Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp 9780253208842, 025320884X

Table of contents :
ANATOMY OF THE Auschwitz Death Camp
Contents
Preface
Contributors
Acknowledgments
PART I A History of the Camp
1 Auschwitz—An Overview
2 The System of Prisoner Exploitation
3 The Satellite Camps
4 The Number of Victims
PART II Dimensions of Genocide
5 Auschwitz and the Final Solution
6 A Site in Search of a Mission
7 Gas Chambers and Crematoria
8 The Machinery of Mass Murder at Auschwitz
9 The Plunder of Victims and Their Corpses
PART III The Perpetrators
10 Historical-Sociological Profile of the Auschwitz SS
11 Rudolf Hoss: Manager of Crime
12 Nazi Doctors
13 The Crimes of Josef Mengele
PART IV The Inmates
14 The Auschwitz Prisoner Administration
15 Hospitals
16 Women
17 Children
18 The Family Camp
19 Gypsies
20 Hungarian Jews
21 Auschwitz—A Psychological Perspective
PART V The Resistance
22 The Auschwitz Underground
23 Prisoner Escapes
24. Diaries of the Sonderkommando
PART VI Auschwitz and the Outside World
25. What Was Known and When
26. The Vrba and Wetzler Report
27. Why Auschwitz Wasn't Bombed
28. Postwar Prosecution of the Auschwitz SS
29. The Literature of Auschwitz
Index

Citation preview

YISRAEL GUTMAN AND MICHAEL BERENBAUM

Published in association with the

E ditors

UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

ANATOMY of the

AUSCHWITZ DEATH CAMP

YISRAEL G U TM A N A N D MICHAEL BERENBAUM, editors E ditorial Board Yehuda Bauer, Raul Hilberg, and Franciszek Piper

ANATOMY OF THE

AUSCHWITZ DEATH CAMP Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Washington, D.C. Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis

© 1994 by Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anatomy of the Auschwitz death camp / Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, editors ; editorial board, Yehuda Bauer, Raul Hilberg, Franciszek Piper, p. cm. Commissioned by the U.S. Holocaust Research Institute. ISBN 0-253-32684-2 1. Auschwitz (Poland : Concentration camp) 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)— Poland. I. Gutman, Israel. II. Berenbaum, Michael, date. III. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. IV. U.S. Holocaust Research Institute. D805.P7A53 1994 940.54'7243'094386— dc20 93-45729 1 2 3 4 5 99 98 97 96 95 94

CONTENTS Preface vii Contributors xi Acknowledgments

xv

----------------------------------P art I A H istory o f the Camp 1. Auschwitz— An Overview /

2. T h e System of Prisoner Exploitation / 3. T h e Satellite Cam ps /

franciszek piper

shm uel krakowski

4. T h e N um ber o f Victims /

5

yisrael c u t m a n

franciszek piper

34

50 61

----------------------------------P art I I Dimensions o f Genocide 5. Auschwitz and the "Final Solution" / 6. A Site in Search of a Mission /

81

r a u lh ilb er g

93

robert -jan van pelt

7. Gas Cham bers and Crematoria /

franciszek piper

8. T h e M achinery of Mass M urder at Auschwitz /

157 jean -c l a u d e pressac

WITH ROBERT-JAN VAN PELT 183

9. T h e Plunder of Victims and T h eir Corpses /

andrzej strzelecki

P art III The Perpetrators 10. Historical-Sociological Profile of the Auschwitz SS ALEKSANDER LASIK 271

11. Rudolf Höss: M anager of Crime /

aleksander lasik

288

12. Nazi Doctors / ROBERT JAY LIFTON AND AMY HACKETT 301 13. T h e Crimes of Josef M engele / Helena KUBiCA 317

246

VI

Contents

---------------------------------- P art IV The Inmates 14. T h e Auschwitz Prisoner Administration / Da n u ta Czech 363 15. Hospitals / 16. Women /

irena strzelecka

irena strzelecka

379

393

17. Children / Helena kubica 412 18. T h e Family Camp / 19. Gypsies /

NiLi Keren

yeh u d a bauer

428

441

20. Hungarian Jews / Ran d o lp h l. braham 456 21. Auschwitz—A Psychological Perspective /

leo eitinger

469

-----------------------------------P art V The Resistance 22. T h e Auschwitz Underground / Hermann 23. Prisoner Escapes /

henryk swiebocki

24. Diaries of the Sonderkommando /

langbein

485

503 522

n a th a n c o h en

---------------------------------- Part VI Auschwitz and the Outside World 25. W hat Was Known and W hen / 26. T h e Vrba and Wetzler Report /

m ar tin gilbert

miroslav karny

27. Why Auschwitz Wasn't Bombed /

539 553

david s. w ym a n

28. Postwar Prosecution of the Auschwitz SS /

569

aleksander lasik

29. T h e Literature of Auschwitz / Lawrence langer 601

Index 621

588

PREFACE Auschwitz was the largest and most lethal of the Nazi death camps. Actually it was three camps in one: a killing center, a concentration camp, and a series of slave-labor camps. Long regarded as a symbol of the Holocaust and of the Nazi period, Auschwitz illumines the totality of the Nazi killing machine. A generation of historians has spent the last half-century studying the Holocaust. These senior scholars are now nearing retirement; their work has reached maturation. Many of their individual works have been published, but never have they collaborated on a comprehensive historical overview of Auschwitz. This volume brings together their individual talents and scholar­ ship on this most important subject. For much of the past half-century, the study of Auschwitz was centered in Poland, where it was conducted in a constrained political climate that made it impossible for Polish scholars to tell what they knew, and certainly not all that was known. T he new political situation in Poland permits Polish schol­ ars to create a depoliticized picture of Auschwitz. For the first time since the Holocaust, Polish scholars can write about the Jewish fate in Auschwitz without constraint. And for the first time, scholars in the West have access to major archival holdings in the former communist countries. Until now, there has been no single, comprehensive study of Auschwitz in English or any other language. Although various parts of the camp have been studied in detail, no treatm ent of the whole exists. This work is de­ signed to rectify that situation. A complete exploration of Auschwitz is not the province of historians alone. Psychologists and sociologists, art historians and students of literature and film, physicians and chemists also participate in this research. Each discipline has a unique perspective to offer. Only by approaching Auschwitz from a multidisciplinary perspective can we understand the full dimensions of the largest and most lethal of the death camps. For example, while histo­ rians may document medical experimentation at Auschwitz, only physicians can evaluate the scientific validity of such experimentation and its relation­ ship to medical training and ethics. Pseudoscholars on three continents have tried to deny that Auschwitz was a death camp, that it had gas chambers and ovens, that lethal Zyklon B was used as a killing agent. T hat is the climate in which the present work was created, and the presentation of this collective study of Auschwitz should indirectly address some of the issues raised by these charlatans. T he work is the collaborative effort of scholars from the United States, Israel, Germany, Austria, Norway, Poland, and France. T he contributors are

v iii------------- Preface

among the most distinguished scholars of the Holocaust on three continents. All the essays are original, written exclusively for this book. Some are based on research that was published elsewhere but that appears here for the first time in the English language and in a new formulation. The sum total of these individual essays represents a significant original work. T he division of the book is organic. We begin in part I with the camp as an institution—the instrument of death and its history. We learn of its role in the Nazis' "final solution of the Jewish question." We read a detailed study of the statistics of those dead, a meticulous treatment that dispels the mis­ taken calculation that four million were murdered at Auschwitz but docu­ ments the murder of more than 1.1 million—90 percent of whom were Jews. We look at the role the camp played in the use of slave labor and in the German economy, and at the other dimensions of Auschwitz, its satellite camps. And we learn of the dismantling of Auschwitz, the death marches, and the final flames in which the SS sought desperately in a race against time to destroy the evidence of their crimes by shipping out the remaining victims and destroying the camp. From the institution, we turn in part II to the mechanism of destruction. We present a major study of the gas chambers—which for the first time makes use of German documentation from newly opened archives in the former Soviet Union—by a scholar who demonstrates the economic com­ petitiveness, bureaucratic struggles, and technological sophistication that led to the evolution of means capable of murdering and incinerating thousands of persons a day. We also reexamine Polish and other German documents on the gas chambers. We then learn the fate of those murdered, whose posses­ sions were taken from them and recycled—so too the gold from their teeth, the hair from their heads, even the ashes of their bodies. In sum, this part presents an exhaustive, detailed analysis of the infrastructure of destruction. From the mechanisms, we turn in part III to the Nazi personnel, the kill­ ers. Who was the commandant of Auschwitz and who constituted his staff? What was their background? How did they run the camp? What was their fate in the aftermath? From the killers, we proceed in part IV to explore the life and fate of the Auschwitz inmates: the inmates forced by the killers to run the camp, the daily life of the ordinary inmate, the special fate of women and children, the family camps, the Gypsies. We learn of a peculiar aspect of Auschwitz, an aspect that appears to be a contradiction in terms, certainly a conflict in experience. We read of "health and hospitals" at Auschwitz, of "medical practice"—legitimate and otherwise—in the shadow of the gas chambers. We approach the specialty killers—the healers turned killers, the physicians of Auschwitz—and the experiments they performed. We turn to the fate of Hungarian Jews who entered Auschwitz in record numbers in the late

