Before I go into detail about your book choices, I think it might be helpful to understand exactly what auschwitz was. It wasn’t just one camp, but a group of camps, right?
One of the reasons it has become so incredibly important in the public imagination is that it was the largest single camp to combine a death camp and a labor camp. it had the most murders in the holocaust (over a million people were killed there), but also a huge number of survivors, because of this huge complex of labor camps and subcamps that it ran. so you combined the two functions.
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There are three camps: Auschwitz I, which was the original, for political prisoners, predominantly Polish political prisoners, opponents of Nazism, etc.; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, which housed the infamous gas chambers; and auschwitz iii, a third camp within the city of oświęcim, which is now not on the public tourist route, at the i g farben buna plant in monowitz. that was just a big german industrial company that used slave labor from auschwitz.
What is available to visitors today is only a small fraction of the Auschwitz complex that is spread across Oświęcim. not long ago i tried to film in the monowitz buna factory area and was bluntly pushed off the premises. we got permission to film in auschwitz but the people who run the factory now don’t want anyone to look at it, film it and show it was part of the old slave labor system. beyond the camps around oświęcim, there was a huge network of satellite subcamps throughout silesia and beyond. there was a vast complex of subcamps run by the ss with slave labor.
“In the early years, people weren’t really that interested in what the survivors had experienced; They were only interested as witnesses to the crimes of others, not as testimonies of what the past had done to them”
On the famous ramp where the selections were held, you could go to the gas chambers and be dead right away; if he went to the other side of slave labor, he was exterminated through labor. the average life expectancy, if selected for slave labor, was precisely three months. So, not exactly a good chance of survival, but nonetheless, it was the chance of survival for those who survived.
one of the reasons auschwitz has become so big in the public imagination is because there are so many survivors from all over europe writing memoirs in all european languages and representing quite different communities, whether it be the french resistance, the Polish resistance or the Greek Jews. or Hungarian Jews. there were many, many different communities that were subsequently able to identify with the survivors after the war and that provided audiences for their memoirs, publications and stories.
I think another reason it looks so big is because so much of it stays still and you can see it. it is close to good transport links; it is on the tourist route of krakow.
That leads me very clearly to my next question. how will the memory of the holocaust and its remembrance change as the last survivors die in the coming years? of course, in that same time frame, the perpetrators will also be dead, which is perhaps more significant.
In any case, the way survivors have been heard has changed enormously over the last half century. they were more or less ignored in the early postwar years. for a long time, no one was really interested in them. they couldn’t get publishers, they couldn’t get outlets, they couldn’t get audiences. the one exception was anne frank, who was of course quite a different story.
Actually, it was only from the late 1970s that this obsession with memoirs and survivor testimonies emerged. In the early years, even in the 1960s and 1970s, people weren’t really that interested in what the survivors had experienced; the survivors were only interested as witnesses to the crimes of others, not as testimonies of what the past had done to them.
“many mass graves remain unmarked throughout eastern europe”
One of the things that I try and make quite clear in the calculations is that there is a fairly short phase, really, the late 20th and early 21st century, where we have created a lot of memory and survivor testimony. . but we have to remember that this does not tell us the whole story of the holocaust. half of the holocaust victims died in eastern europe outside the camps in the so-called “holocaust by gunfire”, and were only summarily shot. many mass graves still remain unmarked throughout eastern europe.
that aspect of the holocaust has not lodged in the public consciousness in the same way as the auschwitz story. I think one of the things we have to remember is that the memory of survivors that has come down to us paints a very unique picture of people belonging to a particular age group: young at the time, selected largely for slave labor because they were strong and able to work, and that they lived to a ripe old age when they could communicate their experiences.
It’s an intriguing point you make about the interest in survivor memoirs and survivor testimonials that only really took off in the 1970s. what changed around that time? we remember this, probably quite rightly, as an almost unique horrific crime in human history, and yet in the immediate aftermath of the war it doesn’t seem to have been recorded in the way one would have expected. . .
