by JA Norland (abbreviated posts on this are being published all across the blogosphere today, the blogroll is at the end. I am posting his piece in its entirety, with permission.)

Cross Posted to The Wide Awakes

Being the worst of the death camps, Auschwitz may be viewed as the symbol for the Holocaust, and the liberation of Auschwitz, which we are commemorating today (January 27, 2005), may be viewed as the symbol of defeating evil at its worst.

In remembering Auschwitz, we should try to learn the lessons it teaches us concerning current trends and events, and to do so we should focus on the basic questions: How could it have happened and can it happen again?

A thorough analysis of “how could it have happened?” is given in Goldhagen’s book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” (see reference to this book, as well as to other works mentioned below, at article’s end). The essential point underscored by the author is that as a result of consistent, unrelenting anti-Jewish propaganda, the elimination of the Jews from German society was accepted as axiomatic, leaving open only two questions: when and how:

The German discourse in some sense had as its foundation the extremely widespread, virtually axiomatic notion that a ‘Judenfrage,’ a “Jewish Problem,” existed. The term ‘Judenfrage’ presupposed and inhered within it a set of interrelated notions… Because of the Jews’ presence, a serious problem existed in Germany. Responsibility for the problem lay with the Jews, not the Germans. As a consequence of these “facts,” some fundamental change in the nature of Jews or in their position in Germany was necessary and urgent. Everyone who accepted the existence of a “Jewish Problem” - even those who were not passionately hostile to the Jews - subscribed to these notions…

This axiomatic belief in the existence of the “Jewish Problem,” more or less promised an axiomatic belief in the need to “eliminate” Jewishness from Germany as the “problem’s” only “solution…”

The toll of these decades of verbal, literary, institutionally organized, and political antisemitism was wearing down even those who, true to Enlightenment principles, had resisted the demonization of the Jews. The eliminationist mind-set was so prevalent that the inveterate antisemite and founder of the Pan-German League, Friedrich Lange, could with verity declaim the universal belief in the “Jewish Problem,” rightly pointing out that the means to the “solution,” and not the existence of the “problem” itself, was the only remaining subject of doubt and disagreement. [Goldhagen, pp.80-81; for a longer quotation,click here].

This analysis is reflected in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf [see reference at article’s end]. Talking about his childhood, Hitler says,

Not until my fourteenth or fifteenth year [i.e., 1903-1904 – ed.] did I begin to come across the word ‘Jew,’ with any frequency, partly in connection with political discussions. This filled me with a mild distaste, and I could not rid myself of an unpleasant feeling that always came over me whenever religious quarrels occurred in my presence…

Then I came to Vienna…

In the first few weeks my eyes and my senses were not equal to the flood of values and ideas. Not until calm gradually returned and the agitated picture began to clear did I look around me more carefully in my new world, and then among other things I encountered the Jewish question…

I now began to try to relieve my doubts by books. For a few hellers I bought the first antiSemitic pamphlets of my life. Unfortunately, they all proceeded from the supposition that in principle the reader knew or even understood the Jewish question to a certain degree.

As Goldhagen noted, the existence of a “Jewish Question” was seen in Germany as a fact, and one that required a “solution”, namely the removal of all Jews from German society: emigration, expulsion, concentration or annihilation. When Hitler became Chancellor on January 30, 1933, the soil had already been prepared for any of these “solutions”, and, indeed, the Nazis tried them all in sequence.

Upon assuming power, the Nazis began a process of transforming the Jews into “socially dead” beings: severe legal restrictions; assaults on individuals, businesses, synagogues cemeteries and institutions; prohibiting Jews to enter a growing number of villages and towns; and a boycott of all Jewish businesses (the latter declared on April 1, 1933). A few days after the boycott, a large number of Jews lost their jobs with the public service, through racist legislation. None of these steps could have succeeded without widespread consent, and often encouragement, by the German population.

