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Video Description
Corruption (April 1943-March 1944)
"Corruption" reveals why Auschwitz was unique in the Nazi state as the only site that was both a concentration and an extermination camp. The reason was simple-money. At Auschwitz, the Nazis wanted to kill "useless mouths" instantly and work stronger prisoners to death as slave laborers in places like the nearby IG Farben factory. Meanwhile, the SS profited from the belongings of those they killed-so much so, that in the summer of 1943, an investigation was launched into corruption in the camp and the commandant was removed. Elsewhere, individuals and nations are finding ways to resist the spread of deportations. Denmark, for example, is able to protect its Jewish population from Auschwitz.
In the final segment, Linda Ellerbee talks with David Marwell, a historian and director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City; Doris Bergen, associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and author of War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); and Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies and director of The Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University and author of Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust (1933-1945) (Free Press, 1986), Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (Plume, 1994), and History on Trial: My Day in Court with Holocaust Denier David Irving (Ecco, 2005).
TRANSCRIPT
Corruption: Episode 4
In 1943, Auschwitz was about to enter the most crucial phase of its existence. One that would eventually make it the site of the largest mass murder in the world. In March 1943 new gas chambers and crematoria opened, increasing dramatically the killing potential of the camp. Enormous wealth stolen from the arriving Jews flooded through Auschwitz. And contrary to the direct orders of the Nazi leadership, individual members of the SS took great personal advantage.
Libuša Breder - Auschwitz Prisoner: "They were taking home lots of gold and other valuables, nobody counted it—it was a bonanza for them."
This is the surprising and shocking story of life and death at Auschwitz, during what for the Nazis at the camp was the start of the boom years. Of how corruption pervaded all aspects of the extermination process, and why for many of the SS, life was good.
Oskar Gröning - SS: "The special situation at Auschwitz led to friendships of which I'm still saying today I like to look back on with joy."
AUSCHWITZ: Inside The Nazi State
Corruption: Episode 4
Auschwitz main camp was on the banks of the Sola River in Southern Poland. And it was here that the Commandant, SS Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Höss, worked hand in hand with businessmen to grow a giant industrial complex. Ultimately, about 60 million Reichmarks - 125 million Pounds in today's money - would be generated here for the Nazi state, for there was not one Auschwitz camp, but many.
Eventually there were 45 sub camps dotted round the region, most providing slave labor for armaments factories and other industrial concerns. And at the centre of this web of slave labor and industry was the giant camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The vast Auschwitz complex was now a self-contained universe: a place to live, a place to work, a place to die.
At the heart of Birkenau were the gas chambers, one of which stood on this site. Selections were made from arriving transports of Jews. Those thought fit enough were taken away to be worked to death. The remainder - the old, the weak, the children were murdered immediately in buildings like these.
Dario Gabbai - Jewish Prisoner, Auschwitz 1944-45: "There are, there were people… That they were starting to understand that something was funny going on there, but nobody could do anything. The process had to go you know they had everything was done from the German point of view. They were all precise. There were the people screaming at the, the Germans screaming, 'Schnell. Schnell!'"
The Jews were ordered to undress, and then forced towards a room further down the building and told they would take a shower.
Dario Gabbai: "Could you imagine what, what was done with the children and their, their families, their thinking, they didn't know what to do scratching the walls, crying until the, the the gas take effect. And when everything stopped you know and they opened the doors and I see these people I saw a few minutes, half an hour before that they were going in, I see them all standing up, some black and blue from the gas, no place where to go, dead."
A few hundred yards from the gas chambers was the area of the camp known as 'Canada' - because Canada was thought to be a land of untold riches. This is where the belongings snatched from the arriving transports were sorted before being repacked and sent to Germany. For the inmates, working in Canada was one of the few sought after jobs in the camp.
Libuša Breder - Jewish Prisoner, Auschwitz: "Working in Canada saved my life because we had food, we got water. And that was the best working unit for life for us because we were not beaten."
The majority of inmates who worked in Canada were women. They could grow their hair and were able to snatch extra food from the belongings as they sorted them. Against the explicit rules of the SS - friendly relationships could develop in Canada between the German guards and the women prisoners. Helena Citrónová, a Slovakian Jew who'd been sent to Auschwitz in 1942, became the object of attention of one of the SS who worked in Canada.
Helena Citrónová - Jewish prisoner, Auschwitz: "When he came into the barracks where I was working, he passed me by and threw me a note. I destroyed it right there and then, but I did see the word 'love', 'I fell in love with you'. I thought I'd rather be dead than be involved with an SS man. For a long time afterwards there was just hatred—I couldn't even look at him."
But over time Helena's feelings changed, especially with the arrival of one particular train at Auschwitz Birkenau. Helena's sister was on board, along with her daughter and baby son. After they arrived at Birkenau, Helena learnt that they were being taken to the gas chamber. Her SS admirer - Franz Wunsch, ran to see if he could help.
Helena Citrónová: "So he said to me, 'Tell me quickly what your sister's name is before I'm too late.' So I said, 'You won't be able to, she came with 2 little children.' He replied, 'Children, that's different. Children can't live here.' So he ran to the crematorium and found my sister."
Wunsch could not save the children, but he rescued Helena's sister claiming that she was a member of his work detail in Canada.
Helena Citrónová: "Here he did something great. There were moments when I forgot that I was a Jew and that he was not a Jew and honestly, in the end I loved him, but it could not be realistic."
Both Helena and her sister survived Auschwitz. And although nothing came of her relationship with Wunsch, she did give evidence on his behalf at his war crimes trial many years later. There were other temptations for the SS in Canada.
Libuša Breder: "Every piece had to be searched—underwear, everything, and we found lots of diamonds, gold, coins ah, money, dollars, foreign currency from all over Europe."
Workers in Canada were meant to put any valuables they found in a locked box in the centre of the barracks. But their SS guards often managed to interfere with this procedure.
Libuša Breder: "They were taking home lots of gold and other valuables because they were stealing, nobody counted it. And it went on all the time while I was working in Canada."
Oskar Gröning - SS Garrison, Auschwitz: "If a lot of stuff is piled up together, then you can easily stash away something for your personal gain. Stealing things for yourself was absolutely common practice in Auschwitz."
In 1943 Oskar Gröning was a 22 year old corporal in the SS. He'd been employed in a bank before the war and so was put to work in Auschwitz managing the foreign money stolen from the incoming transports. Every few months, he'd pack up the currency and take it to Berlin. Supervision was so lax that he had the chance to steal some of it for himself, using it to buy goods on the thriving black market in Auschwitz. One day Gröning decided he'd like to buy his own hand gun.
Oskar Gröning: "So I said: 'My dear friend, I need a pistol with ammunition. And he said: "Well how much do you want to spend?'— 'I don't know what does it cost?' - 'Well, you as the Dollar King should pay in Dollars, so I'd say it'll cost you 30 Dollars.' And then he came back with the pistol and got his 30 Dollars."
The ready availability of foreign currencies and valuables to pilfer was just one of the reasons that Auschwitz was a surprisingly attractive posting for many members of the SS. Auschwitz was not just a profitable place to be for them, it was also a good deal more comfortable than fighting with their comrades against the Red Army on the Eastern Front.
Oskar Gröning: "The main camp of Auschwitz was like a small town, with its gossiping and chatting. There was a grocery, where you could buy bones to make broth. There was a canteen, there was a cinema, there was a theatre with regular performances. And there was a sports club of which I was a member. It was all fun and entertainment, just like a small town. Alcohol played a big role there. Every day we were allocated a ration of alcohol, which sometimes we'd all collect to have a really big drinking bout."
Far from being driven to psychological torment by the knowledge that they were participating in the mass murder of men, women and children, the majority of SS working at Auschwitz seem to have carried out their jobs with few qualms. With death and starvation around them, they gorged themselves on food and drink, much of it stolen from the arriving transports.
Tadeusz Rybacki - Polish Political Prisoner, Waiter SS Canteen: "They drank everything there. It was like some kind of gangsters' feast. They drank, they sang, they patted each other. There was an assortment of alcohol on the table - a whole variety of French cognacs. And we served them food. It all looked so disgusting, this feast, that when the prisoner overseer, Paschke, saw one of them vomiting, he said with contempt: 'These pigs sure know how to vomit.' It was only the prisoners who were to be starved to death. Being at the camp was a slow execution through starvation, beatings and hard labour. The SS, however, lacked for nothing. And when we look at this feast, they had everything."
Oskar Gröning: "Throughout Auschwitz military discipline was actually very loose. The lack of discipline meant that we went to bed completely pissed and we had our pistols in their holsters hanging off the bed frame, and when somebody was too lazy to turn off the light, we just shot it out. And nobody said anything about the bullet holes in the walls."
Getting wildly drunk was only one symptom of a widespread attitude among the SS—that the circumstances of Auschwitz allowed them to behave however they liked. Even, on occasion, commit sexual assault. The women most at risk worked in the sorting area in Canada.
Linda Breder: "'Fat swines', that's what the SS officers called us. We looked good. We looked as though we were from the normal world. Not like the others. Once there was a very good looking woman, she wasn't thin, she had a full body. An SS man came in. He raped her. There was no God in Auschwitz. There were such horrible conditions that God decided not to go there."
It wasn't just men who exploited the situation they found themselves in—women did as well. Irma Grese was one of 170 female SS staff at Auschwitz. She was just 20 years old in 1943, and her combination of beauty and cruelty was to make her notorious. But there was nothing in her background before she came to the camp to give any hint of the monster that she was to become.
Vera Alexander - Jewish Prisoner, Auschwitz: "She didn't go to school. She was a farmer's daughter. I thought she was a small silly country bumpkin. She became someone just because she was wearing a uniform and had a whip in her hand."
Irma Grese was one of the SS who supervised the women's camp at Auschwitz Birkenau. By the end of 1943, in the southern part of the camp complex, there were 30,000 women, housed in 62 barracks in some of the worst conditions in the whole of Auschwitz. There was little running water, and disease was rampant. For Irma Grese the women's camp became a sadistic playground.