Immediately after the war, the allies and other governments (for example, the Polish state) tried to bring the perpetrators to justice. In the late 1940s, you can find many perpetrators on trial and get a comprehensive look at the horrific scale of the atrocities and the multiplicity of different organizations that were involved in making this mass murder machine possible. therefore, there was a very distinctive attempt to deal with it judicially in the late 1940s.
what changes then is this terrible period, the 1950s. from the late 1940s onwards, the cold war takes precedence for the western allies. They begin to see ex-Nazis as useful in the fight against communism and West Germany as useful in the fight against communism. So from then on, Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first chancellor, and his government prioritized the rehabilitation of former Nazis, granting amnesties, early releases, and reduced sentences. The Allies, the Americans in particular, and West Germany were in complete agreement on this.
so, from the early 1950s onwards, there were Nazis who had been sentenced to death in the late 1940s but were not executed because their sentences had been commuted to, say, life in prison, or 25 years, or even lower sentences. —suddenly being released from prison. this was just absurd. as a result, by the mid-1950s, ex-Nazis could breathe easy and return to life as before. that’s the really disgusting switch. so it’s not like nobody thought about it until the 1960s – a lot was being done and then abandoned for political reasons in the late 1940s and early 1950s with the cold war.
so what changes? why is it back on the agenda? there are several reasons, but I think one of the most important is the cold war again. Since the late 1950s, East Germany begins to politically capitalize on the fact that there are ex-Nazis prominently in high places in West Germany, and this is deeply shameful.
“it was not ‘west germany’ that decided to put auschwitz on trial in 1963, it was some committed people and in particular fritz bauer”
what the east germans say about the adenauer government is quite true. Adenauer’s chief aide in his chancellery, Hans Globke, had been the official legal commentator on the Nuremberg Laws for Hitler in the mid-1930s. Theodor Oberländer, who was Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees and War Victims under adenauer, he knew all about refugees and expelled from eastern europe precisely because he had cared about “population planning” and was involved in “anti-partisan” warfare under the nazi regime, along with the einsatzgruppen, and potentially engaged in this way. It’s absolutely disgusting, actually, how many ex-Nazis Adenauer had in his government. East Germany was goading West Germany, so to speak, to make a move.
another point that i think is very, very important and cannot be stressed enough is that it was not ‘west germany’ that decided to put auschwitz on trial in 1963, it was some committed people and in particular fritz bauer . , the district attorney for the state of Hessen, who was Jewish and a socialist and had to flee into exile to escape Nazi persecution.
He returned to Germany after the war and was determined to stage the Auschwitz trial as a full explanation of the Nazis’ crimes, in the face of massive opposition. Most people in high positions in West Germany in the late 1950s when this attempt began, until the early and mid-1960s while he was organizing the trial, opposed the process. It was not West Germany facing its past. it was bauer pushing him against major political opposition.
the other thing to add about bauer is that he was the guy who gave the mossad, the israeli secret service, the tip on adolf eichmann’s whereabouts so they could kidnap him and take him to jerusalem to stand trial. Fritz Bauer did not trust that the West German government would give Eichmann a decent trial and a proper sentence, so Bauer contacted the Mossad to ensure that Eichmann would be tried in Jerusalem and not in West Germany.
“Of more than 140,000 people investigated, fewer than 6,660 were found guilty, and of these, nearly 5,000 received lenient sentences of less than two years. only 164 were found guilty of the crime of homicide”
you asked about the issue of prosecuting perpetrators so late, but not too late, that germany set up. that actually came about as a result of a change in the law that came into effect with the conviction of john demjanjuk in 2011 (when the former concentration camp guard was sentenced to five years in prison for acting as an accessory to murder, although he died while his appeal was still pending). the effect was to establish that working in a place, whose primary purpose was to put people to death, was in itself sufficient to prove that person was an accessory to murder. if they had done it in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, we could have prosecuted a lot of perpetrators, but they didn’t.
In the end, of more than 140,000 people investigated in the federal republic, fewer than 6,660 were found guilty, and of these, almost 5,000 received lenient sentences of less than two years. only 164 were found guilty of the crime of murder.
To what extent does the politics that still plagues this entire area of historical research interfere with your work? Does it limit you in any way? Is it something you’re constantly dealing with, or is it an unavoidable part of the job and something you’re happy to accept?
none of the above. I think that’s an incredibly difficult area to work on, and I guess I try to isolate myself from revisionism, holocaust denial and the far right scene, while also being aware of it.
