Hirler's Furies: A Review

The same day that I put up my last post, Women and National Socialism, I received my copy of Wendy Lower’s new book, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. Lower is an academic historian with appointments in the USA and in Germany. Since the early 1990s she has been doing research on the subject of women’s positions under the Nazis. Her work is quite illuminating. She makes the interesting point that after WWI there was a “baby boom” in Germany similar to that of post-WWII. A large cohort of children was growing up as the Nazis were cementing their bases during the late 1920s. By the time Hitler came to full dictatorial power in 1933-4 this group was entering teen years; at the beginning of the war in 1939 they were young adults, already primed for playing specific roles for the war effort. For the boys this primarily meant being drafted into the Wehrmacht, the German army. Youth groups led by members of the National Socialist were begun in the 1920 under the general name of Hitler Youth. The branch of the organization specifically for girls was called The League of German Girls in the Hitler Youth. Once Hitler was in power all other youth groups were forbidden: their alternatives were to close down or to amalgamate with the existing Nazi groups. (Catholic youth groups were exempt as part of the concordat signed with papal authorities.) Most other groups aligned themselves with Hitler Youth. In 1936 participation was made compulsory.

A young girl's introduction to Hitler Youth came at age 10. Until 14 she belonged to the Young Girl’s League. From 14-18 she was enrolled in the League proper. Later a third group was initiated on a voluntary basis for young women aged 18-21. Membership was dependent upon German ethnicity and an absence of hereditary diseases. Many activities of the League were similar to those of youth groups established in other societies: skills training, exercise, camping experiences, and so on. This particular organization, however, from its restrictive criteria of selection to its ideological underpinnings and values, had as its purpose the shaping of German youth to participate in the already articulated goals of expansion in the east through wars of conquest, and, the complete eradication of groups deemed harmful to the Aryan nation: Jews, “Gypsies,” homosexuals, black, and mentally or physically disabled people.

In the six years between the coming of Hitler to power and the beginning of the war, young Germans were inculcated with the tenets of their new national “religion” of National Socialism. Hitler was promoted as the long dreamed of “Messiah” who would restore the people to the glory and paramount position of Germanic myth, poetry and opera. Masses congregated for Goebbels’s orchestrated extravaganzas of German patriotism and adoration of their leader. His passionate speeches left no one in doubt of the earnestness of his hatred of the Jews, his intention to rid the German nation of their presence and influence, and of his ambition to claim lands in the east as the rightful patrimony of Germany. The influence of any religious or ideological training upon young people varies considerably with the individuals undergoing it. Some are swept up by its power, becoming acolytes, even fanatics in its service. Others absorb and are influenced by its tenets though these are balanced more or less by countervailing strains within the larger society. Still others are observant participants but inwardly are less affected by its values. As Germany geared for war throughout the second half of the 1930s, young people were trained physically and mentally for their particular participation.

Successful outcomes of the Nazi war effort clearly required the involvement of this cohort. Young men of 18 or older were drafted into the army, extending the military-like trainings they had been receiving for years. Women were not expected to be or wanted as soldiers. They were needed to serve in the “helping” roles traditionally reserved for women: clerks, typists, secretaries, and nurses. In these roles within Germany but even more so in the conquered lands to the east, German women assisted and facilitated the genocide perpetrated not only by the SS but by the administration of the government at all levels. Women guards or Kapos in the concentration camps have received some notoriety for the criminal abuses of women prisoners, but Lower’s book shines a light on the vast array of women in more pedestrian roles who for various reasons of their own, were fully complicit in murder and genocide.

The clearest example is that of nurses. The so-called “euthanasia” program that was implemented first in Germany required a cadre of nurses to collect and accompany, sometimes to select, patients in hospitals or long-term institutions for death by gassing in vans or by injection. The women who took on these roles did so voluntarily. They were administered an oath of secrecy about the program and their activities. It was made clear that their own lives would be forfeited if the oath was broken. Between December, 1939 and January, 1940 close to 10,000 people considered “defective” in some manner were murdered at a centre established near Stuttgart. In concentration camps and other settings nurses were used to assist with medical experiments and with forced sterilizations. Between 1933 and 1939 roughly 320,000 sterilizations were performed on non-Aryan men and women, people branded “asocial,” or ethnic German people who were believed to carry some genetic defect. The “State Health Offices” and “Departments for Gene and Race Care” that were responsible for the selection and operations on these people were heavily staffed by women. Another function of the nurses and administrators of these and other institutions was to report abnormalities found during pregnancies or in babies after birth. Forced abortions or the “disappearance” of a disabled child would result.

Women who filled the roles of administrators or secretaries in settings in the east knew about, witnessed, and/or participated in mass killings. Being a secretary became an alternative for young women who earlier in the century would have laboured mainly in domestic or agricultural settings. Also, taking opportunities to travel was easier for that generation as from 1934 girls and women between 17 and 25 were expected to leave their homes and to do a year of service on a farm or in a factory. When the war began an extra six months of auxiliary war service was added to this period. These women had already experienced a way of life separate from their own communities so were readied to respond when appeals for women to serve in the east were broadcast. The pay levels, though not high, were superior to those in factories or on farms. The women were also motivated by a sense of adventure and by the idea put forward that they would be contributing to the war efforts.

At least 10,000 young women took up secretarial positions in the east. There they were inserted into the structures of the state and of the industrial machinery that organized and implemented the forced removal of various populations from their homes and land, the creation of ghettos for Jews, deportations  to concentration, labour, and death camps.  They provided support services for the SS groups that conducted mass killing. As clerks they documented names and other details of victims for information and statistical offices in Berlin. According to Lower, the Reich’s military auxiliary service had some five hundred thousand women occupying support service roles in the army, air force, and navy. Two hundred thousand of these were sent to the occupied territories. In their various roles women were witnesses to atrocities perpetrated on the subject populations. Some were by their functions made complicit in these acts; some actively sought opportunities to aid the state-sanctioned “eradication of its natural enemies.”

Lower provides testimonies, documents, and letters of women who spoke out as witnesses after the war about the scenes that they had observed, as well as the evidence given about particular women who used their positions of privilege over prisoners or ghettoed people to criminal advantage. However, the vast majority of women who participated in supportive or direct roles in atrocities against subject people, slid at the end of the war back into anonymity. Prosecutors in all countries and at all levels concentrated mainly on the men who had led criminal organizations or who had had positions of command at the hundreds of camps throughout Europe. Few women were brought to trial and of these only three were executed. Others received prison sentences though the majority was either overlooked or acquitted.

Before the reunification of Germany in the early 1990s much of the scholarship with respect to the roles of women under the Nazis was polarized between two academics: Gisela Bock contended that the Nazi hierarchy in its control of all aspects of reproduction had oppressed and victimized all the women of its society. Claudia Koonz, however, argued that Aryan women were not victimized by their locations but rather were “motherly accomplices” of the Reich. Since that time, especially with records from formerly Soviet-dominated eastern countries made available, researchers have advocated a methodology based less on generalizations. Lower’s work is a good example of research focused on the lived experience of particular women set within a context of the economic and ideological realities of the time.

The experience of that vast group of women in the middle zone: those who clearly knew about and in some fashion agreed with the criminal activities being perpetrated before and during the war, both in the east and within Germany itself, has yet to be understood. There are over-arching themes such as the historic paucity of democratic institutions in Germany, and, the insufficiently rooted humanist ideals within a society undergoing rapid change from the time its inception as a nation in 1870-1, through the disasters of WWI and the economic breakdown of the 1930s. The age-old question: “What were you doing during the war, daddy?” has yet to be taken to the women of that generation. Because of the reluctance of people in post-war Germany to speak openly of their locations much of that history has been lost. But like the individual witnesses or perpetrators to whom Lower has given voice, the women who have maintained anonymity will have left traces of their experiences, thoughts and feelings. These may be imbedded in the memories of their children, or in letters or other documents left within their families.

In my own brief recent travel in Eastern Europe I found that talking with people whom I came upon by chance about their own or their families’ experiences, gave me a small taste of the complexity of these issues. The war ended almost 70 years ago but its aftermath is far from resolved. In the USA the civil war is an even more remote historical event but it clearly remains a major element at all political, economic, and societal levels. For me an important question remains less, “Who was complicit during the reign of terror in the east?” than, “What allowed so many to go along with, to turn a ‘blind eye’ to the clearly reprehensible crimes against humanity being perpetrated?” as well as, “How did they explain these things to themselves after the war?” – i.e., how did they manage to live with themselves?

One further thought: if we look closely into any period or country where there has been clear violations of human rights and, indeed, crimes against humanity or genocide, we will always find evidence of the involvement of women in similar ways to those documented by Lower and those that I question. We have no further to look for proof than the acknowledged involvement of women social workers, teachers, religious women, various levels of administration, and a general ideological bent among the general public which allowed what are now being termed either "genocide" or "crimes against humanity" perpetrated over the past centuries against our own native peoples.

