Every American schoolchild knows about the Holocaust. He or
she may not have an appreciation for Nazi policy or how it came to happen, but he
or she knows that Nazi Germany killed six million Jews, many of them in gas
chambers. There are, however, some frustrating misconceptions that plague the
popular American understanding of the Holocaust. While the misconceptions are
not necessarily cause for alarm (except to the extent to which they can be
manipulated by Holocaust deniers), they allow for a false interpretation of the
Holocaust to percolate into the American public and cause some serious
misunderstandings about the Nazis’ war against the Jews.
Conflation of concentration and death camps
One of the first terms that comes to mind when the Holocaust
is brought up is “concentration camp.” The Nazis, so it is said, threw all of
the Jews into concentration camps and gassed many of them in those camps. While
partially true, it mostly isn’t. Concentration camps, by literal definition,
are meant to concentrate real and potential enemies of the state; they are
hardly unique to National Socialism or to the Holocaust. Death camps, on the
other hand, were specifically designed to murder people in an industrialized fashion;
these were unique to Nazi Germany.
The concentration camp and death camp are not remotely the same thing. The
typical grouping of Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz, and Treblinka obfuscates
more than it illuminates. These were very different camps with very different
purposes.
Bergen-Belsen was originally a transit camp that in the
final months of the war was overwhelmed by Jews forcefully marched and trained
from places farther east – the result of the influx was devastating epidemics
and starvation, and the kinds of scenes witnessed by the British Army upon
liberation, scenes that are
practically unwatchable.
Dachau was a penal camp for political prisoners, and the
first official concentration camp established by Nazi Germany, in 1933. It
later became a terminus for Jews being pushed westward in 1945, and it too was
the site of
horrific
scenes of human skeletons and piles of corpses upon its liberation by
American troops.
Both of those camps were liberated by Western armies, and
their liberation was widely publicized to American and British audiences, who
were able to see with their own eyes evidence of Nazi abominations. The two, among others such as Buchenwald, became known as “death camps” in popular parlance, but this did not accord with
their intention or function. Neither Jews nor anyone else was systematically
murdered at these places; only later, on the eve of the war’s end, did large
numbers of Jews die in them, mostly of starvation and disease.
Auschwitz was a special case. It opened its gates in 1940 to
imprison Polish political opponents. Jews were sent to Auschwitz and gassed
at the Birkenau camp beginning in spring 1942, but the camp maintained its
original function as a brutal penal camp for political prisoners all the way up
to its liberation in January 1945 by the Red Army. In addition to being an
extermination camp, Birkenau served as a massive forced-labor camp. Because the
main Auschwitz camp was a concentration camp, and Auschwitz sub-camps dotted
the Upper Silesian countryside, there were many survivors of the Auschwitz camp
complex. This is why, even though more Jews were murdered at Auschwitz than
anywhere else, more Jews also survived Auschwitz than any other camp. This
seeming contradiction – it is not, of course – has given fodder to Holocaust
deniers. If Auschwitz was the worst and most murderous death camp, why do you
have all of these elderly Jews in New York with tattoos claiming to have been
in Auschwitz? This is where the misconceptions can actually become dangerous.
Treblinka, which lies some 50 miles northeast of the Polish
capital Warsaw, was a death factory, plain and simple. Unlike at Auschwitz, there
was no industry there except death. There was no “selection” as there was at
Auschwitz-Birkenau. Treblinka, like its sister camps Bełżec and Sobibór,
as well as Chełmno, was a death sentence. This is why very few survived,
and why correspondingly there is less information on these camps. We know much
less about them than Auschwitz-Birkenau, and there is no remnant of them – they
were systematically destroyed by the SS in 1943.
Due to the foregoing, it is silly to categorize these camps under
the same heading. Treblinka was not a concentration camp; Dachau was not a death
camp. The term “camps”, therefore, which conflates all of these different
sites, muddles our understanding of events and gives space for deniers to work
their grotesque spin.
Auschwitz as a synonym and symbol for the Holocaust
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| The gate at Auschwitz's main camp |
I admit that I am guilty of this as well. The need to
differentiate between the Holocaust as a whole and Auschwitz has been made
forcefully by Timothy Snyder, a scholar of Eastern Europe at Yale University. I
agree with his analysis.
The experience of Auschwitz was actually an atypical experience for the vast
majority of Jews. By the end of 1941, one million Jews in the Soviet Union and the
Baltics had been shot into ditches. The Polish Jews had been largely
extinguished by the end of 1942 in Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, at which there was no selection, as explained above, and in mass shootings
carried out by roving death squads. Auschwitz did not become a true factor in
the Final Solution until 1943, when the other three camps had already shut down
or were winding down operations, and when the vast majority of Holocaust
victims were already dead.