“History writing is both a creative act and an intellectual outcome of scholarly research”
What I find most difficult is confronting the issue. the subject itself is so disturbing, so disturbing and incomprehensible. anyone who has looked at this, and spent years and years and years trying to understand it, will still, at times, find it completely incomprehensible, despite being able to account for it. It is a very curious paradox.
and trying to do it in a dispassionate way, I imagine must often feel like a constraint.
Actually, I don’t think it’s possible to be dispassionate. this really challenges notions of historical objectivity. I just don’t think it’s possible, for all sorts of reasons including the selection of examples and style of writing, as well as the arguments developed. it is possible to be historically accurate, to write a story that is true to and consistent with the evidence, and at the same time to be personally committed to the material. writing history is both a creative act and an intellectual outcome of scholarly research.
Now let’s move on to the books, which I found fascinating. you initially gave me a longer list, which I’m glad because the ones you left seem equally worthy of attention. I can see why you had trouble getting it down to five.
I was constrained by the idea that my options should actually be in print and available to readers. may not be something really fascinating but published in 1947.
first in your selection of books about auschwitz, we have charlotte delbo. tell me a little about her history and why you chose her trilogy, auschwitz and after.
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I chose this for several reasons. She was a rather notable female resistance fighter in France, who was transported to Auschwitz after having to witness the murder of her husband. (The men were shot; the women were taken to Auschwitz.) She was in a convoy of 230 women sent there. they entered the camp allegedly singing the Marseillaise.
of his original convoy, only 49 survived, and what I find fascinating about his account is the way he tries to convey the raw experience in small vignettes, clearly drawing on his personal experience, but in some cases trying to telling the stories of other women who were in the convoy with her, and trying to commemorate those who did not survive. she agonizingly conveys aspects of her experience to those of us who have been fortunate enough never to have experienced such things. for example, the way she writes about feeling thirsty, just the little vignette of wanting the drop of water from a tap, or risking a drink despite the possibility of dying from drinking it, is amazing.
That’s one aspect that I think is extraordinary and extremely powerful: this very raw experience, particularly in the first part of the trilogy, which she wrote shortly after the war. The other thing I find fascinating is the way he tries to develop a notion of two selves: the dissociation of his postwar self from the auschwitz self, a complete disconnection (or attempted disconnection) between the self he experienced and lived through. of auschwitz, and the me that survived and told it. that captures what many survivors try to convey in one way or another: this complete break in their lives between what they went through and how they live afterward. different people deal with it in different ways and accept it in different ways.
one of the things that I found difficult in choosing books that are still in print is that many do not convey the experiences of those who never wrote, those who were much less successful, or less literate, or did not have the means or means to publish.
In some of the interview testimonials collected by the different foundations that are collecting them, you get a similar kind of reflection, where some people say that the self who lived after is not their “real” self. they have the feeling that their ‘real self’ died with the family and friends who perished in the holocaust, and the person who lives after is someone completely different, even though it may seem like they are alive and have a new family and a new life and early. I think Charlotte Delbo was particularly successful in the way that she negotiated that.
do you mean successful in the sense that she was able to live an authentic life as herself after her experience in auschwitz?
successful in the sense that it made both people authentic. I’ve heard survivors completely fall apart in interviews because they feel like the present is not their real life. I think delbo was more stable. but this leads to another thing that I think is important about this account: she was not Jewish. she makes it abundantly clear how terrible it was even for non-Jewish prisoners, and yet she records that it was even worse for Jewish prisoners.
“many survivors feel that their ‘authentic self’ died with the family and friends who perished in the holocaust, and the person who lives afterward is someone completely different”
The fact that she was a member of a resistance group allowed for a sense of community when returning after the war. They came back singing just as they had entered singing. they could sing, and this was not possible for other survivors. I think she contrasts sharply with someone like Gilbert Michlin, for example, who I write about in my book, who was a French Jewish prisoner deported from France to Auschwitz. when he returned to france, he had to hide the fact that he was jewish and pretend that he was only french because the myth of resistance was very big in post-war france and there was still festering anti-semitism. So, her return to France was much more miserable than Delbo’s.
