Auschwitz: A History Read online

  With its measures of discrimination and extermination inspired by racial ideology, Nazi ‘Germanization policy’ differed fundamentally from the medieval settlement of the east. ‘Germanization’ was founded on anti-Slavism and eastwards-directed imperialism and involved the racial dogmas of Weltanschauungspolitik (‘politics based on an overarching world view’) centred around a nucleus of anti-Semitism. Its goal was the total destruction of the existing order. At the centre of the policy was the establishment of a German population, along with the expulsion and suppression of the native inhabitants. With the term ‘Germanization’, coined to legitimize eastwards-directed imperialist goals during the time of the Kaiser, the Third Reich made its central goal a restructuring of ethnicities leading to the victory of the ‘Aryan race’. In the context of the Nazi ‘new order of Europe’, ‘Germanization’ meant a ruthless ‘racial restructuring’. The plan was one of radical denationalization and the ruthless suppression of the native population.

  When Hitler and Stalin, in their secret agreement of 23 August 1939, sealed the fourth division of Poland and the destruction of the country’s independence, and drew up their zones of interest along the Narew, the Vistula and the San, half of all Polish territory, with a population of more than 20 million people, fell to the German Reich; 11.8 million inhabitants came under Soviet influence. By invading Poland, Germany came into possession of the country with the biggest Jewish population in Europe: roughly 3 million of the country’s inhabitants, about 10 per cent of the overall Polish population, were Jews; around 1.7 million lived in the German and around 1.2 million in the Soviet sphere of interest.

  Oświęcim, close to the border, was not far from Gliwice (Gleiwitz), where a unit of SS shock troops had, on the evening of 30 August 1939, stage-managed the casus belli. On the first day of the war the Luftwaffe attacked Oświęcim. The Germans were determined to take the strategically important railway station and the barracks of the 6th Polish Cavalry Battalion. The Polish soldiers moved out the same day, and transferred their base to Cracow, about 60 kilometres to the east. Many civilians also fled.

  In the first days of September the bulk of those who left the town were Jews. By horse and cart and on foot, they travelled the poor roads towards Cracow, where most of them ended their trek in temporary lodgings. Some went on to Tarnów and Lwów, some headed for the Romanian, others for the Polish–Soviet, border. But after only a few days those who had stayed in Cracow took the road back home, for on 6 September the Wehrmacht invaded that city as well. Exhausted by their efforts, and hoping that things would be better at home, they retraced their steps.

  Meanwhile the units of the 14th Army, under the orders of General Wilhelm List, had begun to advance. Behind the troops to the rear, the Einsatzgruppe (‘action unit’) z.b.V. (zur besonderen Verwendung: ‘for special use’) under SS-Obergruppenführer Udo von Woyrsch was marching towards Oświęcim. Himmler had hastily telegraphed through an order to form the unit on the evening of 3 September, because of heavy Polish resistance fighting in the industrial area of Upper Silesia. At Oświęcim a Polish regiment did try to break through the German lines, and managed to blow up the bridge over the Soła, the most important access route to the town. This meant that the German conquerors first had to lay a pontoon bridge over the river before they could take the town on 4 September 1939.

  Only a week later the market square was called Adolf-Hitler-Platz, and the name of the town was Auschwitz. Although the streets, bridges and squares soon bore German names, for several weeks it was not even clear whether Auschwitz was part of the rapidly integrated region of East Upper Silesia, the still planned Reichsgau (‘Reich administrative district’) Beskidenland, or the General Government (the term applied by the Nazis to the rump Polish territory not actually annexed by the Reich), which had not yet been legally defined. Only on 26 October 1939, when the regulation concerning the establishment of the new border of the German Reich, drawn up by the Border Commission within the Reich Ministry of the Interior, came into effect was the decision finally made: Auschwitz was part of Upper Silesia, and thus of the German Reich.

