THE FLOWERS IN THE WINDOWBOXWhen you read about the Nazis there's always this strange contradiction - their famous obsession with order, with following orders, with classification, rules, hierarchy, and all of that, is superimposed upon a regime which was most of the time in chaos, ministries competing with other ministries, states (the SS) within states; for many really big projects there was a culture of no written orders, and in many cases major policies were made up on the spot.The answer to this puzzle is : the Nazi regime was radical. It was specifically not democratic and consensual. If a decision was reached at the top it was of no concern if it contradicted any other policy, or even if it was frankly impossible. If subordinates raised any practical objections they were told "You will find a way". This led to, for instance, Rudolph Hoess, newly appointed commandant of Auschwitz, driving around the villages of southern Poland scavenging and stealing any building materials he could find in order to get some barracks built in 1940.In Auschwitz chaos and efficiency were fused together. It was never one thing, not even one camp. It was originally a labour camp for Polish political prisoners and some German criminals; then came the Russian prisoners of war. And it grew and grew. Eventually "Auschwitz" was an area of about 25 square miles. There were two big camps, Auschwitz I and Birkenau, then there were 43 sub-camps which appeared as industries such as I G Farben and Bayer moved in and constructed nearby factories and paid the SS for slave labour. (Bayer is one of the companies I now indirectly work for, it's one of our big pharma clients). Then some low level gassing experiments began, which in time led to huge purpose-built crematoriums with built-in gas chambers being constructed in Birkenau, and we arrive at this summary :1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz1.1 million died there. 1 million of them were Jews. The non-Jews were made up of 70,000 Poles, 20,000 Roma and 10,000 Russians. WE HAVE CARRIED OUT THIS MOST DIFFICULT TASK FOR THE LOVE OF OUR PEOPLE*The first part of the Holocaust was wild and anarchic. The Einsatzgruppen squads murdered Jews just behind the front line in the USSR and they did this by the crudest of methods, they lined the people up, men, women and children, and shot them, and threw them in ditches or pits. This was horrible work, it was day in and day out. It quickly destroyed the morale of the soldiers. They couldn't take it. There had to be a better way. And there was. The Aktion T4 (euthenasia) programme for the eradication of "incurables" in Germany had started in September 1939 and had already concluded that gassing these victims was more efficient than administering lethal injections. By the end of 1941 about 70,000 "incurables" had been killed at six different centres. It was logical to try a few gassing experiments on prisoners in concentration camps and it did seem to work pretty well once they found something better than carbon monoxide (which took too long to kill people). The SS liked the gassing concept because it insulated the SS soldier from the actual killing, that was the main point. Germans did not have to put up with all the screaming and misery or have to look at the dead bodies. All that was the job of the Sonderkommando, which were recruited from the camp inmates. Let the Jews kill themselves. Let the Jews pull out their own gold teeth. Let the Jews incinerate themselves. So three extermination camps were constructed, and these are amazingly unfamous – Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. They were specifically for killing, they did not use any prisoners for slave labour, they were located far away from population centres, way out in the Polish countryside. And they were small. They really should be more famous, because they were extremely efficient.Belzec – operated from March 42 to June 43. People killed there : approximately 600,000Sobibor – operated march 42 to October 43. People killed there : between 200, 000 and 250,000Treblinka – operated between July 42 and August 43. People killed there : approximately 870,000THIS IS AN UNWRITTEN AND NEVER-TO-BE-WRITTEN PAGE OF GLORY IN OUR HISTORY*After these camps were closed their existence was removed from the face of the earth. The land was ploughed, and turned back into farmland, a family was found to live there and tell anyone who asked that they had been there for generations. It was as if the Nazis knew they had committed a crime and they were hiding it. In the same way they always wreathed their official documents about the final solution in euphemism and opaque bureaucracy. Why? In exactly the same way that a psychopath like Ted Bundy or Peter Sutcliffe would carefully cover up their murders. Neither the Nazis, Ted Bundy or Peter Sutcliffe believed for a moment that what they had done was wrong. Not at all. But they knew that other less enlightened people did think it was wrong**. In the Nazis case, even other Germans might think it was wrong. Because they just hadn't had enough time to come to the understanding of this awful necessity, as Himmler might have put it. Even Hitler had to get to a point where he realised, after years of fulminating about smashing the Jews, crushing them, destroying them, that he could actually physically kill them all. He'd been trying to get them to disappear for years – ship them all to Madagascar was one ridiculous idea – but that hadn't meant actually killing them until 1941.TO HAVE SEEN THIS THROUGH AND… TO HAVE REMAINED DECENT *First they drove the prisoners from the cattle trucks to the gas chambers with whips and dogs. That also proved to be distressing for all concerned. So they realised that treating the arrivals with cool efficiency, even courtesy, made the whole process so much easier. They also discovered that it was no problem to separate the men from the women but it was counter-productive to try to separate the women from their children. At Treblinka they rigged up a fake jolly country railway station complete with welcoming band playing popular marches and light classical pieces, nothing too heavy. Easy does it. STUFF I DID NOT KNOW # 1DID YOU KNOW THERE WAS A BROTHEL AT AUSCHWITZ?There was a hierarchy of prisoners. At the bottom were the Jews considered unfit for work. They were killed. In the middle were the Jews, Russians and Poles who were considered fit for being worked to death. At the top were kapos and German prisoners who had specialist jobs. For these, Hoess set up a brothel in August 1943. The deniers have jumped on this bizarre fact – a death camp with a brothel? Come off it. Proves it was an okay place really. There were no gas chambers. And so on.STUFF I DID NOT KNOW #2Jews living in the United Kingdom were handed over to the Nazis for deportation to concentration camps. This was a miserable discovery. What happened was that the British government decided that the Channel islands were useless and would not be defended. These are islands between Britain and France which are part of Great Britain. A lot of Islanders decamped for the mainland but a lot didn't. The German army occupied the islands in summer 1940 without a single shot being fired. Then they rolled out their Jew-hating policies. Now, the Nazis also hated Freemasons. A not so well-known fact. And they wanted to deport all Jews and all Freemasons. The islanders kicked up a huge protest about the masons, because the Channel Islands is a hotbed of masonry. But they gave up the handful (under ten) of Jews without much of a murmer (not that they could have done anything). STUFF I DID NOT KNOW #3There's a huge, huge debate about whether the Allies could have ameliorated the suffering of the Jews by bombing Auschwitz. Books, essays, letters to the editor, this has been going on a while. It's the hectic part of a wider debate about what did the Allies know about the Holocaust and when did they know it. Rees slashes through the nonsense. He says – 1) the Allies knew about the final solution by late 42/early 43; 2) there was nothing they could have done which would have changed anything, either for Auschwitz specifically or anywhere else. But what about this damning quote from Anthony Eden during discussions in Washington in March 1943 about Hungarian Jews (all of whom were later murdered in Auschwitz) – he said it was importantto move very cautiously about offering to take all the Jews out of a country – if we do that then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar efforts in Poland and Germany. Hitler may well take us up on any such offer and there are simply not enough ships and means of transportation to handle them. (p312)By 1943 Hitler had decided on physical liquidation, but if the offer to take all Jews had been made in 1941, then – maybe, maybe – Hitler would have agreed. You know, I don't want to think about that.THIS BOOKIt's pretty good, very readable, but the first half is always turning into a history of the Final Solution and not a history of Auschwitz. Once a couple of German companies are namechecked they don't rate any further analysis. Whereas Rees devotes 13 pages to the revolt at Sobibor and eight pages to the way that Denmark protected its Jews. Both of these interesting stories have nothing to do with Auschwitz. I wanted to know much more about the insidious, repulsive morality of the exploitation of slave labour by big German industry. THE MORAL QUAGMIRE OF YOUR WAR CRIMES VS. MY WAR CRIMESBritish Air Staff paper, dated September 23, 1941:The ultimate aim of an attack on a town area is to break the morale of the population which occupies it. To ensure this, we must achieve two things: first, we must make the town physically uninhabitable and, secondly, we must make the people conscious of constant personal danger. The immediate aim, is therefore, twofold, namely, to produce (i) destruction and (ii) fear of deathOscar Groening, ex-SS, who worked at Auschwitz and was interviewed for this book, commented:We saw how bombs were dropped on Germany, and women and children died in firestorms. We saw this and said "This is a war that is being led in this way by both sides".Rees spends a few frantic paragraphs explaining that there was no moral equivalent at all between the nazis gassing women and children and the Allies bombing and burning women and children. It's a false comparison. But he still says the comparison is "emotionally disturbing" – one reason being that so many raised objections to the carpet bombing of German towns and cities at the time - including Churchill! The bombing campaign killed a minimum of 305,000 German civilians. And the comparison works – the bombers were distanced completely from the horror they unleashed, as the SS guards were insulated from the gassings by the use of Jews to do all the disgusting work for them. Well, no.GERANIUMSAs I mentioned, the SS found that shepherding the Jews to the gas chambers worked much better than brutality, and one nice touch, I think you'll agree, was that someone had the idea of putting windowboxes full of geraniums outside the crematoriums. There weren't any flowers anywhere else in Auschwitz, but here, where the Jews were killed, there were lots of windowboxes full of geraniums._______________________* from a speech by Himmler to the SS, 6 October 1943**Hence, the person who doesn't even realise that other people will think what he has done is a crime is insane.