Preface

ix

spring and early summer of 1944 and were killed in a systematic mass destruction during the most lethal weeks of the Holocaust. We also look at the victims of Auschwitz from a psychological perspective through the work of a distinguished psychiatrist who worked as a prisoner-physician at Ausch­ witz and has since worked with its survivors. We then learn in part V of the underground resistance at Auschwitz, those prisoners who fought and those who escaped, and those who lived as Sonderkommando members, carrying out special assignments at the gas chambers and ovens. We then leave Auschwitz along with those who escaped and explore some perplexing questions in part VI. What did the Allies—the leaders, diplomats, and military officers, especially of the United States and Britain —know, and when did they know it? What was known in London and New York—and es­ pecially in Washington, where the decision not to bomb Auschwitz was final­ ized? We face an awful truth: the Allies knew what was happening, and those who knew did not act. We live two generations after the event. Seemingly, we can look retro­ spectively and gain perspective. And yet, the more historians teach us of the German atrocities, the less we can comprehend their meaning. "In the be­ ginning was testimony," Lawrence Langer writes. In the end, memory does not provide meaning, he adds, but an encounter with its opposite, for "from the perspective of the victims, who far outnumber the survivors, the dis­ order of meaningless death contradicts the ordering impulses of time. Those who died for nothing in the Holocaust left the living with a paralyzing di­ lemma of facing a perpetually present grief." T he editors have permitted the diverse scholars wide latitude in the in­ terpretation of Auschwitz. While the overall presentation of the data forms a singular portrait of the camp, from time to time scholars disagree on details, perspectives, and interpretation. We have sought not to harmonize the de­ tails of each presentation but to let the self-corrective mechanisms of good scholarship do their task. As much as we respect each individual contribu­ tion and contributor, the editors do not agree with each detail in every7essay. This work is one of the initial publications of the United States Holocaust Research Institute, the scholarly and academic wing of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. So perhaps a word about the Institute is in order. It has three components: the Library, the Holocaust Archives, and the Academic Programs. As envisioned, the Library and the Archives are the raw material for assisting the further development of Holocaust-related re­ search, a critical task which the Museum took upon itself from its inception. Toward that end, the Institute’s Academic Programs will serve as the home of visiting scholars-in-residence in the Museum; provide funding for their

x ------------- Preface

stays at the Museum and working facilities to encourage their scholarship; serve as the base for visiting 4graduate-students-in residence who are working on dissertations and pursuing original research and can avail them­ selves of the facilities of the Museum; and assist scholars visiting the Museum for periods ranging from days to months to facilitate their research. The Institute will undertake a publications program to disseminate signifi­ cant works on the Holocaust by publishing books with commercial or uni­ versity presses, publishing a journal and periodical as resources become available, funding translations into English of important works in many lan­ guages, and republishing out-of-print classics or new works of special merit. In addition, the Institute will convene, as appropriate and as resources permit, conferences relating to the Holocaust and publish their proceedings; conduct ongoing seminars and periodic conferences on the state of Holo­ caust scholarship in the United States and the need for graduate training and faculty; and host periodic conferences for college professors from a va­ riety of disciplines who teach the Holocaust—with or without specialized training—to acquaint them with recent research and to discuss issues re­ lating to the teaching of the Holocaust. The Institute also will serve as a re­ source for other elements of the Museum, including its permanent and special exhibitions; its educational programs in the Museum, at high schools and elementary schools, and in outreach programs; and its public programs. Finally, the Institute will host an ongoing public seminar program for schol­ ars that will serve as a center for both the dissemination of in-house research and the discussion of major research and will cooperate with similar research institutions in the United States, Israel, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries. Michael Berenbaum Washington, D.C.

