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.