Освенцим: Нацисты и "окончательное решение еврейского вопроса" (История Второй мировой войны: Преступления против человечества)

I felt that this was an extremely well-researched and well-written account of this episode of the cruelest man has ever been to one's fellow humans. It is the harrowing account of the creation of Auschwitz (with notable parentheses about the other camps and the overall context in which they were created and were operated). I visited Auschwitz days after finishing the book and felt prepared for the horrors that awaited me and also felt I got much more out of the experience since I felt relatively I felt that this was an extremely well-researched and well-written account of this episode of the cruelest man has ever been to one's fellow humans. It is the harrowing account of the creation of Auschwitz (with notable parentheses about the other camps and the overall context in which they were created and were operated). I visited Auschwitz days after finishing the book and felt prepared for the horrors that awaited me and also felt I got much more out of the experience since I felt relatively informed. I would highly recommend this book for anyone planning to visit the Lagers and would highly recommend the 6h tour in English and the amazing tour guide: Borgusia!

Rees' book has a fabulous introduction which gives the context that led to the horror and its consequences and is extremely well-written. The book is the result of hundreds of interviews performed by the author and his team during the research leading to a BBC documentary and this book of survivors, SS officers, Polish residents of Oświęcim, Poland, and others. So, it is based on first hand oral evidence as well as research into the 10% of archives not destroyed by the Nazis during their flight, documents taken back to Russia by the victorious army, etc. I would further recommend that even if you do not wish to read the entire book, that the Introduction is truly an important standalone document including many insights such as Goebbels believed that it was always preferable to reinforce the existing prejudice of the audience rather than try to change someone's mind. (p. 17) This made me think of the current rallies around Trumpism and how now effort by the maga(t)s is ever made to convince, only to validate and terrify.

The book then starts with the origins of the Holocaust. One must bear in mind that the economy of the Nazi empire was based on enslaving the non-Aryan populations and so concentration camps such as Dachau were used for political prisoners (Socialists, journalists, professors on the left, etc as well as prisoners of war). The concept of Death Camps (of which there were four including, of course, Auschwitz, came in 1942 and following. The techniques were adapted from experiences on euthanasia on patients in insane asylums and retirement communities. Germany needed "useful" citizens to build their future and they proceeded to eliminate those they felt were dead weight. It is also important to point out that there were tens (and not hundreds or even thousands) of homosexuals sent to Auschwitz for "re-education" because the sexual act itself was not the real issue, it was the necessity for Aryans to reproduce and create the next generations of Nazis for the empire - so it was not a systematic moral imperative but rather a more political, reproduction-related imperative (contrary to most anti-gay initiatives today). In fact, there was a class of children named pipel who were young male prisoners who were servants and quite often sex slaves to SS officers and to Kapos in camp. In this context, Poland and the conquered territory in the Soviet Union was intended to clear a large space for a growing Nazi empire to expand into. In fact, the invasion of the Soviet Union had a specific idea behind it, as illustrated by this quote from Himmler just before the operation Barbarossa in 1941 was started:'The purpose of the Russian campaign [is] to decimate the Slavic population by 30 millions.' (p. 69). The region around Krakow happened to be in the center of the projected empire which would stretch from the Pyrennees and the Atlantic Ocean to the Volga.

The next chapter, Orders and Initiatives is about how Commandant Rudolf Hoess built Auschwitz. He had been a guard at Dachau before the assignment to convert the marshland around Oświęcim, Poland and the existing Polish army site there into a detainment camp. From Feb 27, 1942, experimentation at The Little Red House on Birkenau was started - the first crematorium. The Poles living the the area were ejected from their homes and pushed out of the region. Any resistants were murdered or imprisoned in Auschwitz. In fact, the initial population of the camp was Russian and Polish POWs. Jewish prisoners started arriving in 1943. A total of 1.1M people were killed at Auschwitz in the gas chambers, via exhaustion or execution of which 1 million were Jews.

The Factories of Death chapter describes the rapid ramp up of the killing capacities towards the end of 1943 and early 1944 as well as the fate of the 69000 French Jews (the 3rd largest number of murders committed during the Holocaust at Auschwitz after the Hungarians (

450k) and the Poles (300k)) and as someone living in France, this was particularly difficult to read for me.

One interesting piece here (in light of current US ICE policy on the border): Even Hoess observed how families in Auschwitz wanted to stay together at all costs. Although the selection process separated men from women, husbands from wives, the Nazis soon learnt that is was almost always counter to their own interests to separate mothers forcibly from their children. (p. 168) So, in this sense, the ICE policy of separating mothers and children is intentionally cruel and reading that it was even a step that even the Nazis refused to take was shocking to say the least.

