Auschwitz

Table of Contents

 

 

 

T
here is much in this book that is upsetting, but I still think it is a necessary piece of work. Not just for the obvious reason that surveys
¹
still show that there is confusion in the popular consciousness about the true history of Auschwitz, but also because I hope it offers something distinctive.

It is the culmination of fifteen years of writing books and making television programs about the Nazis, and is an attempt to show how one of the worst crimes in history is best understood through the prism of one physical place—Auschwitz. Unlike the history of anti-Semitism, Auschwitz has one certain beginning (the first prisoners arrived on June 14, 1940), and unlike the history of genocide, it has one definite end (the camp was liberated in January 1945). In between these two dates, Auschwitz had a complex and surprising history that, in many ways, mirrored the intricacies of Nazi racial and ethnic policy. Auschwitz was never conceived as a camp to kill Jews, it was never solely concerned with the “Final Solution”—although that came to dominate the place—and it was always physically changing, often in response to the constant shifts in fortunes of the German war effort elsewhere. Auschwitz, through its destructive dynamism, was both a microcosm of the Nazi state and the logical consequence of it.

The study of Auschwitz also offers something other than an insight into the Nazis; it offers us the chance to understand how human beings behaved in some of the most extreme conditions in history. From this story, there is a great deal we can learn about ourselves.

This is a book based on unique research—about 100 interviews specially conducted with former Nazi perpetrators and survivors from the camp—and draws on hundreds more interviews, conducted for my previous work
on the Third Reich, many with former members of the Nazi party.
²
The benefit of meeting and questioning survivors and perpetrators is immense. It offers an opportunity for a level of insight that is rarely available from written sources alone.

Indeed, although since my school days I had always been interested in this period of history, I can trace my own deep fascination with the Third Reich to one moment during a conversation with a former member of the Nazi party back in 1990. While writing and producing a film about Dr. Josef Goebbels, I talked to Wilfred von Oven who, as Goebbels' personal attaché, had worked closely with the infamous Nazi propaganda minister. After the formal interview, over a cup of tea, I asked this intelligent and charming man: “If you could sum up your experience of the Third Reich in just one word, what would it be?” As Herr von Oven thought for a moment and considered the question, I guessed his response would make reference to the horrible crimes of the regime—crimes he freely admitted had occurred—and of the damage Nazism had wreaked upon the world. “Well,” he finally said, “if I was asked to sum up my experience of the Third Reich in one word, that word would be ‘paradise.'”

“Paradise?” That didn't coincide with anything I had read in my history books. Nor did it square with the elegant, sophisticated man who sat in front of me, and who did not, come to that, look or talk as I had imagined a former Nazi should. But “paradise”? How was it possible that he could say such a thing? How could any intelligent person think of the Third Reich and its atrocities in such a way? Indeed, how was it possible that, during the twentieth century, people from Germany—a cultured nation at the heart of Europe—had ever perpetrated such crimes? Those were the questions that formed in my mind that afternoon all those years ago, and that still sit heavily in my mind today.

In my attempt to answer these questions I was helped by two accidents of history. The first was that I set out to question former Nazis at exactly the point in time at which most of them had nothing to lose by speaking openly. Fifteen years earlier, while holding down influential jobs and standing as pillars of their communities, they would not have spoken. Today, fifteen years later, most of them—including the charming Herr von Oven—are dead.

It often took months—in some cases years—to persuade them to allow
me to record an interview. We never will know exactly what tipped the balance and made an individual agree to be filmed but, in many cases, they clearly felt that, nearing the end of their lives, they wanted to put on record—warts and all—their experiences of these momentous times. They also believed that the BBC would not distort their contribution. I would add that I think only the BBC would have given us the necessary support to pursue this enterprise. The research period for these projects was so long that only a public-service broadcaster could have made such a commitment.

The second break I had was that my interest coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of eastern Europe; and it was not just the archives that suddenly became available for research, but the people as well. I had filmed in the Soviet Union in 1989 under Communism and, back then, it was hard to get anyone to speak about their nation's history in any terms other than propaganda slogans. Now, suddenly, in the 1990s, it was as if a dam had broken and all the suppressed memories and opinions came tumbling out. In the Baltic states I heard people say how they had welcomed the Nazis as liberators; on the wild steppes of Kalmykia I learned first-hand about Stalin's vindictive deportations of whole ethnic communities; in Siberia I met veterans who had been imprisoned twice—once by Hitler and once by the Soviet dictator; and in a village near Minsk I encountered a woman who had been caught in the middle of the most vicious partisan war in modern history and, upon reflection, who thought that the Red Army partisans were worse than the Nazis. All of these deeply held convictions would have died with the people who held them had Communism not fallen.