Vera Alexander: "She shot one woman dead who was standing in front of me. Her brains landed on my shoulder. The next day, after the selections, Irma came to see me. I refused to talk to her. She asked, 'Are you angry with me?' I replied, 'You nearly killed me yesterday'. She answered: 'One down, it doesn't matter…'"
After the war Irma Grese was tried for war crimes and sentenced to death. She was executed two months after her 22nd birthday. But it was a member of the SS who worked on this site, where crematorium 2 in Birkenau once stood, who became most infamous for exploiting the opportunities Auschwitz had to offer.
Dr Josef Mengele arrived at Auschwitz in May 1943. There had been medical experiments conducted at the camp before his arrival. At least two German doctors had been examining new methods of sterilizing men and women at Auschwitz since 1942. And in the process hundreds had already suffered.
But Mengele began a variety of new experiments, each related to his own obsessions. He saw Auschwitz as a human laboratory, one which allowed him to pursue any idea he had, no matter how bestial or inhumane. He experimented on children - particularly on twins. This footage shows some of the children he selected, filmed by the Soviets immediately after the liberation of the camp. It is thought that Mengele used these children to research the power of genetic inheritance, an area of interest to many Nazi scientists. Children were installed in special barracks, for Mengele's exclusive use.
Vera Alexander: "Every day Mengele came and every day he brought some toys, sweets, chocolates, and new clothes."
The children called Mengele the "good uncle". But his treatment of them was entirely cynical. Because he wanted them to co-operate when he came to pick them for his experiments.
Eva Mozes Kor - Today: "Mengele came in every morning after roll call to count us. He wanted to know every morning how many guinea pigs he had. Three times a week both of my arms would be tied to restrict the blood flow, and they took a lot of blood from my left arm. On occasion enough blood until we fainted. At the same time that they were taking blood, they would give me a minimum of 5 injections into my right arm. After one of those injections I became extremely ill and Dr. Mengele came in next morning with four other doctors. He looked at my fever chart and he said, laughing sarcastically, he said: 'Too bad, she is so young. She has only 2 weeks to live.'
I would fade in and out of consciousness, and in a semi-conscious state of mind I would keep telling myself: I must survive, I must survive. They were waiting for me to die. Would I have died, my twin sister Miriam would have been rushed immediately to Mengele's lab, killed with an injection to the heart and then Mengele would have done the comparative autopsies. That is the way most of the twins died."
Miklos Nyiszli: "For the comparative examination from the viewpoint of anatomy and pathology, the twins had to die at the same time. So it was that they met their death at the hand of Dr. Mengele. This phenomenon was unique in world medical history. Twin brothers died together, and it was possible to perform autopsies on both. Where, under normal circumstances, can one find twin brothers who die at the same place and at the same time?"
Vera Alexander: "You cannot ask WHY! There was no WHY in Auschwitz. Only WAS."
Eva Mozes Kor: "I was asked by somebody, 'You're very strong. How did you become very strong?' And I said, 'I had no choice: I overcame or I would have perished.'
Mengele experimented not just on twins, but also on dwarves and prisoners with the form of gangrene of the face known as Noma, which was common in Birkenau because of the privations in which inmates were held. He worked closely with an anthropological institute in Berlin, sending them human body parts, especially eyeballs. The parcels were stamped "Urgent - war materials". Doctor Mengele was a member of Heinrich Himmler's SS. And, like Mengele, every member of the SS was told to pride themselves on their hardness and lack of pity.
But during 1943, Himmler realised that he must try harder to prevent the SS from being - as he saw it - corrupted by the extermination of the Jews. In a speech he gave at Poznan on the 4th October 1943, Himmler spelt out just how he wanted the SS to feel about the murders.
Subtitles: I want to put to you a very grave matter in all frankness. We can talk about it amongst ourselves yet we will never ever speak about it in public. I am referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. And to have seen this through and apart from a few exceptions of human weakness to have remained decent - that has made us tough and is a page of glory in our history never to be written. We have taken away the riches that they had and I have given a strict order which General Pohl has carried out. We have delivered all these riches to the Reich, to the State. We have taken nothing for ourselves.
But it was all lies, because in a place like Auschwitz, Commandant Rudolf Höss was presiding over an institution that was riddled with corruption. So much so that in the Autumn of 1943 another SS officer, Lieutenant Konrad Morgen, arrived to look into the running of the camp. There was to be no investigation, of course, into the fact that every week thousands of innocent people were being murdered in the gas chambers. In Himmler's eyes that was a sacred duty. Instead Morgen's investigation was to be centered on theft - on ensuring that the money and goods stolen from the incoming transports ended up in the coffers of the State, not the lockers of individual members of the SS. Morgen was shocked by what he found.
Testimony of Konrad Morgen, Auschwitz Trial, 1964: "Examination of the lockers yielded a fortune in gold, rings, pearls and money, in all kinds of currencies. The conduct of the SS staff was beyond any of the standards that you'd expect from soldiers. They gave the impression of being degenerate and brutal parasites."
