ still haunts me to this day. No one was safe from a knock at the door at midnight. No matter how well you tried to conform, no matter how many slogans you spouted, Stalin’s malevolence ensured that nothing you did or said or thought could save you if the spotlight picked you out.” (xiii). Thus, it is frightening to note that most Germans were fine with Hitler being in charge and conducting aggressive wars and instigating genocide, so long as they weren’t personally affected. Rees then proceeds to discuss Japanese soldiers who committed many barbaric atrocities against civilians, including bayoneting live people to death, ripping out the fetuses of pregnant women, and decapitating civilians for sport. Rees writes that although what they did was horrible, their actions were understandable when one looks at the historical situation, for Imperial Japan was utterly obsessed with worshipping the emperor: “The Japanese soldiers had grown up in an intensely militaristic society, had been subjected to military training of the most brutal kind, had been told since they were children to worship their emperor (who was also their commander-in-chief), and lived in a culture that historically elevated the all-too-human desire to conform into a quasi-religion. All this was encapsulated by one veteran who told me that when he had been asked to take part in the gang rape of a Chinese woman he saw it less as a sexual act and more as a sign of final acceptance by the group, many of whom had previously bullied him mercilessly.” (xiv). Rees maintains that in Auschwitz, the guards and SS men were encouraged to commit murder, though they were not allowed to commit theft. That is, Himmler himself said that the Holocaust was sanctioned and righteous, which means that the Nazis should try to maintain a “clean” conscience by only doing what they “have” to do. Interestingly, “the penalties for an SS man caught stealing could be draconian—almost certainly worse than for simply refusing to take an active part in the killing.” (xv).
Rees concludes that Nazis were more willing to take personal responsibility for their crimes than those serving Stalin and Hirohito, seeing how the Nazis came into power because the people, suffering from the economic turmoil of the Great Depression in the 1930s, turned to them for a solution. Josef Goebbels was the minister of propaganda of Nazi Germany and effectively convinced most German citizens that certain groups of people were threats who had to be liquidated as soon as possible. When WWII began, the speed of the Holocaust increased rapidly. While Hitler was a homicidal maniac who desired the destruction of the Jews and many groups, he was mostly focused on winning WWII. Regardless, he ordered the leaders of Germany to exterminate massive numbers of people. Rees states that phenomena like Auschwitz illustrate that human behavior is flexible, as the behavior of people can be massively affected by the situation they found themselves in. For instance, Toivi Blatt, a Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned in the death camp Sobibór, said that a nice person could become a sadist if they were there. Rees summarizes the lesson as follows: “human behavior is fragile and unpredictable and often at the mercy of the situation. Every individual still, of course, has a choice as to how to behave, it’s just that for many people the situation is the key determinant in that choice. Even those unusual individuals … who appear to be masters of their own destiny were, to a considerable extent, created by their responses to previous situations. The Adolf Hitler known to history was substantially formed by the interaction between the pre-war Hitler—who was a worthless drifter—and the events of World War I, which was a global conflict over which he had no control. I know no serious scholar of the subject who thinks that Hitler could ever have risen to prominence without the transformation he underwent during that war, and the sense of intense bitterness he felt when Germany lost … ‘No World War I, no individual who ever became the Hitler that history knows.’” (xx). Rees demonstrates that some heroes rescued people from the Nazis, illustrating that individuals who opted for the side of right still existed. Rees details that 1.1 million people were systematically murdered in Auschwitz, including more than 200,000 children. “One image stuck in my mind from the moment I heard it described. It was of a ‘procession’ of empty baby carriages—property looted from the dead Jews—pushed out of Auschwitz in rows of five towards the railway station. The prisoner who witnessed the sight said that they took an hour to pass by.” (xxi). The commandant of Auschwitz was a man named Rudolf Höss. While he was a mass murderer, he was quite a usual person, as he possessed no special (that is, concerning) features and acted like a regular person before becoming the commandant of Auschwitz. Höss was born to Catholic parents and his father was an ultranationalist who stated that Germany was betrayed during WWI. Anti-semitism was extremely prominent in Germany at the time, as many people desired scapegoats to blame for Germany’s loss and the Treaty of Versailles. Heinrich Himmler (a chicken farmer before he became one of the chief architects of the Holocaust) personally invited Höss to take up the position due to how he was an early member of the Nazi Party who demonstrated much loyalty. Before being sent to Auschwitz he was placed in charge of Dachau, a concentration camp “infamous for the physical sadism practiced there: Whippings and other beatings were commonplace … The real power of the regime … lay less in physical abuse—terrible as it undoubtedly was—and more in mental torture … unlike in a normal prison, the inmate had no clue as to how long his sentence was likely to last. During the 1930s, most prisoners in Dachau were released after a stay of about a year, but any individual sentence could be shorter or longer depending on the whims of the authorities. There was no end date for the prisoner to focus upon, only the permanent uncertainty of never knowing if freedom would come tomorrow, or next month, or next year.” (6). Dachau also had “Kapos” (literally translates to “head” from the Italian word “capo”), senior prisoners who had privileges and were frequently encouraged to be ruthless to the prisoners. The Nazis believed in pseudoscience, as they were fanatical followers of an extremely inaccurate and racist form of Darwinism, best seen in their view that life was an eternal struggle and that Aryans are racially superior to every other racial group (of course, Darwin never meant this when he added to the theory of evolution that was first espoused by the Greek philosopher and scientist Anaximander). Before the Holocaust began, Jews and other groups (ex. socialists, unionists, students, and those who spoke out against Hitler) were systematically stripped of their rights and were liable to harassment. For instance, “By the outbreak of war in 1939, Jews could no longer hold German citizenship, marry non-Jews, own businesses or work in certain professions; they could not even hold driving licenses. Discrimination by regulation, coupled with the violent outburst of Kristallnacht—in which more than 1,000 synagogues were destroyed, 400 Jews killed, and approximately 30,000 male Jews imprisoned for months in concentration camps—caused a large number of German Jews to emigrate. Nearly 450,000 of them had left the area of the new ‘Greater German Reich’ (Germany, Austria, and the ethnic German Czech lands)—this amounted to more than half the Jews who’d lived there.” (12-3).
Adolf Eichmann, a leading Nazi who was a main designer of the Holocaust, had massive numbers of Jews “relocated” against their will, causing many deaths due to the filthy conditions they were subjected to. The Nazis soon stole the property of Jews and either gave it to the German government or redistributed it to Germans. Despicably, the Nazis believed in subjugating many areas of Europe and reducing their inhabitants to slavery upon their victory. They also desired to virtually ban education upon winning WWII, as Himmler stated that conquered peoples should be taught basic arithmetic and undying obedience to Germans and nothing else, seeing how literacy will cause them to think for themselves and to rely on themselves for certain issues. The Nazis also made it a policy to steal young children from Poland from their biological parents. Himmler recommended that Jews should be banished from Germany and deported to Africa, though this policy was never taken. Auschwitz was initially created to terrorize the Poles. When it came to its construction, “Of the 20,000 Poles initially sent to the camp, more than half were dead by the start of 1942.” (19). Auschwitz included Block 11, a place where prisoners would be tortured and executed (some of them would be locked into a room until they would die of hunger). A survivor of Block 11 was Jerzy Bielecki, who was sent there due to being very sick one day. Trying to avoid punishment, he pretended to work by cleaning up the area, but was caught by a guard and was sent to Block 11. An SS man tied his hands behind his back using a rope that was attached to the ceiling beam and then viciously kicked away the stool he was standing on. “‘Shut up, you! You dog! You deserve to suffer!’” (26). After an hour of hanging like that, he was in a delirium due to the agonizing pain, seeing how his arms were coming out of their sockets. Another SS guard came who was sympathetic to the prisoners, as he released one of them (who was previously dangling from the ceiling) and comforted Bielecki by telling him he only had to endure another fifteen minutes. When he returned to free him, Bielecki recounted the following: “‘Lift your legs,’ he said. But I couldn’t do it. He took my legs, put one on the stool and then another one. He let the chain loose and I fell from the stool on to my knees and he helped me. He raised my right hand up and said, ‘Hold it.’ But I didn't feel my arms. He said, ‘This will pass after an hour.’ And I walked down, barely, with the SS man. He was a very compassionate guard.” (27). This instance demonstrates that the Nazis were still human beings, as some of them did possess humanity. Rees then continues to describe the horrors inflicted in Block 11: prisoners were brutally whipped, water torture was practiced, needles were placed under their fingernails, they were seared with a hot iron, petrol was poured over them before they were set on fire, and sometimes their faces would be forced onto a heating stove until it entirely burned away. Remarkably, occasionally some prisoners would be released from Auschwitz, though they would be forced to sign a contract in which they claimed they were treated with fairness by the Nazis. Sometimes university professors would be sent to concentration camps, as some of them were obstinate critics of the Nazi regime. Before Auschwitz became the killing factory it later became, there was the Einsatzgruppen, a section of SS whose sole job consisted of executing people speedily and efficiently through gunfire. Indeed, they slaughtered entire communities in mere days. Although their killing capacity was very high, those in the Einsatzgruppen frequently suffered from emotional trauma and intense PTSD, causing many of them to become dysfunctional, to turn to drink, or to even kill themselves. Himmler, to deal with this issue, proclaimed that Germans should be protected from murdering people up front, as their mental health was of the utmost importance. Hence came the creation of the gas chambers: the SS responsible for managing them would feel isolated from their actions, protecting their minds from the weight of the reality of what they were actually doing. But before that, Hitler legalized forced euthanasia policies that involved the murder of disabled children and the mentally ill. “Between October 1939 and May 1940 about 10,000 mental patients were killed in West Prussia and the Warthegau, many by the use of a new technique—a gas chamber on wheels. Victims were shoved into a hermetically sealed compartment in the back of a converted van and then asphyxiated by bottled carbon monoxide.” (43). Rees interviewed a member of the Einsatzgruppen, Hans Friedrich, who never felt any remorse or guilt concerning his conduct. Friedrich admitted that he felt justified in slaughtering Jewish civilians, as when he was young he belonged to a family of farmers who loathed Jewish people due to their being traders. Thus, he felt like his family was being continuously cheated by them. Rees writes, “Friedrich … gives every impression of being proud of what he and his comrades did. The justification for his actions is, in his mind, clear and absolute: The Jews did him and his family harm, and the world is a better place without them. In an unguarded moment, Adolf Eichmann remarked that the knowledge of having participated in the murder of millions of Jews gave him such satisfaction that he would ‘jump laughingly into his grave.’ It is easy to see how Hans Friedrich might feel exactly the same emotion.” (49). Rudolf Heydrich was a leading Nazi who was recruited by Heinrich Himmler, and he is noted by Rees to be a man of culture as well as a mass murderer, illustrating the danger of being somewhat intelligent without any sympathy, empathy, or kindness. He was later assassinated in Operation Anthropoid by the enemies of the Nazi regime.