The fact that these measures were accepted by ‘ordinary Germans’ constituted a green light for the Nazi hierarchy, signalling that harsher measures were a viable option. The harsher measures included the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, which effectively cast the Jews out of German society: Jews were stripped of citizenship and marriage with non-Jews was prohibited. On the night of November 9-10, 1938, Germany erupted in the murderous orgy of Kristallnacht: a hundred Jews were murdered, and 30,000 were sent to concentration camps, with the population actively supporting the SA. The Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht demonstrated that the ‘solutions’ of expulsion, concentration and annihilation of the Jewish people had began. To add gravitas to the signal, Hitler declared [http://www.adolfhitler.ws/lib/speeches/text/speeches.htm] on January 30, 1939, shortly after Kristallancht:

If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!

The first opportunity for annihilation came later that year (September 1, 1939), when World War II broke out and half of Poland fell into Nazi hands in short order (the other part was occupied by the USSR). Within German-occupied Poland, the Nazis found two million Jews whom they could concentrate in ghettos and camps, loot, starve and murder outright. These were in addition to the Jews who had already fellen under Nazi domination or occupation in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia (all of which were occupied before September 1939). While the expulsion and the concentration of Jews in large-city ghettos was initiated almost immediately, the large-scale annihilation of Jews was still to wait, among other reasons, because “Given Hitler’s belief that the Jews were all-powerful in the Soviet Union, … a genocidal onslaught against Polish Jewry would…likely have sparked a war with the Soviet Union before Hitler was prepared for it” [Goldhagen, p. 144]. Additionally, Hitler was trying to induce England to sign a separate peace treaty, and the slaughter of Jews, Hitler believed, could well have scuttled such an option.

In the first half of 1941, Hitler began planning an assault on the USSR (Operation Barbarossa) . Part of the planning included the preparations for the ‘final solution’, the annihilation of the Jewish population in Europe, as Hitler announced on January 30, 1939 (see above). Heydrich was charged with providing the plan for the ‘final solution’, a plan he submitted in January 1941 (Goldhagen, p. 147; but other sources state July 1941). The armed forces were assigned to concur the USSR, while the SS, specifically, the Einsatzgruppen, were charged with annihilating the Jews, in close co-operation with the army. Some of the SS officers were concerned that their troops may find mass killings of women and children too distasteful, and proposed to enlist the local population – Latvians and Lithuanians, who were soon to be occupied. Another suggestion was to start with murdering groups of less than one thousand, able-bodied, adult males, leaving the murder of women and children and mass murder of adults to the time when the SS was ‘hardened’.

Operation Barbarossa began on June 22, 1941, with a German surprise attack on the USSR. Within a couple of days, the murder of Jews commenced: On June 25, 1941, 201 people were shot in Garsden, a Lithuanian border town, most of them Jews. As the German armies advanced, the Einsazgruppen broadened the circle of murder, in collaboration with locals, especially in Lithuania and the Ukraine. Himmler visited the killing fields and observed the slaughter first hand. Seeing that the German troops and commanders showed no hesitation in executing the genocidal plan on the initial small scale, he ordered it extended. By July, mass-murder of women and children became routine. For example, 33,000 Jews were massacred in Babi Yar, Ukraine, in September 1941.

As the slaughter continued in 1941, Himmler sought ways to murder the Jews in a way that didn’t involve mass shooting. Initially, gassing vans were used, but in short order, the idea came up to erect death camps with built-in systems for gassing people and disposing of the victims’ bodies. On September 3, 1941, the first ‘gassing test’ with Ziklon B took place in Auschwitz, killing 850 people, of whom 600 were Soviet prisoners of war [Hoess, p. 30].

As the genocidal planning advanced, the Nazi hierarchy in charge, and particularly Heydrich, decided that it was time to formalize and co-ordinate the steps to be taken for the ‘final solution’. To this end, Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference on January 1942, Wannsee being a suburb of Berlin. All the relevant ministries were represented – the Chancellery, the Ministry of Justice, the office of Race and Settlement, and the Security Police; apart from Heydrich, the best-known participant is probably Adolf Eichmann.