Oskar Gröning: "I was on a business trip to Berlin to deliver English pounds and American dollars and just at that time they raided the quarters of the NCO's and other ranks. And when I returned my locker was sealed."
Gröning knew that two of his comrades had already been arrested because contraband had been found in their possession. One of them later hanged himself in his cell. Knowing his own locker contained stolen goods, Gröning came up with an ingenious way out of his predicament. The Gestapo had sealed the front of his locker, so Gröning simply took off the back.
Oskar Gröning: "I went to the Gestapo and said, 'Look, what nonsense are you up to, I can't get into my locker.' - 'Oh, we are sorry.'—'Listen, I've just returned from a trip and I need it' - 'Well, we've got to check it first' So they came, took the 3 seals off, opened the locker, found nothing, patted me on the shoulder and said, 'It's ok. Carry on.'"
Interviewer: "But looking back, aren't you sorry that you made your own life more comfortable while millions actually died?"
Oskar Gröning: "Absolutely not. Everybody is looking out for themselves. So many people died in the war, not only Jews. So many things happened, so many were shot, so many snuffed it. People burnt to death, so many were burnt, if I thought about all of that I wouldn't be able to live one minute longer."
This attitude that it was acceptable to profit personally from the Jews wasn't just common at Auschwitz, it became entrenched throughout the area of the killings. This footage, of Jews being robbed in Eastern Europe, shows how easy it was for the Nazis and their collaborators to pocket money and jewelry for themselves. And it was the corruption of individual Nazis which enabled Jews to fight back in the autumn of 1943. A major act of resistance occurred in the East of Poland, at a Nazi death camp called Sobibor, where the SS were just as corrupt as they were at Auschwitz.
Thomas Blatt - Jewish Prisoner, Sobibor: "They did steal despite everything, they had a good time, they weren't, they didn't go to the Russia where their comrades were killed in the in the Russia, ah, in the Russian Front under Stalingrad, they killed innocent babies, that's a good life for them. They could live like kings."
Sobibor was a tiny camp, hidden in a forest. This is an impression of what it looked like. Several hundred Jews were given a temporary stay of execution and forced to work here, most sorting the belongings of those who had been murdered in the gas chambers of the camp. A group of them realized they might be able to take advantage of the Germans' greed and lure them to nearby workshops.
Thomas Blatt: " There's a beautiful leather coat in the sorting area, would you like to ah, to take a look at it? Of course they were very greedy; they picked up gold, they picked up clothing they sent it later home. When the tailor made appointment with this officer to come 3 o'clock to try on his uniform, you could be sure he was 3 o'clock exactly there. So we were able to plan approximately a new divided time of the killing, you could see that every few minutes, every 50 minutes, a German was killed."
Arkadiy Vajspapir - Jewish Prisoner & Former Red Army Soldier, Sobibor: "Me and Lerner went to the cobblers' shop and we hid behind some clothes. I had an axe and he had an axe too. A German came in to try on some boots that the prisoners had made for him. They sat him down opposite my hiding place. At that moment I stepped out and hit him. I didn't know that you should do it with the flat side of the axe. I hit him with the blade.
We pulled him away and put some clothes over him. Almost immediately another German came in. He walked up to the corpse, kicked him and said - 'what is this, what is this mess over here, what's going on?' At that moment I hit him with the axe and Lerner hit him as well. Then we took his weapons—I took one pistol, Lerner took the other one and we ran away."
The inmates rushed to the wire fences that surrounded the camp, all the time under fire from Ukrainian guards in the watch towers. They pushed the fences down and ran straight towards the forest, crossing a minefield.
Thomas Blatt: "I was, was probably the last one to run—I fall down about two or three times down, each time I thought I'm hit, but I did get up, nothing happened to me and I did run to the forest - 100 meter, 50 meter… finally the forest."
300 of the 600 Jews in Sobibor managed to escape that day. In the end about 50 of them evaded capture and survived the war, many of them former Red Army Soldiers who had been imprisoned in the camp.
Arkadiy Vajspapir: "Only those who flocked together could survive. The only thing that saved me and my friends was that we were like brothers to each other."
In the wake of the Sobibor revolt Himmler ordered the closure of a number of camps in Poland, and the murder by shooting of over 40,000 people. But the Nazis' "Final Solution" was not progressing as Hitler and Himmler would have wished.
The Italians, although allies of the Nazis, had consistently refused to deport their Jews. It wasn't until the Germans occupied their country that deportations began. In Bulgaria, although the government had already given up 11,000 Jews from occupied territories, there were protests during 1943 about proposals to deport Bulgarian Jews. And in Romania, Prime Minister Antonescu, having permitted the destruction of many Jewish communities, refused to co-operate further. For everyone knew that the Germans were losing the war. In the East, in the fight against the Red Army, whole German units had been captured.