Women and National Socialism

I am interested in looking at the positions and roles of women during the period of National Socialism in Germany. I have not come across much in relation to this issue. There are particular groupings about whom there are some writings. For example, there are many survivor stories written by women that give details of the treatment they received in concentration, forced labour, or death camps at the hands of female Kapos, guards, or SS members. There are biographies available of some of the women who were arrested as war criminals for their roles in the camps. There are also stories of women prisoners bonding with one another in ways that allowed them to survive intolerable situations. I have not yet seen anything though that attempts an integration of these locations within the landscape of the world created by the National Socialists.

From the reading I have been doing, it seems clear that German women were generally relegated to a role of traditional domesticity: have lots of babies for the future of the Aryan race and take care of the men and the household. Of course a general tenor and ideology do not reveal the actual lived experience of, in this case, the women of the period. As in all western societies in the early 20^th century the roles and possibilities for women in Germany were becoming more diverse. In 1929 Elsa Herrmann published a book entitled, ”This Is The New Woman,” which described new positions for women in the more experimental Weimar period. Herrmann viewed “the new woman” in much the ways that other women of that period were beginning to articulate in, for example, England and the United States. To her the “woman of yesterday” was entirely focused on the future: to marry, have children, support her husband’s ventures in profitable ways, and see her sons settled in their careers and her daughters well-married. The “woman of today,” Herrmann states, lives entirely in the present, refusing to see herself either a means to the success of others or as dependent upon parents or husbands. Rather, “the new women has set herself the goal of proving in her work and deeds that the representatives of the female sex are not second class persons existing only in dependence and obedience but are fully capable of satisfying the demands of their positions in life.”

Herrmann’s brave words were a reflection of the undoubtedly increased possibilities for German women in the Weimar Republic. Women were elected to the Reichstag and were prominent in all cultural arenas. However, with the advent of National Socialism these nascent developments were aborted. In 1926, three years before the publication of Herrmann’s book, a Nazi activist, Elizabeth Zander wrote an article for the National Socialist’s organ The Volkischer Beobachter entitled, “Tasks Facing the German Woman.” Her over-heated prose articulates the roles of mother and help-mate to men favoured by the male-dominated, highly conservative Nazi hierarchy. Some examples: “We women must, through our quiet, honest work, inspire the German male to do noble things once more! The German women shall and must again be worth sacrificing for.” Moreover, “German youth demands the careful hand of the mother, needs her kind, understanding eye when the great desire shines forth from the eyes of youth: ‘German mothers, lead us to the pure heights of truth.’” Some of the “heights of truth” to be taught: clean living, “as strength lies only in purity,” and, learning to love one’s people above all means also learning to hate all the enemies of one’s people. Be pure and learn how to hate: a singular agenda for mothers with their children!

In his book “The Germans” Gordon A. Craig dedicates a chapter on the roles of women in Germany over the centuries. He writes about the negative effect of the above positions given to women during WWII on the war effort itself. In 1943 Albert Speer, the minister of armaments and munitions twice made a case for mobilizing the approximately five million German women then available for war work but who were doing none. Foreign, mainly slave labourers were utilized in the armament plants throughout Germany and German held territories. The conditions under which they were held and their natural resistance to aiding the German cause significantly undermined the efficacy of their work. Speer recognized that German women could be utilized to much greater benefit in these roles, and moreover, could release up to three million German male workers for military service. On both occasions his proposals met strong opposition from other senior Nazis who convinced Hitler that factory work “would inflict physical and moral harm upon German women and damage their psychic and emotional life and possibly their potential as mothers.” Speer’s proposals were denied.

Last night I saw Haifaa Al-Mansour’s film Wadjda, set and filmed in present day Saudi Arabia. Wadjda, a ten-year old girl with a spirit and mind of her own, enters a Koran contest at her school with the goal of buying a bicycle with the prize money. The story line is fairly straightforward but the power of the film comes from the clear depiction of the circumscribed lives of girls and women in this society built entirely on the supremacy of men. Women and girls labour under the black (sun absorbing) coverings that hide faces and bodies in the public domain. Women do not drive – and are thus dependent upon the availability and humours of the men who drive them, and, girls do not ride bicycles -- that physical experience could in some fashion damage their “virginity,” or harm their ability to have children.  As in National Socialist German a dominant ideology frames the roles of men and women in ways that favour the freedom of men as it limits that of women.

In any society and in any period women have many locations. In Germany during the period dominated by the National Socialists the position described briefly above is but one held by essentially middle-class women. As I have said at the beginning of this post, I aim to look more closely at the lives of these women and of others who were subjected to the ideologies of National Socialism in other ways and at what their locations reveal with respect to power and the uses of power.

A Question and a Comment

Yesterday a question and a comment were left on Facebook for me in regard to my blog. The question was: what has being at the sites of the Holocaust meant to me; the comment: nothing that you are writing about is relevant or new. I will address both of these in today’s post.

Particular sites, most especially at Auschwitz, but also the Wannsee site of the infamous conference, and Sachsenhausen concentration camp, affected me in a physical/emotional manner that is not easily articulated. The word “evil” is used in so many contexts and ways that I hesitate to employ it, though I don’t have a readily available alternative. Actually being in those places, standing right in those locations where, for example in the case of the Wannsee house, a group of men coolly organized the infrastructure for the murder of millions of their fellow creatures, and then sat down to a convivial lunch with wine, I was struck dumb, chilled through and through with the horror and the magnitude of their crimes. I often have a sense of people, histories, and even places as holograms. “Being” there meant to me a form of actually “being” there with those men, with those events, in that époque. I absorbed their essence in some manner, felt the fanaticism (of some), the fears and/or doubts (again of some), and the ambition, power drives, and excitement (perhaps of many). Walking alone around the house, looking at the photos taken by the ever-present Nazi photographers, reading about the background and the eventual history of each of the participants,  and seeing photos and stories of people quickly and directly affected by the results of their deliberations, took me powerfully into the event itself.

This kind of immediate and visceral experience happened again at Sachsenhausen and at Auschwitz. On both occasions I could say little, as I was flooded by the images and the stories of the prisoners who had been incarcerated, tortured, experimented with, humiliated in every conceivable fashion, and in the main, murdered. Though I already knew a great deal of detail from previous readings, I was utterly unprepared for the power of the experience of being there, a dumb witness to the agony of their lives and deaths. Writing the blog as I went through our day-to-day itinerary, I could only describe what we had seen and learned. I did a bit of writing for myself about how I was feeling but didn’t include this in the blog, partly because I wasn’t clear enough in myself about it, and partly because I didn’t want the blog to be about me. We were travelling every third day, setting up in at a new hotel, in a new city, getting ready to meet with new people and to visit new places. My focus was on staying steady in the present and to continue to report on what we were doing and learning.

So that is a bit of an answer to the question of how the trip has affected me. There is, of course, much more, some of which I am only discovering as I go along. I know that I want to continue in some fashion, still not entirely clear to me, to learn and to work with my own particular interests in this profound historical experience.

With respect to the comment that was made that my writing is neither relevant nor anything new: I’m not too clear about the relevant part. It would have to be relevant to some particular question or area that was not specified, so I don’t think I can say much about relevance. As to its not being anything new, that everything that I am writing about has already been said by others, in the main I would agree with that statement. In fact in many of my posts I am giving a summary of things written in the past, for example, my many posts on the excellent Atlas of the Holocaust by Martin Gilbert. I began the post some weeks before we left for Europe as a preparation for myself as well as an introduction to anyone reading it who would be interested in this kind of overview of the terrain. As I have gone along I have also included the thoughts or arguments of authors that I have come across while away or since returning. Each of these have in some way been enlightening for me as I try to flesh out lacunae in my own knowledge or understanding of events. I don’t have and never have had a particular agenda for the blog. I wanted to go to these places and I wanted to write about them. That’s all. I knew that some people would be interested and would want to read about what I was doing, and, that some people would not want to read my posts for personal reasons, or, because they would find them unenlightening. All of that is fine with me.

The question that is with me now is where I go from here. That is not clear to me yet. I only know that I want to continue to learn and to study and to reflect on this period of history and what it has meant to our world and to our century because clearly issues of hatred and genocide remain with us. Thanks to all and any who have shown interest in my writing and to any who have taken the time to question or to comment upon it.

Hoss and Eichmann: The Suppression of Conscience

I have been reading a section of the “autobiography” of Rudolph Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz from its earliest days as a “protective custody,” i.e., concentration camp for Polish intellectuals. He remained at Auschwitz until November, 1943 when he was posted to Oranienburg, Germany to head the administration of all of the Nazi concentration camps. In 1944, however, he returned to Auschwitz to oversee the murder of the Hungarian Jews, a project that lasted about four months, tasking the facilities that he had developed at Auschwitz to their utmost. Hoess wrote his memories of his time at Auschwitz after he had been found guilty as a war criminal and sentenced to death. His testimony is of value because it has provided considerable detail about the development and day-to-day functioning of the camp over the several years of its existence. It is also an apologia aimed at explaining some  of his own inner processes as he co-operated and took initiative in creating and administering probably the greatest centre for murder in the history of the world.

Hoess does not attempt to deny the things he was accused of. On the contrary, he outlines in detail the stages by which his camp became ever more efficient in its “extermination” activities. None of this is written with bravado, however. The tone is rather confiding – this is what you want to know, so I am sharing it with you. It is also liberally laced with complaints about the people with whom he was forced to work, people who, for example, insisted on placing criminals as Kapos over the prisoners, rather than “politicals,” who would have been less violent, more co-operative with the other prisoners and so might have set a better, more positive tone in the camp, facilitating the work that he needed to extract from his inmates. He whines about the amount of work with which he was constantly burdened just to build and put into operation the facilities demanded by his ultimate boss, Heinrich Himmler. Hoess contends that these demands, and I have no doubt they were considerable, prevented him from having a closer daily overview of the condition of the prisoners and the ways that they were abused by his subordinates.

Overall the tone of his writing is that of a good guy who was placed in a difficult position, who did the best he could under the circumstances to live up to the expectations of his superiors, and who recognizes that people got hurt because he wasn’t able to pay more attention to the details of the situation. All this is quite remarkable when placed beside the reality that the project on which Hoess was expending all of his energy was to create and operate a smoothly running machine to murder innocent men, women, and children. This begs the question: how can Hoess hold these seemingly contradictory realities within himself? Is he lying or is he mad? Or, are their other ways of looking at the inner machinations of people like Hoess, people who acted in concert with the ideology and demands of National Socialism as interpreted to them by Hitler and his closest associates like Himmler.

Hoess does not deny that he had doubts and discomforts about the mass killings and that he found it painful and distressing when forced by his position at Auschwitz to witness these events. In fact he writes about it in some detail: “I had to appear cold and indifferent to events that must have wrung the heart of anyone possessed of human feelings. I might not even look away when afraid lest my natural emotions got the upper hand. I had to watch coldly, while the mothers with laughing or crying children went into the gas chambers....I had to see everything. I had to watch hour after hour, by day and by night, the removal and the burning of the bodies, the extraction of the teeth, the cutting of the hair, the whole grisly, interminable business. I had to stand for hours on end in the ghastly stench, while the mass graves were being opened and the bodies dragged out and burned. I had to look through the peep-hole of the gas chambers and watch the process of death itself, because the doctors wanted me to see it. I had to do all of this because I was the one to whom everyone looked, because I had to show them all that I did not merely issue the orders and make the regulations, but was also prepared to be present at whatever task I had assigned to my subordinates.

Hoess modeled for his subordinates an inner resolve and clarity of purpose in order to assist them in remaining steadfast in the duties given to them, duties which contradicted for all but the few truly psychopathic personalities among them, the tenets of early socialization and/or religion: Thou shall not kill. Hoess in turn was confirmed in his duties and in the over-riding of his discomfort and doubts by the surety that he felt in his own superiors. He writes of meetings with Adolph Eichmann to plan the development of Auschwitz 2: Birkenau as the main center for the mass murder of the Jews: “I had many detailed discussions with Eichmann concerning all matters connected with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ but without ever disclosing my inner anxieties. I tried in every way to discover Eichmann’s innermost and real convictions about this ‘solution.’ Yes, every way. Yet even when we were quite alone together and the drink was flowing freely, so that he was in his most expansive mood, he showed that he was completely obsessed with the idea of destroying every single Jew that he could lay his hands on. Without pity and in cold blood we must complete this extermination as rapidly as possible. Any compromise, even the slightest would have to be paid for bitterly at a later date. In the face of such grim determination I was forced to bury all my human considerations as deeply as possible.”

In depositions given at his trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann himself spoke of his discomfort and doubts about the plans for mass murder of the Jews that were planned from mid-1941. At the Wannsee meeting on January 20, 1942, however, he took comfort from the absolute clarity and determination shown by his own superiors, Himmler and Heydrich, as well as the acceptance and co-operation of other heads of departments for the planned “Final Solution.” From that day forward, Eichmann stated, he put his own doubts behind him and remained steadfast in his duty. Who was he, he asked himself, to question the decisions of his superiors and of his leader, Hitler.

The men who facilitated the murder of millions during WWII were not in the main psychopathic. By this I mean that they were not individuals who for complex reasons were incapable of identifying with the pain and distress of others. There were, of course, psychopaths among them, as there are in any population, but the aggregate numbers of such individuals is never great. The leaders in the Nazi organization had come through a long process of “toughening” from their early days of rallying around Hitler in the 1920s and during the long journey to political victory and control of the German state before and during the war. Individuals less capable of repressing their compassionate responses had long since been winnowed out of the ranks. But as the stakes continued to rise, even these “tough guys,” for example Hoss and Eichmann, were inwardly confronted with “discomfort” with respect to their contributions to genocide. Unable to discuss their doubts with either superiors (from whom they would fear reprisals: loss of position, and possible arrest), with peers (any of whom might report them), or with their subordinates when their duty was intrinsically ordered to holding these people firmly to the party line, each ultimately found justifications for silencing their own consciences.

Some Current Holocaust Research

Yesterday I attended the morning session of a day-long conference held at New College, U of Toronto entitled “Holocaust: New Scholars – New Research.” There were a hundred or more people gathered there from Canada, Europe, the United States, and Israel, giving and receiving brief overviews of current research by their authors. Each of the three sections of the morning was in a panel format, with three to five presenters (about ten minutes each,) followed by a discussant who addressed questions or comments to each presenter, then questions from the audience, and, an opportunity for the presenters to speak to the issues raised. A chairperson worked hard at keeping each section to an hour and a half. It has been many years since I have attended such a conference but I felt at home and enjoyed my brief conversations with some of the attendees between sections. Most present were involved in some fashion with research related to the Holocaust; some represented institutions like museums or other bodies that are focused on Holocaust education; there were at least two Holocaust survivors present, both of whom I had an opportunity to speak with because of the simple coincidence that we were sitting close to one another. I also chatted with a lovely young woman from Bonn, Germany who works with museums and other groups, and another from Berlin who was giving a presentation in the afternoon entitled, “The Universal Victim: Representing Jews in European Holocaust Museums.” I regretted not being able to stay for the afternoon session as there were several papers and presenters I was especially interested in.

As I had only heard of the conference a few days earlier I was not as well prepared as I might have been. The individual papers were available to anyone who sought them, a convenience which would have been helpful, especially when listening to the summaries given by some presenters. Each person spoke in English but with a more or less heavy accent, which in a few cases were entirely impenetrable to my ears. Luckily the fellow to my right had printed out some abstracts which he generously shared with me. The variety of papers given illustrated for me once again how varied is the terrain of the Holocaust in its reach and its depth. Here are some examples of the talks that I heard: The first section was focused of reportage. Norman Domeier from the University of Stuttgart is examining the role of foreign correspondents in Europe during the war and looking at why though there was considerable coverage of military issues, that the clearly developing evidence of atrocities and of genocide was vastly under-reported.  Ksenia Kovrigina of the University of Paris is researching the varieties of witness testimonials given in the Soviet territories after the war and the ways that the influence of the Soviet narrative of the war shaped these. Stephanie Benzaquen from Erasmus University in Rotterdam focused on images of the Holocaust from the period of the war and its aftermath to the present in Instagram formats, sent via Twitter and other social media, and the varied meanings of these.

The second session entitled, “A European Project,” delivered the following four pieces of on-going research: Diana Dumitru from the Ion Creanga State University of Moldova spoke about atrocities committed by peasants in Bessarabia against their Jewish neighbours during WWII, looking at the influence between the wars of the right wing Cuzist party upon them. Yuri Radchenko of the Centre for Research of Inter-Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe is examining a variety of issues related to the killing of Jews in the Ukraine by the Ukrainian police, working together with the Nazis. Peter Staudenmeier of Marquette University talked about anti-Semitism in Trieste, Italy as unusually virulent for Italian centres and the work of a particular right-wing political party which had prepared the way for the unusually bad treatment of the Jews there during the war. Finally, Daniijel Matijevic and Jan Kwiatkowski of McGill University spoke of research they conducted in a small Polish township which had housed a slave labour camp during the war. They were struck by the way that memories of what had occurred there were shaped by the ethnicity of their witnesses. Clearly Polish people focussed on the sufferings of their people as the Jewish people did on theirs. It was a case of what they spoke of as “disregard,” a problem each group had of stretching their own awareness and compassion for the evident suffering of the other.

The third section was entitled Militaries. Albert Kaganovitch of the University of Manitoba spoke of the survival rates of Soviet non-Ashkenazi Jews in Nazi prisoner of war camps. One main issue was hiding their ethnicity from the Nazis’ gaze, a possibility because of particular features of their histories. Vojin Majstorovic of the University of Toronto talked about the different narratives given about the Holocaust by Soviet officers in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Hungary after the war and reasons for these differences. Finally, David Wildermuth of Shippensburg State University looked at the ways that survivor testimonies can be used as a way of “fleshing out” other sources such as army reportage of particular episodes during the war.

From this brief overview of the research presented, but a portion of the submissions made to the organizing committee, it is clear that the areas of investigation that are on-going are rich and varied. Being there gave me a glimpse into this world of academe, its fellows and its work. I stood there at its edge, happily wondering at its energy as people continue to regard the events of the past century as truly present and meaningful within our own.

Primo Levi at Auschwitz 3: Monowitz/Buna

I continue to circle around the idea of writing about Primo Levi, or more accurately, to write about the things that Primo Levi has written about. This seems a redundant enterprise: he has written about these things and now others ought simply to read his writings. I heartily recommend doing so as his insights are compelling, the information he gives about life in a slave labour camp incisive, and moreover, his prose is beautiful. But because few people who read my words will have the inclination or time to look up his writings, I will begin by telling you some of the information that can be learned from him about the slave labour camp at Auschwitz 3: Monowitz/Buna where he spent much of 1944 and the early part of 1945. He and his 94 companions, the men who had been chosen for slave labour from the 650 people arriving at Auschwitz 2: Birkenau in late February, were packed into lorries and driven the eight kilometres to Monowitz/Buna. This camp or lager (the German word) is dedicated to the production of a synthetic rubber called buna, from which came the name of the camp. About ten thousand prisoners work there in a variety of capacities as do civilian workers and the SS contingent that guards and controls the prisoners.

An SS-man enters the room to which they are brought. Through an interpreter, another prisoner, he instructs them to remove their clothing and to bundle them in a particular fashion. After he leaves four men in the striped uniforms of prisoners burst in upon them, catching hold of each, rapidly shaving and shearing him of all bodily hair. In an adjoining room they stand interminably in water to their ankles, cold and naked. A shower, a few moments of bliss, then pushed back to the first room where four shouting prisoners hurl “unrecognizable rags” and broken-down boots with wooden soles at them, pushing them out the door into the winter’s cold to run, naked and barefooted the 100 yards to the next hut. There they dress and look at one another, each recognizing that he himself has been transformed from the individual of yesterday, into a nameless cog within the great machine of the lager. Each has become a “Haftling,” a prisoner, known only by the number tattooed onto his arm on that first day of initiation.

Throughout the rest of that first day they wait within the confines of their hut, forbidden to lie upon the bunks, moving as well as they can about the tiny space and suffering from a thirst and hunger unabated from their days-long journey from Italy. At dusk they are taken outside to the central square of the lager, lined up in ranks and wait while the camp orchestra plays the marches to which the returning workers must conform their gait and soldierly spacing, thus facilitating a count of their numbers. An hour passes while roll call is taken; numbers are reported to a man like them dressed in stripes, who in turn gives them to a group of SS-men who wait in full battle dress. Prisoners are dismissed and head for their huts and their evening soup.

The lager which houses the approximately 10,000 prisoners of Monowitz/Buna is about 600 yards square. It is surrounded by two fences of barbed wire, the inner one of which is electrified. There are 60 huts, called Blocks, some of which are still under construction. There is a brick kitchen and an experimental farm. There is a hut with showers and latrines, one for each six or eight blocks. Some blocks have special purposes: a group of eight are for the infirmary and clinic; one is set aside for infectious skin-diseases; another hut is the place held for special Haftlings, the “Prominenz,” or aristocracy of the prisoners, those holding the highest posts; another is for the “Reichsdeutsche,” the Aryan Germans, either politicals or criminals; a further one is for the Kapos – it also houses a canteen with special items available only to the Kapos and the Reichsdeutsche; one hut is the quartermaster’s office; and, finally, there is a hut with its windows always closed – the Frauenblock, the camp brothel, which holds Haftling Polish women and is reserved only for the Reichsdeutsche.

Each regular Block is divided into two parts: at one end are 148 bunks on three levels, all fitted close to one another with three narrow corridors between. The ordinary Haftlings live here, about 200-250 per Block. Thus most bunks were shared; each was made of a wooden plank covered with a thin straw sack and two blankets. The other end of the Block is the domain of the head of the hut and his friends. It contains their beds, a long table with seats and benches, a variety of items, ornaments, and photos, as well as some tools of their trade: essentials for the Block barber, ladles for soup distribution, and rubber truncheons with which to enforce discipline.

Prisoner categories are identified by triangles sewn onto their striped jackets: green for criminals – deliberately imported from jails by the SS to act as Kapos; red for politicals; and, yellow for Jews who form by far the largest category. SS-men are around but seen infrequently. Mastery over the regular Haftlings is mainly in the hands of the green triangles, who are often assisted by the red. In the earliest days of the lagers, Kapos were allowed a wide discretion in the amount of force that they could exert upon their charges. Beating a prisoner to death was not discouraged or disallowed. By 1944, however, the need for workers was deemed sufficiently dire that this degree of violence was discouraged, though not entirely eradicated.

Primo Levi and his fellow initiates into the Monowitz/Buna lager learned quickly several essential details of the life: always reply “Jawohl,” never ask questions, and always pretend to understand. Failure to observe these conventions lead to blows and other punishments. Food, its acquisition and protection, requires constant focus: enter the line for soup when the optimum moment appears to have arrived to receive a portion closer to the bottom of the pot where the vegetables lie; scrape the bottom of one’s bowl for each morsel; and, eat bread over the bowl so as not to lose crumbs. Everything is useful and everything can be stolen: save any bits of wire, rag, or paper found – they can be used to tie up one’s shoes, to wrap one’s feet, or to pad one’s clothing. Make a bundle of all belongings including shoes and one’s bowl and sleep with the bundle as a “pillow.” All clothing, shoes, and one’s bowl and spoon for eating must be carried everywhere, even to the latrine or to wash, lest they be stolen.

One must learn and obey the complicated rules of the camp: come no closer than six feet to the barbedwire; do not sleep with one’s jacket or without one’s pants; do not use latrines set aside for Kapos or Reichsdeutsche; do not miss the prescribed shower on its assigned day or go on any other; do not leave the hut with one’s collar up or with one’s jacket unbuttoned;  do not carry paper or straw under one’s clothing for warmth; do not wash except stripped to the waist. “Beds” were to be made flat and smooth; shoes were to be smeared with grease daily; mud was to be scraped off clothing; and, hair was to be shaved weekly. Shoes, invariably ill-fitting, could be a direct cause of death. Marching on these to and from work can lead to sores that easily become infected; feet become swollen; the more swelling, the more friction caused by the rubbing of the shoes, and thus, the more swelling. There is no cure for this trouble given the conditions of the camp. The afflicted prisoner is ripe for the weekly selection by the SS-men for those to be sent to Auschwitz 2: Birkenau and “the chimney.”

All who are not ill, work. Squads leave the lager each morning for Buna, and return in squads in the evening. The prisoners are divided into about 200 Kommandos, each with between 15-150 men, and each commanded by a Kapo. Most are used for transporting materials and so are in the open, a terrible burden for poorly clothed and fed men in the winter. There are also skilled Kommandos – electricians, bricklayers, and so on – who work in particular workshops or departments of Buna, and are regulated more often by civilian workers. The better posts are often awarded by favoritism or corruption. Hours of work depend upon the season as Haftlings are not allowed to work when it is dark or foggy as escape might be more possible under such conditions.

Primo Levi found that within two weeks he had learned to wipe out both his past and his future and to live only within the immediacy of whatever was needed to survive each day: “A fortnight after my arrival I already had the prescribed hunger, that chronic hunger unknown to free men, which makes one dream at night, and settles in all the limbs of one’s body. I have already learned not to let myself be robbed, and in fact if I find a spoon lying around, a piece of string, a button which I can acquire without danger of punishment, I pocket them and consider them mine by full right. On the back of my feet I already have those numb sores that will not heal. I push wagons, I work with a shovel, I turn rotten in the rain, I shiver in the wind; already my own body is no longer mine: my belly is swollen, my limbs emaciated, my face is thick in the morning, hollow in the evening; some of us have yellow skin, others grey. When we do not meet for a few days we hardly recognize each other.”