CONTRIBUTORS Y e h u d a B a u e r is Director of the Vidal Sassoon Institute on the Study of Antisemitism and Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. A prolific writer and lecturer, he is the author of The Holocaust in Historical Perspective and A History of the Holocaust, among other works.

is Director of the United States Holocaust Research Institute and Hymen Goldman Adjunct Professor of Theology at George­ town University. He is the author of After Tragedy and Triumph: Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience.

M ic h a e l B e r e n b a u m

L. B raham is Director of the Emeric and liana Csengeri Insti­ tute of Holocaust Studies at the City University of New York and the author of The Holocaust in Hungary and The Tragedy of Hungarian Jews, as well as many other books. RANDOLPH

N a t h a n C o h e n completed B.A. and M.A. degrees at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His master's thesis dealt with diaries written in Lithuania during the Holocaust, and he is currently preparing a dissertation about Warsaw as a Jewish cultural center, 1920-1942. He teaches in the Yiddish Department at Hebrew University and conducts research at the Institute of Contempo­ rary Jewry there. D a n u t a C z e c h , a sociologist, completed her studies in 1952 at the Philoso­ phy Faculty of Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Since 1955 she has been Director of the Research Department at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. A member during the Second World War of the resistance move­ ment in the Tarnow district of Poland, she is the author of Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau (The calendar of events in concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau), as well as many other pro­ fessional monographs and articles.

a survivor of Auschwitz, is Professor of Psychology at the University of Oslo (Emeritus). T he author of several textbooks on neuroses, psychoses, and forensic psychiatry, he has published several monographs and numerous papers on concentration camp survivors in Norway and Israel and has edited The Psychology and Medical Effects of Concentration Camps and Related Persecution on Survivors: A Research Bibliography.

L eo E i t i n g e r ,

M a r t i n GILBERT is a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and the o ffic ia l biographer of Winston Churchill. He has published more than thirty books.

xii

Contributors

including Auschwitz and the Allies and The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War. is Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Hebrew Uni­ versity of Jerusalem and Chairman of Yad Vashem's Academic Committee. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Macmillan Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Among his many books is The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943. YlSRAEL G u t m a n

A my H a c k e t t has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and has taught at Columbia University, Washington University, and Iona College. She edited the English translation of The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. Ra u l H il b e r g is the John G. McCullough Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont (Emeritus). His work The Destruction of the Euro­ pean Jews is widely regarded as a classic in the field. M iroslav K arny studied History in Prague. During the German occupation of Czechoslovakia he spent three years in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Dachau. After liberation he worked as a journalist in Prague, and for the past fifteen years he has been a free-lance historian of German fascism.

NlLI KEREN is Director of Holocaust Studies at the Kibbutz Seminary in Tel Aviv. She received her Ph.D. from Hebrew University after writing a disser­ tation on Holocaust education in Israel. She has also published a wellreceived book on education in Theresienstadt (in Hebrew). is Chief Archivist of Yad Vashem, Israel's national me­ morial to the Holocaust, and co-author of Unequal Victims: Poles and Jews during World War II, among other works. S h m u e l K rakowski

H e l e n a K ubica graduated from the Department of History of the Jagiellonian University. Since 1977 she has worked in the Department of Histori­ cal Research at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. She is leading a research project on the fate of children and juveniles in Auschwitz and is the author of several works on the subject. H e r m a n n L a n g b e in , born in Vienna, fled to Spain after the Anschluss to take part in the International Brigade against Fascism. He was interned in a French camp, then in Dachau, Auschwitz, and Neuengamme. Now a free-lance writer in Vienna and secretary of the International Committee of the Camps, he is the authoi of Menschen in Auschwitz. L a w r en c e L a n g e r , Alumni Professor of Literature at Simmons College (Emeritus), is the author of The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, Ver­ sions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit, and Holocaust Testimo­ nies: The Ruins of Memory.