But one occupied country in Europe did more than any other to protect Jews - Denmark. The Germans had first occupied Denmark in 1940 but it was only now, in August 1943, after Danish resistance had increased, that they imposed full military rule. Now German brutality was practiced in the open and the Danish Jews were hugely at risk.
In September 1943 Hitler's representative in Denmark, Dr Werner Best of the SS, a man whose hands were already bloodied by the persecution of Jews in France and Poland, met with the German diplomat, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, a known sympathizer of the Danes. According to their later testimony, Best first informed him that 8000 Danish Jews would shortly be rounded up.
Subtitles: We now have a definite date. The operation will take place on the night of 1st October. And there is nothing you can do about it? No. The security police have already received their orders.
It was at this point that Best acted seemingly out of character.
Subtitles: I wish I could build a bridge over the Baltic Sea so the Jews could find a way to Sweden. Rest assured, Dr. Best, the bridge will be built.
Best's heavy hint about a bridge for the Danish Jews to neutral Sweden was clearly understood by Duckwitz. He immediately warned Danish politicians who in turn warned the Jews. As a result on Wednesday the 29th of September 1943 in the central synagogue in Copenhagen Rabbi Melchior made a surprise announcement.
Rabbi Bent Melchior: "During the service of that morning my father stopped the service and ah, repeated the message that he had received. Don't be at home on Friday night."
Knut Dyby - Danish Policeman: "I would go out and find one of the fishermen that I knew and tell him how many I had and we would have to beg and borrow enough money to pay the fishermen as much as we could to get everybody on board."
Once in neutral Sweden, the Danish Jews were given food and shelter. Altogether 95% of Danish Jews were saved in a rescue action that is without parallel in the history of the Nazis' "Final Solution"
Rudy Bier - Jewish Escapee from Denmark: "The Danes considered the Jewish population as a part of the Danish population and they could not understand why these people should have separate treatment. And I think it was very much a question of fairness and justice, I would even say more that than love."
But while the motive of the Danes who helped the Jews was clear, it's less easy to understand why Werner Best acted as he did. One possible explanation is that he wanted the Jews to escape to save him the trouble of deporting them himself. Best sent a report to Berlin on October the 5th. He said:
"As the objective goal of the Jewish action in Denmark was the de-Judification of the country and not a successful headhunt it must be concluded that the Jewish action has reached its goal."
Even committed Nazis like Best were lacing their ideological hatred with pragmatism. And in 1943 here within Auschwitz main camp, there was the most extraordinary example of that same thinking.
Józef Paczynski, Polish Political Prisoner, Auschwitz: "And so, in 1943 I and many others were living in Block 24A. The block elder came in and said: 'We're moving out because there's going to be a brothel here.' We all started laughing."
But it wasn't a joke. It was bizarre - but true. Block 24 just beside the main gate of Auschwitz was to become a brothel. And the decision to make it happen had come from the very top of the SS. Heinrich Himmler had been considering for some time how to provide incentives to prisoners within the concentration camp system. He'd written to Otto Pohl of the SS Economic Division:
"I consider it necessary to provide in the most liberal way hard working prisoners with women in brothels."
These instructions were passed onto commandants like Höss in a directive from Pohl in 1943. The idea wasn't for every prisoner to use the brothel - certainly not the Jews, but for vouchers for the brothel to be issued only to those prisoners whom the Nazis considered of special value. Prisoners like Ryszard Dacko, a member of the Auschwitz fire brigade.
Ryszard Dacko—Polish Political Prisoner, Auschwitz: "If I wanted to get a voucher, I had to sort things out with an SS-man. And they only gave vouchers to healthy prisoners, they wouldn't give them to prisoners who were on their last legs. Prisoners who worked as cooks for the SS, as hairdressers for the SS—the special prisoners got those vouchers. I got 2 vouchers."
Little is known about the women who were forced to work in the brothel - this whole subject is one many prefer not to talk about. But it's believed they were selected from non-Jewish prisoners already in the camp. They were given these rooms on the first floor of Block 24 where prisoners who had the necessary vouchers visited them.
Ryszard Dacko: "I wanted to cuddle up to her as much as I could, because it was three and a half years since I'd been arrested, three and a half years without a woman."
In the brutalized atmosphere of Auschwitz, prisoners like Ryszard Dacko found it hard to have sympathy for the women who worked in the brothel.
Ryszard Dacko: "The girls were treated very well, they had good food, they went for walks. They just had to carry out the work that was required of them."
The brothel lasted until January 1945 - and the suffering endured by the women who worked in these rooms is one of the least acknowledged aspects of the history of Auschwitz. Shortly after supervising the opening of the brothel, Höss learnt that he was to be removed as Commandant of Auschwitz. He didn't want to leave. He and his family had manufactured a comfortable life for themselves.
The SS investigation had uncovered clear evidence of corruption at the camp. But Höss wasn't disgraced; he was promoted—to a desk job in Concentration Camp Administration back in Berlin. He left on his own. Rather than move to Berlin, his family preferred to stay on after he'd gone in the Commandant's house on the edge of Auschwitz main camp.