Prepared by Eichmann, the Conference Protocol, essentially a summary (see source at article’s end), included a list of Europe’s countries, indicating the number of Jews in each; even the minuscule Jewish populations in Scandinavia, Albania, Spain and Portugal were noted. Heydrich announced that

Approximately 11 million Jews will be involved in the final solution of the European Jewish question.
…

[I]n the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.

The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival.

In typical bureaucratic manner, the document goes into detail as to the treatment of “Persons of Mixed Blood of the First Degree” and “Second Degree”, with exact definition for subcategories. The document discusses the final solution explicitly, albeit without using the term ‘extermination’ or ‘annihilation’, but, as Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference] noted,

Eichmann later admitted at his trial that the actual language used during the conference was much more blunt and included terms such as “extermination” and “annihilation”.

The Nuremberg trials also established beyond doubt that the “final solution” was synonymous with “the extermination of Jewry” (see, for example, Shirer, p. 963).

Thus were eleven million European Jews condemned to death.

Following the Wannsee conference (20 January 1942), mass gassing of Jews in death camps began on a large scale: Belzec and Auschwitz – in March, Sobibor – in May, Treblinka – in July. Auschwitz operated for approximately three years before it was liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. During that period it operated with diabolic efficiency, as the example of Hungarian Jews illustrates. Between May 15, 1944 and July 9, 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to Auschwitz and gassed.

The extent of the camps set up to murder Jews is unbelievable: Goldhagen [p.167] gives the figure 0f 10,005, including ghettos, concentration camps, and slave-labour camps (though some did not house Jews). This means that at the very least, tens of thousands of Germans were aware of what was happening.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau complex (with 50 satellite camps) alone had 7,000 guards at one time or another. Among the camps, Auschwitz was the largest death-machine, routinely gassing some 6,000 people, mostly Jews, in one day (Shirer, p. 967). Gilbert (p. 210) writes about one particular day:

On May 21 [1944] the railway sidings, gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau were more active than they had ever been before. For on that one day three trains arrived from Hungary, two from Holland, and one from Belgium. The second Dutch train did not contain Jews, but Gipsies, all of whom were sent to the barracks. From the three Hungarian trains, only eleven men and six women were sent to the barracks, and more than 12,000 gassed. This was the largest number to be gassed in a single day in the history of Auschwitz up to that moment. But it was a number that was now to be repeated day after day.

An eye-witness account of what went on in Auschwitz was given by a Jewish physician, Miklos Nyiszli, whom Josef Mengele selected as his assistant. Nyiszli also witnessed the one and only uprising in Auschwitz (October 7, 1944 – see below), and survived miraculously to inform the world. A few paragraphs from the chilling book, which must be read in its entirely, are reproduced on IsraPundit at this site:

http://www.israpundit.com/archives/2003/09/thats_why_israe.php

In all, between three and four million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles and POWs from the Red Army, were slaughtered in Auschwitz alone (Shirer, p. 973). But the slaughter was not the only atrocity committed. The death camps also conducted “medical” experiments, torturing prisoners to death; slave labour on starvation food-rations reduced life expectancy of those not condemned to immediate deaths to a few months; the dead were exploited for their golden teeth and hair, which were removed and sent to Germany; and humiliation, abuse and torture of the living were omnipresent. Particularly bestial were the experiments that Dr Josef Mengele conducted on twins, some as young as five. The caption of the picture below, presented at the site,

http://www.deathcamps.info/Experiments/jpg_exp5.htm

reads as follows:

Mengele did a number of medical experiments of unspeakable horror at Auschwitz, using twins. These twins as young as five years of age were usually murdered after the experiment was over and their bodies dissected.

Mengele injected chemicals into the eyes of children in an attempt to change their eye color. Unfortunately a strict veil of secrecy over the experiments enabled Mengele to do his work more effectively.

