157 Auschwitz.pdf

(19244 KB) Pobierz
AUSCHWITZ
No. 157
£4.25
NUMBER 157
© Copyright
After the Battle
2012
Editor: Karel Margry
Editor-in-Chief: Winston G. Ramsey
Published by
Battle of Britain International Ltd.,
The Mews, Hobbs Cross House,
Hobbs Cross, Old Harlow,
Essex CM17 0NN, England
Telephone: 01279 41 8833
Fax: 01279 41 9386
E-mail: hq@afterthebattle.com
Website:
www.afterthebattle.com
Printed in Great Britain by
Warners Group Publications PLC,
Bourne, Lincolnshire PE10 9PH.
After the Battle
is published on the 15th
of February, May, August and November.
LONDON STOCKIST for the
After the Battle
range:
Foyles Limited, 113-119 Charing Cross Road,
London WC2H 0EB. Telephone: 020 7437 5660.
Fax: 020 7434 1574. E-mail: orders@foyles.co.uk.
Web site: www.foyles.co.uk
United Kingdom Newsagent Distribution:
Warners Group Publications PLC,
Bourne, Lincolnshire PE10 9PH
Australian Subscriptions and Back Issues:
Renniks Publications Pty Limited
Unit 3, 37-39 Green Street, Banksmeadow NSW 2019
Telephone: 61 2 9695 7055. Fax: 61 2 9695 7355
E-mail: info@renniks.com. Website:
www.renniks.com
Canadian Distribution and Subscriptions:
Vanwell Publishing Ltd.,
622 Welland Avenue, St. Catharines, Ontario
Telephone: (905) 937 3100. Fax: (905) 937 1760
Toll Free: 1-800-661-6136
E-mail: sales@vanwell.com
New Zealand Distribution:
Dal McGuirk’s “MILITARY ARCHIVE”, PO Box 24486,
Royal Oak, Auckland 1345, New Zealand
Telephone: 021 627 870. Fax: 9-6252817
E-mail: milrchiv@mist.co.nz
United States Distribution and Subscriptions:
RZM Imports Inc, 184 North Ave., Stamford, CT 06901
Telephone: 1-203-324-5100. Fax: 1-203-324-5106
E-mail: info@rzm.com Website:
www.rzm.com
Italian Distribution:
Tuttostoria, PO Box 395, 1-43100 Parma
Telephone: ++390521 29 27 33. Fax: ++390521 29 03 87
E-mail: info@tuttostoria.it Website:
www.tuttostoria.it
Dutch Language Edition:
SI Publicaties/Quo Vadis, Postbus 188,
6860 AD Oosterbeek
Telephone: 026-4462834. E-mail: si@sipublicaties.nl
CHELMNO
TREBLINKA
SOBIBOR
MAJDANEK
BELZEC
AUSCHWITZ
CONTENTS
AUSCHWITZ
UNITED STATES
The 70th Anniversary of
Stars and Stripes
2
48
Front Cover:
The gate building of
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp —
the ‘Gate of Death’. Hundreds of thousands
of victims entered the death camp through
this gate. The railway line leading directly
into the camp was completed in May 1944.
(Karel Margry)
Back Cover:
The International Monument to
the victims of all nations at Auschwitz-
Birkenau. Inaugurated in 1967, it stands at
the end of the railway siding, close to the
ruins of Krematoria II and III. (Karel Margry)
Acknowledgements:
The text of the
Auschwitz story is reproduced from
‘Auschwitz — An Overview’ by Yisrael
Gutman, included in
Anatomy of the
Auschwitz Death Camp,
by Yisrael Gut-
man and Michael Berenbaum (Editors)
published by the Indiana University Press
(Bloomington and Indianapolis © 1994) in
association with the United States Holo-
caust Memorial Museum. Reprinted with
permission of Indiana University Press
and the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum. For assistance with the Ausch-
witz story, the Editor thanks Naama Shilo
of Yad Vashem; Nancy Hartman of the
US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and
Okko Luursema.
Photo Credits:
USHMM — United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum.
During the five years of its existence, an estimated 1.1 million people perished at
Auschwitz (see page 44). With the general public having grown used to the figure of
six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, it may be useful to point out that not all of
them died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Some 1.35 million Jews were shot by
the SS-Einsatzkommandos (SS mobile killing squads), first in Poland in 1939-40 and
then, on a much larger scale, in Russia in 1941-42 (‘Holocaust by bullets’) and 800,000
perished in the overcrowded ghettos set up by the Nazis in eastern Europe. Nearly
two million were murdered by gas in other death camps: Chelmno (150,000-200,000),
Belzec (435,000-550,000), Sobibor (170,000-250,000), Treblinka (700,000-1,000,000) and
Majdanek (50,000-60,000) in occupied Poland and Maly Trostenets (40,000-65,000) in
the Soviet Union. Another 250,000 died in numerous other concentration camps all
over Europe, giving a final figure of between 4.9 and 5.4 million victims.