Nazi Slave Camps and the Gulag of the USSR

Primo Levi has written in depth and in great detail about the day-to-day existence and struggle for survival of the slave labourer in the Nazi Lager system. Reading If This is a Man I was reminded of my complete survey of the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn about 35 years ago, and especially of his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. But the Gulag in the USSR was substantially different from the slave labour existence of Levi under the Nazi regime. By the early 1950s the hundreds of forced labour camps across the Soviet Union held over a million prisoners. Some were German prisoners of war, never released; others were returned Soviet prisoners of war whom Stalin globally suspected of conspiracies with the enemy; there were common criminals in the mix, as well as political dissidents or people suspected in the minutest fashion of being contrary to a rigid identification with the aims of the government, i.e., Stalin himself. The Gulag served many purposes in the pre- and post-war USSR. It was an immense reservoir of muscle and talent for the development of remote areas and natural resources in the sprawling country. Its scientists and other relevant professionals were put to work on goals potentially useful to the aims of population surveillance at home as well as others related to the on-going rivalry with the United States. The knowledge of the existence of the Gulag was the existential threat with which all citizens parried in their daily lives: no one living in the USSR could be unaware of it as all had personal associates who either were or had been incarcerated in its unholy grasp. The power of Stalin, father and leader, arbiter of life, death, and freedom, was magnified through his personal hold over this far-reaching institution.

Horrific though it was the Gulag did not have as one of its goals to work one or another of its constituent populations to death through starvation and brutality. It was brutal and the diet was very poor and people did die but these facts were part of the nature of the camps, the personalities of some of the guards or co-prisoners, and the general poverty of the post-war diets and lives of most citizens. Struggling to recover from the devastation of the war, the regime focussed its resources on the main aims of development and of competition with its arch rivals in the West. Unlike the Nazi use of slave labourers, especially of the Jews, death in the traces did not stem from policy.

While in Prague we visited the tiny two-room plus basement Museum of the KGB, owned and operated by a Russian from Uzbekistan whose grandfather was a KGB officer during the war. His mother was also with the KGB, presumably until the collapse of the USSR and its loss of control over its “colony” republics like Uzbekistan. This gentleman has accumulated an impressive array of artefacts related to the time of the USSR and its not-so-secret secret service, the KGB. When we arrived at his door, Ivan (my name for the proprietor) was already engaged with another couple, giving them his standard tour and talk. Somewhat brusquely, he advised us to return in 45 minutes when he would be free. Immediately behind us came two young women from Chicago, also wanting entrance. Perhaps not wishing to discourage all of us and to lose his 300 Czech Crowns per person entry fee (12 Euros, about $17 Canadian), he then invited us in and brought us into the tour mid-way. Ivan proved to be smart, well informed and a natural comedian. Another fairly large group of English-speaking tourists came along soon after he began with us; Ivan managed to draw them into the mix and to shepherd us all about the ever more crowded space of his museum with a sense of humour and friendliness that everyone clearly enjoyed.

He had accumulated some amazing things. In the small basement room, reached by a circular iron staircase were mounted pictures of all of the directors of the KGB from the earliest day of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the original secret service, the Cheka, to recent days with a photo of Vladimir Putin prominently displayed. Overhead was hung the silken folds of a parachute used by a secret agent dropped into enemy territory. The entry room of the main floor showcased uniforms of male and female KGB members for use in various terrains and weathers. Artefacts straight out of a James Bond novel were demonstrated: a cigarette case that held a double-barrelled gun; pens and other items that housed tiny cameras; and glasses that permitted night sight. He had a variety of weapons that he not only demonstrated but also passed among us to experience their weight and heft. These included knives, hand guns, larger machine guns, and a series of weapons that looked like small axes. These could be taken apart or put together in several ways making them useful for movements that could immediately kill or seriously wound an enemy. He performed these with the assurance of a ballet master. This brief survey doesn’t do justice to the variety of items shown to us by our host, however.  

One exhibit that particularly interested me was a large map of the USSR which highlighted the camps of the Gulag. Ivan spoke about that institution, saying that it was essentially shut down in the 1950s – likely after the death of Stalin. It simply had become too expensive to maintain. Some of the inmates were paroled and allowed to return to their former lives; others were sent into exile in other parts of the Soviet Union, often to Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan. It is still in existence, though in a considerably truncated form, and is used for a combination of criminal and political prisoners. The Nazi slave labour camps came to an end only with the termination of the war. To the very last days the determination to squeeze every ounce of productivity possible from labourers working with starvation diets and insufficient protection from the inclement weather and the brutality of their Kapos and SS guards, was unabated. Primo Levi’s tale of his life under those conditions reveals in detail the nature of the camps and the hatred and inhumanity at their core.

Primo Levi

And so our journey is over. We are back in Toronto and I am sitting physically and mentally within all of the accumulated materials and experiences of the past three weeks as well as the regular commitments and paraphernalia of our lives here. I have been thinking this morning of the cities that we visited, the people that we met and spoke with, the powerful visits to historical sites of Nazi atrocities, the documents that I have been able to bring back with me, and the leads that I found for other books related to this period and these issues. Some of the latter have not been translated into English, but of those that have I have been able to order used copies through my favourite on-line site abebooks. A grounding place in the midst of all these connections has become for me the writings of Primo Levi.

I wrote briefly about Levi in an earlier post but will say more about him now. He was born in Turin, Italy in 1919 so was just 20 years old at the outbreak of the war. He had, however, grown up during the Mussolini years and was opposed to fascism. In 1943, by then a young chemist, he helped to form a partisan band, intended to co-ordinate with other resistance groups in Italy. Arrested by Italian forces toward the end of that year, he was in custody when in early 1944 the Germans invaded Italy following it’s capitulation to the Allies. In February Levi and other Jews incarcerated with him were told to prepare themselves for deportation. The next day he and about 650 others were loaded into 12 “goods wagons” and shipped to Auschwitz. Of those 96 men and 29 women were sent to Birkenau or to Auschwitz 3: Monowitz-Buna for forced labour; the others went directly to the gas chamber. Of the 125 who were chosen for labour only three survived; Levi was one of these.

Soon after his return to Italy Levi wrote his account of the voyage to Auschwitz and his time at Monowitz-Buna in If This is a Man, first published in 1947. It had already been rejected by a number of publishers and in this edition only 2500 copies were printed. In 1958 when the early repugnance in Europe to thinking or talking about the war years had begun to wane, it was published again, this time to unflagging interest. In 1963 he published The Truce, an account of his passage from a traumatized survivor to a person who to the extent possible, had found his way to a sense of living in the present. He published several other books, novels and essay collections before his death in 1987.

A distinguishing feature of all of Levi’s writings is his sensitive and intelligent observations of not just the details of camp life, but also of the various peoples that inhabited and interacted with one another in that closed universe that he rightly viewed as “hell.” Levi does not write from a place of theory but rather from his lived experience, giving stories about the people with whom he lived and negotiated his survival – as all who survived had to do – in the sense of working with on a day-to-day basis the ingredients of the camp as it was in such a manner as to make ultimate survival a possibility. Those who failed to do so, who were unable to “organize” as it was put, to find items or services that had value within the economy of the camp, would succumb to the starvation diet and brutal work agenda within a month or so of arrival. They either died at Monowitz of illness brought on by these things or were “selected” in the on-going process of the SS, weeding out those who were unable to produce enough work value to be worth keeping. These people were sent to Auschwitz: Birkenau either for the gas chambers or more likely to be shot.

Levi entered the camp in the latter stages of its existence and in relatively good condition. Though he had been held in custody in Italy, the intention of his jailers had not been to starve or work to death their captives. Many of the Jews sent to Auschwitz in 1942-4 were already in pitiful conditions given the diet, over-crowding, and brutality of the ghetto or camp from which they came. He was 25 years old and had trained as a mountaineer which meant that he was physically fit. He was also a chemist, which after a number of months became his passport from crushing physical labour to the relatively privileged position of an inside worker. These things aided his survival. In answer to frequent questions put to him by readers, however, (quoted in the afterword of the Abacus edition of his first two books combined), he also refers as a major contributor to survival to, “my interest, which has never flagged, in the human spirit and by the will not only to survive (which was common to many) but to survive with the precise purpose of recounting the things we had witnessed and endured. And finally, I was also helped by the determination, which I stubbornly preserved, to recognize always, even in the darkest days, in my companions and in myself, men, not things, and thus to avoid that total humiliation and demoralization which led so many to spiritual shipwreck.”

My immediate intention is to look in greater detail at the life of the labour camp as described by Levi in his precise but elegant prose.

Berlin: The Topography of Terror

Tomorrow morning we will leave early for a flight to Brussels and from there to Toronto, regaining the six hours we lost on the way here two and a half weeks ago. I walked by Checkpoint Charley today, just a couple of blocks from our hotel. It was a very crowded area with many tour buses parked about its location on Friedrichstrasse. Two blocks west of there we visited a large area museum called The Topography of Terror. It is on the location of the former buildings that housed the offices of the Gestapo and the SS. There people were held, tortured, beaten, and executed from the earliest days of Nazi power. It now houses a large, partially outdoor, partially indoor exhibit detailing the rise to power, the years of domination, and the final days of the Nazi regime, including material about later trials of war criminals and their results. The Centre has had a number of exhibits over the years and has published a book on each. I came away with four significantly heavy tomes on different aspects of the Nazi years, adding to the other volumes that I’ve been lugging around during our tour. The Centre and the exhibits are most impressive and powerful. Like at other places that we have visited, there were many people taking the two to three hours (at least) needed to go through the whole place. Again the mood was reflective and the atmosphere quiet. We saw people our age but more often younger people were there – not school groups, just young people with friends or partners. They wanted to know about the history and they were taking it seriously.

