Concluding Thoughts 1

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The trip that Hannah and I took was amazing and deeply moving. Before I close the blog on our pilgrimage, I want to try and collect my impressions and those thoughts that have persisted and maybe begin to make meaning of it all. I expect this to take the form of three more posts: on the National Socialist “project” and its conduct; on “remembering and forgetting;” and on what I think it means for me and for us. What follows is my antepenultimate post. (I have always wanted to use that in a sentence!)

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Since returning, all I have to do is close my eyes to see the vastness of Birkenau. Rows of barracks and a forest of chimneys divided by barbed-wire, as far as the treeline in the distance. A pair of train tracks splits the scene in two. I can also see the long pile of hair in the glass case at Auschwitz, and the prayer shawls, and the inside of the gas chamber there, the walls scarred by people desperate to escape the suffocating gas, and the small sliver of light coming in the top of the “Tower of the Holocaust” at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

I wrestle with the enormity of it all. Birkenau covers some 425 acres and contains nearly 300 buildings or their remains. At its busiest, 100,000 men, women and children were imprisoned there - it was the size of Cambridge. When the SS withdrew, they had killed one-and-a-quarter million people - the equivalent of every man, woman, and child in Boston - twice. It operated on an industrial scale.

And the granularity. The designers of the “Final Solution” and their accomplices in its implementation missed no opportunity to humiliate and degrade those they regarded as inferior. Stripping their opponents of their material possessions was followed by the disruption of their communities and then by degradation of their humanity. The loss of professions and livelihood, homes and goods, the labelling, the desecration of things held dear, were only the first stages to be followed by assaults on individual dignity. Women were forced to strip naked in front of their male kin, other prisoners, and the guards, violating every norm of modesty and decency. Their heads were shorn, and they were tattooed, like cattle or sheep. The men were forced to watch, violating all the obligations of provider and protector. And these were the ones who were being allowed to live. Their deaths would come later after brutal labor, inadequate nutrition and hygiene, and rampant disease either took their lives or made them too weak to work and candidates for the gas chamber.

Those too old, too young or too infirm to work were herded straight to the gas chambers and the ovens, efficiently located at the far end of the tracks. These did not even warrant registration. Their worth lay in the clothes on their backs, the hair on their heads, and the gold in their teeth.

What took place at Birkenau was monstrous in its size and scale, but also in the accumulation of countless individual, corrosive, gratuitous indignities, injustices, and assaults. Even the most ordinary things were pressed into the service of the hitherto unspeakable.

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I am confounded by the deliberation of the National Socialists as they conceived and carried out their program of domination and their “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Its roots may lie, in part, in Hitler’s paroxysms of rage about his and Germany’s disappointing circumstances, but it took careful planning and diligent management by thousands of officers, officials, lawyers, clerks, mechanics, engineers, and scientists applying all their intelligence, skill, and experience to nearly “rid” Europe of Jews, opponents of the Nazis, and individuals and groups classified by them as inferior.

Eichmann, at the behest of his superiors, Himmler and Heydrich, conducted detailed surveys and maintained up-to-date lists of the number and distribution of Jews in Nazi-occupied territory. Others coordinated railroad schedules and construction activities to construct and fill the network of hundreds of labor and extermination camps and sub-camps. Economists and planners in the economics offices ofthe SS planned and orchestrated the exploitation of slave, forced and prison labor to support the German war effort and life on the homefront, and plundered occupied lands and captive people of their food and possessions.

It was striking as we moved through Auschwitz and Birkenau how ‘permanent’ everything seemed, as if the SS planned on using these facilities for a long time. There were nearly 100 all brick barracks with ceramic tile roofs, the remaining were wood above the foundation. The barbed wire was strung on concrete posts. The construction of the camp in general appears very methodical and competent, like everything else we saw of the SS/Nazi terror apparatus. There were problems building on the marshy ground but the brick structures remain intact today, with minimal restoration.

In the early days, as the National Socialists were building electoral coalitions in provinces and the Reichstag, they periodically reminded the public and their opponents of the force they could call on in the Brown Shirts. The strong-arming of rival politicians of the 1920s and early 1930s and the book-burnings of 1933 put all on notice that Hitler had brute force that he could unleash should he fail to get what he wanted through constitutional means. Their thorough perversion of the institutions of government and the judiciary lent a façade of legality and legitimacy to the capricious application of arbitrary rules and specious science, like the Nürnberg Laws enforced by the Volksgerichtshof and its infamous President, Roland Freisler. Whatever was true, the Gestapo were never far away.

It took 7,000 SS personnel to create and maintain Birkenau. Prisoner labor did the actual “heavy lifting.” Among the SS, certainly those at the top, were true believers, acolytes of Hitler and Himmler. Many more, perhaps the majority of the officers were opportunists, tying their fortunes to those who seemed to be succeeding, or they were acting out of habit, fulfilling their oaths and obeying authority. Among the non-SS personnel, the train drivers, switchmen, delivery people, etc, were many bystanders, passive and motivated by fear. Part of the National Socialist “genius” was to create the conditions where all of those motivations were engaged.

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The National Socialist state was built on falsehoods. There were Hitler’s delusions - about his own military and political genius, the perversity and power of Jews, the decadence and duplicity of the nations opposing him, Germany’s ineluctable destiny as the master race.

And Hitler’s “con.” Through the use of propaganda and political spectacle, the National Socialists sought to create an image of the Volk on the march, the invincible heirs of the Roman and German empires, moving inescapably to their historical destiny. Their domination of print, film and broadcast media was used to blunt or redirect the consciences of the German people and stifle any sense of agency among the conquered. The torrent of insults and lies about their opponents and victims impugned their character, motives, sincerity and intelligence and ultimately their humanity.

Different individuals and groups were told different things, each tailored to achieve maximum compliance with the least resistance possible. The Gestapo and the Ordnungspolizei instructed deportees to bring one suitcase, clearly marked with the owner’s name and other identifying information, knowing full well that people would be separated from their belongings within moments of arriving at the camps. There is a wall of photographs in the ‘reception’ building at Birkenau - people must have thought they would be able to keep these reminders of loved ones and better times.

The whole point of the ghetto at Terezín was to deceive the international community, to refute the rumors of widespread mistreatment and executions. In international affairs, Hitler and his diplomats misled other countries about Germany’s intentions in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland and beyond.

Termed the “big lie” by the intelligence people who studied it, the constant repetition of their version of reality and truth regardless of how divorced from the objective and verifiable, if said loud enough, often enough, with sufficient conviction, and in the absence of any credible contradiction, became (becomes) that upon which people make their choices. It worked then and it appears to be working today.

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The immensity, the intricacy, and the pervasiveness made, make, it all very haunting.

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Photos

Nuremberg Laws
German Government ("Entwurf Willi Hackenberger", "Copyright by Reichsauschuss für Volksgesundheitsdienst", government agency apparently part of the Reichs- und Preußisches Ministerium des Innern) - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection