Auschwitz (49 page)

Montgomery's testimony is, of course, worryingly reminiscent of the distancing effect the Nazis sought to create for themselves by building the gas chambers. Just as it was easier to kill people by dropping a bomb on them rather than bayoneting them, so it was easier for the Nazis to kill human beings by gassing them rather than shooting them. Twentieth-century technology not only allowed more people to be killed in war than ever before, it allowed those who did the killing to suffer less psychological damage as a result of their actions.

None of this, however, means that any legitimate comparison is possible between the Allied bombing of Germany and the extermination of more than a million people at Auschwitz. For all of the reasons mentioned, the two actions are conceptually different. But in Höss's mind, and in the minds of many other Nazis, the comparison did hold—bombing and gassing were simply different methods of killing the enemy. This meant that no matter how Höss was treated—even if he had been paraded around “in a cage” as Stanislaw Hantz wanted—he would never have truly regretted what he had done. As it is, he is most likely to have walked up the steps to the gallows with two thoughts in his head: “I die not because of my crimes, but because we lost the war; and I die a much misunderstood man.” Ultimately, that is why such an outwardly nondescript person as Höss is such a terrifying figure.

In 1947, as Höss left this life, the camp complex he created was decaying fast. Poles in the nearby area were dismantling some of the barracks of Birkenau to use the wood to repair their own houses, and an even more disturbing looting of the camp was taking place. When Polish teenager Józefa
Zielińska and her family returned to Auschwitz after the war, they discovered they had nowhere to live. Their house had been destroyed in the massive Nazi reorganization of the area and they were forced to live in a shed that had once housed chickens. To make money, Józefa and her friends went to the site of the crematoria at Birkenau and searched for gold. They dug up the soil and the fragments of bones that lay within it, placed them in a bowl, and sieved them through with water. “Everyone felt bad doing it,” says Józefa. “Whether they had family that had died in the camp or not, everyone felt uneasy because they were human bones, after all. It wasn't a pleasure. But it was poverty that forced us to do such a thing.” With the money gained by selling the gold they had prospected from the soil of Birkenau, Józefa Zielińska's family managed to buy a cow.

Jan Piwczyk was another Pole forced by circumstance to live in one of the chicken coops near Birkenau, and he too admits that he searched for valuables near the remains of the crematoria: “I remember I found a gold tooth and a Jewish coin and a gold bracelet. Now today I wouldn't do it, right? I wouldn't look through human bones, because I know this is sacrilege. But at the time the conditions forced us to do it.” When he was not searching for valuables, Jan and his friends also bribed the Soviet soldiers, who occasionally patrolled nearby, so that they could take wood from the barracks of Birkenau to use to build their own houses. “You know,” says Jan, “after the war it was tough—you had to start from scratch.”

Immediately after the war, Stanislaw Hantz, the former Polish political prisoner who had witnessed Rudolf Höss's execution, got a job guarding the Birkenau site. He tried to protect the camp from locals intent on stealing from the remains of the crematoria by firing warning shots above their heads. “We called them cemetery hyenas,” he says. “We couldn't understand how these people could search these tombs.” Away from the site, he had a foolproof way of detecting their presence, “You could recognize them by the smell—they smelt from afar. It was a stench of fermenting bodies. You could tell such a person walking down the street.”

It would take years for the site of the atrocities at Auschwitz to be appropriately maintained and cared for. Indeed, not until well after the fall of Communism would the signage at the museum finally be changed to reflect in a proper manner the suffering of the Jews.

In the meantime, Oskar Groening, who had spent several years in the SS
at Auschwitz, steadily rose through the management structure of the glass factory where he now worked, eventually becoming head of personnel. Finally, he was made an honorary judge of industrial tribunal cases. Without seeing any sense of irony or inappropriateness in his words, Oskar Groening believes that the experience he gained in the SS and Hitler Youth helped him do his job as a personnel officer better, because “from the age of twelve onwards I learned about discipline.”

Even though he had worked at Auschwitz and helped in the extermination process by sorting and counting the foreign money stolen from the arriving transports, Groening never considered himself “guilty” of any crime. “We drew a line between those who were directly involved in the killing and those who were not directly involved.” Additionally, he felt he was—using the words of the infamous Nazi post-war defense—acting under orders, and he attempts to defend himself with this analogy: “The first time a company of soldiers gets a volley of machine gun fire they don't all get up and say, ‘We don't agree with this—we're going home.'”

This was, perhaps surprisingly, a similar line to the one taken by West German prosecutors after the war as they sought to determine who from Auschwitz should face war crime charges and who should not. If a member of the SS was not either in a senior leadership position or directly involved in killing, he generally escaped prosecution. Thus, when Oskar Groening's past was eventually uncovered—inevitably, because he never made any attempt to change his name and hide—the German prosecutors did not press charges against him. His experience therefore demonstrates how it is possible to have been a member of the SS, worked at Auschwitz, witnessed the extermination process, contributed to the “Final Solution” in a concrete way by sorting the stolen money, and still not be thought “guilty” by the post-war West German state.

Indeed, out of the 6,500 or so members of the SS who worked at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945 and who are thought to have survived the war, only approximately 750 ever received punishment of any kind.
²⁹
The most notorious legal process was the “Auschwitz trial” in Frankfurt between December 1963 and August 1965, when, of the twenty-two defendants, seventeen were convicted and only six received the maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

However, it was not only Germany that failed to prosecute in substantial
numbers those SS members who had worked at Auschwitz. This was a collective failure of the international community (with the possible exception of the Polish courts, who tried a remarkable 673 out of the 789
³⁰
Auschwitz staff ever to face justice). Prosecutions were hindered, not just by lack of consistency between nations about what conduct constituted a “crime” in Auschwitz, but also by the division caused by the Cold War and—it must be said—by a clear lack of will.

Despite the Nuremberg trials stating that the SS was a “criminal” organization in its entirety, no attempt was ever made to enforce the view that the mere act of working in the SS at Auschwitz was a war crime—a view that popular opinion would surely have supported. A conviction and sentence—however minimal—for every SS man who was there would have sent a clear message for the future. It did not happen. About 85 percent of the SS members who served at Auschwitz and survived the war escaped scot-free. When Himmler began the development of the gas chambers in order to distance the SS men from the psychological “burden” of shooting people in cold blood, he could scarcely have predicted that it would have this additional benefit for the Nazis. This method of murder meant that the vast majority of the SS members who served at Auschwitz could escape punishment after the war by claiming to not have been directly involved in the extermination process.

Oskar Groening also feels no unease about the fact that, while many of those who were imprisoned in Auschwitz faced further hardship after they were liberated, he enjoyed (and continues to enjoy) a life of comfort. “It's always like that in the world,” he says.

Given this attitude of insouciance, it is all the more surprising that, towards the end of his life, Oskar Groening decided to speak openly about his time in Auschwitz. The circumstances that led to his change of heart are intriguing. After the war, Groening became a keen stamp collector and was
a member of his local philately club. At one of the meetings, more than forty years after the war, he started to chat to the man next to him about politics. “Isn't it terrible,” said the man, “that the present government says it's illegal to say anything against the killing of millions of Jews in Auschwitz.” He went on to explain to Groening how it was “inconceivable” for so many bodies to have been burnt, and he also maintained that the volume of gas that was supposed to have been used would, in reality, have killed “all living beings” in the vicinity.

Groening said nothing to contradict these statements at the philately club, but later obtained one of the Holocaust deniers' pamphlets that his fellow stamp collector had recommended, wrote his own ironic commentary on it and posted it to him. Then he suddenly started to receive odd phone calls at home from strangers who disputed his view that Auschwitz was really the center of mass killing by gassing. It turned out that his denunciation of the Holocaust deniers' case had been printed in a neo-Nazi magazine. And now “90 percent” of the calls and anonymous letters he received “were all from people who tried to prove that what I had seen with my own eyes, what I had experienced in Auschwitz was a big, big mistake, a big hallucination on my part because it hadn't happened.”

Motivated now by a desire to speak out against those who denied the sights he personally had witnessed, Groening wrote down his own personal history for his family and eventually agreed to be interviewed by the BBC. Now well into his eighties, Groening has one simple message for the Holocaust deniers: “I would like you to believe me. I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematorium. I saw the open fires. I was on the ramp when the selections took place. I would like you to believe that these atrocities happened, because I was there.”

At the end of this tragic story, what are we left with? For certain, a world in which the majority of those who ran Auschwitz were not punished for any crime, and in which most of the inmates of the camp never received full restitution for the suffering endured. Far from it, because so many endured the consequences of more prejudice and victimization after the war was over. One naturally revolts against this conclusion. There is a deep human need to feel that life offers an element of justice—the sense that the innocent eventually receive recompense and the guilty are brought down.

This history, however, offers little of that comfort, for the most searing example of lack of redemption rests in the soil of Birkenau, the earth worked over for valuables by locals after the war, in the largest graveyard in the history of the world. This, together with the nearby Vistula River where many ashes were dumped, is the final resting place of more than a million people whose testimony we cannot listen to.

Nor does it appear, as a general rule, that those forced to endure Auschwitz could find solace or a sense of redemption in spiritual comfort. For every Else Abt who, as a Jehovah's Witness, felt that God was with her in the camp, there are many more like Linda Breder who believe that “there was no God in Auschwitz. There were such horrible conditions that God decided not to go there. We didn't pray because we knew it wouldn't help. Many of us who survived are atheists. They simply don't trust in God.” What a survivor like Linda Breder realizes is that she owes her life, to a large extent, to luck—and the belief that life can be governed by chance factors wholly outside of one's control is hardly a firm basis for religious doctrine.

The current estimate is that of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million died there. A staggering one million of them were Jews—an important statistic for those few who still seek to follow the Communist line and characterize all who died there as collectively “victims of Fascism.” It always must be remembered that more than 90 percent of those who lost their lives at Auschwitz did so because the one “crime” they had committed in the Nazis' eyes was to be born Jewish.

The majority of Jews from any one national group transported to Auschwitz
³¹
(438,000) came from Hungary during the frenzied action of early summer 1944. The next largest number were from Poland (300,000), followed by France (69,114), the Netherlands (60,085), Greece (55,000), Czechoslovakia and Moravia (46,099), Germany and Austria (23,000), Slovakia (26,661), Belgium (24,906), Yugoslavia (10,000), and Italy (7422). Of course, we also must never forget the non-Jews who perished in the camp: the 70,000 Polish political prisoners; the more than 20,000 gypsies; the 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war; the hundreds of Jehovah's Witnesses; the homosexuals; nor any of the others sent to the camp for myriad warped reasons—and sometimes for no reason at all.

Soon the last survivor and the last perpetrator from Auschwitz will have
joined those who were murdered at the camp. There will be no one on this earth left alive who has personal experience of the place. When that happens, there is a danger that this history will merge into the distant past and become just one terrible event among many. There have been horrific atrocities before, from Richard the Lionheart's massacre of the Muslims of Acre during the Crusades, to Genghis Khan's genocide in Persia. Maybe future generations will see Auschwitz the same way—as just another bad thing that happened in the past, before living memory. But that should not be allowed to happen.