Himmer, before coming across the concept of gas chambers as a method of execution, tested explosives. Wilhelm Jaschke, a captain in Einsatzkommando 8, testified that the bombs led to a terrible sight, as the prisoners were terribly maimed but still alive, seeing how their body parts were scattered haphazardly everywhere. When poison gas was adopted in 1941, the sick reasoning behind its implementation can be noted: Höss’s deputy, Fritzsch, “saw a new use for a chemical used to remove the infestations of insects around the camp—crystallized prussic acid (cyanide), sold in tins and marketed under the name Zyklon (for cyclone) Blausäure (for prussic acid), popularly known as Zyklon B. … If Zyklon B could be used to kill lice, why could it not be used to kill human pests? And because Block 11 was already the place of execution within the camp and its basement could be sealed, was this not the most natural place to conduct an experiment?” (54). Höss revealed in an interview during the Nuremberg trials that he never thought of disobeying the orders of Himmler, seeing how the Nazis were indoctrinated to do nothing but obey. When Jews were being shipped to concentration and death camps, the German populace did virtually nothing, as they took comfort in the fact that they weren’t the ones being subjected to such mistreatment. Birkenau was created by Höss in 1941 when Himmler ordered him to create an area that can house 100,000 people. When it came to WWII, the Soviet Union, which withstood the mass of Nazi troops, lost an estimated twenty-seven million people (Stalin killed a large number of people himself, seen in how he was so paranoid that he ordered for the executions of Soviet officers who were detained by the Nazis upon their release, seeing how they had supposedly “betrayed” their motherland). Rees further details, “In the first seven months of the war against the Soviet Union, the Germans took 3 million Red Army prisoners. In the course of the war as a whole they took 5.7 million, of whom a staggering 3.3 million lost their lives in captivity.” (64). When the first groups of Soviet POWs were sent to concentration camps, the Germans, to mask their mass murder, alleged in the Totenbuch (Death Book) that they had perished not because of gross maltreatment, but because of medical issues such as “heart attacks.” Rees elaborates, “So appalling were the conditions for the Soviet prisoners that Rudolf Höss witnessed evidence of cannibalism among them: ‘I myself came across a Russian lying between piles of bricks, whose body had been torn open and the liver removed. They would beat each other to death for food.’ Höss documents many examples of such suffering in his memoirs, but nowhere does he address the reason why the Soviet POWs were reduced to this state. The fact that over a six-month period he and his SS comrades were to blame for the death of more than 9,000 of the 10,000 Soviet POWs seems to have escaped him. And it is clear why Höss feels no guilt, because by behaving like ‘animals’ the Soviet POWs were simply acting as Nazi propaganda had predicted they would. Once again, the Nazis had created a self-fulfilling prophecy.” (66). The Jews who weren’t in Auschwitz by that time frequently found themselves in dilapidated ghettos where they were forced to work strenuously to demonstrate their usefulness and where their jobs would act as safeguards from being deported. Ghettos generally had Jewish councils who would act as intermediaries between the Nazi authorities and the civilians, seeing how the Nazis were worried on some level that the Jews might rebel against them (which did indeed happen in certain cases).
The day after Pearl Harbor, the death camp Chelmno saw its first batch of victims. The Jews who were taken to Chelmno were taken into a basement that housed a van and were promptly suffocated via exhaust gases. The Nazi meeting at Wannsee is frequently believed to be the main meeting which led to the Final Solution (a euphemism employed by the Nazis to make genocide sound noble and not despicable), though Rees alleges that this wasn’t true, as “Much more important … were the discussions Hitler held in December 1941. If proper minutes were available of the Führer’s meetings with Himmler during that period, then we would truly see the bleak landscape of the mind that made all this suffering enter the world.” (80). By this time gas chambers were installed not in Block 11 but in an open area in Auschwitz that were only a few feet from Höss’s personal office for the sake of space, seeing how a large area is needed for hordes of people to be crammed inside and speedily suffocated. When the concept of gas chambers became widely accepted and even embraced, the Nazis relied on deception to get their victims to enter them, seeing how their knowledge of their fates could lead to them openly rebelling. Józef Paczyński, a survivor of Auschwitz who worked near the crematorium, claimed that the SS were polite to those who were going to be executed: “And these people undressed, and then they made them go in … and then the doors were locked behind them. Then an SS man crawled up on to the flat roof of the building. He put on a gas mask, he opened a hatch [in the roof] and he dropped the powder in and he shut the hatch. When he did this, in spite of the fact that these walls were thick, you could hear a great scream.” (82). Rees then describes how brutalized Paczyński became: “Having suffered in the camp himself for nearly two years, Paczyński felt no great emotion as he saw these people go to their deaths: ‘One becomes indifferent. Today you go, tomorrow I will go. You become indifferent. A human being can get used to anything.’” (82). When it comes to deceiving the prisoners, another reason why the Nazis did so was that if their victims were to be gassed with their clothes still on, it would be very hard to remove them from their corpses. Thus, if the victims are convinced that they’ll be given fair treatment, they’ll comply with all the orders they receive (including the undressing) and give little trouble to their executioners. Some of the SS took the concept of deception to such an extent that they would entertain themselves by taking the prisoners to their deaths, seen in the jokes they made: “Perry Broad, a member of the SS at Auschwitz … [claimed that] one of the SS men then shouted through the door once it was screwed shut: ‘Don’t get burnt while you take your bath!’” (83). A major problem with gassing despite the thick walls of the gas chambers consists of how the victims would shriek with the utmost intensity: the Nazis dealt with this issue by turning on some machinery (motors) to drown out the noise. While countless people were put to death in Auschwitz upon arrival due to being “unfit” (being too old or too young, having a disability, being sick), Auschwitz did see some survivors due to it relying on the forced labor of prisoners who were spared from the initial selection. Paczyński, who had beaten the odds regarding survival, was able to live due to being appointed a barber, an ideal position for a prisoner. In fact, he gave Höss a haircut on numerous occasions. While he entertained the idea of murdering him, he knew that doing so would accomplish little, as there are plenty of fanatical SS officials who are willing to become the commandant of Auschwitz upon Höss’s death, demonstrating that totalitarian countries try to mass-produce a certain type of individual who will enable its long-term survival (such individuals are usually close-minded, ignorant, hateful, prejudiced, cold-hearted, and cruel). As Paczyński put himself, “He had a cigar in his mouth and was reading a paper. I did the same haircut I had seen done on him before. It wasn’t a great piece of art. Höss didn't say a word to me, and I didn't say a word. I was afraid, and he despised inmates. I had a razor in my hand. I could have cut his throat—it could have happened. But I’m a thinking being, and you know what would have happened? My whole family would have been destroyed; half of the camp would be destroyed. In his place someone else would have come.” (84). Paczyński was in deep trouble once when he was caught stealing tomatoes and onions by Höss’s wife. Fortunately, a Polish prisoner, Stasiu, spoke up in his defense, claiming that she had told him to transport the onions and tomatoes. Rees remarks that this showed that while the families of Nazis viewed prisoners in a low way, they were simultaneously unwilling to have medium-to-long-term associates put to death, seeing the existence of some sort of emotional connection (one that is based on slavery and degradation, but a relationship on some level nonetheless).