Contributors

xiii

graduated from the Department of Sociology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and received his Ph.D. in 1988 with a thesis on SS troops in Auschwitz. He is preparing a study of the SS in KL Stutthof, as well as another monograph. "SS Totenkopfverbände 1939-1945." He has worked at the College of Pedagogy in Bydgoszcz since 1977. A l e k s a n d e r L a SIK

R o b e r t Jay L i f t o n , Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the City University of New York, John Jay College, is the author of The N azi Doctors and The GenoridalMentality.

received his Ph.D. from the Department of History at Jagiellonian University. Since 1965 he has been employed in the Department of Historical Research at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and now heads the department. He is the author of several monographs about the Auschwitz satellite camps and has led research on the methods of extermi­ nation of prisoners (including the use of gas chambers) along with the nu­ merical results of extermination. F r a n c isz e k PlPER

is a pharmacist and an independent scholar working in La Mile du Bois, France. Since 1982, the work of Mr. Pressac has been promoted and supported on a documentary, editorial, and financial level by the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, which has published in English the follow­ ing works of Pressac: The Stuthoff Album, The Deficiencies and Inconsistencies of the Leuchter Report, and Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers. T he latter work was sent to hundreds of libraries and documentation centers throughout the world by the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation. Mr. Pressac's chapter is adapted from his book Les Crematoires dAuschwitz: La machinerie du meurtre de masse (Paris: CXRS, 1993).

JEAN-CLAUDE PRESSAC

is a graduate of the History and Philosophy Department at Jagiellonian University. Since 1965 she has worked in the Department of Historical Research at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. She is the author of several monographs and articles dealing with the history of the Auschwitz subcamps, the first transports of Poles to Auschwitz, camp hospi­ tals, and medical experiments. Ir e n a S t r z e l e c k a

graduated from the History and Philosophy Depart­ ment of Jagiellonian University in 1964. Since then he has worked at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in the D epartm ent of Historical Re­ search. In 1979 he received a Ph.D. at the Silesian University in Katowice. He has published several treatises and articles, among them a large work en­ titled Evacuation, Liquidation and Liberation of KL Auschwitz (1974, in Polish).

ANDRZEJ S t r z e l e c k i

graduated from the Department of History of Jagiel­ lonian University. Employed in the Department of Historical Research of HENRYK S w ie b o c k i

XIV

Contributors

the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, he is the author of historical exhibi­ tions and publications about Auschwitz. His work mainly concerns resis­ tance in the camp, the help extended to prisoners by Poles, and attempts to inform the outside world about Nazi crimes. R o bert -Ja n VAN P elt is Assistant Professor of Architecture in the Architec­ ture School at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is the author of three books on architectural history, including a history of Solomon's Temple and a theoretical discourse on the significance of the Auschwitz crematoria for the understanding of architectural history. He is completing a major study of the planning and architectural history of Auschwitz. D avid S. W ym an is the Josiah DuBois Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts (Emeritus) and the author of The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945 and Paper Walls.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We wish to acknowledge colleagues and friends who encouraged us along the way to completing this book. First and foremost, we thank the mem­ bers of the editorial board— Raul Hilberg, Yehuda Bauer, and Franciszek Piper—who cooperated closely in soliciting and evaluating papers. Their insights helped shape the book, and their scholarship informs it. We wish to thank the contributors, distinguished scholars all, who were generous with their knowledge and talents and almost without exception gracious in the manner in which they cooperated with the publication. We thank our colleague and friend Jeshajahu Weinberg, Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, who supported this project from its inception, and Alfred Gottschalk, Chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, whose en ­ couragement was essential. Ronald Goldfarb, the Museum's literary agent, demonstrated friendship and patience. His experience and advice were of substantial importance in seeing this work to publication. Janet Rabinowitch of Indiana University Press, our able editor, has be­ lieved in this project and supported it. We have benefited from her meticu­ lous work and sanguine advice. Ken Goodall performed with precision the difficult and unenviable task of copyediting the manuscript. We wish to thank the translators who contributed to this work. Peter Heinegg translated Jean-Claude Pressac's text from French into English, and Robert-Jan van Pelt worked closely with Mr. Pressac to ensure that a technical article was clear and lucid as well as precise and informed by the latest scholarship. We wish to thank T. Aaron Wachhaus and Charlotte Hebebrand, who translated from German, and Jerzy Michalowicz, who trans­ lated from Polish. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp is one of the initial publications of the United States Holocaust Research Institute, the scholarly division of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Several of the Research Insti­ tute's staff contributed importantly to the publication. Betsy Chock graciously and selflessly assisted with the typing of the manuscript. Linda Harris and Bryan Lazar scanned chapters into the computer. Genya Markon and Teresa Amiel of the M useum s photo archives helped select the photo­ graphs and prepared their captions. Dewey Hicks and William Meincckc competently and quickly produced the maps. David Luebke, former Di­ rector of Publications at the Museum and now a professor at Bennington College, assisted in the preparation of the book. So, too, did Alcisa Fishman,

