Auschwitz (3 page)

Perhaps above all, though, Auschwitz and the Nazis' “Final Solution” demonstrate the overriding power of the situation to influence behavior. It is a view confirmed by one of the toughest and bravest survivors of the death camps, Toivi Blatt, who was forced by the Nazis to work in Sobibór and then risked his life to escape:

What these survivors have taught me (and, if I am honest, I learned it from the perpetrators as well) is that human behavior is fragile and unpredictable and often at the mercy of the situation. Every individual still, of course, has a choice as to how to behave, it's just that for many people the situation is the key determinate in that choice. Even those unusual individuals—like Adolf Hitler himself, for example—who appear to be masters of their own destiny were, to a considerable extent, created by their responses to previous situations. The Adolf Hitler known to history was substantially formed by the interaction between the pre-war Hitler—who was a worthless drifter—and the events of World War I, which was a global conflict over which he had no control. I know no serious scholar of the subject who thinks that Hitler could ever have risen to prominence without the transformation he underwent during that war, and the sense of intense bitterness he felt when Germany lost. Thus, we can go further than saying, “No World War I, no Hitler as German Chancellor,” and say, “No World War I, no individual who ever became the Hitler that history knows.” And while, of course, Hitler decided for himself how to behave (and in the process made
a series of personal choices that made him utterly deserving of all the obloquy heaped upon him) he was made possible only by that specific historical situation.

This history also shows us, however, that if individuals can be buffeted around by the situation then groups of human beings working together can create better cultures which, in turn, can help cause individuals to behave more virtuously. The story of how the Danes rescued their Jews, and of how they ensured that the Jews had a warm welcome when they returned at the end of the war, is a striking example of that. The culture in Denmark of a strong and widely held belief in human rights helped make the majority of individuals behave in a noble way.

But one must not be overly romantic about the Danish experience. The Danes, too, were influenced hugely by situational factors outside of their control: the timing of the Nazi attack on the Danish Jews (at a point when the Germans were clearly losing the war); the geography of their country (which allowed for a relatively straightforward escape across a narrow stretch of water to neutral Sweden); and the lack of a concerted effort by the SS to enforce the deportations.

Nonetheless, it is reasonable to conclude that one form of partial protection against more atrocities like Auschwitz lies in individuals collectively ensuring the cultural mores of their society are antipathetic to such suffering. The overtly Darwinian ideals of Nazism, which rested on telling every “Aryan” German that he or she was racially superior, created, of course, precisely the reverse effect.

In the end, though, there is a profound sense of sadness around this subject that cannot be reduced. Throughout the time I was working on this project the voices I heard loudest were those of the people whom we could not interview: the 1.1 million human beings who were murdered in Auschwitz, and in particular the more than 200,000 children who perished there and were denied the right to grow up and experience life. One image stuck in my mind from the moment I heard it described. It was of a “procession”
¹¹
of empty baby carriages—property looted from the dead Jews—pushed out of Auschwitz in rows of five towards the railway station. The prisoner who witnessed the sight said they took an hour to pass by.

The children who arrived at Auschwitz in those baby carriages, together
with their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, and aunts—all of those who died there—are the ones we should always remember, and this book is dedicated to their memory.

Laurence Rees is Creative Director of History Programs for the BBC and author of five books, including
The Nazis: A Warning from History
and
Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II.
He lives in London.

O
n April 30, 1940, SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Rudolf Höss achieved a great ambition. At the age of thirty-nine, and after six years' service in the SS, he had been appointed commandant of one of the first Nazi concentration camps in the New Territories. On this spring day he arrived to take up his new duties in a small town in what had been, until eight months earlier, southwest Poland and was now part of German Upper Silesia. The name of the town in Polish was Oświęcim—in German, Auschwitz.

Although Höss had been promoted to commandant, the camp he was to command did not yet exist. He had to supervise its construction from a collection of dilapidated and vermin-infested former Polish Army barracks, grouped around a horse-breaking yard on the edge of the town. And the surrounding area could scarcely have been more depressing. This land between the Sola and Vistula rivers was flat and drab, the climate damp and unhealthy.

No one on that first day—and that certainly included Rudolf Höss—could have predicted the camp would, within five years, become the site of the largest mass murder the world has yet seen. The story of the decision-making process that led to this transformation is one of the most shocking in the whole of history and one that offers great insights into the functioning of the Nazi state.

Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Hermann Goering—all these leading Nazis and more made decisions that led to the extermination
of more than a million people at Auschwitz. But a crucial precondition for the crime was also the mentality of more minor functionaries such as Höss. Without Höss's leadership through the hitherto uncharted territory of mass murder on this scale, Auschwitz would never have functioned as it did.

To look at, there was little exceptional about Rudolf Höss. He was of medium height, with regular features and dark hair. He was neither ugly nor strikingly handsome; he simply resembled—in the words of American lawyer Whitney Harris,
¹
who interrogated Höss at Nuremberg—“a normal person, like a grocery clerk.” Several Polish inmates of Auschwitz confirm this impression, remembering Höss as quiet and controlled, the type of person you walk past every day in the street and fail to notice. Thus, in appearance, Höss was as far away as it is possible to get from the conventional image of the red-faced, saliva-spitting SS monster—which, of course, makes him all the more terrifying a figure.