Rees then provides the following devastating statistic: “Between January and May 1942 a total of 55,000 Jews were deported from the Lódź ghetto and murdered at Chelmno.” (886). Rees includes the testimony of a survivor named Lucille Eichengreene. Eichengreene’s mother lost the will to live once she was sent into the ghetto, and her sister was taken away from her by the Nazis due to her being perceived as unfit to work (she was twelve). Eichengreene was later molested by Rumkowski, the leader of the ghetto she was in who utilized his power to force himself sexually on young women. A few weeks after being molested, “Lucille was sent to a leather factory within the ghetto to sew belts for the German army. She never saw Rumkowski again. All that was left was the damage he had done … In 1944, both Lucille and Rumkowski were among the Jews from Lódź who were transported to Auschwitz when the ghetto was finally closed. Rumkowski and his family died in the gas chambers of Birkenau. Lucille, as a young woman, was selected not for immediate death but for work, and was saved by the defeat of the Nazis in May 1945.” (90). The Nazis pressured other governments to hand over their Jewish populations: this included France when it was occupied. In another instance there was Slovakia, a part of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. “The president of Slovakia was Josef Tiso, a Catholic priest, leader of the fiercely nationalistic Slovak People’s Party of Hlinka. Tiso allied Slovakia with the Nazis, and a Treaty of Protection allowed Germany to control Slovak foreign policy. The Slovakian government enthusiastically adopted anti-Semitic measures against the 90,000 Slovak Jews—in rapid succession regulations were introduced to seize Jewish businesses, encourage Jewish emigration, exclude Jews from public life, and to make them wear a yellow star. The effect of these measures on the Slovakian Jewish community was swift and brutal.” (91). Later in February 1942, the Slovaks forcibly deported tens of thousands of Jewish people. Later, Karl Bischoff and Hans Kammler, correspondingly an architect and the head of the central SS buildings office, under the orders of Höss, erected more crematoriums. To be exact, two new crematoriums, “The Little Red House” and “The Little White House,” were made to appear as cottages to deceive the victims. Since the cottages were located in the woods, the bodies were disposed of by being buried under a thin layer of soil. However, in the summer heat the stench would become unbearable and prisoners who were allowed to survive would be forced to exhume the rotting, putrid bodies for them to be dumped into pits or thrown into flames. Rees then compares Nazi to Soviet persecution: “Stalin may have persecuted whole nations, but the Soviet system did not seek to eliminate them in their entirety. Yet, to fulfil the Nazis’ purpose, every single Jew had to be removed from German territory one way or the other.” (104). When it comes to the prisoners who served the desirable jobs of waiters, they would starve while being forced to cater to the SS who were allowed to drink much wine and food in front of them: a survivor who performed such a function stated that it was a horrible mockery of their suffering. By the early summer of 1942, Auschwitz was composed of two sections: Birkenau and the main camp. Although Birkenau was less than three kilometers away from Auschwitz, the prisoners in both of them varied greatly in their culture. When it comes to France, the Nazis were enraged when some members of the population defied them. Thus, they demanded draconian punishment. Consequently, the French surrendered some Jews and Communists as recompense: “The first of these transports left France in March 1942 for Auschwitz … A combination of starvation, abuse, and disease ravaged them. Of the 1,112 men who boarded the train at Compiegne 1,008 were dead within five months. Only about twenty of them are thought to have survived the war—which means that more than 98 percent of this first transport died in Auschwitz.” (112).
The French authorities complied with the Nazis: they traded the lives of Jews and foreigners to keep native French people relatively safe. The Nazis forced some mothers to part from their children at gunpoint, and many of them were sent to Auschwitz and other areas, where the vast majority of them perished due to being unable to fend for themselves in such conditions. The Nazis, as usual, derived no moral lesson from their actions. Instead, they utilized their observations to revise their procedures to make mass murder more efficient: “the Nazis … learned that it was almost always counter to their own interests to separate mothers forcibly from their children. Even though the Nazis lost valuable labor by sending some young, healthy women to the gas chambers with their offspring, they realized that to wrench boys and girls from their mothers against their will at the initial selection would result in such horrendous scenes that efficient management of the killing process would be almost impossible. Moreover, the upset involved in such separation would be so great as to rival the emotional disturbance caused to the killing squads by shooting women and children at close range—the very trauma that the gas chambers had been designed to diminish.” (125). As for the French authorities, “after the last train containing parentless children left Drancy on August 31 an order was given that such transports were not to be repeated. Never again … would children be snatched from their mothers; instead, whole families would be sent to Auschwitz together … the French authorities … had realized … that it would be easier for them—in pursuit of their own interests—if they avoided separating mothers from their children.” (125). Rees scathingly writes of French complicity with the Nazis, seeing the abominations that occurred due to their actions (though understandable from a historical standpoint: the Nazis were occupying France and had demonstrated their brutality on numerous occasions). Rees writes, “Altogether just under 80,000 Jews were killed as a result of deportation from France during the war, which represents about 20-25 percent of the total Jewish population in France at the time. That figure—which means that roughly four out of five Jews in France survived the war—is sometimes quoted by apologists as a ‘healthy’ statistic showing that the French authorities behaved with relative honor in the face of Nazi occupation. On the contrary, it demonstrates precisely the reverse because, almost certainly, little would have happened had the French refused to cooperate in handing over their ‘foreign’ Jews. Even after the occupation of the whole of France in November 1942, the Nazis did not enforce violent reprisals when the French authorities dragged their feet and the German targets for deportations were subsequently not met.” (125-6). Rees then damningly writes, “Every single one of the more than 4,000 children deported without their parents from France in the summer of 1942 died at Auschwitz.” (126). Oskar Groening was a Nazi who was twenty-one years old when he was sent to Auschwitz to serve as an accountant. He was virtually an entirely normal individual, as he was utterly ignorant of what was being done to the Jews beforehand and joined the Nazis out of a naive belief that Hitler would improve the world. Groening notes that in September 1942 80-90% of the prisoners would be gassed upon arrival. Groening mentions that he was horrified to see other guards being so low as to kill children, sometimes for pure enjoyment. Groening told Rees in the interview that the propaganda he and the others were subjected to was so intense and constant that he believed genocide not as an abhorrent crime, but as a routine procedure in war that was entirely justified. Regardless, after witnessing the callousness of some of the Nazis, “he went to his superior officer and told him: ‘It’s impossible, I can’t work here any more. If it is necessary to exterminate the Jews, then at least it should be done within a certain framework.’ I told him this and said, ‘I want to go away from here.’ His superior officer calmly listened to Groening’s complaints, reminded him of the SS oath of allegiance he had sworn and said that he should ‘forget’ any idea of leaving Auschwitz. But he also offered hope—of a kind. He told Groening that the ‘excesses’ he saw that night were an ‘exception,’ and that he himself agreed that members of the SS should not participate in such ‘sadistic’ events. Documents confirm that Groening subsequently put in for a transfer to the front, which was refused. So he carried on working at Auschwitz.” (128). Groening at the time of being in Auschwitz did what he did due to his upbringing: when he grew up he had a very high view of Hitler and the Nazis, seeing how they utilized public events to make them seem like they genuinely cared about Germany. Furthermore, Hitler’s successful attempts at combating unemployment during the Great Depression made him popular among the populace. Also, when Groening first arrived at Auschwitz, he thought it was a good place to live in, and only learned after some time its purpose. While Groening may be difficult to understand from today’s standpoint, his words are extremely relevant, for institutionalized injustice is frequently viewed as justice by those subjected to indoctrination and propaganda. In my personal opinion, this principle can be seen very clearly in the barbaric practice of slaughtering and exploiting animals: while those working in slaughterhouses are encouraged to avoid inflicting unnecessary suffering when it comes to putting animals to death, some of them treat them with utter sadism. To clarify, I am not comparing the slaughter of people to that of animals: I’m simply demonstrating the same attitude behind both of these wanton actions. That is, the attitude that fosters such horrid acts is one that assumes that a specific group, be it religious, political, classist, nationalistic, or specieistic, is superior to another and has the right to oppress those belonging to the other group. The Nazis were firm believers that the Germans had every right to rule the world and to wipe out ethnic groups they disliked while most people today by their choice to consume animal products are virtually giving their assent to the inhumane exploitation of more than 100 billion sentient beings a year, seeing how all the animals that are being exploited live in absolutely horrid conditions with no sense of escape or freedom.