In another chapter, Rees talks about the widespread corruption in the camp. Here I learned of 'Canada', the warehouse at Birkenau where all the goods stolen from victims was sorted and stored. This was probably the luckiest place to be assigned as a girl or woman because the prisoners here were able to occasionally get slightly better clothes and larger rations than in other barracks of the camp. The property in Canada (diamonds, gold, watches, coins, dollars, etc) was all the explicit property of the Reich, but the temptation was overpowering to steal and there was an incredibly huge black market (well described in terms of bread as currency in Primo Levy's If This Is a Man • The Truce) (p. 224) Fritz Klein, one Nazi doctor, was quoted as saying with no remorse "Out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind."Therefore, from the purist Nazi point of view, Auschwitz and the other death camps were an exercise in health management - facilitating the removal of people who were a burden or a threat to the wellbeing of the state. (p. 229)

It is also in this chapter that the human experiments are described. one day, readers must visit Block 10 to get an idea of exactly how grim and evil this was. The thing to realize is that it was done for profit: Bayer paid 170 Reichmarks for each woman that was killed in experiments on an anaesthetic. Bayer was a division of IG Farber, the company that owned the synthetic rubber plant, Buna, where Primo Levy and Elie Wiesel were imprisoned.

The other gruesome aspect to camp was the brothel in Bloc 24 (page 249), limited to non-Jewish and non-gypsy prisoners, and the common rape in Canada of women working in that block. See page 238.

There are popular books such as The Tattooist of Auschwitz which purport to be realistic pictures of life in the camps or which romanticize the relationships between SS and Jewish women in camps. The problem with the former is that there are situations such as witnessing executions which were impossible given the organization at Auschwitz (the executions were committed between Bloc 18 and Bloc 19 against the execution wall and there was no way for a prisoner to observe this.) As for the second, it was exceedingly rare because there was little direct contact between the SS who lived outside the camp walls and the prisoners. The creation of brothels was the reason that Hoess was dismissed from running Auschwitz (temporarily as it would turn out because he was recalled when operations needed to be scaled up in 1944 for the arrival of Hungarian Jews) because the internal Morgen investigation into the camp revealed an unacceptable level of corruption and Hoess was the fall guy.

There were gruesome stories of the roundups, the one from Izbica in Poland where Janek denounces his friend Toivi saying "He's a Jew. Take him." Janek then said goodbye to me in a way that is difficult even now for me to repeat. he said, "Goodbye Toivi. I will see you on a shelf in a soap store." (p. 255). One needs to realize that the remains of cremated prisoners were not actually used for soap, but they were used as fertilizer and the ash fell in the river, so the Nazis were eating and drinking the dead Jews quite literally. That in addition to sleeping on mattresses filled with Jewish women's hair, wearing clothes woven from that same hair, etc. etc. The industrial nature of converting literally millions of humans into compost and industrial products is just appalling and terrifying in this reader's view.

Perhaps the most evil part of the book, the Frenzied Killing chapter, is where the Sonderkommando are described. These are the unfortunate prisoners - often Greeks or Ukranians - who were to strip the bodies of the dead in the gas chambers, search orifices for valuables, and cut off dead women's hair before transporting the bodies to elevators up to the crematoria. There were 900 of these workers in 1944. There was a special exhibit during my visit to Auschwitz in February 2020 about the Sonderkommando and I cannot describe how horrific the scenes and testimonies were. Here the revolt of the Sonderkommando on October 7, 1944 is described in which crematorium 3 was destroyed but at the cost of over 460 prisoners shot and executed.

The last chapter, Liberation and Retribution, describes what happened after Jan 27, 1945 and it was particularly galling to read that over 85% of SS that committed murder at Auschwitz and other death camps went unpunished. This is a fact that Primo Levy also bemoaned as it was done as a political consideration and was truly another injustice for the victims. To think Doktor Josef Mengele, who was the notorious doctor of Block 10 and who as a non-soldier did not have the underarm tattoo of the SS and therefore escaped and was aided by the Vatican to escape to Argentina, dying of a stroke while peaceably swimming in the ocean in Brazil.

This is truly an essential book on the most horrific incident in human history. One of many horrific events. One wonders whether humans will ever evolve beyond this kind of brutality, but the rise of Nazism in the 21st century seems to give rise to skepticism in that regard.By their crime the Nazis brought into the world an awareness of what educated, technologically advanced human beings can do, as long as they possess a cold heart. Once allowed into the world, knowledge of what they did must not be unlearnt. It lies there - ugly, inert, waiting to be rediscovered by each new generation. A warning for us, and for those who will come after. (p. 375)