  Hitler did not divide up the territory of Poland with a view to establishing German claims in the East once and for all. Rather he wanted to set in motion the ‘Germanization’ of the western Polish regions – East Upper Silesia, Danzig–West Prussia, Wartheland (generally known as the Warthegau) and East Prussia – as well as the economic exploitation of the rest of Poland as quickly as possible. In its efforts to establish a new territorial and economic order, the Border Commission accomplished its territorial task from the military, economic and transport points of view. The Reich gained over 90,000 square kilometres of land that had previously belonged to Poland, with four fifths of the country’s industry and a population of about 10 million. Far more territory than had been claimed since the end of the First World War thus came to Germany.

  The annexation of western Poland had an immediate effect on Auschwitz: the town was part of the German Reich – and did not, as is often suggested, lie in the geographically nebulous East. In other words: the largest extermination site in the Third Reich was (like Chelmno extermination camp in the Warthegau) on German soil – and it was also very near a town, and one that was shortly to be Germanized.

  At the time of the annexation, however, there was hardly anyone in Auschwitz, which from now on belonged to the district of Bielitz (formerly Bielsko) in the newly formed government district of Kattowitz (formerly Katowice), who could have been considered German in terms of Nazi racial ideas. This fact casts a sudden light on the scale of the racial task that the German civilian administration and the SS faced in Auschwitz. Given excessive historical importance because of the eastern settlers’ movement in the Middle Ages, the brutal ‘Germanization policy’ became the ideological programme of the occupying forces everywhere in the annexed western Polish regions.

  MAP 1 The location of Auschwitz in the German–Polish border zone

  The western Polish territories were to be restructured as quickly as possible into a racially ‘cleansed’, ethnically homogeneous and, in alliance with fundamental measures designed to achieve an economic and social new order, economically viable region. This plan provided both for the construction of the German administration and the settlement of ‘racially valuable Germans’. The goal was to expel all Jews and most Poles (meaning the non-Jewish native population), and strictly segregate them from the remaining Poles, Germans and people of German descent.

  Early in October 1939 Hitler had given Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS and head of the German police, extensive additional powers in his new function as Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood to promote the establishment of Germans and people of German descent in the western Polish regions, while at the same time expelling the ‘racially inferior’ native population. In the wake of the first resettlement programme planned by Himmler, Auschwitz was to become the political, economic and cultural centre of Germans from the South Tyrol. But the plans were not definite, because after the defeat of France Himmler favoured Burgundy as the place to settle the South Tyroleans, followed by Lower Styria in Austria and the Crimea.

  Meanwhile, in the region around Auschwitz it was becoming clear that ‘Germanization’ was not going to take place quite as easily as anticipated. The whole ‘Eastern strip’ of the government district of Kattowitz, of which Auschwitz was a part, proved to be hard to ‘Germanize’, because of its almost exclusively Polish and Jewish population. The settlement strategists agreed that the region was unsuitable as a base for Germans and people of German descent. Separated from the western districts of the government zone by the newly erected ‘police border’, a guarded rampart, from now on the ‘Eastern strip’ had second-class status in terms of territorial law. At least temporarily, this territory was exempt from ‘Germanization’. For the native population of Auschwitz this was significant to the extent that it meant that they were – initially – safe from deportation.


  Because of the situation in the ‘Eastern strip’ Auschwitz became a collecting-point for those Jews who had been deported from the western parts of Regierungsbezirk (‘government district’) Kattowitz, where hurried ‘Germanization’ was under way; their numbers were constantly on the rise. The Jewish Elders’ Council, set up on German orders, which was responsible for food and lodging, soon encountered quite insoluble problems. In the spring of 1940 Auschwitz had grown into one of the largest Jewish communities in the ‘Eastern strip’. The Jews lived crammed together in the alleys of the Old Town, isolated from the rest of the inhabitants and subjected to strict checks by German guards.

  Among the Germans who now moved to Auschwitz were administrative officials, but also businessmen and Treuhänder, people who sold off expropriated Jewish and Polish companies. The move to the annexed Eastern regions gave inhabitants of the Old Reich (Germany in its 1937 borders), Reichsdeutsche (‘Reich Germans’)as they were called, ample opportunity to climb the social ladder. Corruption and unscrupulousness quickly became the pattern of behaviour among the conquerors. War euphoria, confidence in victory and a pioneering spirit turned into a lack of moral inhibition, and personal enrichment became the rule among the Germans in the East.

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  The concentration camp

  Auschwitz in the National Socialist camp system

  At the beginning of 1940 Auschwitz caught Himmler’s eye. The Reichsführer-SS was in search of suitable areas all around the border regions to build concentration camps for political opponents. The former Sachsengänger camp was one of three possible locations that Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski had reported to Berlin from his SS-Oberabschnitt Süd-Ost (‘SS Main District ‘‘South-East’’’); other senior SS and police leaders came up with different suggestions. But the site in Auschwitz was by no means ideal as far as the SS experts were concerned: the buildings and barracks were dilapidated, the site was on swampy ground and afflicted by malaria, and ground-water resources were atrocious. Three commissions came to inspect the compound before the decision was reached in April 1940. For all its shortcomings, the concentration camp inspectors saw its benefits: the area had transport connections, it was at a railway junction, and it was easy to close off against the outside world. It is not certain, as has been suggested, that the crowded prisons in the Kattowitz government district prompted the final decision, and doubts surround Himmler’s supposed order of 27 April 1940 that building should go ahead. It seems unlikely that the concentration camp inspectors would have taken an interest in regional problems, and after weeks of planning we may presume that an actual order was no longer necessary.

  The first to suffer as a result of the camp’s construction were about 1,200 unemployed Polish refugees from the Hultschiner Ländchen, who had lived next to the site and were now expelled, and Jews from Auschwitz, from whom the SS recruited about 300 men for the building work with the forced support of the Jewish Elders’ Council. More than 500 large and small companies from the whole of the Reich were involved in the construction of and provision of equipment for the concentration camp: in civil engineering and construction work, and fittings and supplies of all kinds.

  Auschwitz was the seventh concentration camp, after Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen and the women’s camp in Ravensbrück. In other border areas, to the north-east as well as in the north, west and south-east, other camps were coming into being at the same time: as early as September 1939 the civilian prisoner camp in Stutthof near Danzig; in June 1940 Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace; and in August 1940 Gross-Rosen concentration camp in the Old Reich area of Silesia, which was initially a sub-camp of Sachsenhausen and later became a camp in its own right.

  MAP 2 Auschwitz I (parent camp) as of 1943–4

  At the top of the SS hierarchy in Auschwitz was Commandant Rudolf Höss, whom Himmler appointed head of the new camp on 4 May 1940.Asa Blockführer (‘block leader’) in Dachau and a Schutzhaftlagerführer (‘protective custody camp leader’) in Sachsenhausen, Höss had a great deal of experience of the camps. In the spring of 1940 he had headed the commission that came to Auschwitz to inspect the site. In all likelihood it was on his initiative that the slogan Arbeit macht frei (‘Work makes you free’) was placed above the camp gate of Auschwitz. The same inscription was prominently displayed at the camp entrances of Dachau and Sachsenhausen, and also in Flossenbürg and Ravensbrück. In völkisch (‘ethnic German’) and nationalist circles, the phrase had been circulating since the late nineteenth century. For the prisoners the motto was one of sheer cynicism, because work in the forced regime of the Nazi concentration camps meant exploitation, beatings, harassment and death.

