Auschwitz

There are no words with which to write about Auschwitz. There is a lot of information about it in the booklets – the statistics, the various stages of its development, the atrocities committed there, the individuals who lived and died there; the Sonderkommandos who were pressed into service to take thousands of men, women, and children to be undressed, herded naked into “showers,”  to listen to their screams and dying agonies, then to remove their corpses and transmit them to the enormous ovens built at Birkenau for their cremation, their liquidation, their annihilation, their rendering unto ashes which could be then used as land fill or in some places as gravel on pathways. Their atoms dissolved from their human bodies and freed to enter into other forms – as they were in the beginning and shall be universe without end. Amen. When I close my eyes I see only pictures: the brick prison buildings, two stories high with basements, of the original Auschwitz 1.

It was a Polish army barracks, taken over by the invading Germans and made into a concentration camp for educated Poles who might spark a germ of resistance. Quickly all university professors, doctors, government officials and administrators, as well as known members of communist or social democratic movements were arrested; as police prisons became overcrowded, the decision was made to transport them here. Soon Jews were sent to join them and over the next years the population became substantially Jewish, though always with others: prisoners of war (Soviets, not prisoners from western countries), Roma people, homosexuals, other political prisoners. The original barracks was expanded using the labour of the prisoners. More buildings, more diverse uses. One, Block 11, at the end of a corridor of buildings was known as the building of death. Prisoners were taken there to be tortured as punishment for infractions of the rules though most housed there awaited execution. The “legal” forms passed into law by the Nazi government required certain rituals to be performed beforehand. I am speaking here of the early days of the war – roughly 1939-41. Of course many were killed in the camps themselves during these years by starvation, overwork, and brutal treatment at the hands of their guards or fellow prisoners. But official decisions to execute continued to be ritualized. Political prisoners or prisoners of war would be housed in the building of death. There they would be subjected to various forms of torture designed to extract confessions of their adversity to the German state. Once they had been reduced to the stage of non-being, in the sense of being incapable of further protest, they would be taken individually before a “court,” an officer representing the government. This procedure occurred in the front, first floor room of the building of death. Here the accusation against the prisoner was read and the sentence of death pronounced. It took on average about one minute. The prisoner was then taken to an adjacent room where he was stripped of his clothing. He was led naked out a door at the side to a courtyard where by a wall he was shot in the back of the head. His corpse was removed for cremation in the ovens at the far end of the rows of buildings. In another moment the door of the building of death would open and the next naked prisoner being brought for execution appeared. One SS officer would be the executioner for all indicted and sentenced that day, perhaps a hundred or so.

It was in this building that the first experiment was conducted that  opened the possibility of truly mass executions. In Germany itself and later in Poland death by suffocation was used for “unwanted” groups who were driven about in trucks with the exhaust fed into the back. It was effective but inefficient as only limited numbers could be killed in this way. Many were killed by firearms, tens of thousands at a time even, as I have written about in earlier posts, but this was messy, distressing to the murderers as well as to other adjacent populations, and besides, left traces of evidence in the mass graves scattered about the countryside. Rudolph Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz was away from his post on the occasion in September, 1941 that his next in command had an idea to use a substance on hand to kill lice. In solution Cyclone B, as it was known, was sprayed on prisoners entering a Lager after they had been shaved. It was known to be highly toxic. As an experiment he had an area of the basement of the building of death sealed as tightly as possible. Residing there at the time were about 600 Soviet prisoners and 250 Poles being held before their “court” proceedings. The anti-lice pellets were poured into openings for air; the Germans waited 24 hours before venturing into the basement, but discovering that some of the prisoners still lived, resealed the space for a further 24 hours. All had died; the experiment was successful and could be replicated.

In a bunker by the relatively small crematoria ovens a space was cleared for mass gassing. It was here that the first purposely selected groups were murdered. Very likely they were people already imprisoned in the Lager who had become too ill or too debilitated to work efficiently. Space at the Lager was never sufficient for the numbers continually being sent there so this method of elimination of those “without use” or those of “no further use” was inspired. Forgotten or with some bureaucratic slight of hand the “legal” form of the “courtroom” was abandoned. The selection process was finessed as the need to prevent panic among those about to die was deemed important to efficiency and order. They were given the formula: take off all of your clothes; you will be given a shower and provided with new clothing. Other prisoners chosen to speed the process would press them insistently; if lagging they would be screamed at, hit or whipped, and chased naked across the space leading to “the shower.” Bundled and locked within, in moments they would experience pellets being dropped by an SS functionary through spaces in the roof above. As the gas arose and spread the awareness of the victims focused on the reality that they were all being murdered. The screams and struggles of the dying within the chamber was so loud and distressing that trucks with their motors running were placed around the perimeter of the building to mask the sounds from others who might soon be gathered to a similar fate.

The shortcomings of this newly developed means of mass extermination were clear: larger gas chambers and larger ovens were needed; also the gas chambers had to be buried underground to avoid the noise problem of the original chamber. Moreover more facilities would be required to house, sort, pack, and  ready for transportation to Germany, all of the usable artifacts taken from those sent to the chambers. Space for prisoners to provide various services such as the latter, those to be with the people selected to die from initial choice to cremation, those to work on the continually needed infrastructure, and those who would work in subsidiary industries not necessarily related to the purposes of Auschwitz but providing income for the SS who farmed out their slave labourers to German and Polish factories and businesses. As Auschwitz was roughly at the centre of the territories taken by or allied to Germany and because of its good system of communication, it was deemed the place to focus the now consciously formulated program entitled “The Final Solution” of the Jewish “problem.” In October, 1941, several months before the Wannsee Conference, work began on the second phase of the camp: Auschwitz 2: Birkenau.

I will continue to write about Auschwitz for some time though we have left Poland and are now in Vienna. Hearing about the activities of Auschwitz gives only the palest glimpse of the reality that being there does. Auschwitz was of human invention, construction, and administration – conceived with ingenuity and intelligence for a purpose that most truly is called “diabolical,” though it must be understood that rather than pertaining to the “devil,” its activities pertain to humanity, to the heart of darkness that human beings are capable of reaching.