As Höss carried his suitcase into the hotel opposite Auschwitz railway station that would be the SS officers' base until suitable accommodations had been arranged within the camp, he also brought with him the mental baggage of an adult life devoted to the nationalist cause. Like most ardent Nazis, his character and beliefs had been shaped by his reaction to the previous twenty-five years of German history—the most turbulent the country had ever experienced. Born in the Black Forest in 1900 to Catholic parents, Höss was affected in his early years by a series of important influences: a domineering father who insisted on obedience; his service in World War I, where he was one of the youngest non-commissioned officers in the German army; his desperate sense of betrayal at the subsequent loss of the war; his service in the paramilitary Freikorps in the early 1920s in an attempt to counter the perceived Communist threat on the boundaries of Germany; and an involvement in violent right-wing politics that led to his imprisonment in 1923.

Many, many other Nazis were forged in a similar crucible. Not least among them was Adolf Hitler. Son of a domineering father,
²
nursing his violent hatred of those whom he felt had lost Germany the war in which he had just fought (and during which, like Höss, he had been awarded an Iron Cross), Hitler tried to seize power in a violent putsch in exactly the same year as Höss was elsewhere involved in a politically inspired murder.

For Hitler, Höss, and others on the nationalist right, the most urgent need was to understand why Germany had lost the war and made such a humiliating peace. In the immediate post-war years they believed they had found the answer. Was it not obvious, they felt, that the Jews had been responsible? They pointed out that Walther Rathenau, who was Jewish, had become Foreign Minister in the new post-war Weimar government. And in 1919 they believed the link between Judaism and the feared creed of Communism had been proved beyond doubt when, in Munich, a Soviet-style Räterepublik (the Councils' Republic) was established briefly in the spring. The majority of the leaders of this Communist-led government had been Jewish.

It did not matter that large numbers of loyal German Jews had fought with bravery (and many had died) during the war. Nor that thousands of German Jews were neither left-wing nor Communist. It was much easier for Hitler and his followers to find a scapegoat for Germany's predicament in the German Jews. In the process, the newly formed Nazi party built on years of German anti-Semitism in a new way.

From the first, its adherents claimed that their hatred of the Jews was motivated not by ignorant prejudice but by scientific fact: “We fight their [the Jews'] actions as they cause a RACIAL TUBERCULOSIS OF NATIONS,” declares one of the earliest Nazi posters, published in 1920. “And we are convinced that convalescence can only begin when this bacteria has been removed.”
³
This type of pseudo-intellectual attack on the Jews had a huge effect on men like Höss, who professed to despise the primitive, violent, almost pornographic anti-Semitism propagated by another Nazi, Julius Streicher, in his magazine
Der Stürmer
. “The cause of anti-Semitism is ill-served by the frenzied persecution which was provided by
Der Stürmer
,”
⁴
wrote Höss from prison, after the defeat of Nazism. His approach was always colder—more “rational,” as he saw it. He claimed to have little quarrel with individual Jews; the problem for him was the “International world Jewish conspiracy,” by which he imagined that Jews secretly held the levers of power and sought to help each other across national boundaries. This was what he believed had led to Germany's defeat in World War I. This was what he felt had to be destroyed: “As a fanatical National Socialist I was completely convinced that our ideal would gradually be accepted and would
prevail all over the world ... Jewish supremacy would therefore be destroyed.”
⁵

After his release from prison in 1928, Höss pursued another of the treasured right-wing nationalist beliefs which, like anti-Semitism, helped define the Nazi movement: love of the land. While the Jews were hated because, for the most part, they lived in cities (despised, as Josef Goebbels put it, for their “asphalt culture”), “true” Germans never lost their love of nature. It was no accident that Himmler himself had studied agriculture, nor that Auschwitz was eventually to have one incarnation as an agricultural research station.

Höss joined the Artamans, one of the agricultural communities that flourished in Germany at the time, met the woman who became his wife, and settled down to become a farmer. Then came the moment that changed his life. In June 1934, Himmler, Hitler's chief of police, invited Höss to give up farming and become a full-time member of the SS, the elite Shutzstaffel that had originally been founded as the Führer's personal bodyguard and, along with other duties, was now running the concentration camps.
⁶
Himmler had known Höss for some time and liked what he saw—Höss was an early member of the Nazi party, having joined in November 1922, and held party number 3240.

Höss had a choice. He was not forced to volunteer—no one was conscripted into the SS. Yet he chose to join. In his autobiography he gives this reason for his decision: “Because of the likely prospect of swift promotion and the salary that accompanied it, I was convinced that I had to take this step.”
⁷
This was only half the truth.

Not surprisingly, writing after Nazism had been defeated, Höss omits what must have been for him the most important deciding factor—his emotional state at the time. In 1934, Höss would have felt he was witnessing the beginning of a new and wonderful world. Hitler had been in power for a year and already the Nazis' internal enemies—the left-wing politicians, the “work-shy,” the anti-socials, the Jews—were being confronted. All over the country, Germans not in these specific risk-groups welcomed what they saw.