The other person I’d really like to contrast your experience with is Pierre Seel, who I also write about in my book. they didn’t take him to auschwitz but to schirmeck, and they arrested him because he was homosexual. after the war, homosexuals could not talk about the reasons why they had been arrested and imprisoned. In the annexed area of Alsace, where Seel lived, the Nazis had introduced homophobic laws that were not repealed immediately after the war when de Gaulle repealed Nazi anti-Semitic legislation, so homosexuality remained a criminal offence.
even when it was decriminalized, seel said he felt very embarrassed about it. he couldn’t talk to his family, his friends. he tried to marry and have children with his wife even though he was gay. he eventually became an alcoholic, had a total meltdown, got divorced and finally came out and said he had to talk about it. As frightening and heartbreaking as Delbo’s experiences are, and I have to admit that the first time I read the book I was in tears; I couldn’t take it, I think we have to acknowledge that there were other experiences as well, experiences that were terrible in a wide variety of ways.
One of the things that really struck me about your book, which I found particularly shocking because I had never heard it before, was how poorly many Jews were treated when they returned to their European countries of origin after the war. In Poland, hundreds were killed by their neighbors; there was no sympathy at all.
in fact. particularly in eastern europe, where non-jews had taken over the homes and possessions of jews whom they thought were dead. it was a ‘what? Have survived? we don’t want to see you!’, slamming the door in their faces and telling them to leave.
let’s move on to man’s search for meaning by viktor frankl. he was a highly educated man, an academic psychoanalyst. tell us a little about this book, it is a combination between a memory of auschwitz and also a work of psychoanalysis.
yes. is an interesting contrast to delbo. Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. he spent very little time in auschwitz; in fact, he was in theresienstadt, the so-called “model ghetto” for red cross inspection. he then he was deported to auschwitz where he spent only a short period of time because he was selected to work. He spent most of the rest of the war in a Dachau subcamp in Bavaria.
It is a very controversial story because it is considered that he was a bit of an accomplice. To what extent is not entirely clear, but she certainly made compromises and survived both through his medical expertise and the privileged positions he was able to hold. The interesting thing about his story, which I found absolutely fascinating, is the way he explores the importance of the meaning of life as a key to survival.
Before the war, he had been an academic specialist in suicide. his main practice had been to help people who were contemplating and at risk of committing suicide, trying to work with them to find ways to make sense of their lives, so that they would not commit suicide. and he had been quite successful in some of the techniques he used.
one of the ways he found meaning while a prisoner was observing how other people reacted and responded to conditions, and the ways some were psychologically more resilient than others. delbo, on the other hand, makes it quite clear that the best physical conditions and luck made the difference between surviving or not, dying of typhus or dysentery or not. she emphasizes that aspect a lot, as well as the mutual support within her resistance group.
frankl looks more into the inner life and how using your mind can give life meaning and give you a ray of hope in the dark. he speaks, for example, of the way he has mental conversations with his young wife, who would have just turned 24 the day after he arrived at auschwitz. she didn’t survive, but for the rest of the war he didn’t know it. he had imagined conversations with her and was mentally transported to another place. he enjoyed what he could, like a ray of sunlight breaking through the clouds, or thinking about light in the dark and suddenly seeing the lights of a country house come on when they came home from work. he’s looking at how the inner life could help in survival, which I think is extraordinarily interesting, although it’s not a sufficient explanation by any means.
There is a memoir titled Prisoners of Fear by another survivor from Vienna, Ella Lingens-Reiner, who was a medical doctor jailed for trying to save Jews. she talks a lot about just being in a more privileged position: not having her hair shaved off, not having a number tattooed on her arm, not being so completely dehumanized, having slightly better rations, being respected for her intellectual and technical expertise as a medical doctor. She comments on how Eastern European Jews who had lived very hard lives as peasants were able to withstand the ordeal better than Western European Jews who had had bourgeois existences and did not have the same kind of survival skills. There are many, many other things going on, but I find Victor Frankl’s story very fascinating.
what were the types of commitments you made that perhaps led to your survival? I know that one of the books that was not on your shortlist was Filip Müller’s Auschwitz Eyewitness. he actually helped operate the gas chambers. Frankl obviously wasn’t doing that, but does he speak to the moral compromises within the prisoner community that were made in a struggle to survive?