xvi

Acknowledgments

who had the unenviable task of proofreading the manuscript and who han­ dled other chores with skill and efficiency. Janice Cook and Jeffrey Burridge helped in the editing of this work. Lydia Perry and Deirdre McCarthy, assistants to Michael Berenbaum, were gracious and able. Their assistance was invaluable. Ms. Perry typed sec­ tions of the manuscript, prepared other portions for editing and scanning, and handled difficult correspondence and various negotiations. Ms. McCarthy saw to it that the manuscript was ready for publication, freeing her schedule to perform the work in a timely fashion. This book is the first joint publication effort of scholars on three conti­ nents and from several different countries brought together under the aus­ pices of the United States Holocaust Research Institute. May it be the first of many. Yisrael Gutman Jerusalem, Israel Michael Berenbaum Washington, D.C.

ANATOMY of the

AUSCHWITZ DEATH CAMP

Part

A History of the Camp

YlSRAEL G u t m a n , presenting a historical overview of Ausch­ witz, chronicles its development from an army barracks to its emergence as a full-fledged concentration camp and the largest Nazi killing center. He de­ tails life inside the concentration camp, from its earliest stages through the mass killing process and its liquidation prior to the long-delayed liberation by Soviet troops on January 18, 1945. Gutman, a survivor of Auschwitz and a par­ ticipant in its resistance, was also a participant in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. He writes with the authority of a scholar and participant in the events he chronicles. Gutman also explores the scholarly and political controversies that impacted the historians of Auschwitz. Franciszek Piper explores the role of Auschwitz as a slave-labor camp as it evolved throughout the war, most especially during periods of intense labor shortages. His work depicts the tension between the Nazis' need for slave labor and their effort to achieve a "final solution of the Jewish question." With regard to Birkenau, the relationship between killing and labor was symbiotic, Piper writes. The killing center could operate because deportations—the ar­ rival of new prisoners—maintained a renewable supply of fresh labor. Piper details the corporate investment in the slave-labor camps by main­ stream German firms motivated by profits and spurred on by the SS offer­ ings of unique economic and production opportunities. He clarifies the shift in policy that resulted from the labor shortages and from failures of Heinrich Himmler's great plans for concentration-camp based enterprises. Rather than invest in new facilities, which were expensive and unprofitable, the Nazis situated labor camps adjacent to industrial sites because it was cheaper and organizationally simpler. The need for labor in 1943 resulted for a time in better living conditions in some concentration camps. As for Auschwitz, Piper documents the uniqueness of this extermination, concen­ tration, and slave-labor camp in scale and in task. Shmuel Krakowski documents through Nazi records the evolution and implementation of the destruction-through-work policy that viewed slave labor as slow extermination. He depicts the German corporate investment in the slave-labor program and the partnership between the SS and private in­ dustry. He describes the differences between Jewish and non-Jewish prison­ ers. The former lived under a sentence of death in virtual isolation from the outside world, while the latter were allowed to send letters and receive packages. From Jewish sources, diaries, letters, memoirs, oral testimony, and trials, he depicts daily life in these camps. The question of how many people died at Auschwitz has been shrouded in mystery. Figures based on exaggerated estimates were published early on and repeated in the media: four million dead, including two million Jews and two million Poles. With the collapse of the Communist regime in Poland, Polish researchers are now free to publish detailed documentation on the question of numbers. Franciszek Piper reveals the fruits of twentyfive years of historical research that provides figures on deaths of Jews,