Going back to the book, Rees provides a description of the SS at Auschwitz: 70 percent of them, like Groening, didn't belong to any high position: “26 percent were non-commissioned officers … and just 4 percent of the total SS complement were officers. There were around 3,000 members of the SS serving in Auschwitz I and the related sub-camps at any one time. The SS administration of the camp was divided into five main departments—the headquarters department (personnel, legal, and other related functions), the medical unit (doctors and dentists), the political department (the Gestapo and the criminal police, the Kripo), the economic administration (including the registration and disposal of property stolen from the murdered prisoners), and the camp administration (responsible for security within the camp). By far, the biggest department was the last—about 75 percent of the SS members who worked at Auschwitz performed some kind of security function. Oskar Groening was unusual only in that he had a comparatively ‘easy’ job as part of the economic administration.” (135). Himmler visited Auschwitz and witnessed the executions and punishments dealt to prisoners (flogging). Subsequently, Himmler, impressed, promoted Höss to the rank of SS lieutenant colonel. Höss still had a problem, however: some inmates were escaping from Auschwitz. To dissuade them from doing so, Höss made it a law that when one prisoner escapes, ten random ones would be sent to Block 11 and locked in a cell until they died of starvation. On July 19, 1942, Himmler ordered the number of executions at Auschwitz and other concentration camps to be accelerated. The three death camps of Belźec, Sobibór, and Treblinka saw a total of 1.7 million fatalities, 600,000 more than the death toll of Auschwitz. Rees notes that the three camps could easily fit inside Auschwitz due to their constricted and compact nature. Rees describes, “Somehow the mind associates an epic tragedy with an epic space—another reason, perhaps, that Auschwitz is so much better known today than these three death camps. The massive scale of Birkenau gives the mind space to try and conceive of the enormity of the crime—something that is utterly denied to visitors at a place like Belźec. How can the brain conceive of 600,000 people, the estimated death toll here, being murdered in an area less than 300 meters square?” (149). The commander of Belźec was a sadist named Christian Wirth, and he helped make the death camp the efficient factory of death it became. There were three classes of prisoners at Belźec. The first involved a few hundred Jews who would be chosen from the mass of doomed prisoners to manage the camp, including the disposal of corpses and the organization of the belongings of the murdered. The Jews would frequently be killed, though Wirth decided to give them more time to live due to the inconvenience of training them. The second class was composed of around 100 Ukrainian guards who were infamous for their brutality due to fighting for the Red Army before being captured by the Germans and given a chance to escape harsh imprisonment. The third category involved the Germans. Rees notes, “So smoothly had Wirth delegated the mechanics of running his killing machine to other nationalities, however, that only twenty or so German SS men needed to be involved in the process of murder at Belźec. By March 1942, with the arrival of the first transport at Belźec, Wirth had realized Himmler’s dream. He had built a killing factory capable of exterminating hundreds of thousands which could be run by a handful of Germans, all of whom were now relatively protected from the psychological damage that had afflicted the firing squads in the East.” (150). Rees details that the Nazis had done something that was never attempted in human history: they had created procedures that facilitated the mechanized slaughter of millions of people. He details that Treblinka’s death count was horrendous: “the death toll at Treblinka—an estimated 800,000 to 900,000—very nearly rivals that of Auschwitz … In slightly more than a month’s time, from between the end of July and the end of August 1942, an estimated 312,500 people were murdered at Treblinka. This is a phenomenal figure, a killing rate of around 10,000 a day and a death toll not even approached by any other camp until the height of the Hungarian action at Auschwitz—in 1944—when the four crematoria of Birkenau were functioning at full capacity.” (151-3). Ironically, Eberl, the Nazi in charge of Treblinka, was put on trial for the monstrously efficient killing rate, as so many were slain that their belongings were difficult to organize and send to the authorities for the sake of funding Nazi conquests.
Rees goes back to Groening. As stated before, he was an accountant, and he stayed at Auschwitz due to being mostly isolated from the slaughter and brutality. As an accountant he organized a diverse amount of foreign money, a silent testimony to the variety of victims who found themselves in Auschwitz. Overall, Groening’s recollection of Auschwitz illustrates what people can get used to, especially those in a privileged position, as he looks back at it fondly in many respects: “Auschwitz main camp was like a small town. It had its gossip—it had a vegetable shop where you could buy bones to make broth. There was a canteen, a cinema, a theatre with regular performances. There was a sports club of which I was a member. There were dances—all fun and entertainment … [when I left] I’d left a circle of friends who I’d got familiar with, I’d got fond of, and that was very difficult … the special situation at Auschwitz led to friendships which, I still say today, I think back on with joy.” (157). Regardless, Groening near the end of 1942 witnessed depravity, as some Jews tried to escape. While some of them were caught and killed, other prisoners were gassed: Groening witnessed Zyklon B being administered to slay them. He then saw the burning of the bodies, which he described as nauseating. Horrified, he went to the authority he had previously complained to before, “who was ‘an Austrian and basically an honest bloke’ and poured out his feelings. ‘He listened to me and said: ‘My dear Groening, what do you want to do against it? We’re all in the same boat. We’re given an obligation to accept this—not to even think about it.’” (158). Groening consequently stayed. Rees writes that the Germans treated Jehovah’s Witnesses pretty well, seeing that they were quite anti-semitic and were only disliked due to opposing war mobilization. Consequently, they could be released at any time if they were to sign a form renouncing their faith. Rees details a woman named Else Abt who was fanatical: she was sure that the Judeo-Christian god was looking out for humanity even while witnessing depravities. When it comes to the unbending mental rigidity and willful ignorance of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (clearly showing that all fanaticism is undesirable and irrational), Höss details, “Himmler … offered the fanatical faith of the Jehovah’s Witnesses as an example. SS men must have the same fanatical and unshakable faith in the National Socialist ideal and in Adolf Hitler that the Witnesses had in Jehovah. Only when all SS men believed as fanatically in their own philosophy would Adolf Hitler’s state be permanently secure.” (161). Rees further elaborates on the similarity of fanaticism: “To those who lack the certainty of faith expressed by Else Abt, it is hard to see how a creator was ‘looking out’ for the Jehovah’s Witnesses who Höss describes as being shot in Sachsenhausen. Nor does he seem to have been ‘looking out’ for the Poles, Soviet prisoners, the sick, Jews, and countless others who lost their lives so cruelly at Auschwitz. But one of the intriguing aspects of the theological position taken by Else Abt is that such atrocities are immediately explicable to her—simply evidence of the will of a higher power whom we cannot fully understand but in whom we must have absolute faith … if one substitutes ‘Hitler’ for ‘Jehovah’ in Else Abt’s testimony the words do bear a striking resemblance to the ideological position taken by SS men like Höss.” (162-3). Indeed, as Bertrand Russell once noted, all fanatics have the same mental processes, as they are unwilling to question their beliefs and are obsessed with indoctrinating others (when Abt was imprisoned she didn't renounce her faith, even to help care for her young daughter—her daughter later became a Jehovah’s Witness herself, no doubt due to the obsession her mother had with the doctrine). By 1942, “The German cable reveals that Treblinka, Belźec, Sobibór, and Majdanek (a much smaller-capacity camp in the Lublin district) had so far murdered a total of 1,274,166 people. That figure is further broken down as 24,733 at Majdanek, 101,370 at Sobibór, and 434,508 at Belźec. The figure given in the intercepted cable for Treblinka is 71,355, but that is obviously a typing error, as to read the total of 1,274,166 the number killed at Treblinka must be 713,555. Treblinka was thus—officially—the largest killing center in the Nazi state during 1942. Auschwitz was left far behind. But not for long.” (164).