frankl doesn’t talk about it as much as his critics do. critics of him point out that he had managed not to be deported until quite late and that when he was in theresienstadt he had certain privileges. but he really is not so much interested in that aspect as he is in the inner life. it’s about how meaning can give you psychological sustenance.
if I compare it with some of the unpublished interview testimonials, there are several survivors who talk about what gave them faith in humanity is as important as the physical support they received. people say that when they were on the death march, lying hungry and dying in the back of a railway car or truck passing through prague, czechs threw pieces of bread at them from a bridge they were standing on. one of them says that, at first, he was humiliated to see himself so gaunt and despondent and in rags. he thought that people who leaned in and talked were just making fun of them.
then a moment later these people came back and threw some bread, and suddenly he realized that the people had been discussing how they could help, they had come back to get some bread and then it was thrown at him. this small gesture of moral support made a huge difference in their sense of common humanity. gave him the belief that he would be welcome back to the land of the living.
there is another story of a guy who later became a psychoanalyst in the united states. he described himself as a non-religious Jew; he was of Jewish descent, but entirely secular in outlook. However, when it came to Yom Kippur, he decided to fast along with the religious Jews because, even though they were starving, it was a kind of defiance to reject the Nazi imposition of a dehumanized category on them. they were not just animals, they could still choose to observe the religious rituals of their ancestors. this endowed the world with a meaning that was not the one given to it by the Nazis. I think that was very important psychologically, and it’s something that Frankl’s story points to.
let’s move on to the search for sociologist gerhard durlacher: the birkenau boys. he was a child during auschwitz and he wrote this book in the 1980s. it’s a search for the other boys who were taken there with him, right?
yes. the reason i included this one is precisely because of that later search, not so much for what it tells us about auschwitz but for what it tells us about the survivors. he is trying to locate other children who had been at the family camp and survived. one of them was otto dov kulka, who recently also produced an almost dreamlike memoir called landscapes of the metropolis of death (which did not achieve my goal because it is relatively recent and has already been discussed a lot).
what’s interesting about this book is how durlacher tries to reconnect with other children who had gone through the same experience. she finds them in very different places. One of the stories she tells is about one of the boys, whom she tracks down to the Queens borough of New York. he is living a very miserable and angry life and doesn’t want to talk.
There are a large number of survivors, tens of thousands, who may speak of it at some point. on the other hand, there are many survivors who are completely incapacitated by their experiences, the consequences of which we see through the writings of psychiatrists who have treated them in institutions, people like dori laub, who has done an incredible amount of work with holocaust survivors who they can’t talk about their experiences, trying to help them articulate what they’ve been through to help them with PTSD.
so, we have those two extremes: literature and testimonies of survivors, and psychoanalytic literature on the ptsd. durlacher tracks down a man who falls between these two extremes. there must have been tens of thousands like that; people who are just miserable, angry, isolated, and socially don’t function very well, but who also don’t account for their past and aren’t able to understand it.
everyone had a meeting in israel in 1990. how does durlacher describe that?
Not everyone came to the meeting. what is very clear is that everyone had different ways of dealing with the past. Otto Dov Kulka became a professional historian; he wrote about anything but his personal experiences down to his last memoirs. another became a painter, another rabbi. but the wretch of queens was not. he wouldn’t speak. they just had a terrible dinner in new york and that was it.
“durlacher, like otto dov kulka, talks about seeing american planes flying through the blue skies over auschwitz in the summer of 1944. . . both children saw them almost like little toys in the air”
durlacher has discovered that extra variant that doesn’t normally show up: not badly damaged enough to be in a psychiatric institution, but damaged to the point where he can’t articulate what happened to the rest of the world.
another thing that struck me about the book was the way durlacher, like otto dov kulka, talks about seeing american planes flying through the blue skies over auschwitz in the summer of 1944. i thought that it was fascinating that both children saw them almost like little toys in the air, independent accounts of the same experience. otto dov kulka said it was so beautiful. She says that the little silver planes in the deep blue skies over Auschwitz were the most beautiful summer skies you could imagine, more beautiful than anything she’s ever seen in Israel or anywhere else. this type of perception and memory is extraordinary. It also echoes the insights conveyed in some of Imre Kertész’s fictional accounts, Fateless, about the afternoon “quiet hour” that he was able to appreciate even at camp.
