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.