Auschwitz Read online

  During the 1930s, Hitler—to Goebbels’ approval—did not often try to impose policies on the majority of the population against its wishes. This was a radical regime, of course, but one that preferred the consent of the majority and, to a large extent, relied upon individual initiative coming from below to generate the dynamism it so desired. All of which meant that, when it came to the persecution of the Jews, the Nazis progressed gingerly.

  Central though the hatred of the Jews was to Hitler, it was not a policy he overtly pushed in the elections of the early 1930s. He did not hide his anti-Semitism, but he and the Nazis consciously emphasized other policies, like their desire to “right the wrongs” of the Versailles treaty, get the unemployed back to work, and restore a sense of national pride. In the immediate aftermath of Hitler becoming Chancellor, there was an outpouring of violence against the German Jews, orchestrated to a large extent by Nazi storm troopers. There was also a boycott of Jewish businesses (supported by Goebbels, an ardent anti-Semite), but this only lasted for one day.

  The Nazi leaders were concerned about public opinion both at home and abroad—in particular they didn’t want their anti-Semitism to make Germany a pariah state. Two more anti-Semitic upsurges—one in 1936 with the advent of the Nuremberg Laws withdrawing citizenship from German Jews, and the second in 1938 with the burning of synagogues and the imprisonment of tens of thousands of Jews at the time of Kristallnacht—marked the other significant pre-war moments in the Nazi persecution of the Jews. But, overall, the pace of Nazi anti-Semitic policy was gradual, and many Jews tried to stick out life in Hitler’s Germany during the 1930s. Nazi propaganda against the Jews (with the exception of fringe fanatics like Julius Streicher and his outrageous anti-Semitic rag Der Stürmer) proceeded at Goebbels’ speed of the slowest vessel in the convoy, with neither of the overtly anti-Semitic films, Der ewige Jude or Jud Süss, shown until after the war had begun.

  This notion that the Nazis proceeded incrementally against the Jews goes against the understandable desire to point to a single moment when one crucial decision was made for the “Final Solution” and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. But this history is not so easily resolved. The decisions that led to the sophistication of a killing technique that delivered families to their deaths by a railway link which stopped only meters from the crematoria, took years to evolve. The Nazi regime was one that practised what one historian famously called “cumulative radicalization,”7 whereby each decision often led to a crisis which led to a still more radical decision.

  The most obvious example of how events could spiral into catastrophe was the food crisis in the Łódź ghetto in the summer of 1941—a situation that led one Nazi functionary to ask whether the most “humane solution might not be to finish off those of the Jews who are not fit for work by means of some quick-working device.”8 Thus, the idea of extermination is offered up out of “humanity.” It should be remembered, of course, that it was the policies of the Nazi leadership that had created the food crisis in the Łödź ghetto in the first place.

  This does not mean that Hitler was not to blame for the crime—he undoubtedly was—but he was responsible in a more sinister way than simply calling his subordinates together on one particular day and forcing the decision upon them. All of the leading Nazis knew that their Führer prized one quality in policy making above all others—radicalism. Hitler once said that he wanted his generals to be like “dogs straining on a leash” (and in this they most often failed him). His love of radicalism, plus his technique of encouraging massive competition within the Nazi leadership by often appointing two people to do more or less the same job, meant that there was intense dynamism in the political and administrative system—plus intense inherent instability. Everyone knew how much Hitler hated the Jews, everyone heard his 1939 speech in the Reichstag during which he predicted the “extermination” of the European Jews if they “caused” a world war, and so everyone in the Nazi leadership knew the type of policy towards the Jews to suggest—the more radical the better.

  Hitler was massively preoccupied with one task during World War II: trying to win it. He spent much less time on the Jewish question than on the intricacies of military strategy. His attitude to Jewish policy is likely to have been similar to the instructions he gave to the Gauleiters of Danzig, West Prussia, and the Warthegau when he told them he wanted their areas Germanized, and once they had accomplished the task he promised to ask them “no questions” about how it had been done.

  In just such a manner it is not hard to imagine Hitler saying to Himmler in December 1941 that he wanted the Jews “exterminated” and that he would ask him “no questions” about how he had achieved the desired result. We cannot know for sure whether the conversation went this way, of course, because during the war Hitler was careful to use Himmler as a buffer between himself and the implementation of the “Final Solution.” Hitler knew the scale of the crime the Nazis were contemplating and he did not want any document linking him to it. But his fingerprints are everywhere—from his open rhetoric of hatred to the close correlation between Himmler’s meetings with Hitler at his East Prussian headquarters and the subsequent radicalization of the persecution and murder of the Jews.

  It is hard to convey the excitement that leading Nazis felt at serving a man who dared to dream in such epic terms. Hitler had dreamt of defeating France in weeks—the very country in which the German army had been stuck for years during World War I—and he had succeeded. He had dreamt of conquering the Soviet Union, and in the summer and autumn of 1941 it looked almost certain that he would win. And he dreamt of exterminating the Jews—which in some ways would prove to be the easiest task of all.

  Hitler’s ambitions were certainly on a grand scale—but they were all ultimately destructive, and the “Final Solution” was the most conceptually destructive of them all. It is of huge significance that, in 1940, two Nazis—who would subsequently become leading figures in the development and implementation of the “Final Solution”—each separately acknowledged that such mass murder would go against the “civilized” values to which even they aspired. Heinrich Himmler wrote that “physically exterminating a people” was “fundamentally un-German,” and Reinhard Heydrich recorded that “biological extermination is undignified for the German people as a civilized nation.”9 But, step by step, within the next eighteen months “physically exterminating a people” was just the policy they would be embracing.

  Tracing how Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, and other leading Nazis created both their “Final Solution” and Auschwitz offers us the chance to see in action a dynamic and radical decision-making process of great complexity. There was no blueprint for the crime imposed from above, nor one devised from below and simply acknowledged from the top. Individual Nazis were not coerced by crude threats to commit murders themselves. No, this was a collective enterprise owned by thousands of people, who each made the decision not just to take part but to contribute initiatives in order to solve the problem of how to kill human beings and dispose of their bodies on a scale never attempted before.

  As we follow the journey upon which both the Nazis and those whom they persecuted embarked, we also gain a great deal of insight into the human condition—and what we learn is mostly not good. In this history, suffering is almost never redemptive. Although there are, on very rare occasions, extraordinary people who act virtuously, for the most part this is a story of degradation. It is hard not to agree with the verdict of Else Baker, sent to Auschwitz as an eight-year-old child, that “the level of human depravity is unfathomable.” If there is a spark of hope, however, it is in the power of the family as a sustaining force. Time and again heroic acts are committed by those sent to the camps, for the sake of a father, mother, brother, sister, or child.

  Perhaps above all, though, Auschwitz and the Nazis’ “Final Solution” demonstrate the overriding power of the situation to influence behavior. It is a view confirmed by one of the toughest and bravest survivors of the death camps, Toivi Blatt, w
ho was forced by the Nazis to work in Sobibór and then risked his life to escape:People asked me, “What did you learn?” and I think I’m only sure of one thing—nobody knows themselves. The nice person on the street, you ask him, “Where is North Street?” and he goes with you half a block and shows you, and is nice and kind. That same person in a different situation could be the worst sadist. Nobody knows themselves. All of us could be good people or bad people in these [different] situations. Sometimes when somebody is really nice to me I find myself thinking, “How will he be in Sobibór?”10