let’s move on to the only history book you’ve chosen, the auschwitz trial in frankfurt, 1963-1965, by devin o pendas. We’ve already talked a bit about this, but can you tell me how the trial came about? How was it received and what were the “limits of the law” mentioned in the subtitle?
yes, there is another book i could have included, rebecca wittmann’s book about the auschwitz trial, beyond justice. Both, in different ways, point out that West Germany’s choice to use the ordinary criminal law definition of murder was wholly inappropriate for trying people who had been involved in genocide. collective violence is different from individual violence.
West Germans chose to resort to old German criminal law; they did not want to adopt the nuremberg principles. they did not want anything that was retroactive, punishing crimes that were not defined at the time. but the problem with the West German definition of murder was that it involved showing individual intent and excessive brutality. This effectively meant that if a person could not be shown to be subjectively motivated to kill, they could not be convicted of murder.
“the overwhelming majority of the people who had worked in auschwitz were never brought to justice”
that meant that in other trials, for example those related to bełżec (which took place in munich in the mid-1960s), seven of the eight accused were acquitted because there were no survivors to prove that they had been individual , sadistic brutes meant you could operate the genocide machine “just by obeying orders” and put 300,000 people in the gas chambers and still not be a murderer. I think it was a shocking misuse of the law.
How many people were tried in Frankfurt and what was the conviction rate?
about 8,200 people had worked in auschwitz. A few, including former camp commander Rudolf Höss, had already been sentenced to death in Poland; others had been individually convicted in allied trials. In the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, there were initially 22 defendants, two of whom dropped out due to illness. finally, three were acquitted; one received a juvenile sentence; ten received custodial sentences that ranged between three and a half years and fourteen years; and only six were sentenced to life imprisonment. The overwhelming majority of people who had worked in Auschwitz were never brought to justice.
was this the last test of this type?
not at all. There were more trials of people who had been involved in Auschwitz in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and there were several other major concentration camp trials in the 1960s and 1970s, up to the Majdanek trial of 1975. -1981 in West Germany. but all of them were beset by this need to show subjective intent and excessive brutality.
That’s one of the things I work on in the calculations in my book, looking at the different major trials in the concentration camps. the testimony of the survivors was terribly important because as a witness you had to be able to say, “I saw this person actually do something really brutal and disgusting to another person at a specific time on a specific day” and of course as one of The survivors put it acidly: “We had no guards at Auschwitz.” They didn’t know what day it was. They didn’t know what time it was. so it was very difficult to show subjective intent.
in bełżec, which was one of the most efficient extermination camps, there were only two survivors. one was killed in 1946 while giving evidence. the other, when he came to testify at the trial in the 1960s, was unable to give conclusive evidence, so seven of the ss guards at the trial simply said, “no, i didn’t want to do it, but i had to do it” . do it. he was just following orders. and they were acquitted. It makes no sense to use the individual crime of murder as the basis of prosecution when dealing with mass murder, which is part of a system of collective violence. that’s one of the things you think makes it pretty clear.
were there no crimes in international law that could circumvent such restrictions?
Only West Germany refused to adopt the Nuremberg Principles. in east germany they adopted a much broader definition that had to do with the fact that someone was dead at the end of a process. In East Germany, former Nazis were six to seven times more likely to be prosecuted and convicted than in West Germany.
“in East Germany, former Nazis were six to seven times more likely to be prosecuted and convicted than in West Germany”
austria is also a very significant comparison. there, it was not the law that was the problem, it was the public culture. The law would have allowed prosecutions and convictions in a much broader way than in West Germany. the problem was that juries tended to acquit ex-Nazis and it was getting embarrassing to even put them on trial, so they just stopped prosecuting after too many embarrassing acquittals.