I also encountered something more frightening as I traveled these newly liberated countries, from Lithuania to the Ukraine and from Serbia to Belarus—virulent anti-Semitism. I had expected people to tell me how much they hated the Communists—that seemed only natural now. But to hate Jews? It seemed ludicrous, especially as there were hardly any Jews in the places I was visiting—Hitler and the Nazis had seen to that. Yet, the old man in the Baltic states who had helped the Nazis shoot Jews in 1941 still thought he had done the right thing sixty years earlier. And even some of those who had fought against the Nazis held wild anti-Semitic beliefs.

I remember the question one Ukrainian veteran put to me over lunch. He was a man who had fought bravely for the Ukrainian Nationalist partisans
against both the Nazis and the Red Army and been persecuted as result. “What do you think,” he asked, “of the view that there is an international conspiracy of Jewish financiers operating out of New York which is trying to destroy all non-Jewish governments?” I looked at him for a second. Not being Jewish myself, it is always something of a shock to encounter naked anti-Semitism from an unexpected source. “What do I think of that view?” I replied finally. “I think it's total garbage.” The old partisan took a sip of vodka. “Really,” he said, “That's your opinion. Interesting. ...”

What shocked me most of all was that these anti-Semitic views were not just confined to the older generation. I remember the woman at the Lithuanian Airways check-in desk who, after learning the subject of the film we were making, said, “You're interested in the Jews, are you? Well, just remember this—Marx was a Jew.” Also in Lithuania, I recall an army officer in his mid-twenties showing me round the site of the 1941 Jewish massacres at a fort in Kaunas and saying, “You're missing the big story, you know. The story isn't what we did to the Jews. It's what the Jews did to us.” I do not claim for a moment that everyone—or even the majority—in the eastern European countries I visited subscribes to these views; but that this kind of prejudice is openly expressed at all is disturbing.

All of which should be remembered by those people who think that the history in this book is of little relevance today. It should also be mulled over by those who think that corrosive anti-Semitism was somehow confined to the Nazis or even to Hitler. Indeed, the view that the crime of the extermination of the Jews was somehow imposed by a few mad people upon an unwilling Europe is one of the most dangerous of all. There was nothing “uniquely exterminatory” (to use the current academic buzzwords) about German society before the Nazis came to power. How could there have been, when many Jews fled anti-Semitism in eastern Europe in the 1920s to seek sanctuary in Germany?

Yet there is something about the mentality of the Nazis that seems at odds with the perpetrators who flourished in many other totalitarian regimes. That was certainly the conclusion I reached after completing three separate projects on World War II, each a book and television series: first
Nazis: A Warning from History
, then
War of the Century
, an examination of the war between Stalin and Hitler, and finally
Horror in the East
, an attempt to
understand the Japanese psyche during the 1930s and World War II. One unplanned consequence of this experience is that it puts me in a unique position as the only person I know of who has met and questioned a significant number of perpetrators from all three of the major totalitarian powers—Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Having done so, I can confirm that the Nazi war criminals I met were different.

In the Soviet Union, the climate of fear under Stalin was pervasive in a way it never was in Germany under Hitler until the last days of the war. The description one former Soviet air force officer gave me of open meetings in the 1930s, when anyone could be denounced as an “enemy of the people,” still haunts me to this day. No one was safe from a knock at the door at midnight. No matter how well you tried to conform, no matter how many slogans you spouted, Stalin's malevolence ensured that nothing you did or said or thought could save you if the spotlight picked you out.

In Nazi Germany, however, unless you were a member of a specific risk group—the Jews, the Communists, the gypsies, homosexuals, the “work-shy,” and anyone who opposed the regime—you could live comparatively free from fear. Despite all the recent academic work that rightly emphasizes how the Gestapo relied hugely upon denunciations from members of the public to do its work,
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the central truth still holds: The majority of the German population—almost certainly right up until the moment Germany started to lose the war—felt so personally secure and happy that the Germans would have voted to keep Hitler in power if there had been free and fair elections. In contrast, in the Soviet Union not even Stalin's closest, most loyal colleagues ever felt that they could sleep securely.

The consequence of this for those who perpetrated crimes at Stalin's behest was that the suffering they inflicted was so arbitrary that they often did not know the reasons for it. For example, the former Soviet secret policeman I met who had bundled up Kalmyks and put them on trains to exile in Siberia even today still has no clear idea about what was behind the policy. He had one stock response when asked why he had taken part—ironically, it is the one most commonly ascribed to Nazis in popular myth; he said he had been “acting under orders.” He had committed a crime because he was told to and knew that, if he failed to do so, then he would be shot; and he trusted that his bosses knew what they were doing. Which meant, of course, that
when Stalin died and Communism fell he was free to move on and leave the past behind. It also shows Stalin as a cruel, bullying dictator who has many parallels in history, not least in our own time with Saddam Hussein.