But Höss was not finished with Auschwitz yet. Just 2 months after he left the warehouse in Auschwitz, where much of the evidence about corruption at the camp was being stored, mysteriously caught fire. Höss would return to the camp in 1944, where he would oversee the dramatic months that made Auschwitz into the biggest killing centre the world has ever seen.
END CREDITS
Source: http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/about/transcripts_4.html
Documentary Description
Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution', is a BBC six-episode documentary film series presenting the story of Auschwitz through interviews with former inmates and guards and re-enactments, first televised on BBC One on 11 January 2005. The series prominently featured the music of Gorecki Symphony No 3 , Arvo Pärt's "Spiegel im Spiegel" and Handel's Harpsichord Suite No. 4 In D Minor, HWV 437: Sarabande.
In the United States, this series first aired on PBS television stations as Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State in early 2005 and was released, under that title, in a 2-DVD box set (Region 1), by BBC Warner, on 29 March 2005.
BBC Press Releases
Auschwitz: The Nazis & the 'Final Solution'
BBC TWO, January 2005
With a number of recent high profile Hollywood films such as Schindler's List and The Pianist and iconic books such as The Diary of Anne Frank it is easy to assume that everyone is familiar with the Holocaust and Auschwitz.
Yet a recent BBC survey suggests that almost half the adult population (45%) claim to have never even heard of Auschwitz.
Amongst women and people aged under 35 the figure is even higher at 60%.
Even among those who have heard of Auschwitz, 70% felt that they did not know a great deal about the subject.
Most of them (76%) were unaware of its roots as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners; the majority (74%) did not know that people other than Jews were killed there and only a few recognised the name of the camp commandant or knew who finally liberated the camp at the end of the war.
The BBC's research informs a definitive new series which has been made to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January 2005.
Written and produced by Bafta Award-winning producer Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis & the 'Final Solution' offers a unique perspective on the camp in which more than one million people were ruthlessly murdered.
"We were amazed by the results of our audience research" says series producer Laurence Rees. "It's easy to presume that the horrors of Auschwitz are engrained in the nation's collective memory but obviously this is not the case.
"We were particularly startled by the fact that less than 40% of younger people have even heard of Auschwitz.
"The research reinforced the importance of making this series and trying to ensure the atrocities that unfolded at Auschwitz are never forgotten."
The series is the result of three years of in-depth research, drawing on the close involvement of world experts on the period, including Professors Sir Ian Kershaw and David Cesarani.
It is based on nearly 100 interviews with survivors and perpetrators, many of whom are speaking in detail for the first time.
Sensitively shot drama sequences, filmed on location using German and Polish actors, bring recently discovered documents to life on screen, whilst specially commissioned computer images give a historically accurate view of Auschwitz-Birkenau at all its many stages of development.
"The name Auschwitz is quite rightly a byword for horror," says Laurence Rees. "But the problem with thinking about horror is that we naturally turn away from it.
"Our series is not only about the shocking, almost unimaginable pain of those who died, or survived, Auschwitz. It's about how the Nazis came to do what they did.
"I feel passionately that being horrified is not enough. We need to make an attempt to understand how and why such horrors happened if we are ever to be able to stop them occurring again."
The BBC will be marking Holocaust Memorial Day (27 January 2005) with a number of other television and radio programmes, including a live event on the day, an international musical performance in and around the museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and a documentary that traces one woman's story of survival told through her grandson's eyes.
Notes to Editors
The research findings were based on a nationally representative postal survey of 4,000 adults aged 16+ conducted by IPSOS RSL as part of their weekly Quest survey.
All respondents recruited were mailed a questionnaire to complete covering a number of topics, with quota controls imposed, within region, by age within sex and social class.
Fieldwork was conducted during February 2004.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/12_december/02/auschwitz.shtml
The Killing Evolution
by PBS
The Nazis did not start World War II with a plan to eliminate the Jews. This solution evolved—especially from 1939 to 1941—as they tried different techniques to accomplish their goals. Particularly in Germany and Poland camp commandants experimented with various killing methodologies and consulted with one another on their successes and failures. The ability of a single camp to kill 2,000-3,000 people per hour took years to achieve. At first, though, murder was done at close range-man-to-man, woman, or child.
Death by Firing Squad
In 1941, SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski told his superior Heinrich Himmler that the Nazis had been murdering Jews, including women and children, at close range and in cold blood all summer. Bach-Zelewski was worried about this method's traumatizing effects on his men. Himmler recorded in his diary the General's concerns: "And he said to me, 'Reichsfuhrer, these men are finished for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we producing here- either neurotics or brutes?'"
Himmler realized he had to find new methods that would spare his troops the psychological strain of killing human beings at close range.
Carbon Monoxide
According to the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, Adolf Eichmann suggested using "showers of carbon monoxide while bathing, as was done with mental patients in some places in the Reich." Instead of leading to water, the showerheads were connected to canisters of carbon monoxide.
The birth of this method had varied sources, including one ironic twist. Artur Nebe, a Nazi-killing squad commander, had come home drunk from a party one night and passed out in his garage with his car still running. The carbon monoxide gas from the exhaust nearly killed him.