A H istory o f the Camp

3

Poles, Gypsies, Soviet POWs, and other victims. By documenting those who entered, those who left, and the number that remained, Piper triangulates his figures. Once he calculates how many arrived at Auschwitz, how many departed, and how many remained in the camp, he can detail with precision the number of inmates killed at the camp: 1.1 million. Piper's work could not have been published a few years ago, when the Polish government placed itself squarely behind the figure of four million dead. Although his conclusions challenge common assumptions, they substantiate the claim that Jews were the focus of Nazi mass murder plans and that Auschwitz was the epicenter of the "final solution." Michael Berenbaum

1

Auschwitz—An Overview YISRAEL G U TM A N

In the years since the Second World War, the name Auschwitz has become virtually synonymous with the unrestrained tyranny, the power of terror, and the systematic murder of millions of human beings during German Nazi rule. In D erSS S ta a t{the SS state), a book on the structure of the concentration camp system, Eugen Kogon, a former prisoner of the Buchenwald camp, de­ scribed almost unlimited totalitarianism in which living arrangements and behavioral norms were imposed on persons deprived of any right to partici­ pate in shaping their lives and fate.1It was under the unremitting oppression of the concentration camps that the Nazi concept of absolute power over a captive population came closest to full implementation. Thus a survivor, Primo Levi, observed that never has there existed a state that was really "totalitarian." . . . N ever has som e form o f reaction, a corrective o f the total tyranny, been lacking, not even in the Third Reich or Stalin's Soviet Union: in both cases, public opinion, the magistrature, the foreign press, the churches, the feeling for justice and humanity that ten or tw enty years o f tyranny were not enough to eradicate, have to a greater or lesser extent acted as a brake. Only in the Lager was the restraint from below non-existent, and the power o f these small satraps absolute.2

In a similar vein, Hannah Arendt argued that "the concentration and ex­ termination camps of totalitarian regimes serve as laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible is being verified."3

6

A History o f the Camp

Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazi concentration camps. In the period from May 1940, when German authorities laid the groundwork for its es­ tablishment, to January 1945, when most surviving Auschwitz prisoners were marched off by their German captors and Soviet Army troops liberated the camp, approximately 405,000 prisoners of both sexes from nearly every Euro­ pean country were registered, assigned serial numbers, and incarcerated there. Of this number an estimated 200,000 perished.4(This figure does not include prisoners who were murdered without being registered.) The propor­ tion of deaths among Auschwitz prisoners was much higher than in other con­ centration camps, such as Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen.5 With the expansion and development of the camp complex, Auschwitz and its satellites encompassed more than 40 camps spread over a vast indus­ trial area rich with natural resources. These camps served as a huge pool of prisoner labor for the German war effort, as well as for work in mines, con­ struction, and agriculture. But the uniqueness and historical significance of Auschwitz do not derive from those features. In January 1941, the head of the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or Reich Main Security Office) of the elite Nazi police unit, the Schutzstaffel (SS), Reinhard Heydrich, second in the SS hierarchy to Heinrich Himmler, classified various concentration camps in accordance with the severity of the offenses committed by their prisoners. Auschwitz was placed in the same category as Dachau and Sachsenhausen as a camp for prisoners whose offenses were "relatively light and definitely cor­ rectable." One might conclude that at that time Auschwitz did not differ sig­ nificantly from other concentration camps. From May 1940 to January 1942, 36,285 prisoners (26,288 civilians and 9,997 Soviet prisoners of war) were incarcerated in the camp. But not even the mass scale of the camp and the savagery of its regime were fated to become its hallmark. The gruesome history and enduring horror of Auschwitz can be attributed primarily to the machinery for mass extermination of human beings created by the Nazis at the nearby Birkenau camp, a unit of Auschwitz. The lo­ cation was designated by Himmler as the centerpiece for "the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe." From spring 1942 until fall 1944, the operation designed to annihilate European Jews functioned almost without letup as transport trains delivered Jews from Nazi-occupied countries and European satellites of the Third Reich. The overwhelming majority of those victims, designated as "RSHA trans­ ports" earmarked for "special treatment" (