Though our journey is over, I intend to continue this blog about the Nazis and the Holocaust, using the materials that I have accumulated as well as other resources that I have sent for. As mentioned in an earlier post, when I get my photographs organized, I will post them under another blog title, the link for which I will post.

Berlin: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

We returned by train to Berlin yesterday, to the same hotel AND even to the same room! On the way we chatted with a young woman from the Silesian area of the Czech Republic. (Silesia again is divided between Poland and the Czech lands.) She is currently a student of economics at a university in Potsdam, close to Berlin. She said that under communism many people in her country became lazy, got used to things not being great but at least predictable, so they focussed on family life and didn’t bother with personal ambition. It is different for her generation who must stir themselves if they want to survive in the new, more competitive world. When I mentioned that we had visited Auschwitz, she made a series of strange (though charming) faces to indicate the repulsiveness of this idea. She said that she was once planning to go – whether with friends or with her school, she didn’t say, but her mother discouraged her from the idea, saying that it would be too much for her. It might very well have been. It’s a quite overwhelming experience.

After we settled into our present and former room, we walked over to the massive Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe which is close to the Brandenburg Gate. It has two components: the first is external – a 19,000 sq. meter open area upon which 2711 concrete blocks have been placed – called The Field of Stelae, representing those who were murdered in the Holocaust. Underneath the memorial is an information centre that houses a powerful permanent exhibit giving both an overview of the numerical and geographical dimensions of the Holocaust as well as delving into the personal and family histories of 15 different Jewish families from throughout the areas of Nazi domination. The exhibit also records the capture and murder of the Roma and Sinti peoples. As well the foundation of this memorial is responsible for the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime. Many visitors made their way through the different rooms of the exhibit along with us. The atmosphere was entirely quiet, each person absorbed in his or her own interaction with the photographs and historical notes throughout. The experience was at once powerful and meditative.

At each of the sites that we have visited I have been able to purchase otherwise difficult to access literature about the Holocaust. At the Memorial yesterday I bought a book entitled KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS, first published in 1970 but recently re-released. It contains three documents authored by former SS men all of whom worked at Auschwitz: Rudolph Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz for most of its existence, Johann Paul Kremer, a medical doctor who was assigned to Auschwitz in August, 1942 but who stayed only about three months, and, Perry Broad, who volunteered for the SS in 1941 and acted as a guard at Auschwitz from then until the camp was abandoned in early 1945 before the Soviet takeover. The Hoss document is a part of the autobiography written by him before his execution by hanging in 1947 at Auschwitz 1. (The site chosen stood between the beautiful house where he had lived with his wife and five children and the initial gas chamber that he had set up in 1941. His gallows still stand on the site; we saw it during our tour.) The part of Hoss’ autobiography reprinted in this edition concerns only his period at Auschwitz. Dr Kremer kept a personal diary during his three months at the camp which was found by British after the war when he was arrested. Broad, when also arrested by the British, gave to them an account that he had written, describing the crimes of the SS at Auschwitz.

A foreword to this set of documents is written by Jerzy Rawicz, himself a prisoner at Auschwitz and at Mauthausen during the war. Afterward his work focussed mainly on Polish-German questions and on the investigation of Nazi crimes in Poland. He was the author of a collection of Auschwitz stories and of a book about Rudolph Hoss. Rawicz stresses the importance of Hoss’ recollections as the most detailed summary of much of the organization and functioning of the camp throughout its history. At the same time he underscores the fact that Hoss’ account, though “open and frank” consistently places himself in a good light – the tortures and terrible crimes committed on a day to day basis were the result of men under him who refused to go along with his desire to treat the prisoners more humanely in order to get them to work more efficiently. The tone of his reminiscences continually has the effect of blaming the victims. Rawicz notes that many commentators looking at the veracity of Hoss’ statements seemed to have been taken in by his seemingly forthcoming “confession.” Rawicz summarizes Hoss’ attitude in the following manner: “In other words – Soviet prisoners were killing their own countrymen, Jews were murdering other Jews, and the Poles were murdering other Poles. These lies and slanders of Hoss, just like the lie that it needed only courage to escape from Auschwitz, have so far been missed by the commentators.”

As I continue through this set of documents, I will write about facts that they might contain that shed further light on the world that was Auschwitz.

Auschwitz 5: Sonderkommandos

Our train from Prague to Dresden past along the beautiful Elbe River, scenic in all directions. Across from us sat a young man, Sebastian, a German student engineer who had just spent six months in The Czech Republic on an internship. We talked with him for some time about many things, including about the way people his age in Germany think about or deal with things related to the Nazis and WWII. He said that as students at every age and grade they were taught about the Nazis and about the atrocities that had occurred – perhaps too much he said. He said that of course, these things were terrible and we must know about them and be careful that they cannot happen again. At the same time he doesn’t feel any responsibility for them as an individual, nor does he think of his present day nation as responsible for them. His grandparents, who were in their early teens at the beginning of the war, did not like to talk about it so he knew little from them. One grandmother achieved a rank within the Hitler Youth which gave her the right to carry the German flag in parades. Her father who was a long-time communist would not allow her to bring it into the house. Luckily for the family they lived in a small out-of-the-way place so her father was never denounced and arrested as a communist.

At the end of the war Sebastian’s grandparents suffered a fate common to many of the German people living in Silesia, a large area in the southwest of present-day Poland. Silesia over the centuries was part of Germany, Poland, and the current Czech republic, either whole or divided. There was a large Germanic population living there at the beginning of the war, many families, like Sebastian’s, for generations. This area was one of the first overrun by the Germans in their blitzkrieg offensive in September, 1939. In 1945 the Soviet’s advance through Silesia ruthlessly punished all Germans in its path; thousands, perhaps tens of thousands were raped and murdered. Ethnic Germans fled when possible; many of those who remained were forced to relocate to Germany as by the Potsdam Conference, this area was ceded to Poland, now an “independent” country, though about to become a Soviet satellite. Sebastian was aware that his grandparents had suffered greatly from the Soviet advance and their relocation into a devastated Germany. Speaking of the current situation, he spoke about the sensitivity of the German people and press to categorizing any group in terms of racial bias. It simply cannot happen as international opinion would immediately be aroused. During his time in the Czech Republic he was aware from different indications of the fairly open discrimination against the Roma people there, something he said could not happen in Germany now.

I have been reading another book about the Sonderkommandos that I purchased at Auschwitz 2: Birkenau. It is the transcript of a number of interviews done by Jan Poludniak of Henryk Mandelbaum, a former Sonderkommando survivor of Auschwitz. Jan Poludniak was born in 1926 in Katowice, the main city of Silesia in Poland. He and his family were evicted from their home to central Poland during the German occupation. In 1944 he was held as a hostage at the concentration camp Plazow, near Krakow. After the war he worked as a journalist and was the originator of a Polish centre for the recording of Auschwitz ex-prisoners testimonies. Henryk Mandelbaum was born in 1922 to a Jewish family in a village in Poland. When his family was forced into a nearby ghetto, Mandelbaum managed to elude the German troops and with the help of neighbours stay hidden until 1944. In 1943 his family was transported from their ghetto to Auschwitz where they were all murdered. On April 10, 1944 he was himself captured and sent to Auschwitz; there he was chosen to work in the crematoria. In January, 1945 he was able to escape from the forced march of many thousands of prisoners leaving Birkenau; he was protected by Polish people and survived the war.

Mandelbaum remained in Poland afterward and gave testimony at the trials of the war criminals from Auschwitz. He often visited the Auschwitz memorial museum and would talk with groups and individuals about his experiences. At one of the bookstores at Auschwitz 1 we talked with a woman who had worked there for the past 13 years. She showed us an album of photographs of Auschwitz survivors who had returned to visit the camp, now a museum and memorial. She also had begun a few years ago to collect their autographs in a special book. Tears welled up as she spoke with us about those people and how she loved them; they are her special friends, she said.  As her own family is not especially interested in Auschwitz or its survivors, when she dies (she might be about 40 years old now), she said she wanted to be sure that her collection of photographs and pictures went to someone who truly cared about what had happened there. Mandelbaum, who died in 2008, and visited often, was undoubtedly one of her “special friends.”