At the same time, political parties in Austria were concerned with rehabilitating and integrating former Nazis. much political pressure was exerted on judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys to secure acquittals. From 1955 there were very few cases in Austria. those that were filed tended to end in acquittals; then, starting in the mid-1970s, testing just stopped altogether.
is the penda book legible?
yes, it’s a good read. I think it’s an important read. what it also brings out are the public reactions and the broader meaning of the auschwitz trial. We’ve made a big deal out of it and that’s partly because there was massive media coverage, partly because of the way fritz bauer staged the trial. Bauer was determined to make sure there was media coverage. He was determined to make sure that victims and survivors were brought in from around the world to give testimony, a bit like the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.
He also arranged for members of the court to visit the Auschwitz site itself, which was quite unusual in the mid-1960s at the height of the Cold War, to go behind the Iron Curtain to see the site. of the crime. that had a huge impact because the journalists also went and reported and showed the watchtowers and the barbed wire. people were able to imagine it for the first time in a way they couldn’t before.
“It makes no sense to use the individual crime of murder as a basis for prosecution when dealing with mass murder, which is part of a system of collective violence.”
pendas also shows that the way the press reported on the trial interacted with a broader ambivalence among the public. There were these younger journalists who thought they were mounting this big crusade to bring Auschwitz to the public’s attention, and a broader public that was unsettled by this and didn’t like it. But the highest percentage of those who opposed the trial were people who were young adults in the Third Reich who had actually been mobilized to fight for Hitler, who had been participants in the war. that’s very interesting.
Much of the West German public did not follow the trial at all, and even those who did were quite hostile. but I think it was terribly important in drawing the public’s attention to the subject so vividly that it could no longer be ignored. it prompted a younger generation to feel that there was a generational struggle they had to take on.
The generation born just after World War II would then have been young adults and would have had no vested interest in hiding the crimes of the Third Reich.
Correlated with the student revolts of the 1960s, the beginning of an extra-parliamentary opposition that emerged in the 1960s, fed up with the Adenauer era. adenauer steps down as chancellor in 1963. there are many student riots going on in the 1960s; these are people in their twenties, born in the 1940s, suddenly exposed to the full horror of the crimes of their elders (and supposed superiors), and then galvanized into that generational conflict summed up as “1968.”
of course, it was a bigger phenomenon that went beyond west germany: the vietnam war protests, the prague spring, that’s the broader atmosphere. but i think the auschwitz trial played a very important role in the development of the youth rebellion in west germany. the pendas book reveals it well.
Finally, let’s move on to Marie Jalowicz-Simon’s Berlin Subway: a young woman’s extraordinary story of survival in the heart of Nazi Germany. I had never heard of it, but this is probably the most extraordinary story of all the ones you have mentioned. tell us.
well, i was supposed to find five books about auschwitz. I am deliberately choosing one that is not about auschwitz, but about avoiding it.
I have a problem with the prevailing focus on auschwitz because I believe that, as important as it is and as horrible as it is, it can inadvertently serve to divert attention from the multiplicity of other experiences and contexts. The Auschwitz story of arrival on the train and selection on the ramp for gas chambers or slave labor has become the scripted narrative we expect from a survivor. we don’t expect the miserable homosexual to emerge after the war, too ashamed to talk about it. We don’t know the stories of those who have just been shot in a mass grave outside their village in Eastern Europe.
We have many stories of ghettos, but even there, sometimes we see a kind of implicit hierarchy of suffering or heroism. we also have an implicit view of “survivor”, that is, someone who survived the camps. but I think we need to try to understand the full range and impact of the experiences of Nazi persecution, even for those who made it out before the war. Unfortunately, very few were able to emigrate in time.
the reason i chose marie jalowicz-simon is twofold. first, because she survived hiding in berlin, living as an ‘illegal’, and her account shows her own sharpness, her ability to evade recognition, to think quickly in difficult situations, to escape, to find ways to survive, and her sheer good lucky sometimes. but second, because I think her story also highlights the pervasive goodness, kindness, and willingness to take risks of many people, as well as the difficulties of evading those who might betray her as she moved from place to place. other. This is a very different story from Anne Frank.
Actually, we don’t know how many people helped the victims of the persecution. if you think about an account like this, marie jalowicz-simon was helped by numerous people. and a lot of these stories of people who went underground—untergetaucht is the German word they use; some called themselves ‘u-boote’ or ‘submarines’ – they show that usually you could only stay with a certain person or in a certain place for a short period of time and then you had to move on.