As Nebe related the incident to his SS comrades, this near-miss convinced him that gassing could be used effectively against the Jews and other Nazi enemies. Gas would be cheaper than bullets, and no Nazi would directly take a life.
Hell Vans
The Nazis' experimented with another methodology using carbon monoxide. Deported Jews from the Lodz Ghetto were led through a basement corridor and then up a ramp to a small windowless room that turned out to be the cargo area of a large van. Once the van was full, the doors were slammed shut, and as it was driven to a nearby forest, exhaust fumes were routed into the back, asphyxiating the trapped victims.
After the van reached its destination, the bodies were buried or burned. Zofia Szalek, a German residing in the Polish town of Chelmno, describes what she witnessed: "We could hear the screams, but we couldn't see the people. They were loaded in and murdered there. It was hell. That's why we called these vans 'Hell Vans.'"
Zyklon B
The most effective and efficient technique developed for killing at Auschwitz depended on the same pesticide that was used to kill the lice in prisoners' clothing. The disinfectant, sold under the trade name of Zyklon B, was in plentiful supply. Once exposed to properly heated air, the crystals produced lethal gas.
In the fall of 1941, the basement of cell block 11—the Auschwitz building where some of the most despicable punishments were meted out—was sealed and locked down. August Kowalczyk, a Polish political prisoner on a nearby work detail, witnessed the entire event. He reports that because they were still experimenting, Nazi judgments in error caused the murders to take place over a two-day period, instead of the expected half hour.
Massive Gas Chambers and Crematoria
By the early spring of 1943, four huge crematoria became fully operational at Auschwitz II (Birkenau). They housed eight gas chambers and forty-six ovens that could dispose of some 4,400 corpses per day. Trains would arrive at the camp and those most fit—approximately 10-30 percent of the arrivals—would be selected for a work detail. The remaining prisoners were sent to the gas chambers.
Prisoners assigned to a unit known as the Sonderkommando had to move the bodies from the gas chambers to the furnaces. Several bodies at a time were burned in a single oven. In May 1944 a serious bottle-neck occurred at Auschwitz, because the deportation and extermination of the Hungarian Jews was under way.
Numbering about 725,000, plus thousands more who were Christian converts but still counted as Jews by Nazi racial criteria, the Hungarian Jews were the largest Jewish group that remained alive in Nazi-dominated Europe. Between late April and early July 1944, more than 380,000 of them were brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most were gassed and cremated. When the demand for corpse disposal overtaxed the camp’s ovens, camp authorities, needing to speed up the process, again resorted to burning bodies on pyres, using the huge pits that had been dug behind Crematorium V.
Precise counts of how many people actually were murdered in death camps can never be made because those marched off directly from the trains usually were not registered. However, a calculation that is both conservative and reliable indicates that at least 1.1 million people were gassed to death at Auschwitz—90 percent of them Jews.
Even with all of the death technology, the Germans could not cremate everyone they murdered during the Holocaust. As they retreated from the advancing Allied forces, they blew up the gas chambers and crematoria to destroy the evidence at Auschwitz. But the evidence lingered. In camps throughout Poland and Germany, tens of thousands of bodies remained stacked or spilling out into the cold winter snow.
Surprising Beginnings
March 1940 to September 1941
Auschwitz, the site of the largest mass murder in the history of the world did not start out as a death camp. In the spring of 1940, Rudolf Höss, a captain in the SS (Schutzstaffel), the elite defense organization that answered only to Hitler and advanced his plans, became Commandant of a new Nazi concentration camp at the southwestern Polish town of Oswiecim. Auschwitz, as the Germans called it, was in territory that Hitler had invaded the previous year.
Höss was directed to create a concentration camp for 10,000 prisoners, using old Polish army barracks, but as he later wrote in his memoirs, "The task wasn’t easy. In the shortest possible time, I had to create a camp for 10,000 prisoners using the existing complex of buildings which were well constructed but were completely run down and swarming with vermin."
“True opponents of the state had to be securely locked up... Only the SS were capable of protecting the National Socialist State from all internal danger. All other organizations lacked the necessary toughness.”
– Memoirs of Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz
Auschwitz I, as the camp came to be called, was built primarily to confine and oppress Polish dissidents whom the Nazis considered to be a threat to their occupation. Polish Jews were confined elsewhere, increasingly in ghettos. Höss adopted the motto of Dachau, another concentration camp where he had previously worked: Arbeit Macht Frei ("Work Makes You Free").
“Watch your bread so that no one steals it. This is what you were preoccupied with, and this was a constant vigilance.”
– Kazimierz Piechowski, Polish political prisoner, Auschwitz
The Polish prisoners were subjected to appalling treatment from the SS. More than 10,000 died within twenty months. The camp received little support from Nazi headquarters and Höss often had to scrounge for supplies.