It’s quite different to read Mandelbaum’s words and those of Nyiszli. Nyiszli was an educated and sophisticated person who, one sensed reading his book, elaborated some details that shone a good light upon himself. Mandelbaum, who unlike Nyiszli, actually did the strenuous and horror-filled work of escorting newly arrived victims to the undressing room and later of disposing of their corpses left in the gas chambers, spoke simply and with little evasion to his interviewer. He acknowledged that once he realized what he was asked to do by his jailers that he might have refused and joined the others being taken to be murdered. But he was young and he wanted to live. He believed that his sacrifice would be meaningless because the SS would simply designate someone else to take his place. He, like Nyiszli worked in the crematoria area during those extremely busy months of 1944 when the SS was struggling to kill as many Jews as possible before the Soviets pushed their way west. During that time almost a half a million Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz, along with the populations of many ghettos like Lodz and Theresienstadt. His interviews confirm much of Nyiszli’s testimony about the period but also differs in some ways. It was true that the Sonderkommando units were themselves killed by the SS guards from time to time but usually during slower periods when there was less demand for their services. As they could not be allowed back into the regular camp population, they would be murdered, always in an unexpected manner and time in order to avoid their resistance.

When he first began working at the crematoria he and his team of workers did not live in the area set aside above one crematorium as did the group that Nyiszli wrote about. Rather they were returned after their shifts to a special spot in one of the regular camps at Birkenau. They were separate from the other prisoners but had some opportunities to communicate with them. In this way he met with briefly and agreed to help a Polish prisoner whose family had been close to his own when they were children. For this man he took enormous risks, stealing some of the gold and money from the properties left in the undressing room at the gas chamber. His friend needed these to bribe guards in an escape attempt with some others. Their escape was successful. Mandelbaum and others would sometimes bring items of clothing with them back from the chambers which they would drop along their route between the neighbouring camps for others to find them. On one occasion Mandelbaum was caught doing this and was punished with 25 blows on the back. Later in the summer of 1944 his team was moved to the attic of crematoria II and III described by Nyiszli.

Jan Poludniak pressed Mandelbaum about his early impressions when he first came to the gas chamber and saw the bodies dead there.  Mandelbaum replied: “The first time it made an incredible impression on me. Shocking. I was broken by what I saw, for never in my life had I seen, had I even thought that people could be murdered in that way..... (Then having to pull them down to be burned), everything inside me died, it all died because never in my life had I witnessed something like this, you see.  It’s difficult, it is difficult to explain my first impressions. When I think about what I have seen and what I have been through, even today (about 50 years after the events) as I sit here talking I feel like someone who has risen from the dead..... risen from the dead.” Poludniak asked if the men became indifferent to the humans they were burning once they became accustomed to the work. Mandelbaum agreed that that happened, saying, “from a normal person you became quite different, like an animal.” He could have rebelled but “I wanted something else. I wanted to tell the world that I had come from another world. I wanted to survive this world and tell the people... but you were unfeeling, that’s obvious ...Inside in such situations, do you know what a person experiences? It cannot be described, it’s impossible. You really needed to be healthy because only someone able to resist, in full health was able to experience this so that the heart didn’t burst, so that you didn’t experience too great a shock, so that you didn’t go crazy.”

Asked if there were co-workers who did break down, Mandelbaum replied, “Yes, indeed.” He would say to his companions, “Tough, we’re here, we know what is planned for us but we need to have this tiny ray of hope. Perhaps there’ll come a time when we’ll be freed.” He spoke of the despair formerly devout people felt, leading them to abandon their faiths, no longer believing in God or in justice. If the camp was purgatory, they would say, then the Sonderkommando work was hell and there is no other hell. Mandelbaum also described in his interviews some details of the revolt that took place in the crematoria in October 1944. It had been conceived as a camp-wide experience but was precipitated when guards came to take away one section of the Sonderkommando, who then began the revolt. Mandelbaum himself was working in a different part of the crematoria complex that day so was not involved. When the revolt was subdued, however, all of the men were rounded up and made to lie on their faces on the floor with their hands behind their backs. The SS-men then shot every third man. An investigation into the revolt and its instigators went on for several weeks, involving people throughout the whole of the camp. Some were tortured and later executed, including four women who had been instrumental in getting explosives to the Sonderkommandos.

Mandelbaum told Poludniak some of his post-war difficulties: “After liberation when I went out into the street, I didn’t know if I was walking on the pavement or on the road. I was too busy looking around, making sure that nobody would suddenly grab me by the coat or trousers and drag me back to the camp.” He had constant nightmares about that period and about the work he had done. Asked by Poludniak if he felt hatred for the Germans, he said he did not, though he did hate the murderers who sadistically committed such crimes. He told about incidents in which he knew that Germans had helped prisoners. He believed that it is important to not give in to hatred “because that is exactly what can turn a decent person into a fiend.”

I continue to be interested in these men and what happened to them and also in the men who became SS or Gestapo members. What were the things that motivated them to follow those paths? What did they think of as they moved deeper and deeper into acts of criminality? Did they feel regret or guilt during or after the end of the war? Many clearly involved in murder were tried and executed soon after the war, not just at Nuremberg which tried the main leaders, but also in different countries, related to the crimes committed there. But many people also evaded capture and imprisonment.

Prague: Theresienstadt

I am beginning to feel ready to go home. We left Toronto two weeks ago last night and have had an intense round of Berlin, Warsaw, Krakow, Vienna, and Prague. Tomorrow we will go to Dresden for just overnight, go on to Berlin for two nights, and then home. We have had several very powerful experiences, the strongest without doubt being at Auschwitz. Yesterday we spent four hours at the fortress town of Terezin, the place called Theresienstadt by the Germans. The site is comprised of two distinct fortified structures: the so-called small fortress, the place used as a prison for political prisoners by the Germans, and the large fortress, the actual town, used by them as a ghetto or camp. Both were built in the late 18^th century by the Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II in preparation for a coming war with the Prussians. From that time on it was a military barracks, walled and strongly fortified.

We were part of a nine person group tour which started out from the Intercontinental Hotel at the edge of the former Jewish area of Prague.  Our guide, Vida, who grew up under the Soviet regime in Czechoslovakia, was told at the age of 14 by her parents that she is Jewish. Her father was a member of one of the many Prague families that was sent to Theresienstadt in 1941. In 1944 he was sent to Auschwitz with a large contingent of Czech Jews. Because he was young and in relatively good condition he was one of the approximately 1,500 men and women who were chosen for slave labour when the Czech camp was “liquidated” in August. In early 1945 he was sent from there to Buchenwald again as a slave labourer, escaped capture, and was hidden by a family in Pilsen, later liberated by the Americans. Under the Soviets, Jews, like other groups, were not allowed to practice their religion; as well there were other discriminations against Jews that led Vida’s parents, who themselves were non-religious, to underplay their Jewish heritage. Vida was interested though and became involved with the existing remnants of the community, despite the concern of her parents and the strong opposition of her older brother. With the fall of the communist regime the freedom to practice one’s religion was restored to all citizens.

The tone of Vida’s approach to her people’s history before, during, and after the Nazi period differed considerably from that of Andrezij, our guide in Warsaw. He seemed to be imbued with a living awareness of the tragedies that had befallen Polish Jews. Vida, on the other hand, spoke throughout in a determinedly up-beat manner about the Czech people’s tolerant approach to Judaism throughout the past century and presumably beyond. She related details of the incarceration of Jews from Prague and later from other countries at Theresienstadt, of later deportations to the Baltic States and to Auschwitz, and of the epidemics of typhus and “spotted fever” that swept the camp even as liberation came. We watched a film partially of clips from a movie made by the SS depicting happy Theresienstadt inmates playing soccer before an enormous crowd, children cheerfully cavorting in a park, and well-dressed ladies chatting over a cup of tea. The clear intention of the film was to assure the international community of the Nazis’ good treatment of Jews who had been removed from their homes: the government has given a lovely spa town to the Jews to live in according to their own ways. In the version that we saw, the clips of that film were juxtaposed with stills of drawings and paintings done by children and by the many artists resident there. These conveyed a radically different picture: nightmare scenarios of starving, dispirited men, women, and children, crowded into rooms filled with bunks, and lining up for inadequate food in open courtyards.

The guides that we have encountered during our travels exemplify for me, each in her or his own way, some of the complexity of how Europeans currently deal with their experiences of the past century. Martin Jander, a non-Jew from a family of Nazi sympathizers, takes interested tourist to sites in Berlin which relate to the history of the Jews in Germany. He communicates quite passionately his conviction that much more could have been done by ordinary Germans to help the Jews during the Nazi period and his disdain for conventionally spouted ideas that people simply didn’t know what was happening. Andrezij, grandson of a Jew who escaped into the USSR and became a dedicated communist, son of a mother who was a sceptic of the worker’s paradise and who married a non-Jewish Pole, is at 28 a fully self-identified Jew who volunteers in Warsaw to teach people about the tragedies suffered by his people. In Krakow, Jakub, who though a non-Jew, found after his university years an empty niche (as there are so few Jews resident in the Krakow area), and developed his business in genealogy and touring for mostly non-Europeans Jews interested in tracing their roots. His touring approach is informative but decidedly uninvolved. In Prague Vida, daughter of secular Jews, married to a non-Jewish Czech, seems to embody what she proclaims to be the Czech ready acceptance of all cultures and religions. The tenor of her remarks was factual, informative, and interesting, but with little of the personal intensity or compassion one felt when touring with Martin or Andrezij, for example.

Theresienstadt was a ghetto with its own special features but like all of the places devised by the Nazis to segregate Jews from Aryans, it was a destination which doomed the vast majority of its inhabitants to a life of deprivation of every kind, and ultimately to death by starvation, disease, or in the case of those deported later to Auschwitz, within the gas chambers.

We have taken quite a few photos at Auschwitz and at Theresienstadt, for example, which I have not posted as the blog format that I have gives me little control over their order. I plan to post them later under a different blog name which I will post within this one.

Auschwitz 4

Nyiszli learned soon from his location in the crematoria complex that there were other ways that people were murdered here aside from gassing them. Every evening several trucks would arrive carrying about 70 men or women brought from one of the existing sections of the camp. They were chosen generally because their productive value was no longer high enough to, “make it worth maintaining them.” They would be forcibly brought into the crematorium, made to undress, and then taken individually into an adjoining room where an SS officer would shoot them in the back of the head with a small calibre gun. The body would be dragged off and the next prisoner admitted. Their clothing was disposed of and the bodies were taken to the ovens or, if these were not currently operational, to an open pit pyre which was kept burning beyond the area of the crematoria. All who were brought by lorry were aware from the moment of their selection that they were about to be murdered. Their screams and struggles reverberated throughout the complex until they were silenced by death.

On one occasion when Nyiszli was sent to the area of the pyre to collect some medicines and eyeglasses that had been left among the property of murdered people, he witnessed another use to which this burning pile was put. Several trains had arrived that day and all four crematoria were heavily laden with those selected for immediate death. The overflow was directed to the pyre. There, groups of about 400 at a time were sent into a simple hut, forced with shouts and beating to remove their clothing, then individually grabbed and pulled screaming down the path to the edge of the pyre where an SS officer would shoot them in the head; then his or her body was unceremoniously thrown onto the burning pile below them. Many were still alive when they were pushed into the fire.

Nyiszli was present in the camp throughout the remaining months of 1944. The largest contingent of people to be murdered were his own: 438,000 Jews were deported from Hungary beginning in May. Families who had been sent earlier from Theresienstadt near Prague were living together in one of the sub-camps of the facility. On July 10-12 this group (12,000 according to Nyiszli; closer to 9,000 from other sources) was “liquidated.” Groups like the Czechs and the Roma had not undergone selection at their arrival at Birkenau. Young and old, they had been able to live together and have some form of family existence despite the terrible conditions. On the morning chosen for the action against them all other prisoners were confined to barracks. Heavily armed troops cordoned off the area surrounding the Czech camp and a selection was made. Those being loaded into lorries knew immediately their destination; the crying and screaming could be heard throughout the complex. About 1,500 men and women were selected to be sent to work camps; the others were taken to the crematoria. On August 2, the “Gypsy” camp of about 3,000 was wiped out in the same way. Shortly afterward the deportation of 67,000 Jews from Lodz to Auschwitz began. Also in August 13,000 Poles were sent there following the Warsaw uprising.

Much has been written about the immorality and cruelty among those who “chose” to work for the SS in camps. Their numbers were in the tens of thousands. The conditions of their beginning to work, of the manner in which they operated, and how they viewed what they were doing must have varied considerably among this population. Nyiszli, far from being judgemental of the Sonderkommandos with whom he worked, clearly saw them as co-workers, caught unwittingly, as he was himself in a terrible position. The men were chosen usually at the time of selection because they were young and healthy. Some stepped forward when a general search was made, for example, for dentists or dental assistants thinking that they might be able to do something useful in the camp related to their profession, little realizing that they would be put to work removing the gold teeth and dentures of corpses.  Knowing nothing of the crematoria or its business until arriving there, theirs was hardly a question of choice. Once realizing the horrors that they were involved with, some did refuse to work and were immediately killed. They learned very early on that their own time was limited and that they would never escape the crazed universe within which they operated. Some managed to deal with this; others succumbed to depression and attempted or succeeded in committing suicide.

Because the Sonderkommandos were well housed and fed there was considerably less friction and competition among them than was endemic within the concentration and work camps. They recognized one another as members of a team that had a job to do but that soon would be annihilated; generally they looked out for one another. Their common enemy was their SS guards; even there, however, even there was some sense of understanding. The guards themselves had an inkling of the fact that they too would never be permitted to re-enter regular society: the possibility of their disclosing the terrible secrets of the crematoria were too great. There was an unacknowledged collusion among all who worked within the crematoria premises by which some tiny portion of the confiscated gold was collected by the Sonderkommandos, turned into 140gm discs, smuggled out of the crematoria premises to purchase perishable foods more difficult to obtain. All within the area participated at least by having knowledge of the activity and all received its benefits.

Nyiszli states clearly that he found some of the Sonderkommandos with whom he associated to be decent men. He cites as an example a situation in which a group of 500 women were constructing a road close to the crematoria fence by moving stones to it. The women were guarded by two SS men with dogs. Gaining permission from their own guards, some of the Kommandos made contact with the SS men watching over the women and handed each a box of cigarettes. Individually then they casually approached the gate adjoining the outside area and handed a prepared bundle of food, clothing, and cigarettes to each woman who approached them. They repeated the practice again the following day. These men did not know the woman and had nothing personal to gain from what might have been sufficient cause for their own instant deaths. They did it, Nyiszli says “as a matter of honour.” Nyiszli himself would take medicines with him on his walks about the crematoria perimeter and leave these close to places where they might be found.

Nyiszli gives an account of the co-operative work of a number of the Sonderkommandos and himself to leave a document describing the activities of the crematoria to future readers. One of the senior officers of the SS had commissioned a group of the Kommandos to make a special bed for him; it was to be transported to his home when finished. Nyiszli hit on the idea of producing the document, sealing it a metal tube and hiding it among the springs of the bed. The document was copied by one of the men in calligraphy and 200 of the Sonderkommandos signed it. A second copy in another metal case was buried in the courtyard of the crematorium. These documents have never been found though five others of this nature were discovered, four buried in the grounds of the crematoria.

In October, 1944 some of the men with whom Nyiszli had worked developed a plan to break out of the crematorium premises and the camp. Under cover of air strikes by the Allies which were happening more frequently, Polish partisans in the area had been able to breech the fences of the compound and to leave explosives for the men. This seems to have been part of a broader plan of the partisans to liberate the camp. Sensing that the SS would be moving soon to eliminate part of their compliment, the Kommandos decided to strike early. Before they did, however, the SS sent in special troops and a fierce fight broke out between the two groups. An explosion in Crematorium III reduced it to rubble, killing many of the Sonderkommandos who had retreated there. Some escaped the camp but were hunted down and executed. In all 451 of the Sonderkommandos died in the attempt for freedom. Three SS men also died in the battle and twelve were wounded.

In November word came from Berlin that the killing at Birkenau was to be stopped. The mass murders in the gas chambers did cease at that point but other groups continued to be killed by shooting. The remaining Sonderkommandos were killed by SS troops as they were no longer needed in the crematoria and would not be allowed into the general population. Nyiszli and the few doctors working with him on Mengele’s “research” were spared as he continued to need their help. By early January, 1945, however, the entire camp was mobilized as the Soviet troops grew closer. Discovering that their SS guards had left the crematoria, Nyiszli and his colleagues dressed in warm clothing and left the area, heading toward the centre of the camp. They mingled with the thousands of prisoners being ordered out of Birkenau, to walk in long columns toward Germany. Nyiszli and the others knew that if it was discovered by the SS that they had been workers at the crematoria their lives would have been immediately forfeited. Over the next few months Nyiszli managed to stay alive as he went with other prisoners on their long death march to elude the approaching Soviets. Nyiszli did survive and returned to his home. His memoirs were published in Hungarian in 1946.

On January 17, 1945 there were still over 67,000 prisoners at Auschwitz and its subsidiary camps. On the eighteenth all but about 7,000 were marched in long columns to another centre 69 kilometres away. Many died enroute. The Soviets liberated Auschwitz on January 27. Before leaving the SS blew up the remaining crematoria and tried to burn any buildings containing records. These efforts were not entirely successful, however. Many documents were saved and used in later criminal proceedings. Nyiszli gave evidence at the Nuremberg trials, the most publicized of the many trials after the war.

We are in Prague now; today we will go to the town of Terezin to visit the former concentration camp of Theresienstadt.