Auschwitz: A History

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I learned many things about Auschwitz I didn't know before. Well written, intensely researched, intricately detailed, I learned about concentration camps, work camps, and death camps. I saw how European countries were culpable in the detention and transport of Jews to Auschwitz, and how many (not all) looked on as their neighbors were taken away. I thought perhaps Germans, Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, French, etc., really weren't aware of the mass extermination of human beings, and I found out that I was wrong. Everyone knew. I see now how it happened, and given the political climate in the U.S., I can see it happening again. A lot of the West German public didn’t follow the trial at all, and even those who followed it were pretty hostile to it. But I think that it was terribly important in bringing the issue so vividly to public attention that it could no longer be ignored. It galvanized a younger generation into feeling that there was a generational fight that they had to take on. There were brothels with working prostitutes inside Auschwitz to motivate the Germans (Kapos and guards), their unwilling but had no choice cohorts (Sonderkommandos) and even the Jews. Unlike the comfort women in Korea, the Philippines, etc. the prostitutes here were not forced as they were paid for their services (and they "give what one wants"). She had to sell sexual favours as a young woman would have to do, and she was fortunate that one old Nazi that she actually managed to stay with was syphilitic and impotent, and therefore unable to avail himself of what she had on offer, but liked having her around. There were ruses she and many others used, with stories about lost papers, about being bombed out, taking on false identities. I think what’s interesting about her account is also that she’s a clever woman. She subsequently goes on to be a distinguished academic in East Germany. Her son, Hermann Simon, got her to record her testimony late in her life. He took down a very long interview with her and wrote it up, and it came out in an extraordinarily articulate way. He said he barely needed to edit it to produce the book. Frankl doesn’t talk about that so much as his critics do. His critics point out that he had managed not to be deported until quite late, and when he was in Theresienstadt, he had certain privileges. But he’s not actually as interested in that aspect as he is in the inner life. It’s about how meaning can give you psychological sustenance.

Revenge is a dish best not served. If a victim's only sense of justice comes from victimizing his perpetrator it only perpetuates the cycle. The Germans felt victimized by the Jews in World War I (whether justified or not). If in the process of killing the monster you have to become one, have your really won? In East Germany, former Nazis were six or seven times more likely to be prosecuted and convicted as in West Germany” Now let’s move on to the books, which I found fascinating. You gave me a longer list initially, which I’m glad about because the ones you left off seem equally worthy of attention. I can see why you had trouble getting it down to five.

Rees spends a few frantic paragraphs explaining that there was no moral equivalent at all between the nazis gassing women and children and the Allies bombing and burning women and children. It's a false comparison. But he still says the comparison is "emotionally disturbing" – one reason being that so many raised objections to the carpet bombing of German towns and cities at the time - including Churchill! The bombing campaign killed a minimum of 305,000 German civilians. And the comparison works – the bombers were distanced completely from the horror they unleashed, as the SS guards were insulated from the gassings by the use of Jews to do all the disgusting work for them. The other thing to add about Bauer is that he was the guy who gave Mossad, the Israeli secret service, the tip-off on the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann so that they could kidnap him and bring him to Jerusalem for trial. Fritz Bauer didn’t trust the West German government to give Eichmann a decent trial and an appropriate sentence, so Bauer tipped off Mossad to ensure that Eichmann was put on trial in Jerusalem and not in West Germany. The Kapos favored hiring Jehova's Witnesses as they are very honest and hardworking. These people believe that God was still with them inside the camp which was unlike the Jews that abandoned their faith. Most Jews who survived said that they just went through the motion and learned to be "numbed." Canada" is that place where some chosen women work by sorting out the valuables of the Jews after they are gassed out. Working in "Canada" is a privilege as there are foods and roof above their heads but they are also tortured and raped by the Kapos. It was really only from the late 1970s onwards that there became this obsession with memoirs and survivor testimonies. In the early years, even into the 1960s and 1970s, people were actually not that interested in what survivors had experienced; the survivors were only of interest as witnesses to the crimes of others, not as testimonies to what the past had done to them.

Only in West Germany did they refuse to adopt Nuremburg principles. In East Germany, they adopted a much broader definition which had to do with the fact that somebody was dead at the end of a process. In East Germany, former Nazis were six or seven times more likely to be prosecuted and convicted as in West Germany. So three extermination camps were constructed, and these are amazingly unfamous – Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. They were specifically for killing, they did not use any prisoners for slave labour, they were located far away from population centres, way out in the Polish countryside. And they were small. They really should be more famous, because they were extremely efficient. I’ve got an issue with the predominant focus on Auschwitz because I think that, important though it is and horrifying though it is, it may inadvertently serve to displace attention from the multiplicity of other experiences and contexts. The Auschwitz story of arrival on the train and selection on the ramp for the gas chambers or slave labour has become the patterned narrative that we expect from a survivor. We don’t expect the miserable homosexual emerging after the war, too ashamed to talk about it. We don’t know the stories of those who are just shot into a mass grave outside their village in Eastern Europe. Pendas also shows that the way the press reported the trial interacted with a wider ambivalence among the public. You had these younger journalists who thought they were mounting this great crusade to bring Auschwitz to public attention, and a wider public who were unsettled by this and didn’t like it. But the highest percentage of those opposed to the trial were people who were young adults in the Third Reich who’d actually been mobilized to fight for Hitler, who’d been participants in the war. That’s very interesting. It’s worth thinking about what risks they were taking. Why were they doing it? Very often you find it’s basic compassion and a sense of humanity. They think they just have to do it, even though many who were discovered were put to death. Tens of thousands of people are involved here, and I think that’s worth remembering. Some were willing to be duped, to be misled, to pretend they believed the story that someone had been bombed out and had lost their papers or whatever. Others were willing to help actively in forging papers and passing people on and getting people out and I think that’s a really interesting area to explore.Successful in the sense that she managed to make both selves authentic. I’ve heard survivors completely break down in interviews because they feel the present isn’t their real life. I think Delbo was more stable. But this leads to another thing which I think is important about this account: she wasn’t Jewish. She makes it very clear how dreadful it was even for non-Jewish prisoners, and yet registers that it was even worse for Jewish prisoners. Yes, it’s a good read. I think it’s an important read. What it also brings out well is the public reactions to, and the wider significance of, the Auschwitz trial. We’ve made a big deal of it and that’s in part because there was massive media coverage, largely because of the way Fritz Bauer mounted the trial. Bauer was determined to ensure there was media coverage. He was determined to ensure that victims and survivors were brought from all around the world to give evidence, a bit like the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. We have many stories of ghettos, but even there, we sometimes see a kind of implicit hierarchy of suffering or heroism. We also have an implicit view of ‘survivor’, meaning someone who survived the camps. But I think we have to try to understand the full range and impact of experiences of Nazi persecution, including for those who managed to get out before the war. Sadly, too few were able to emigrate in time. KL Auschwitz seen by the SS - This volume contains reminiscences and a diary by three members of the SS: Rudolf Höss, the first camp commandant, Pery Broad, an SS non-commissioned officer in the camp Gestapo, and the SS physician Johann Paul Kremer.

Lobstergirl wrote: "Jarmila wrote: "Hi,can anyone recommend me the books that are dealing with the problem of post traumatic stress of holocaust survivor? tx" Even Hitler had to get to a point where he realised, after years of fulminating about smashing the Jews, crushing them, destroying them, that he could actually physically kill them all. He'd been trying to get them to disappear for years – ship them all to Madagascar was one ridiculous idea – but that hadn't meant actually killing them until 1941. Anne Frank was in the hiding while Victor Klemperer was working outside the concentration camp during the Holocaust. This book tells us about the atrocities of the Germany as they implemented "The Final Solution". I don’t think it’s possible to be dispassionate, actually. This does really challenge notions of historical objectivity. I simply don’t think it’s possible, for all sorts of reasons which include the selection of examples and the style of writing, as well as the arguments developed. It is possible to be historically accurate, writing an account that is true to and commensurate with the evidence, and yet at the same time be personally engaged with the material. History-writing is as much a creative act as an intellectual outcome of scholarly research.Well, I was supposed to find five books on Auschwitz. I’m wilfully choosing one which isn’t about Auschwitz, but rather about evading it. What the East Germans point out about the Adenauer government is quite true. Adenauer’s chief aide in his Chancellery, Hans Globke, had been the official legal commentator on the Nuremberg laws for Hitler in the mid-1930s. Theodor Oberländer—who was Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees and Victims of War under Adenauer—knew all about refugees and expellees from Eastern Europe precisely because he’d been concerned with “population planning” and involved in “anti-partisan” warfare under the Nazi regime, alongside the Einsatzgruppen, and potentially compromised in this way. It’s absolutely disgusting, actually, the number of former Nazis that Adenauer had in his government. East Germany was goading West Germany, if you like, to make a move. It correlates with the student revolts of the 1960s—the beginning of an extra-parliamentary opposition that emerged in the 1960s, fed up with the Adenauer era. Adenauer ceases to be Chancellor in 1963. There’s a lot of student unrest developing in the 1960s; these are people in their 20s, born in the 1940s, suddenly exposed to the full horror of the crimes of their elders (and supposed betters), then galvanized into that generational conflict summarised as “1968”. I think this book should be essential reading for all, especially if one is interested in learning more about The Holocaust. Previously, my only knowledge about Holocaust was those from watching Schindler's List and The Pianist and reading Anne Frank and Victor Klemperer (read in April of this year). This book, however, Auschwitz: A New History, gives a more details on what happened not only in Auschwitz but also in the other lesser-known death camps like Birkenau, Sobibor, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, etc.