I believe the reason for the fixation on Auschwitz is
manifold. More Jews were murdered there than at any other single location. It
is largely intact so we know what it looked and looks like: the Birkenau gatehouse,
the ruins of the crematoria, the barracks, the vast expanse of it all. This is
not the case with Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, or Treblinka, which are
today just forests and fields. There were tens of thousands of survivors of
Auschwitz because the prisoners were used for forced labor. Therefore, there
are more eyewitness accounts and generally quite a lot (indeed, an exhaustive
amount) of information on Auschwitz. Finally, while Bełżec, Sobibór,
and Treblinka consumed mainly the Jews of Poland, Jews were sent to Auschwitz
from nearly every country in Europe, including and especially Western Europe.
But it is important to remember that the center of European, and world, Jewry
lay in the east – and these were the communities that were the most thoroughly
destroyed, and destroyed immediately upon conveyance to the death pits and
death camps.
This might be a side note, but there is an annoying conflation
of the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Birkenau death camp. Jews and
others flock from around the world to the main camp at Auschwitz to make a
pilgrimage of sorts. This is the location of the Arbeit Macht Frei gate and the Death Wall, where thousands of
prisoners were shot. It is also where you can see piles of suitcases,
eyeglasses, other personal artifacts, and, most gruesomely, hair. The fact,
however, is that the vast majority of Jews never saw the Arbeit Macht Frei gate. The main camp was mostly a center of Polish
persecution, suffering, and death (about 80,000 Poles were murdered there). The
Jews met their suffering and death down the road, in Birkenau. A lot of
visitors do not know the distinction, or that Birkenau is even a thing – I have
read accounts of people visiting the main camp and then getting on the return
bus back to Kraków, never knowing that they were skipping the main site of
death. There is little understanding of the distinction between the main camp,
which was comparable to Dachau and Buchenwald (albeit much deadlier, because the Nazis viewed the majority of its prisoners, Poles, as a lesser species), and Birkenau, which was its own
beast. This is why I don’t care about a Carmelite convent or a large cross at
or near the main camp. The main camp’s story is mostly a Polish one, not
Jewish. Misconceptions therefore have led to unnecessary tensions between Jews
and Poles at the Auschwitz site.
The canard against Poland
“The Nazis built the extermination camps in Poland because
the Poles are a viciously anti-Semitic people.” I’ve heard this voiced, with
absolute conviction and certitude, a million times. It is an absurdity.
There were anti-Semites among the Poles, of course; it is depressingly clear in the Polish underground literature that, even if at
times they were sympathetic, the vast majority of Poles did not view the Jews
as their own kind. Poles carried out pogroms of Jews, most notoriously at
Jedwabne and Radziłów (they also carried out post-war massacres, such as that
in Kielce in July 1946). Polish blackmailers (szmalcowniks) would demand money from Jews in hiding; if the Jews could not provide it, the blackmailers would turn them
in to the German authorities. Polish resistance units, including those of the Home
Army, at times murdered Jews and then robbed them of their belongings. Most Poles
watched the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with utter indifference; a minority watched
in admiration as the Germans crushed the “Jewish problem.”
Yet other Poles were inspired by the uprising. Many risked
their lives to save Jews. An organization was formed by the Polish government-in-exile
to hide the Jews and assist them in any way possible. In other word, it’s a
mixed picture, to say the least (it would take a book or books to reckon with
this subject) – and Poland continues to this day to suffer from demons and a
very serious complex for what its soil, and its people, witnessed. Poles
infuriatingly insist that they were practically angels during the war, but that
was obviously not true.
But it was also not true of the vast majority of the people
of Europe. The Nazis were able to take advantage of a nearly complete societal
and moral breakdown on the European continent that was largely effectuated by
their conquests and subsequent policies. With a few noble exceptions, such as
the people of Denmark’s heroic action in spiriting Jews by boat to neutral
Sweden, all of Europe was passive, or gleeful, at the fate of the Jews. The
nations and governments of Europe by and large did not see stopping the
slaughter of the Jews as a priority (nor, for that matter, did the United
States). That is why the Holocaust was possible. If all of Europe had resisted
the Nazis to save the Jews, the death toll would not and could not have been so
high. So singling out the Poles on this score is unfair, even if they do (and,
believe me, they do) have a lot to answer for.
So why were the death camps placed on Polish soil? The
answer is easy – Poland was where the vast majority of Jews lived. 3.3 million
Jews lived in Poland on the eve of the German invasion in 1939, representing
10% of the total country’s population. Over 90% of them were murdered – indeed,
Polish Jews alone constituted at least half of the victims of the Holocaust.