When the Warsaw ghetto was liquidated on the orders of Himmler, seeing how certain concentration camps known as the Operation Reinhard camps had already murdered 1.65 million out of a future total of 1.7 million, the Jews finally rebelled. In the fighting most of the dead were Jews, seeing how they didn't have access to the same organization and weaponry the Nazis did, though the Nazis did lose some soldiers. In 1943 more crematoriums and gas chambers were built in Auschwitz. Therefore, the four crematoria of Auschwitz “had the capacity to murder about 4,400 people every day and then dispose of the bodies. Auschwitz, by the summer of 1943, therefore had the capacity to kill more than 120,000 people a month.” (169). Rees then provides even more statistics: “Approximately 2.7 million Jews were murdered in 1942 (about 200,000 of them in Auschwitz, 1.65 million in the Operation Reinhard camps, and 850,000 shot by mobile killing squads in the East); while in 1943 a total of approximately 500,000 Jews were killed, around half of this number in Auschwitz.” (170). Auschwitz, as stated before, was supposed to be a profitable venture. Thus, sometimes tens of thousands of prisoners would perform hard labor for the sake of generating revenue. Overall, Auschwitz made around 30 million marks by allowing private businesses to purchase slave labor. Auschwitz had an area known as “Canada” that was more pleasant than the other areas for the prisoners. Indeed, the survival rate in Canada was much higher than other places due to the jobs being easier, as those who worked there were given more food for relatively undemanding tasks (when compared to jobs like the Sonderkommando and hard labor), such as sorting the belongings of the recently murdered. Due to all the valuables in Canada, many SS committed theft. Himmler was very bothered upon learning this, as he thought the Holocaust a mandatory, noble venture and thievery an unnecessary and degrading one. He said the following in his Posen speech of October 1943, in which fifty senior SS officials were present: “It is a page of glory in our history that has never been written and is never to be written. We have taken away the riches that they had … we have delivered all of these riches to the Reich, to the State. We have taken nothing for ourselves. We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to destroy the people who wanted to destroy us. We have carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people. And our heart, our soul, our character have suffered no harm from it.” (175). Overall, Himmler’s belief in the sanctity of genocide like the Holocaust illustrates the danger of bigotry, seen in how he wished to portray Nazis as respectable murderers to excuse their horrid abominations. At Auschwitz, some doctors, including German ones, decided who would live and who would die at the selection. Certain doctors like Josef Mengele also conducted terrible medical experiments on prisoners, causing many to die. In the 1930s 300,000 Germans were forcibly sterilized due to being seen as inferior, and the Nazis perverted medicine and the Hippocrates oath by maintaining that noble and intelligent doctors must kill certain individuals who possess “life unworthy of life” (“lebensunwertes Leben”). Indeed, Eberl, the head of Treblinka, was a doctor himself before arriving there. Another effect of having doctors at Auschwitz who would supervise the killing was the justification of the existence of industrialized slaughter, as their presence made the entire endeavor seem reasonable and well-thought-out. Certain Auschwitz prisoners were sold to companies to make money for the Nazi state, including those desiring to test out certain drugs. As Rees details, “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.’ These women, who had died in testing an experimental anesthetic, cost the Bayer company 170 Reichsmarks each.” (179). The most infamous doctor of Auschwitz was undoubtedly Mengele, who was described by Rees as schizophrenic, as while he was quite intelligent and could be charming if he wished, he was also unimaginably callous towards those he viewed as inferiors. In one instance, he shot a mother and her child in front of the other prisoners when they caused a scene at the selection before ordering all those on the same transport as them to be executed by gassing as a blanket punishment for their insubordination. Mengele is known today for his experimentation on children, some of them infants, as he was utterly obsessed with the notion of German superiority and desired to find a way for German women to have multiple children at once to overpopulate other nations and to bolster Nazi forces. This is seen in how Mengele would perform barbaric medical tests on twins by injecting them with chemicals: if one of them died, the other one would be promptly murdered so that Mengele could perform an autopsy on them both simultaneously. Rees then describes Mengele in further detail, making it clear the power of the situation over the individual: “Before he arrived at Auschwitz he showed no signs of becoming a sadist; by all accounts he demonstrated bravery fighting in the East, rescuing two soldiers from a blazing tank, and before that he had led a relatively unexceptional life in the medical profession after studying at Frankfurt University. It was the circumstances of Auschwitz that brought forth the Mengele the world was to know—a reminder of how hard it is to predict who, in exceptional situations, will become a monster.” (181-2).
While Mengele and most of the SS in camps like Auschwitz viewed the prisoners as not being sentient beings deserving of decent treatment, they made sure to refrain from having sexual relations with them, as they viewed a relationship with prisoners as being a crime against the “purity” of German blood. This puts the Nazis in clear contrast to other groups of fanatics who utilized rape to commit genocide and to spread suffering, such as the Turks who slaughtered Armenians, the Japanese Imperialists who committed mass rape, and the Serbians who forced themselves on Muslim women during the Bosnian War. Despite the Nazi ideal of the purity of the SS, some of the SS were willing to have relationships with the prisoners, many of them resorting to rape for the sake of sexual gratification. On very rare occasions, some of the prisoners had romantic relationships with the guards, though these, as expected, were ambivalent and awkward. A woman named Helena who was sent to Auschwitz met an SS named Franz Wunsch: she had been caught trying to infiltrate into Canada to escape hard labor. Her Kapo told her that she would be transferred into the Penal Commando, the equivalent of a death sentence, but in a stroke of luck, that day was the birthday of Wunsch. She sang (very reluctantly) in German for him, and he was so enamored with her he had the Kapo spare her. He treated her well, though he had a cruel side: it was rumored that he murdered a prisoner for possessing contraband. Wunsch sent Helena food and even gave her a note that proclaimed his love for her. Eventually, he ordered her to come into his office and to manicure his nails. She told him that he disgusted her, but he, remarkably, refrained from shooting her. Helena was able to utilize Wunsch to save her family: one day, her sister Róžínka and her two children were sent to Auschwitz and were being sent to the gas chamber. She informed Wunsch of what had happened, and he was able to rescue Róžínka, though her two children were gassed. He then arranged for her to work in Canada. Heartbreakingly, Róžínka didn't know where she was, believing that her children were safe. Eventually, she was informed of their fates. Though despondent, she still survived. After Wunsch saved her sister from death, Helena began to feel some affection for him. Their romantic feelings for each other were eventually revealed to the authorities. Fortunately, while both were punished to some degree, their punishments weren’t of great severity. Wunsch continued to protect Helena and her sister for the rest of their time at Auschwitz. When it came to Höss, he virtually forced Eleonore Hodys, an Austrian political prisoner, to have a romantic relationship with him. That is, she was put into a prison in the basement of the “main administration building, which was chiefly reserved for SS soldiers guilty of serious transgressions.” (192). Höss visited her during the evening and eventually copulated with her despite being married with children, and he entered her cell “not by the normal route—straight down from his office above—but via his own garden and through an underground air raid shelter that adjoined the basement.” (192). Hodys was eventually sent to Block 11. By that time (she had spent weeks in the cell), she had become pregnant, and Höss made her sign a note alleging that she slept with another prisoner, not with him. She eventually aborted the fetus by ingesting some unknown substance. Rees believes that she probably wasn’t lying, seeing that she has nothing to gain from telling a story that lurid. Furthermore, there is some evidence for it, seeing how Höss said himself he didn't engage in sexual activity with his wife once she realized what his job consisted of. Höss was eventually removed from Auschwitz due to this misdemeanor, but before he left he had a brothel set up in Auschwitz as an incentive for prisoners to work hard, as those that did their jobs well would have a chance of receiving a ticket that would permit them to enter the brothel. The females who would “work” in the brothels were envied by the other prisoners, for they were given good treatment compared to them. As Rees elucidates, “Most of the women who worked in the brothel were selected from the inmates of Birkenau (unlike other brothels in the concentration camp system, women were not sent there from Ravensbrück) and then were forced to have sex with approximately six men every day. Their experience in the Auschwitz brothel is one of the hidden stories of suffering in the camp, and bears some comparison with the ordeal of the Korean ‘comfort women’ who endured so much as a result of the sexual abuse meted out to them by soldiers of the Japanese army. But in Auschwitz at the time, the women who worked in the brothel were not so much pitied as envied. ‘The girls were treated very well,’ said Ryszard Dacko. ‘They had good food. They took walks. They just had to do their job.’” (197). Rees tells the story of Toivi, a fifteen year old Pole who asked his Catholic friend Janek to help him. Janek betrayed him to the Nazis, telling him spitefully that he looks forward to buying his corpse in the form of soap (it was rumored that the Nazis made soap out of human bodies). He and his family were sent to Sobibór. At that time almost everyone would be executed due to it being a death camp, but very rarely some physically fit individuals would be selected to be workers. Toivi was fortunately spared, but his parents and his ten-year-old brother were gassed. Upon learning of their fates, he didn't mourn or feel much emotion: if he acknowledged the reality of the situation, he probably would’ve suffered a nervous collapse and would’ve been executed himself. He states that his experience wasn’t particularly bizarre, seeing how others who went through similar situations became emotionally cold when faced with the horrible truth. Toivi was forced to facilitate the executions of thousands a day (Sobibór was so efficient in its slaughter that 3,000 people could be gassed in less than two hours). Rees details that “Toivi points to a fundamental change in extreme circumstances that is less a change in behavior … and more a change in essential character … the realization came in the camps that human beings resemble elements that are changeable according to temperature. Just as water only exists as water in a certain temperature range and is steam or ice in others, so human beings can become different people according to extremes of circumstance … I remember one former dedicated member of the Nazi party saying to me in an exasperated manner, after I pressed on why so many went along with the horrors of the regime, ‘The trouble with the world today is that people who have never been tested go around making judgments about people who have.’ A view that Toivi Blatt would no doubt echo.” (204-5).