We are all acquainted with the global number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust, 6,000,000. But when examined on a country-specific basis, the horror becomes even more pronounced. The historian, Sir Martin Gilbert has documented these horrors in an article entitled, “The final solution”,

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/holocaust/finalsolution.htm

in which he notes:

Only 20,000 Dutch Jews remained undeported; 106,000 were deported and killed. Of Yugoslavia’s Jews, 60,000 were killed, and only 12,000 survived. From Greece, 65,000 were taken to their deaths, and only 12,000 survived.

Beginning in September 1944, as the Nazis experienced labour shortage, and as the Red Army pushed westward, defeating the Vehrmacht, the Nazis began to evacuate the death camps, including Auschwitz, and to plan for the destruction of evidence. The evacuation has gone into history as the “death marches”, because hundreds of thousands of prisoners were marched on foot for hundreds of miles westwards, while the Nazi guards shot any laggards or prisoners who attempted an escape. Gilbert estimates that 100,000 Jews were murdered during the death marches. The final evacuation of Auschwitz-Birkenau took place on January 18, leaving behind a few personnel and some 9,000 prisoners too sick to join the death march. Hundreds of these were shot in the camps even as late as January 25. The others were also slated to be shot, but had to be left alive because the Red Army was so close that most of the killers had to leave immediately.

At the same time, the Nazis began a systematic campaign of evidence destruction: documents and registers were burned, the gas chambers and crematoria were blown up and/or dismantled. For example, Crematorium V in Auschwitz was blown up on January 26, one day before the camp was liberated; the SS squad in charge then escaped.

Auschwitz was finally liberated sixty years ago today, on January 27, 1945. The Red Army found 7,600 survivors in the entire Auschwitz-Birkenau complex (Gilbert, p. 337).

During the years that Auschwitz conducted the slaughter, the Allies were informed of the atrocities. In one case, as reported in an article at The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies,

http://www.wymaninstitute.org/articles/2004-12-unmentionable.php :

After escaping from Auschwitz in April 1944, Slovak Jewish refugees Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler compiled a detailed 25-page report on the mass murder process which they had eyewitnessed during their two years in the death camp.

The report was forwarded to all the major Allies, but the information was suppressed. About the US, in particular, the article notes:

After reading and Vrba and Wetzler eyewitness report on Auschwitz, War Refugee Board director John Pehle prepared to release it to the news media, together with additional documents which verified the information. But the State Department and the Office of War Information, learning of Pehle’s plan, strongly objected.

The Office of War Information’s chiefs had previously instructed their staff that coverage of the Nazi mass-murders would be “confused and misleading if it appears to be simply affecting the Jewish people.” OWI director Elmer Davis now called Pehle into his office and berated him for planning to release the Vrba-Wetzler report…

Later in the war, Allied flights of bombers and reconnaissance planes over Auschwitz were conducted repeatedly. Yet, the Allies refused to bomb the railway lines. Further photographic proof of this statement appeared recently, as reported in this news story from Arutz 7

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=56424 .

Arutz 7 quotes the director of Yad Vashem as saying, “These photos show once again, in a most chilling manner, that which was known before: The Allies were able to reach the death camps, fly over them, photograph them - and bomb them.”

Entire volumes have been devoted to the issue of the complicity of the Allies in the Holocaust by refusing to bomb the camps and/or the railways to them. From the evidence, it is clear that the complicity was deliberate: see the volumes by Gilbert and by Neufeld/Berenbaum cited at article’s end. Noteworthy in particular are the facts that the Allies bombed the industrial plants in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, and during the Polish uprising against the Nazis, the Allies flew in supplies, at times overflying Auschwitz. Yet, the bombing of Auschwitz and its rail lines was never attempted.

Even this brief recounting of the Auschwitz story is incomplete without recalling the uprising on October 7 (Hoess, p. 365). The Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners who were forced to participate in the gassing, in the burning of the gassed bodies, and in the looting of the victim’s gold teeth and hair, destroyed one crematorium and greeted the SS squad with fire from smuggled arms. The uprising was quashed with most of the Sonderkommando dying during the battle or being murdered subsequently.

There are numerous other issues that should have been dealt with in this essay, but could not be covered because of space constraints: What happened to the perpetrators? What happened to the survivors? Some works on these topics are listed at the end of this article.

A final word

The first paragraph posed the question, “how could it have happened”. The foregoing narrative suggests that the slaughter of Europe’s Jews came about after a systematic, relentless campaign of vilification, which rendered the “Jewish question” and the inevitable ‘final solution’, part of the common-sense and acceptable discourse of German society. Escalating the persecution and slaughter of the Jews step by step, the Nazi regime ensured that the population and the executioners alike became inured to the results of their deeds. Furthermore, the campaign of vilification rendered the Holocaust the top priority objective of the Nazi regime, an objective for which Germany diverted scarce resources needed on the battlefield.

There were additional factors that facilitated the Holocaust: the deliberate complicity of the Allies; the collaboration of the population in such countries as the Baltic states and the Ukraine; and the collaboration of the Jundenrats (Jewish councils) and Kapos.

When the question is asked whether a genocidal plan of such a magnitude can recur, one need only look to Rwanda for an answer: It has already happened. Can genocide against the Jewish people recur? To answer honestly, one must underscore the strong parallels between the systematic vilification of Jews before the Nazi ascent to power and the current vilification of the Jewish people and Israel. Suffice it to note the annual flood of anti-Israel resolutions at the UN; or the public opinion polls taken in Europe, which single out Israel as a danger to world peace; or the divestment campaigns being waged in the US against Israel; or the attempts to delegitimize Israel’s very existence. The complicity of the Allies in WW II is mirrored by the support the PLO is receiving from Europe, China and Russia today. And the Judenrat collaborators have their parallels in the many Jews who collaborate and initiate anti-Israel agitation. The similarities call for urgent, sustained action.

If remembering Auschwitz should teach us anything, it is that we must all support Israel and the Jewish people against this vilification, knowing where it inevitably leads.

References:

In addition to the links that are incorporated in the text, this piece derived the information from the major works listed below. The literature about the Holocaust in general, and on Auschwitz in particular, is vast; a Google search for “Holocaust+Auschwitz” yields over 400,000 links.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Hitler’s Willing Executioners. New York: Random House, 1997.

Adolf Hitler. Mein Kampf. http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv1ch02.html

Miklos Nyiszli. Auschwitz: An eye Witness Account. New York: Seaver Books, 1960.

Protocols of the Wannsee Conference. http://www.ghwk.de/engl/protengl.htm [also available at many other websites].

William L Shirer. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960.

For an abridged timeline of the Holocaust, consult the Auschwitz site,

http://www.auschwitz.dk/id19.htm

Of special significance are the sites of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Holocaust Chronicles and Yad Vashem:
http://www.ushmm.org/
http://www.holocaustchronicle.org/index.html
http://www.yadvashem.org/

Also of special importance is the site of the House of Wannsee Conference:

http://www.ghwk.de/engl/kopfengl.htm

Of the many volumes and articles devoted to the deliberate complicity of the Allies in the Holocaust, I recommend two:

Michael J Neufeld and Michael Berenbuam. The bombing of Auschwitz. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000.

Martin Gilbert. Auschwitz and the Allies. London (UK): Michael Joseph, 1981.

One of the most notorious Kommandants of Auschwitz was Rudolph Hoess (not to be confused with Rudolph Hess). Prior to being executed he wrote his memoirs:

Rudolph Hoess. Death Dealer. Edited by Steven Paskuly. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1992.

Of the many books written by survivors about their survival in Auschwitz and their life subsequent to liberation, the following two short volumes are noteworthy:

Livia Bitton-Jackson. My Bridges of Hope. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.

Anna Heilman. Never Far Away. Calgary (Alberta, Canada): University of Calgary Press, 2001.

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