Chełmno was built to kill the Jews of the Łódź Ghetto to make room for Jews being
deported from the Reich. Bełżec was designed to annihilate either the Jews of
the Lublin district or of all of occupied Poland (this is not exactly clear –
probably the former). Sobibór was built to assist Bełżec in its grisly task and
Treblinka for the destruction of the Jews of Warsaw, Radom, and other Polish
cities. Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek were built to accommodate huge numbers
of Soviet POWs and only latterly were shoehorned into the Final Solution. The
common denominator is that literally zero of this had to do with Polish
anti-Semitism, whether it was ferocious or not – what it did have to do with was murdering
Jews where most of them were and to where they could easily be deported. It also
had to do with Nazi racial engineering – moving Jews and Poles around the map
to make room for German settlers.
“Desk Killers”
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| Adolf Eichmann |
The notion of the Nazi genocidaire as a “desk killer” who
keeps his hands clean and just shuffles paper has been the most common
understanding of the Nazi perpetrators since the trial of Adolf Eichmann in the
early 1960s (Eichmann was the chief manager and logistician of the Final
Solution). The philosopher Hannah Arendt attended Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem
on assignment with The New Yorker and
concluded after a couple of weeks that Eichmann was no murderous anti-Semite,
but merely a cog in a totalitarian machine and a taker of orders. She thus
shoehorned Eichmann into her extant theory of totalitarianism rather than
appreciating him as an individual phenomenon. Funnily enough, Arendt’s
perception of Eichmann was precisely how he wished to be perceived, as the crux
of his defense strategy. Anyone reading the transcripts of his postwar
conversations while a fugitive in Argentina knows he was a vicious anti-Semite
who reveled in his role as chief executioner of the Jews. He literally bragged about
it to his associates.
The fact is that Eichmann was not removed from his
paperwork; on the contrary, he witnessed gassings of Jews at
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, and Chełmno, and a mass shooting of Jews outside of
Minsk. Throughout the murder campaign, but especially while in Budapest in
1944, Eichmann went above and beyond the call of duty, and even against express
orders, in making sure that as many Jews as possible were sent to their
deaths. Young intellectuals of the Reich
Main Security Office – including historians, sociologists, economists, and
lawyers – volunteered (or did not protest about being sent) for killing
operations behind the front lines in the east, where they could put their
theorizing into practice.
Odilo Globocnik, the
destroyer of Polish Jewry, oversaw the operations of Bełżec, Sobibór, and
Treblinka with great gusto, and said golden plaques should be buried along with
the corpses in these camps to explain that it had been the National Socialists
who had had the fortitude to murder the Jews. These were people intellectually
and emotionally invested in what they were doing. Certainly there were individuals
who would fit the mold of the stereotypical “desk killer,” but not enough to
make sweeping, declaratory statements about the perpetrators. It is not even
true about the supposed archetype: Adolf Eichmann.
Ghettos designed as a waystation to slaughter
This is actually partially true, but not in the way one
might think. Nazi policy was not originally to kill all of the Jews. Rather, it
shifted and morphed until it crystallized into genocide. At first, it was Nazi
policy for Jews to emigrate out of Germany and, after the annexation of Austria
and Czechoslovakia, out of German-controlled territory.
The Nazis were faced
with a conundrum when they conquered Poland due to the voluminous number of
Jews now under their control. They considered deporting them to a
conceptualized Jewish reservation in the Lublin district, which was the
easternmost territory under their control at the time; they also seriously
(yes, seriously) considered shipping all of the Jews to far-off Madagascar.
Neither vision came to pass. In the meantime, however, Jews were concentrated
in ghettos in major cities in Poland along railway lines – in Warsaw, Łódź, etc.
The Nazis, as just explained, had certainly not conceived of extermination
camps or even mass shootings at this point. The reason why it is partially true
to suggest that the ghettos were a waystation to death is because the Lublin
reservation plan and the Madagascar Plan were implicitly murderous and
genocidal. And when those plans failed, so too was the plan to send the Jews
somewhere to Siberia. While the ghettos were certainly designed as holding
pens, they were not done so as part of an already-conceived extermination
program in the way that the Final Solution is known to history. In fact, the Nazis argued bitterly among themselves as to what the point
of the ghettos should be: productive labor or slow death? Different ghetto
administrators had different answers to the question.
Ghetto policy was not
consistent – while Jews from surrounding towns were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto,
in Kraków, it was literally the opposite – most Jews were driven from the city.
Therefore, this misconception is due to reading history backward.
