Holocaust memorial day, Sunday, January
28, 2001
Auschwitz
Revisited: Polish Scholars Compile Version
Left by Victims and Killers
Alike By RALPH BLUMENTHAL Prodded
by Holocaust survivors and scholars,
Auschwitz has been giving up more of
its last infernal secrets. Drawing on captured
German documents newly available from
Russian archives and more than a
half-century of Auschwitz
studies, researchers in Poland have
compiled what experts call the most
complete and authoritative history of the
vast killing center for the Nazi
extermination of the Jews. Called simply
"Auschwitz 1940-
1945" and just issued in English,
it is a five-volume work of more than half
a million words that has been under
preparation by Auschwitz-Birkenau State
Museum since 1979. Replete with names of
killers and victims, it fills 1,799 pages,
including construction plans for the gas
chambers and crematories, prisoner lists,
first-hand accounts, rare photographs, an
almost day-by-day calendar and a 49-page
bibliography. By
the time Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz
and its subcamps 56 years ago yesterday,
an estimated 1.3 million people had been
shipped there and at least 1.1 million,
including 960,000 Jews, had died there,
the history establishes. Because fleeing
guards burned millions of documents while
leaving behind others from the so-called
Hygiene Institute and infirmary
as exculpatory
ploys the exact toll will never be
known. "It is by far the most comprehensive in
its detail and level of source material,"
said Rabbi Irving Greenberg,
chairman of the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, which will be selling the
work. Using lists
of victims and other camp
documentation recently retrieved from
Russia, the Auschwitz history offers new
computations of the death toll, including
the fate of 232,000 deportees under 18. It
profiles many of the nearly 8,000 SS men
and women who ran the camp and who, the
book says, largely escaped justice after
World War II. It tallies property
plundered from the prisoners: gold teeth
and hair by the trainload and convoys of
empty baby carriages that, one former
prisoner recalled, "were pushed in rows of
five, and the procession took more than an
hour to pass." But the study also devotes nearly 400
pages alone to the often-overlooked camp
resistance movement: the operations of
Polish underground cells; an ill-fated
mutiny on Oct. 7, 1944, in which 451
prisoners died; and
802 escapes
that helped smuggle out news of the
killings to an often uninterested
world. The history includes accounts secretly
recorded by anonymous doomed prisoners
assigned to execution details who buried
their testaments like time capsules around
the Auschwitz grounds. It also
cross-references Nazi memoirs and
testimony from a welter of war crimes
proceedings, including the trial of the
camp's commandant, Rudolf
Höss, who was hanged in
1947. For many years after the war, said
Teresa Swiebocka, a curator at the
museum, the Polish Communist authorities
played down the singular victimization of
the Jews. Since the fall of Communism,
scholars say, the distortions have been
redressed, as the book reflects. Eli Rosenbaum, director of the
Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office
of Special Investigations, called the
history "clearly a landmark work and a
major contribution to scholarship." He
said his office has consulted it on people
suspected of being Nazi guards who might
have taken refuge in the United States and
who could be stripped of their American
citizenship and deported. After the history appeared in Polish in
1995 and in German in 1999, an expanded
version was translated into English by an
American educator and filmmaker,
William Brand, and paid for by
Warren L. Miller, a former federal
prosecutor and trial lawyer in Washington.
Mr. Miller has served since 1992 on the
United States Commission for the
Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad,
which helps maintain European sites of
historic and cultural interest to
Americans. The history costs $60 at the
Auschwitz-Birkenau museum. Compiling the history was an arduous
job, said Ms. Swiebocka, who helped
prepare the English version. Researchers
drew on museum archives going back to
1947, a grim
trove that now includes more than 70,000
death certificates, punishment annals, r
sum s of more than 500 SS members, 6,000
drawings by prisoners and 40,000
photographs of mostly non-Jewish prisoners
taken by the Germans before they abandoned
the practice. Yet despite all the new research, Ms.
Swiebocka said, some critical questions
remain unanswered: particularly the number
of victims. The history traces Auschwitz from its
designation on Jan. 25, 1940, at the site
of a Polish artillery barracks in the
Katowice district at Oswiecim (pronounced
ohsh-VYEN-cheem), a remote location at the
fork of the Sola and Vistula rivers served
by good rail connections. On June 14, the
first transport, from Tarnow, brought 728
Polish prisoners, mostly high school and
university students and soldiers. On July 6, a Polish prisoner became the
first escapee. When his absence was
discovered, all prisoners were forced to
stand at roll call for 20 hours. Many were
beaten and flogged and one, Dawid Wong-
czewski, a Jew, became the first to
die at Auschwitz, according to the
history. The
first prisoners were put to work expanding
the camp and building the first crematory.
The coke- fired ovens, with an initial
capacity of at least 100 bodies a day,
were supplied by J. A. Topf &
Söhne of Erfurt, Germany, and the
burning of corpses began on Aug. 15, 1940.
Heinrich
Himmler, commander of Hitler's SS,
visited the camp on March 1, 1941, and
decreed a vast expansion that would clear
the surrounding countryside for a second
large camp called Birkenau, subcamps and
factories of I. G. Farben, Bayer and other
industrial giants, to be staffed by forced
labor. Shortly afterward, Höss later
recalled, Himmler told him, "the
Führer has ordered the final solution
of the Jewish question." Until 1942, Poles made up the largest
group of prisoners, the history recounts.
An estimated 150,000 were deported there
throughout the war and about 75,000 died.
Starting in 1941, Soviet prisoners of war
were sent to Auschwitz, where at least
15,000 of them died, many in the first
trials of the gas chamber using pellets of
Zyklon B. The first transport of Jews arrived
from Bytom, Poland, on Feb. 15, 1942. By
the end of 1942, there were more Jews than
Poles in Auschwitz, and thereafter the
camp became primarily an extermination
center for Jews, although most of the
estimated 23,000 Gypsies and perhaps
15,000 other prisoners deported there also
were killed. Although calculations after liberation
suggested that four million people may
have died at Auschwitz, based in part on
the capacity of the crematories, most
scholars have since settled on a toll of 1
million to 1.5 million. From personnel records of 6,335 of the
men and women who served at Auschwitz, the
study also analyzes the varied makeup of
the SS garrison, putting the average age
at 36.1 years and the educational level as
relatively low, with about 70 percent not
having gone beyond grade school. In the
whole history of Auschwitz, it said, there
were few instances of SS members refusing
to carry out orders and no documented
instance of any guard being punished for
refusing to carry out mass murder. Justice was substantially cheated, a
chapter by a Polish sociologist,
Aleksander Lasik, concludes. No
more than 789 members of the staff were
ever tried and, he wrote, "a smaller
percentage were convicted and a still
smaller percentage served their sentences
in full." Copyright
2001 The New York Times
Company
Related
items on this website: - Auschwitz
index
-
(On
journalist Blumenthal): The
Deschênes Report: The Mengele
Affair
|