  What these survivors have taught me (and, if I am honest, I learned it from the perpetrators as well) is that human behavior is fragile and unpredictable and often at the mercy of the situation. Every individual still, of course, has a choice as to how to behave, it’s just that for many people the situation is the key determinate in that choice. Even those unusual individuals—like Adolf Hitler himself, for example—who appear to be masters of their own destiny were, to a considerable extent, created by their responses to previous situations. The Adolf Hitler known to history was substantially formed by the interaction between the pre-war Hitler—who was a worthless drifter—and the events of World War I, which was a global conflict over which he had no control. I know no serious scholar of the subject who thinks that Hitler could ever have risen to prominence without the transformation he underwent during that war, and the sense of intense bitterness he felt when Germany lost. Thus, we can go further than saying, “No World War I, no Hitler as German Chancellor,” and say, “No World War I, no individual who ever became the Hitler that history knows.” And while, of course, Hitler decided for himself how to behave (and in the process made a series of personal choices that made him utterly deserving of all the obloquy heaped upon him) he was made possible only by that specific historical situation.

  This history also shows us, however, that if individuals can be buffeted around by the situation then groups of human beings working together can create better cultures which, in turn, can help cause individuals to behave more virtuously. The story of how the Danes rescued their Jews, and of how they ensured that the Jews had a warm welcome when they returned at the end of the war, is a striking example of that. The culture in Denmark of a strong and widely held belief in human rights helped make the majority of individuals behave in a noble way.

  But one must not be overly romantic about the Danish experience. The Danes, too, were influenced hugely by situational factors outside of their control: the timing of the Nazi attack on the Danish Jews (at a point when the Germans were clearly losing the war); the geography of their country (which allowed for a relatively straightforward escape across a narrow stretch of water to neutral Sweden); and the lack of a concerted effort by the SS to enforce the deportations.

  Nonetheless, it is reasonable to conclude that one form of partial protection against more atrocities like Auschwitz lies in individuals collectively ensuring the cultural mores of their society are antipathetic to such suffering. The overtly Darwinian ideals of Nazism, which rested on telling every “Aryan” German that he or she was racially superior, created, of course, precisely the reverse effect.

  In the end, though, there is a profound sense of sadness around this subject that cannot be reduced. Throughout the time I was working on this project the voices I heard loudest were those of the people whom we could not interview: the 1.1 million human beings who were murdered in Auschwitz, and in particular the more than 200,000 children who perished there and were denied the right to grow up and experience life. One image stuck in my mind from the moment I heard it described. It was of a “procession”11 of empty baby carriages—property looted from the dead Jews—pushed out of Auschwitz in rows of five towards the railway station. The prisoner who witnessed the sight said they took an hour to pass by.

  The children who arrived at Auschwitz in those baby carriages, together with their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, and aunts—all of those who died there—are the ones we should always remember, and this book is dedicated to their memory.

  LAURENCE REES

  Laurence Rees is Creative Director of History Programs for the BBC and author of five books, including The Nazis: A Warning from History and Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II. He lives in London.

  CHAPTER 1

  SURPRISING BEGINNINGS

  On April 30, 1940, SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Rudolf Höss achieved a great ambition. At the age of thirty-nine, and after six years’ service in the SS, he had been appointed commandant of one of the first Nazi concentration camps in the New Territories. On this spring day he arrived to take up his new duties in a small town in what had been, until eight months earlier, southwest Poland and was now part of German Upper Silesia. The name of the town in Polish was Oświęcim—in German, Auschwitz.

  Although Höss had been promoted to commandant, the camp he was to command did not yet exist. He had to supervise its construction from a collection of dilapidated and vermin-infested former Polish Army barracks, grouped around a horse-breaking yard on the edge of the town. And the surrounding area could scarcely have been more depressing. This land between the Sola and Vistula rivers was flat and drab, the climate damp and unhealthy.

  No one on that first day—and that certainly included Rudolf Höss—could have predicted the camp would, within five years, become the site of the largest mass murder the world has yet seen. The story of the decision-making process that led to this transformation is one of the most shocking in the whole of history and one that offers great insights into the functioning of the Nazi state.

  Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Hermann Goering—all these leading Nazis and more made decisions that led to the extermination of more than a million people at Auschwitz. But a crucial precondition for the crime was also the mentality of more minor functionaries such as Höss. Without Höss’s leadership through the hitherto uncharted territory of mass murder on this scale, Auschwitz would never have functioned as it did.

  To look at, there was little exceptional about Rudolf Höss. He was of medium height, with regular features and dark hair. He was neither ugly nor strikingly handsome; he simply resembled—in the words of American lawyer Whitney Harris,1 who interrogated Höss at Nuremberg—“a normal person, like a grocery clerk.” Several Polish inmates of Auschwitz confirm this impression, remembering Höss as quiet and controlled, the type of person you walk past every day in the street and fail to notice. Thus, in appearance, Höss was as far away as it is possible to get from the conventional image of the red-faced, saliva-spitting SS monster—which, of course, makes him all the more terrifying a figure.

  As Höss carried his suitcase into the hotel opposite Auschwitz railway station that would be the SS officers’ base until suitable accommodations had been arranged within the camp, he also brought with him the mental baggage of an adult life devoted to the nationalist cause. Like most ardent Nazis, his character and beliefs had been shaped by his reaction to the previous twenty-five years of German history—the most turbulent the country had ever experienced. Born in the Black Forest in 1900 to Catholic parents, Höss was affected in his early years by a series of important influences: a domineering father who insisted on obedience; his service in World War I, where he was one of the youngest non-commissioned officers in the German army; his desperate sense of betrayal at the subsequent loss of the war; his service in the paramilitary Freikorps in the early 1920s in an attempt to counter the perceived Communist threat on the boundaries of Germany; and an involvement in violent right-wing politics that led to his imprisonment in 1923.

  Many, many other Nazis were forged in a similar crucible. Not least among them was Adolf Hitler. Son of a domineering father,2 nursing his violent hatred of those whom he felt had lost Germany the war in which he had just fought (and during which, like Höss, he had been awarded an Iron Cross), Hitler tried to seize power in a violent putsch in exactly the same year as Höss was elsewhere involved in a
politically inspired murder.

  For Hitler, Höss, and others on the nationalist right, the most urgent need was to understand why Germany had lost the war and made such a humiliating peace. In the immediate post-war years they believed they had found the answer. Was it not obvious, they felt, that the Jews had been responsible? They pointed out that Walther Rathenau, who was Jewish, had become Foreign Minister in the new post-war Weimar government. And in 1919 they believed the link between Judaism and the feared creed of Communism had been proved beyond doubt when, in Munich, a Soviet-style Räterepublik (the Councils’ Republic) was established briefly in the spring. The majority of the leaders of this Communist-led government had been Jewish.

  It did not matter that large numbers of loyal German Jews had fought with bravery (and many had died) during the war. Nor that thousands of German Jews were neither left-wing nor Communist. It was much easier for Hitler and his followers to find a scapegoat for Germany’s predicament in the German Jews. In the process, the newly formed Nazi party built on years of German anti-Semitism in a new way.

  From the first, its adherents claimed that their hatred of the Jews was motivated not by ignorant prejudice but by scientific fact: “We fight their [the Jews’] actions as they cause a RACIAL TUBERCULOSIS OF NATIONS,” declares one of the earliest Nazi posters, published in 1920. “And we are convinced that convalescence can only begin when this bacteria has been removed.”3 This type of pseudo-intellectual attack on the Jews had a huge effect on men like Höss, who professed to despise the primitive, violent, almost pornographic anti-Semitism propagated by another Nazi, Julius Streicher, in his magazine Der Stürmer. “The cause of anti-Semitism is ill-served by the frenzied persecution which was provided by Der Stürmer,”4 wrote Höss from prison, after the defeat of Nazism. His approach was always colder—more “rational,” as he saw it. He claimed to have little quarrel with individual Jews; the problem for him was the “International world Jewish conspiracy,” by which he imagined that Jews secretly held the levers of power and sought to help each other across national boundaries. This was what he believed had led to Germany’s defeat in World War I. This was what he felt had to be destroyed: “As a fanatical National Socialist I was completely convinced that our ideal would gradually be accepted and would prevail all over the world ... Jewish supremacy would therefore be destroyed.” 5