There was a rebellion at Sobibór in which the prisoners murdered a few Nazis and escaped into the woods. A total of 300 survived the day out of 600, one of them being Toivi, who survived due to being one of the last to leave: as they ran, those at the front were decimated by landmines. The rebellion occurred thanks to a Soviet officer named Sasha Pechersky, who although underwent great suffering in WWII, could barely stomach Sobibór, a testimony to its inhumanity. Most of the 300 escaped prisoners didn't survive the war, as a majority of them were betrayed by Poles or were turned in by those around Sobibór just a few hours after leaving. As for Toivi, he survived and went to America when WWII ended. Himmler, upon learning of the revolt at Sobibór, ordered mass executions: “These reprisals, carried out from November 3, were among the bloodiest of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution.’ Some 43,000 people were killed … code named by the Nazis ‘Harvest Festival.’ … 17,000 Jews were shot at Majdanek in just one day.” (209). In Denmark, the members of society didn't persecute the Jews whatsoever, even when the Nazis had great influence over the area, due to the precarious war situation and the fact that the Jews were given toleration due to being largely assimilated into the community already. In 1943 the Nazis lost key battles such as Stalingrad, and the first shadows of defeat began to appear on the horizon. In 1944 Auschwitz “became the site of the largest mass murder in history” (219). As the war became more and more desperate, Hitler became increasingly interested in wiping out the Jews to ensure there remain no survivors. Most of the Jews who were executed in 1944 in Auschwitz came from Hungary, as Hungary allied itself with Germany in the Tripartite Pact for the sake of acquiring northern Transylvania from Romania, its rival. Eichmann was in charge of sending the Jews en masse to concentration camps, and Hungary volunteered to give all the Jews to Nazi authorities, which pleased Eichmann. Eichmann, surprisingly, made it clear to a member of a peace committee that he is willing to release some Jews in exchange for supplies for the Nazi regime, fantastically illustrating the danger the Nazi regime was in from a militaristic standpoint. Höss eventually returned to Auschwitz in 1944 due to his having much prior experience with the camp and was reinstated as its commander. Höss wasted no time in turning Auschwitz into a killing machine operating constantly by ordering the creation of more gas chambers and crematoriums. Rees details that 400,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz in a few weeks of 1944, and 10-30% of the people of each transport were selected to become slaves, while the rest were gassed. As he put it, “The camp had never seen a killing spree like it, with more than 320,000 murdered in less than eight weeks—indeed, for sustained killing within the Nazi State the only comparable slaughter on that scale was the initial murders in Treblinka, which cost Dr. Eberl his job. To keep up with the pace of the arriving transports, the Nazis increased the number of Sonderkommando working in the four crematoria at Auschwitz from just more than 200 to nearly 900. These Sonderkommando … helped guide and reassure the new arrivals as they walked into the gas chambers, and cleaned up after the murders.” (227-8). Rees elaborates, “The Sonderkommando had to remove the bodies from the gas chamber and transport them via a small corpse lift up to the crematorium ovens on the ground floor above them. Then they had to re-enter the gas chamber wielding powerful hoses and clean up the blood and excrement that was on the walls and floor … Even when the killing process was stretched to the limit there were only ever a handful of SS members around. This, of course, limited to a minimum the number of Germans who might be subjected to the kind of psychological damage that members of the killing squads in the East had suffered. Far from there being reports of psychological breakdowns among the few SS men who oversaw the actual killings, however, there were instances where the Germans seem to have taken sadistic pleasure in what they did … one member of the SS who would occasionally visit the crematorium, [would] select seven or eight beautiful girls and tell them to get undressed in front of the Sonderkommando … Then he would shoot them in their breasts or their private parts so that they died right in front of them.’” (230). In another instance, a survivor testified that three young women, two sisters and a friend, asked an SS man to die together. The SS-man was happy to oblige, and made them stand in a line before shooting through them. After the deed, their bodies were consigned to the flames, and it turned out that only two of them were dead, as one corpse was shrieking. The SS-man was proud of himself, as he felt it was an accomplishment to kill two people with a single bullet. So many were being slain in Auschwitz at the time that to save time, many prisoners would be simply shot in the back.
Rees then details that the Nazis, despite viciously attacking Britain during WWII, actually desired an alliance with it: “The Nazi dream had always been for an alliance with Britain against the Soviet Union. Hitler’s vision had been for Germany to be the dominant power on mainland Europe and Britain to be the world’s dominant sea power, via the British Empire. In 1940, however, Winston Churchill had smashed any possibility of an Anglo—Nazi partnership. So deeply felt was the sense of outrage … that it still rankled with former Nazis after the war. Some years ago, one former member of the SS greeted me … ‘How could it ever have happened?’ Thinking that he was referring to the extermination of the Jews, I replied that I was glad he felt so badly about the crime. ‘I don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘I mean who could it have ever happened that Britain and Germany ended up fighting each other? It’s a tragedy. You lost your Empire, my country was devastated, and Stalin conquered eastern Europe.’” (236). As WWII neared to an end, Himmler, who was very opportunistic, offered “[a] million Jews for 10,000 trucks” to raise money for the Nazi war effort. While some Jews were allowed by the Nazis to escape to freedom in exchange for much money, the vast majority of them remained in concentration camps. Rees notes that while it may be surprising to think that the Nazis were willing to release some of the Jews, it should be remembered that their initial vision of a Germany free of Jews involved robbing them of their valuables and exiling them permanently. News of the concentration and death camps eventually reached the outside world. While their actions drew much condemnation, little action was undertaken. While it was proposed for Auschwitz to be bombed, the entire idea was overturned due to the authorities believing that doing so wasn’t worth the effort. Rees details that even if Auschwitz was bombed, the Holocaust would have continued, seeing the existence of gas chambers like “The Little White House” and “The Little Red House” that were mentioned by the Auschwitz Protocols to be enough to continue the extermination. Rees describes that as 1944 entered the summer, “Instead of 10,000 people being killed every day the number dropped to an overall daily average of fewer than 1,500, and continued at around that level until November and the closing of the crematoria. Therefore the conclusion must be that, far from saving ‘many’ of the ‘six million,’ any bombing of the camp initiated by the requests in the summer of 1944 would have saved no one. In fact, because of collateral damage to the barracks only meters from the crematoria it would probably have killed hundreds of the very prisoners the raid was designed to save.” (246-7). The idea that the Allied Powers could drop guns into Auschwitz to incite revolt is likely to be met with failure if it was undertaken, seeing the malnourishment of the prisoners. Furthermore, Rees details that Britain knew the exact details of the Nazi concentration and death camps by the beginning of 1943 yet refused to loosen its immigration policy to alleviate the severity of the situation for some Jews. Auschwitz also housed gypsies, who were viewed with disdain by the Nazis. A section of “Birkenau had been used since February 1943 to accommodate (at its peak) about 23,000 gypsy men and women. They were allowed to live as families and wear their own clothes, and did not have their hair shaved. Conditions in the gypsy camp, however, soon became among the worst in Auschwitz. Overcrowding combined with lack of food and water meant that disease was rife, particularly typhus and the skin disease called noma, and many thousands died. Altogether, 20,000 of the 23,000 gypsies sent to Auschwitz died there, whether of disease or starvation, or in the gas chambers when the gypsy camp was eventually liquidated … the gypsies suffered more than any other group under the Third Reich apart from the Jews. There is no accurate statistic for the number of gypsies killed by the Nazis, but between a quarter and half a million are thought to have perished.” (248). Rees details that Nazi treatment of gypsies, however loathsome, were quite inconsistent, seeing how gypsies in the Soviet Union were slain alongside Jews by the Einsatzgruppen while in Romania they were largely mistreated. As expected, the Nazis hated the gypsies due to their race. The gypsy camp at Auschwitz was liquidated on August 3, 1944. A gypsy who witnessed the liquidation witnessed “gypsy children … smashed against the side of trucks and heard automatic machine gun fire and pistol shots. He saw the gypsies fight back with whatever makeshift weapons they could find—often spoons or knives—but soon they were overwhelmed … That night, 2,879 were taken to crematorium 4 and gassed. Their bodies were burned in open pits nearby.” (251).