Auschwitz was the creation of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler (second from left)
with camp commander Rudolf Höss (third from right) as his prime executive, pictured
here on July 17, 1942 during Himmler’s two-day inspection of Auschwitz and the
associated IG Farben plant. The man in civilian suit (centre) is Max Faust, IG Farben’s
head engineer on site.
2
Auschwitz — the most infamous of all the Nazi concentration
camps — has globally come to symbolise the atrocities committed
by the Third Reich. Begun as a detention camp, primarily for Polish
political prisoners, it grew to become the principal killing centre set
up for the mass murder of the European Jews. At the same time, it
was one of the largest of the Nazi slave labour camps, distributing
thousands of inmates to war factories, building projects and other
industries in the region, spawning dozens of satellite camps.
‘Arbeit macht frei’ (Work makes you free), the cynical slogan above
the entrance gate of Auschwitz I — the Stammlager (main camp),
pictured here by Stanislaw Luczko after liberation in 1945 — also
appeared at the gates of other concentration camps like Dachau
and Sachsenhausen (in both of which camp commander Rudolf
Höss had served before he came to Auschwitz) and Flossenbürg.
By Yisrael Gutman
In the years since the Second World War,
the name Auschwitz has become virtually
synonymous with the unrestrained tyranny,
the power of terror, and the systematic mur-
der of millions of human beings during Ger-
man Nazi rule. In
Der SS-Staat
(The SS
State), a book on the structure of the concen-
tration camp system, Eugen Kogon, a former
prisoner of the Buchenwald camp, described
almost unlimited totalitarianism in which liv-
ing arrangements and behavioural norms
were imposed on persons deprived of any
right to participate in shaping their lives and
fate. It was under the unremitting oppression
of the concentration camps that the Nazi
concept of absolute power over a captive
population came closest to full implementa-
tion. Thus a survivor, Primo Levi, observed
that ‘never has there existed a state that was
really “totalitarian”. . . . Never has some
Right:
The sign at Auschwitz had been
manufactured by prisoners from the
camp blacksmith under the supervision
of Jan Liwacz in July 1940. They deliber-
ately inverted the letter B as a covert
mark of disobedience. Early in the morn-
ing on December 18, 2009, the sign was
stolen in an overnight raid that made the
world headlines. The culprits, five local
petty criminals, were arrested within
two days near Turin in northern Poland
and the five-metre-long cast-iron sign —
which had been cut in three to fit into a
getaway car — was recovered and
returned to its original place. It later
transpired the theft had been organised
by a former Swedish neo-Nazi, Anders
Högström, who had hired the Poles for
the job.
AUSCHWITZ
Our author, Yisrael Gutman, is one of the world’s leading historians on the Nazi
genocide of the Jews. A survivor of Auschwitz and other camps, he was professor of
Modern Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as chairman of
the Academic Committee of Yad Vashem, the central museum and archives on the
Holocaust in Israel, and deputy chairman of the International Auschwitz Council.
3
ATB
Right:
In order to isolate the Auschwitz
camp from the Polish population living in
the vicinity, the SS in June 1940 deported
some 2,000 people, with further evacua-
tions following in July and November,
demolishing 123 houses and appropriating
all the land in a five-kilometre radius around
the camp. In October 1941, after a decision
had been taken to build an extension of the
Auschwitz camp at Birkenau (later desig-
nated Auschwitz II), further evictions and
demolitions took place around that site. In
all, seven villages were evacuated. In this
triangular area of 40 square kilometres at
the confluence of the Sola and the Vistula
— known as the Interessenbereich KL
Auschwitz (Interest Area of Auschwitz Con-
centration Camp) — the camp administra-
tion set up several satellite facilities, mostly
agricultural model farms, all of them
worked by prisoners housed in small sub-
camps. These included the plant-breeding
establishment at Raïsko (where there was
also a bacteriological research station of the
Hygiene-Institut der Waffen-SS), the poultry
farm and the fish-processing plant at Har-
mense, the agricultural estate at Babitz and
the cattle-breeding station and fishponds at
Budy. Also within the Area of Interest were
the armaments factories of the Deutsche
Ausrüstungswerke (DAW) and Krupp AG
(later Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke) and a
quarry run by the Deutsche Erd- und Stein-
werke GmbH (German Earth and Stone
Works Ltd — DEST). Thus the Auschwitz
SS created their own industrial zone around
the two main camps.
form of reaction, a corrective of the total
tyranny, been lacking, not even in the Third
Reich or Stalin’s Soviet Union: in both cases,
public opinion, the magistrature, the foreign
press, the churches, the feeling for justice
and humanity that ten or 20 years of tyranny
were not enough to eradicate, have to a
greater or lesser extent acted as a brake.
Only in the
Lager
was the restraint from
below non-existent, and the power of these
small satraps absolute.’