We know that between 1,500 and 2,000 people survived by hiding alone in berlin. probably more like 10,000-15,000 german jews tried to hide (mainly in berlin, but also in other parts of the reich), but many were betrayed or found out. for any one of those people, probably 10 or more people would have been involved sequentially in hiding them; in some cases, there were up to 50 people helping. We’re just making estimates here, but hypothetically you could say that over 50,000 people in berlin alone must have been involved in trying to hide people, which is a significant figure.
It’s worth thinking about the risks they were taking. why were they doing it? very often you find that it is basic compassion and a sense of humanity. they think they just have to do it, even though many of those who were discovered were executed. tens of thousands of people are involved here, and I think it’s worth remembering. some were willing to be fooled, to be fooled, to pretend to believe the story that someone had been bombed and had lost their papers or whatever. others were willing to actively assist in falsifying documents and getting people in and getting people out and I think that’s a very interesting area to explore.
we need to understand the machinery of mass extermination that allowed a camp like auschwitz to be built and run and have all the subcamps and have all the involvement of industrialists and employers in slave labor, but we also need to explore why, under certain Under these conditions, people who were mere bystanders were able to become saviors, and why others chose to remain passive or instead were complicit, betraying those who tried to hide and those who tried to help. and there were variations in the character of the surrounding societies throughout europe that affected the ability of the persecuted to survive in different areas.
what tricks in particular did jalowicz-simon use to stay alive for so long in berlin?
she had to sell sexual favors as a young woman would, and was lucky that an old Nazi she managed to stay with was syphilitic and impotent and therefore unable to take advantage of what she offered . , but she liked having it near her. there were tricks that she and many others used, with stories about lost documents, about being bombed, assuming false identities. I think what’s interesting about her account is also that she’s an intelligent woman. Subsequently, she becomes a distinguished scholar in East Germany. her son, hermann simon, got her to record her testimony late in her life. he wrote down a very long interview with her and wrote it down, and it came out in a remarkably articulate way. he said she hardly needed to edit it to produce the book.
Is she angry or self-pitying or just ruthlessly objective about the whole thing?
Not really, although many accounts adopt at least one of those shades. she’s a lot less bitter than you’d think she should be, in part because there was still human contact during that period and there were still people she could relate to as a human being. she did not face the total dehumanization and utter destruction of self that the people in auschwitz had to face. That may be a bit simplistic, but I think the idea that you could still feel that you had some degree of agency was important: it’s that sense of agency that Viktor Frankl was referring to. and she managed to make a satisfying life after the war.
For someone surviving in hiding, it could be absolutely, frighteningly difficult, but if you were lucky enough to survive, you probably had a sense of a coherent self afterwards, in contrast to the experience delbo describes of this abrupt break with the past.
Finally, I wonder if it’s useful to have this symbol, auschwitz, as some kind of uniquely evil moment in human history. One of the things that appears in the calculations in his book is that there was a context around it, a very broad one, that almost made it bland, that at least allowed people to think of it that way.
Indeed, it’s an alibi for so many Germans who pretend they “never knew anything about it.” And in one of my earlier books, A Small Town Near Auschwitz, I explore the Nazi administrator of a nearby county, just 26 miles north of Auschwitz, who reduces “it” to just the gas chambers. and there he was organizing the ghettoization, humiliation, degradation and starvation of more than 30,000 Jews from the town, making it easy for them to be rounded up by the gestapo and the ss. and then after the war, like so many others, he went on to a successful post-war career in the federal republic as a civil servant, and “never knew anything about it” because he reduces evil to just the gas chambers. from auschwitz but it was all part of a huge reich-wide persecution system.
There was no one in the German Reich in the 1930s who did not know that Jews were being humiliated, driven from their professions, driven from their homes. After Kristallnacht in 1938, Jews found it impossible to continue living in Germany. And then reducing everything to the gas chambers of Auschwitz seems patently absurd to me.
Although I’m as shocked and horrified as possible, I just wish we could broaden our view a bit more and say, “but what was going on in berlin or munich or towns all over the reich”…and indeed in All Europe. there was inhumanity throughout the system. he didn’t just focus on the gas chambers of a camp.
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