Jerzy Bielecki was one of the first Polish prisoners at Auschwitz. The SS thought he was with the Polish resistance and sentenced him to “hanging torture,” a brutal punishment where the prisoner carried his full body weight on his arms that were pulled behind his back in an unnatural position:
“He wanted to hang me on the hook. He said, ‘Stand up on your toes. Finally he hooked me and then he kicked the stool away without any warning. I just felt Jesus Mary, oh my God, the terrible pain. My shoulders were breaking out from the joints. Both arms were breaking out from the joints. I’d been moaning and he just said, ‘Shut up you dog. You deserve it. You have to suffer.’”
Writing in his memoirs, Rudolf Höss admits that Auschwitz was a concentration camp where cruel and brutal treatment was routine. Despite this—during the early 1940s—the facility was almost a backwater in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Auschwitz, however, was about to change. The town was situated on major railroad lines. Its surrounding area was rich in natural resources, particularly fresh water, lime, and coal. This made it an excellent location for IG Farben, the German industrial conglomerate, to build a factory that would manufacture war materials.
March 1940 to September 1941
Industrialization interested Heinrich Himmler, Commander of the SS. His dream was that IG Farben's activities would fund the creation of a model Nazi settlement where Auschwitz prisoners would work as slave laborers and the SS would profit by selling coal and gravel as well as labor to IG Farben.
Toward the end of 1940, Himmler visited Auschwitz and ordered the camp tripled in capacity from 10,000 to 30,000 prisoners. Auschwitz would be a backwater no longer, it would become the largest concentration camp in the Nazi empire. Over the succeeding months and years, a series of architectural plans were drawn up, detailing even greater expansion of the Nazi vision for Auschwitz.
While Himmler formulated his ideas for a bigger and greater Auschwitz during the spring of 1941, Adolf Hitler completed plans to invade the Soviet Union. Hitler's plans for Russia would in turn cause a radical change in the function of Auschwitz.
Because it was the home of communism, the Nazis feared and despised the Soviet Union. They also believed that Joseph Stalin's Red Army was made up of inferior human beings and would not be hard to defeat.
“They [the Russians] were—in civilisation terms—not as far on as the West. You just have to imagine the following: France—a civilised nation with flushing toilets. Russia—predominantly toilet behind the house.”
Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Of the three million Soviets troops taken prisoner in the invasion, two million were dead within nine months, either shot, starved, or worked to death.
Jerzy Bielecki, a Polish political prisoner at Auschwitz, watched what happened to the Russian prisoners who were forced to work in gravel pits.
“The prisoner overseers beat them mercilessly, kicked them, clubbed them. They would fall to the ground. It was a macabre scene. I had never in my life seen anything like it. Neither did I later on, even though I remained in the camp for a long time after. ”
– Jerzy Bielecki
“I saw an SS-man, a junior officer, walking around the gravel pit with a pistol in his hand. It was sadism. ‘You dogs! You damned communists! You pieces of shit!’ Horrible words like these. And from time to time he would direct the pistol downwards and shoot: Pow. Pow. Pow.” (Jerzy Bielecki).
“During an evening roll call, we were told that all the sick among us could go away for treatment. Some people believed it.”
– Kazimierz Smolen, Polish political prisoner, Auschwitz
Not only the Soviet prisoners of war suffered as the Germans moved east. Hitler did not want to keep alive any prisoners who could not work.
In the autumn of 1939, Hitler authorized a secret Euthanasia Program, which administered so-called mercy deaths first to handicapped children and later to mentally and physically disabled Germans adults. These people were taken to special institutions where they were gassed with carbon monoxide. Himmler wanted to extend this program to concentration camps, including Auschwitz, to eliminate the need to transport people who could not work. He realized that he had to find a better and more efficient way to murder people—psychologically better for the killers, not for the victims.
March 1940 to September 1941
One of Höss' deputies at Auschwitz developed an efficient method that featured crystallized prussic acid, mass produced under the trade name Zyklon B, and widely used as a pesticide. At Auschwitz it was being used to fumigate barracks and disinfect prisoners' clothes. When the crystals dissolved in air, they created a lethal gas. Block 11, the most feared location in Auschwitz, was chosen for the first Zyklon B experiments.
On a day in late August or early September 1941, the doors and windows in the cellar of Block 11 were sealed.
August Kowalczyk, a Polish political prisoner at Auschwitz, watched what happened the day Zyklon B was first used on Block 11:
“Our attention was drawn by SS men running around with gas masks. The windows of the bunker had been covered up with sand, and in the cellar Soviet prisoners of war were assembled. And it turned out the following day that the SS—actually, it was [Gerhard] Palitzsch in particular who attracted attention because he was running around like crazy. It turned out that the gas hadn't worked properly and that many of the prisoners, the people, were still alive. So they increased the dosage—added more crystals—and finished the job.”
Rudolf Höss later wrote that the experiment with Zyklon B had a calming effect on him: "I was always horrified of executions by firing squads. Now I was relieved to think that we would be spared all these bloodbaths."
But the bloodbaths would continue and grow even larger when a new camp was built a mile and a half from Auschwitz, at a place the Poles called Brzezinka, and the Germans Birkenau. It also became known as Auschwitz II.