Rees detailed that the only flowers in Auschwitz were outside the crematoria. This was to introduce a state of calm into the victims, as people usually associate flowers with happiness and freedom. Rees tellingly comments, “The doutches like this—flowers in the window boxes of the crematorium—are what raise the killing process that the Nazis devised above mere brutality to a level of cynicism as yet unsurpassed in the so-called ‘civilized’ world.” (256). Knowing that they would be put to death soon, seeing how the gassings were mostly finished by that point, the Sonderkommando of crematorium 4 revolted at 1:30 P.M. on Saturday, October 7. “Armed with pickaxes and rocks, they attacked the SS guards as they came toward them and then set fire to the crematorium. After a few minutes of hand-to-hand fighting with the SS men, some Sonderkommando managed to escape into the nearby woods and reached the village of Rajsko beyond, but they were still trapped as they remained within the Auschwitz Zone of Interest. Meanwhile, the Sonderkommando in crematorium 2 also rose against the SS men and shoved one of the guards, alive, into the lit ovens. About 250 members of the Sonderkommando were killed during the ensuing struggle … All of those who escaped were later captured and shot, along with others suspected of involvement in the revolt—a total of 200 more people. Three SS members died as a consequence of the Sonderkommando action that day. But the revolt did save some lives,” as some of the prisoners who were selected for death were told to leave the waiting areas of the gas chambers when the news of the revolt reached the authorities (257). In November of 1944, the Hungarian regime relinquished more Jews: “tens of thousands of Jews from Budapest were forced out of the city and made to trek west to Austria, marching without food through rain and snow. The sight of this pitiful column appalled even hardened SS officers, and Eichmann was told to halt the deportations. He instead worked around the order and carried on, earning the vilification of representatives of neutral countries who observed the suffering.” (258). There were still more than 100,000 Jews in Budapest who were planned by the Nazis to undergo the same thing, but the war situation quickly changed for the worse for the Nazis: when the end came, it came rapidly.
Auschwitz and other concentration camps, when liberated, didn't receive much press. Although people were horrified to see what had occurred, including the Russian soldiers who acted as the liberators, WWII was so tumultuous and brutal that their names were just honorable mentions. Furthermore, the Soviet government at the time was totalitarian as well, seeing how Stalin possessed absolute power and had many Soviet civilians sent to Gulags (labor camps) and executed on bogus charges. When the Nazis heard the Russians approaching, they forced most of the prisoners to go on a forced march where many perished from exhaustion, the elements, and the cruelty of the guards. The prisoners would usually be sent to another concentration camp where they would be held in continuous captivity. Unfortunately, some prisoners who survived months or even years of captivity lost their lives before the Allies came, seeing how no human is indestructible. 20,000 of the prisoners of Auschwitz were sent to Bergen-Belsen, a camp that was infamous for footage shot there that showed the emaciated frames of prisoners and masses of corpses lying in disorganized heaps. Many died at Bergen-Belsen due to starvation and a lack of space that encouraged the spread of disease: by the end of 1944 there were around 15,000 inmates and when the British liberated the area in April 1945 there were 60,000. The conditions were so terrible in Bergen-Belsen that some people went insane. If there is a silver lining, it was that the prisoners at Bergen-Belsen were liberated on April 15, 1945. In one especially heartrending instant, twin sisters who had survived Auschwitz were torn apart when they were rescued, as both of them were so weak they were barely alive. They were separated by the soldiers of the British army who wanted to give them medical care—their names were Alice and Edith. Alice, upon recovering, “tried to trace Edith through the Red Cross … but she heard nothing—not, that is, until fifty-three years after her sister’s disappearance when she discovered in the records of Bergen-Belsen that an Edith Schwartz had died on June 2, 1945 … So, after a fifty-three-year wait—fifty-three years in which every time the phone rang or every time a letter was delivered Alice had prayed it was news of Edith—having endured all this emotional suffering, she discovered that her sister had lived for only a few days after they had parted. Alice had protected her sister through the deportation from Hungary and Auschwitz, on the death march and amidst the starvation and disease of Bergen-Belsen, but in the end the Nazis had still killed her. ‘Liberation came too late for you, my beloved sister,’ wrote Alice in a poem shortly after she learned the news of Edith’s death. ‘How could they do it? How? Why?’” (268). As the war drew to a painful close, Himmler tried to make himself appear more favorable by releasing 1,200 Jews in exchange for money. Indeed, by that time Germany was finished, as even some leading Nazis disobeyed Hitler’s direct commands: on April 21 the Red Army had reached Berlin. Previously, “Hitler ordered SS General Felix Steiner to make a counter-attack against the soldiers of Marshal Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front who were advancing through the capital’s northern suburbs. Steiner refused. ‘When the order came in,’ says Franz Riedweg, General Steiner’s adjutant, ‘he said, ‘I will not launch another attack on this Russian avalanche. I’d be sending men to their death. I won’t sacrifice my troops for a senseless command.’ When he heard of Steiner’s refusal, Hitler shouted and screamed in the worst display of anger that anyone in the bunker had ever seen. The SS had deserted him. All that was left to do now, he said openly, was for him to take his own life.” (269-70).
Himmler’s proposal for a partial surrender was rejected, and when Hitler learned that Himmler had tried to negotiate an armistice, he was further outraged. Hitler committed suicide by gunshot “just before 3:30 P.M. on April 30, 1945, as Red Army soldiers approached the German parliament building, the Reichstag. He died leaving a political testimony composed the previous night—one which blamed the Jews for causing the war. Hitler died as he had lived, consumed with hatred for all Jewish people, and without a hint of remorse … it was the Führer who was consistent to the end in his fanatical hatred of the Jews. He was the most ideologically driven of all the leading Nazis.” (270-1). Himmler ordered the top SS officials to go into hiding, seeing that there was no hope for victory, including Höss. Himmler committed suicide two weeks after giving the order, dying on May 23 when he was detained by the Allied Powers: before he died, he was genuinely shocked they viewed him negatively, as he thought his actions were justified. It should be pointed out that the Soviets, though being liberators in a sense, were also immoral and cruel: they had experienced so much while fighting the Nazis that they had been utterly brutalized, and decided to celebrate their victory by not only stealing from the populations they came across but also raping and killing people for sport as well. Overall, it is certain that at least hundreds of thousands of women were raped by Russian soldiers, including prisoners who had survived the Nazis. Upon the end of the war, Stalin ordered for Russian POWs to be executed, sent into exile, or forced into Gulags as punishment for “betraying the motherland”: a Russian nurse who was captured in 1942 and spent two-and-a-half years imprisoned by the Nazis was sentenced to six years in a Gulag and subsequent lifetime exile in Siberia. In another instance, Pavel Stenkin was a Russian soldier who survived Auschwitz who was sent to a Gulag by Soviet judges who went through his case quickly because they had tickets to a theatre performance that night. “Only in 1953, with the death of Stalin, was Stenkin released. He was one of more than a million Soviet soldiers who were imprisoned twice—once by the Germans and once by their fellow countrymen.” (274). Stories like these clearly demonstrate that the Allied Powers did their fair share of misdeeds, especially considering how Stalin was the destroyer of tens of millions of his countrymen before, during, and after WWII. In another example, after the war Stalin deported 100,000 Kalymks from the steppe land south of Stalingrad to Siberia due to not fighting the Germans hard enough. He forced this fate on other ethnic groups, and he banished more than a million Soviet citizens due to feeling suspicious of them. As Rees summarized, “In May 1945 most of eastern Europe swapped one cruel dictator for another— stark reality that was to impact on many of the Auschwitz survivors as they tried to return home.” (275). The survivors of concentration camps, not just Auschwitz, were unfortunately usually ostracized by their communities upon their return due to bigotry and continued fanaticism, seeing how most people really didn't learn anything from Hitler’s demented anti-semitism. After the war, a young man (Josho) and his father were betrayed by their former friends (who were Christians), seen in how they stole their valuables that they promised to safeguard while they were gone. Then, Josho and his father were beaten up by a group of thirty young people, including a friend of Josho. Ironically, Josho had given his former friend bread, yet that didn't stop him from being pummelled. The mob screamed that they deserved to be punished due to their being Jewish, as they claimed that Jewish people supposedly persecuted the Christians (though, in reality, the Christians were the ones doing the vast majority of the persecuting—most of the Nazis were devout Roman Catholics, such as Hitler, Himmler, and Höss, who believed that the Judeo-Christian god desired the Holocaust to occur). The mob then threw Josho and his father into the police station. The police, instead of aiding them, beat them up. Toivi Blatt faced anti-semitism after the war, as people continued to loathe him for merely being Jewish. While he became financially successful in the United States, he returned to visit his home town of Izbica in the early 1990s, only to realize again that he was not welcome due to his religion. Sometime later, when Toivi entered the house he was raised in, the man who was living there thought that he was the archetypal stereotype of the greedy Jew and told him “‘You have come for the hidden money,’” “‘We could divide it—50 percent for you and 50 percent for me.’ Furious, Toivi Blatt left the house without a backward glance. There is a fitting postscript to this story—one that deserves a place in a morality tale. When he next returned to Izbica, Toivi passed by his old house and saw the place in ruins. He went to his neighbors and asked them what had happened. ‘Oh, Mr. Blatt,’ they said, ‘when you left we were unable to sleep because day and night he was looking for the treasure you were supposed to have hidden. He took the floor apart, the walls apart, everything. And later he found himself in the situation that he couldn’t fix it—it would cost too much money. And so now it’s a ruin.’” (281).
If there is one aspect of hope and human goodness regarding this sad affair, there is the treatment of the Danish Jews: they were welcomed home. As for Groening, he was transferred to a front-line unit in 1944. “After being wounded and sent to a field hospital, he rejoined his unit before it eventually surrendered to the British on June 1945, 10. Once the SS members were in captivity, the British handed questionnaires to all of them. Groening then realized that, as he puts it, ‘involvement in the concentration camp of Auschwitz would have a negative response’ and so he ‘tried not to draw attention to it.’ He wrote on the form that he had worked for the SS Economic and Administration office in Berlin. He did this not because he was suddenly overcome with a sense of shame about what had happened in Auschwitz, but because ‘the victor’s always right and we knew that the things that happened there [in Auschwitz] did not always comply with human rights.’” (283-4). Groening was briefly imprisoned in an old Nazi concentration camp before being shipped to England in 1946 as a forced laborer who enjoyed a comfortable life. He traveled with the YMCA for four months before returning to Germany in 1947. Once at home, he realized that he couldn’t go back to his previous occupation of banker due to his membership in the SS, so he became a member of a glass factory. Once, his father and his parents-in-law casually mentioned once over a dinner that due to how he was at Auschwitz, he could be a murderer. Groening, infuriated, ordered them never to speak of it again. When it came to retribution for what had occurred during the Holocaust, some Jews took vengeance into their own hands, murdering those they believed to be associated with the Nazis. Adolf Eichmann escaped from prosecution but was later hunted down by Jews and was brought to Jerusalem, where he was hanged. Höss was caught when his wife was imprisoned on March 8, 1946 and interrogated. That is, she was told that if she didn't reveal where her husband was, her three sons would be sent to Siberia. She cracked and revealed that Höss was living on a farm at Gottruepel near Flensburg. Höss was caught unaware and utterly exposed, as he was in his pajamas. Tellingly, he was sleeping in a stable that was also a slaughterhouse, giving some symbolic credence to the wantonness of the oppression of all sentient life, not just humans. Höss got what he deserved by being beaten by those who had come to arrest him, though he wasn’t assaulted for the rest of his captivity. Höss was forced to go back to Auschwitz in 1947 and was locked in the basement of the building that housed his former office. Höss was later sentenced to death for crimes against humanity and was executed in front of only a few people (the rest of them were tricked into thinking Höss was somewhere else, as the officials were worried they would lynch him on the spot if they knew his location). Höss was hanged, and an authority who took part in Höss’s trial stated the following: “‘According to me Höss should’ve been put in a cage and been driven all around Europe so that people could see him—so people could spit on him, so that it would get to him what he did.’ But the intriguing question is this: Would what he had done ever have ‘got to’ Höss? All the clues in his autobiography, which he completed just before his execution, point one way: All the humiliation and mistreatment in the world would never have caused Höss to search into his heart and think—fundamentally—that what he did was wrong. Of course, he does say in his autobiography that he ‘now’ sees that the extermination of the Jews was a mistake—but only a tactical one—because it has drawn the hatred of the world upon Germany … one single paragraph in Höss’s memories offers the strongest clue as to what he really felt at the end … Höss justified his actions by simplistic comparison—the Allies killed women and children by bombing, the Nazis killed women and children by gassing … One former member of the SS, who refused to be interviewed formally, went so far as to say in a casual conversation with me: ‘The children who died in our gas chambers suffered less than the children who died in your fire bombing of German cities.’” (291). Oskar Groening said the following: “We saw how bombs were dropped on Germany, and women and children died in firestorms … the Holocaust was part of the fight against the warmongers and part of our battle for freedom.” (291).
Of course, the comparison between bombing cities and gassing people is very inaccurate, seeing how the former is mostly tactical while the latter is done out of bigotry and prejudice. People like Höss, due to their beliefs that genocide was the equivalent of strategy, are very unlikely to feel any remorse for their actions, no matter how callous and destructive. Thus, Rees concludes that “no matter how Höss was treated—even if he had been paraded around ‘in a cage’ as Stanislaw Hantz wanted—he would never have regretted what he had done … he is most likely to have walked up the steps to the gallows with two thoughts in his head: ‘I die not because of my crimes, but because we lost the war; and I die a much misunderstood man.’ Ultimately, that is why such an outwardly nondescript person as Höss is such a terrifying figure.” (293). Groening later became the manager of the factory he was working in and then a judge of industrial tribunal cases: he gave thanks to the SS and the Hitler Youth due to their instilling in him discipline from the age of twelve that made him fit for his jobs. When it was discovered he had worked at Auschwitz (he made no attempt to hide or even change his name), he was let off, as he wasn’t directly involved in the killing process. As Rees notes, “Indeed, out of the 6,500 or so members of the SS who worked at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945 and who are thought to have survived the war, only approximately 750 ever received punishment of any kind.” (295). Overall, the Cold War hampered the trials that the SS should have been subjected to, seeing how the US and the Soviet Union were mainly focused on defeating each other rather than enacting any kind of justice. Consequently, “About 85 percent of the SS members who served at Auschwitz and survived the war escaped scot-free.” (296). Groening feels little guilt involving his time in Auschwitz, as he claimed that life involves competition and that each person is responsible for their own fate (though what the innumerable victims of Auschwitz could’ve done to save themselves is questionable, given the circumstances) and that one shouldn’t care about others too much, as that is weakness. Groening, despite his role in Auschwitz, maintained to Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers that the Holocaust did occur. After stating that the Holocaust wasn’t a hoax, he was bombarded by fanatics who maintained that Auschwitz was never a killing center. Groening, probably surprised yet annoyed, “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.’” (297). Rees acknowledges that although people like to believe in a just and fair world, this isn’t the case, seeing how those most responsible for atrocities as horrid as the Holocaust usually went either unpunished or enjoyed swift deaths (a clear contrast to many of their victims) while the victims themselves were frequently ostracized, bullied, financially and emotionally ruined, sentenced to further captivity (ex. gulags), or silenced. Thus, the unfairness of the world has turned many Holocaust survivors into atheists. One of them, Linda Breder, states that conditions were so terrible in Auschwitz that there was no way God could exist, seeing that if he does, he’s a monster for allowing such places to merely exist. Rees provides the following statistics: “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 Auschwitz (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 (26,611), Belgium (24,906), Yugoslavia (10,000), and Italy (7,422) … 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.” (298). Rees concludes his book with the following sentences, which should be remembered by all: “Soon the last survivor and the last perpetrator from Auschwitz will have joined those who were murdered at the camp … there is a danger that this history will merge into the distant past and become just one terrible event among many … 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.” (298-9).
Personal thoughts:
Auschwitz by Laurence Rees is a phenomenal book. Not only does it contain a massive number of testimonies from a variety of invaluable sources, but it also contains a huge amount of detail. It is to be greatly appreciated that Rees writes calmly for the entirety of the text, which is an achievement in and of itself, seeing how genocide is (rightly) viewed as abhorrent in today’s society. And this leads to the next point: Rees’ ability to portray Auschwitz as run by many regularly normal (though deeply indoctrinated) individuals demonstrates the danger of fanaticism and insensitivity. As Bertrand Russell once noted, knowledge without love can be devastating, and this is encapsulated pretty well with the legacy the Nazis left behind. This book is emotionally exhausting due to all its devastating information, yet it should be read by all, for there is much to learn from it, with one of the foremost lessons being the importance of mutual respect, tolerance, kindness, understanding, and cooperation, as well as the shunning of things like wrath, hatred, scapegoating, prejudice, fanaticism, and premeditated wicked actions. While many readers will be quick to judge those who participated in the killing process of Auschwitz and other concentration camps as being inhuman, it should be remembered that they were, for the most part, humans at the end of the day, just like you and me. Thus, looking at it from their perspective is important, as when one recognizes one’s own potential for evil, innate biases, and prejudices, they can work against them to better themselves. In my opinion, those in the future will probably view those in the present as guilty of some massive misdemeanor. After all, many Nazis were unable to understand how committing genocide could be wrong. I highly recommend Auschwitz to anyone interested in the Holocaust, the banality of evil, psychology, WWII, the danger of fanaticism and hard-heartedness, and human potential, whether it be good or bad.
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