  As commandant, Höss was in charge of the SS guards, was responsible for the security of the camp, and handled all internal matters. The six departments that comprised the staff of the camp administration (every camp was organized identically, and this structure remained unchanged in all cases until the end of the war) were as follows: department I, the commandant’s office, was run by the adjutant to the camp commandant, and was responsible for SS personnel management, correspondence and the arming of the troops. Department II was the political department, the representatives of the Gestapo and the Kripo (‘Criminal Police’) in the camp, who were subordinate to the local Gestapo or the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (‘Reich Security Central Office’), or RSHA, set up at the start of the war, and who were responsible for the interrogation of prisoners. Department III encompassed the running of ‘protective custody’; the senior ‘protective custody camp leader’ covered for the commandant and was in charge of the SS Kommandoführer (‘squad leaders’), Arbeitsdienstführer (‘work duty leaders’), Rapportführer (‘report leaders’) and block leaders deployed in the camp. Department IV was administration; department V was the base doctor and the medical staff, department VI covered the training and welfare of the SS troops. The SS central building administration was part of the SS garrison, but was not incorporated into the camp administration any more than were the SS troop stores or the SS agricultural estate.

  By the end of 1940 the camp building site in Auschwitz was so large that a decision had to be made in the first general building plan as to the location of the ‘protective custody’ camp, industrial site, workshops, barracks area, troop stores, SS housing and the agricultural estate. Zone after zone was added to the camp compound; the site was extended to such an extent that the SS soon acquired whole villages, forests, ponds and farmland: the so-called SS ‘zone of interest’, finally about 40 square kilometres in area. Surrounded by SS guards in the inner and outer cordons – the inner cordon ran round the camp grounds, the outer one around the SS zone of interest – the area was surrounded by warning signs, concrete walls, watchtowers and double-depth, electrified barbed-wire fences that were illuminated at night.

  MAP 3 The SS zone of interest, Auschwitz

  The prisoners

  On 14 June 1940 Auschwitz went into operation as a quarantine or transit camp. Floods of prisoners were ‘sorted’ there, groups were broken up and reassembled, and after a certain period of quarantine transported to another camp. It soon became clear that Auschwitz was to be a permanent institution. The 728 Polish prisoners delivered to the camp on ‘foundation day’, most of them schoolchildren, students and soldiers, came from Tarnów prison near Cracow; a further 313 followed six days later from the Wiśnicz Nowy prison in the General Government. Major transports of 1,666 and 1,705 prisoners arrived from Warsaw in August and September of 1940. Almost all the prisoners were initially employed in the construction of the camp, which, because of the dilapidated state of the buildings and the lack of material, took much longer than planned.

  At no other place in the Nazi sphere of power were so many people killed as in Auschwitz. But the camp was by no means the centre of the genocide of the European Jews from the very outset. Auschwitz was opened as a prison for Polish political prisoners. Within the Nazi camp system Auschwitz was at first one of many compulsor
y institutions for the isolation and ‘disciplining’ of opponents. The only unusual thing was its capacity to accommodate up to 10,000 prisoners (at the beginning of the war there were about 25,000 in all the other concentration camps put together), which had been worked out on the basis that the occupying forces in conquered Poland expected to arrest numerous political enemies.

  During the initial phase, the majority of the inmates were not Jews; those affected by persecution and the arbitrary use of power tended rather to be members of former Polish political parties and organizations, members of the intelligentsia and anyone potentially involved in the Polish nationalist resistance, above all teachers, scientists, clerics and doctors. Until around the middle of 1942, during the ‘Polish phase’ of the camp’s history, the number of Jews, most of whom were arrested for political reasons, remained relatively small. During this period the prisoners were not yet being systematically murdered, but died of hunger, harassment and intolerable working conditions; they were beaten, hanged and shot to death by the SS.

  Their treatment, their everyday life and their response to acts of violence and cruelty are difficult to describe. It is relatively easy to outline the reception process, living conditions and first experiences of the camp, but what is hard to grasp is the constant pressure to conform to which the prisoners were exposed, because conditions in the camp changed often. And the individual suffering of a prisoner can barely be captured in words.