The Nazis and the Holocaust are two topics I have read countless books on since I was farely young. I've always found them endlessly fasicnating. The psychology of the Nazis is something that has forever puzzled me. How is it that a whole nation of civilized people can see it fit to persecute one race of people based on obviously illogical and frankly, silly reasoning?Until now, pretty much every book I've read on the subject has kept to the idea that the Germans were pure evil, cold blooded killers with seemingly no reasoning or logic behind what they were doing. Which is why this is the best book I've read on the subject of the Final Solution. Laurence Rees looks at how the Nazis at first wanted to simply deport the Jewish population of the Reich elsewhere, when this wasn't successful, Himmler ordered the systematic killing.I guess, for me, why I loved this book so much was because the writer clearly thought about what was going through the heads of the SS. He didn't just paint them as evil monsters who were out for blood, but instead disccusses the psychological damage suffered by the SS who were involved in shootings etc. And while the surviving Nazis' logic for what they did is clearly wrong, this book at least shows that human side to (probably) history's biggest villains.I thought I knew pretty much everything on the subject of the Final Solution, boy was I wrong.
What do You think about Auschwitz: A New History (2005)?
The 5 stars I gave are not oh my gosh this was amazing 5 stars. It was I am completely speechless and cannot believe what I did not know 5 stars. I only write these reviews to print them out in my journal so 30 years from now I can laugh at how dumb I was. Or to see what I thought when I re read something. There were times in this book I went and hid in my room to cry so my wife couldn't see me. I have had countless sleepless nights. My kids have yelled out in their sleep and I have dashed into their room to realize it was nothing, then wander into the kitchen and sit at the table to try to get the thoughts out of my head, then blurry eyed wander back into their rooms to make sure they are still there. I will never forget what I have learned. My problems are so small. You have to read this book. Funny, I almost finished it on Pearl Harbor Day, the day Hitler fully committed to murder all of Europe's Jews-and then burn their remains. Children, women, men. All of them.
—Doug
This was a difficult read, and not for the feign of heart. This book opened my eyes to the truth, to the atrocities committed during WWII, and near extinction of an entire race. At times I thought the Author was giving the Germans an excuse for the crimes that were committed. It was not until I became accustomed to the Authors cynical view of what happened that I slipped into the message, that no one is exempt even when they attempt to separate themselves from horror, which makes Hitler and his goon squad twice as menacing, that evil and the devil is truly set up as an ordinary being. How could anyone think that a be-spectacle nerd of a man could be responsible for the murder of over millions of people. This book should be read by every apologist and person who is ignorant to what happened during the Nazi occupations of: France, Poland, Eastern Europe and beyond, and thinks the persecution and deaths of an entire race was made up fiction. One could only hope this would never happened again, but all we need do is turn on the evening news to see the atrocities in Pakistan, Syria, and Africa.
—Sandra Glynn
Sometimes it seems the more you read and learn about certain aspects of history, the more questions you're left with. This book answers a lot of those not only in relation to Auschwitz itself but on a broader scope of the Holocaust and the war in general. It brought me to tears several times, it's more emotional than other similar books yet somehow it doesn't read emotionally, if that makes sense. It's serious and well researched, and maybe it's the honesty and forthrightness of the accounts that is so impacting. The author does an incredible thing by tying so much senseless and difficult to comprehend history into a greater picture and applying excellent moral and philosophical analysis. A Russian poet said something that has become oft-quoted in post WWII literature and memorials, and this book embodies that idea of "Let no one forget. Let nothing be forgotten" in an immense way.
—Rennie