In a similar vein, Hannah Arendt argued
in
The Origins of Totalitarianism
that ‘the
concentration and extermination camps of
totalitarian regimes serve as laboratories in
which the fundamental belief of totalitarian-
ism that everything is possible is being veri-
fied.’
Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazi
concentration camps. In the period from
May 1940, when German authorities laid the
groundwork for its establishment, to January
1945, when most surviving Auschwitz prison-
ers were marched off by their German
captors and Soviet Army troops liberated the
camp, approximately 405,000 prisoners of
Right:
Just inside the camp perimeter
near the gate was the venue of the
Lagerkapelle (camp orchestra). It played
as prisoners departed for their work
details and again on their return. The
Lagerkapelle was originally started by
Polish inmates who had received musi-
cal instruments from home, and they
first began rehearsing in a room in Block
24 on January 6, 1941. After getting offi-
cial permission from the SS, they began
playing at the gate and also giving con-
certs for prisoners and for the Comman-
dant near his villa. The SS approved of
their performing at the gate for it
ensured that the prisoners paraded by in
an orderly fashion and made them easier
to count. The ability to play a musical
instrument, and thus obtain a place in
the orchestra, was one way of enhancing
a prisoner’s chance of survival. The
wooden building behind the musicians is
the camp kitchen and the large empty
space seen on the left is the Appellplatz
(roll-call square).
4
INTEREST AREA
OF AUSCHWITZ
CONCENTRATION CAMP
WEICHSEL/VISTULA
OW
AK
KR
ICE
OW
KAT
TO
TO
BIRKENAU
VILLAGE
AUSCHWITZ
TOWN
GOO
DS S
TAT
ION
LEGEND
Railway
Rivers/Lakes
Roads
Boundary of Camp Interest Area
Outer guard perimeter
Satellite camp
Gas chambers and crematoria
Provisional gas chambers
(Bunkers 1 and 2)
‘Kanada’ I and II (plundered goods depots)
Rampe I-III (unloading platforms)
Birkenau camp sections
Holzhof (timber depot)
Bauhof (building materials depot)
Workshops
Expansion of the main camp
(Lager-Erweiterung)
Armaments factories Krupp AG,
later Union-Werke
Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH
(German Earth and Stone Works Ltd)
TO JAWISC
HOWITZ
TO
BIE
LIT
Z-B
IAL
A
N
both sexes from nearly every European
country were registered, assigned serial num-
bers, and incarcerated there. Of this number
an estimated 200,000 perished. (This figure
does not include prisoners who were mur-
dered without being registered.) The propor-
tion of deaths among Auschwitz prisoners
was much higher than in other concentration
camps, such as Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald
and Mauthausen.
With the expansion and development of
the camp complex, Auschwitz and its satel-
lites encompassed more than 40 camps
spread over a vast industrial area rich with
natural resources. These camps served as a
huge pool of prisoner labour for the German
war effort, as well as for work in mines, con-
struction and agriculture.
But the uniqueness and historical signifi-
cance of Auschwitz do not derive from those
features. In January 1941, the head of the
Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main
Security Office — RSHA), SS-Gruppen-
führer Reinhard Heydrich, second in the SS
hierarchy to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich
Himmler, classified various concentration
camps in accordance with the severity of the
offences committed by their prisoners.
Auschwitz was placed in the same category
as Dachau and Sachsenhausen as a camp for
prisoners whose offences were ‘relatively
light and definitely correctable’. One might
conclude that at that time Auschwitz did not
differ significantly from other concentration
camps.
From May 1940 to January 1942, 36,285
prisoners (26,288 civilians and 9,997 Soviet
prisoners of war) were incarcerated in the
camp. But not even the mass scale of the
camp and the savagery of its regime were
fated to become its hallmark.
The gruesome history and enduring horror
of Auschwitz can be attributed primarily to
the machinery for mass extermination of
human beings created by the Nazis at the
nearby Birkenau camp, a unit of Auschwitz.
The location was designated by Himmler as
the centrepiece for ‘the final solution of the
Jewish question in Europe’. From spring
1942 until autumn 1944, the operation
designed to annihilate European Jews func-
tioned almost without let-up as transport
trains delivered Jews from Nazi-occupied
countries and European satellites of the
Third Reich.
The overwhelming majority of those
victims, designated as ‘RSHA transports’
earmarked for ‘Sonderbehandlung’ (‘special
treatment’), were ignorant of their destina-
tion and their fate. They were moved like
cattle and arrived in a state of total exhaus-
tion. It has been said that ‘there will never be
people as innocent as the victims on the
threshold of the gas chambers’.
‘Selections’ took place on the railway sid-
ing ramp at the gates of Birkenau. Children,
the elderly, the sick, and large numbers of
men and women were selected for death and
marched immediately to the gas chambers.
Left:
The camp kitchen was later enlarged
with two wings to its front that swallowed
up most of the Appellplatz. Today, this side
of the building has lost its wooden cladding
but otherwise it survives unaltered.
5
ATB

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin