Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979. Jonathan Huener

August 1942, a Gypsy camp, or a camp for Jewish families from Theresienstadt established in February 1943), each separated from the next by barbed wire and guard towers. Birkenau was also marked as the largest center for the execution of the “Final Solution,” for in 1941 Himmler had ordered Höss to begin developing facilities for efficient and industrialized mass murder (see Map 3).

      Map 3. Auschwitz II (Birkenau) Camp, summer 1944. Selected features: 1. “Sauna” (disinfection); 2. Gas chamber and crematorium #2; 3. Gas chamber and crematorium #3; 4. Gas chamber and crematorium #4; 5. Gas chamber and crematorium #5; 6. Cremation pyres; 7. Mass graves for Soviet POWs; 8. Main guard house; 9. Barracks for disrobing; 10. Sewage treatment plants; 11. Medical experiments barracks; 12. Ash pits; 13. “Rampe” (railroad platform); 14. Provisional gas chamber #1; 15. Provisional gas chamber #2

      From the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s on-line Learning Center (www.ushmm.org/learningcenter), courtesy of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.

      In addition to the three main camps of the complex, forty auxiliary camps were established in the Auschwitz region between 1941 and 1944. Development of this larger network of camps was considered necessary for security reasons and helped to solve the problem of transporting prisoners from Auschwitz and its two larger subsidiaries at Monowitz and Birkenau to work sites throughout the area. The satellite camps, which housed from several dozen to several thousand prisoners, were located near industrial plants, agricultural enterprises, and mines, all of which served as part of a huge SS economic-industrial conglomerate. Thus, inmates of the nearby Harmense and Rajsko camps farmed; prisoners labored in coal mines at Jawischowitz and Janinagrube; at Chełmek they worked in a shoe factory; thousands of others were forced laborers for the coffers of German industrial concerns such as IG Farben, Siemens-Schuckert, Hermann-Göring-Werke, and Krupp.

      In late 1943 a major administrative reorganization was undertaken at the Auschwitz complex. Rudolf Höss, commandant since the camp’s establishment in the spring of 1940, was recalled to the Inspectorate for Concentration Camps at Oranienburg near Berlin, and was replaced by SS Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Liebehenschel. In November 1943 Liebehenschel ordered that the camp be divided into three main entities: the base camp (Stammlager) KL Auschwitz I, which was the original and expanded main camp and administrative headquarters of the complex; KL Auschwitz II, which comprised the camp and extermination facilities at Birkenau; and KL Auschwitz III, often simply called Monowitz, which centered on the camp adjacent to the Buna-Werke industrial plant, but included as well most auxiliary camps in the region. Auschwitz II/Birkenau was under the command of SS Major Fritz Hartjenstein, and Auschwitz III/Monowitz under SS Captain Heinrich Schwarz, both of whom were subordinate to the Liebehenschel’s authority. Although this subdivision of the complex remained in effect until the liberation in January 1945, the command structure was to change again in May 1944, when SS Major Richard Baer was appointed commandant of Auschwitz. In the same month Höss returned to Auschwitz as commander of the SS garrison, this time for the purpose of coordinating the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews, an effort that bore the code name “Aktion Höss,” which he would supervise until late July 1944.

      This brief description of the development and organizational structure of the camp conglomerate illustrates that there was not one, but numerous “Auschwitzes” of which the larger complex bearing the name Auschwitz was composed. Thus, the varied and fractured nature of the complex’s topography, purpose, and command structure makes it all the more difficult to arrive at a clear definition of what the Auschwitz memorial site was, is, or should be. The number of Jews murdered at Auschwitz and the manner in which they were killed remain the most unique and striking characteristics of the camp and its history, but the experience of the Jewish deportee was not definitive. As the above account suggests, the diverse experiences of the Auschwitz survivor or victim defy convenient generalization. While one prisoner worked in the fishery of a nearby auxiliary camp, another laid railroad ties; while one prisoner never saw the Stammlager Auschwitz I, another never left it; and while many prisoners may never have seen the gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau, the majority of Jews deported there saw nothing else.

      It is therefore nearly impossible to describe in detail or even to generalize satisfactorily about the conditions under which registered prisoners¹³ at Auschwitz lived, worked, and died, for those conditions varied according to each prisoner’s national or “racial” status, work assignment, and, not least, location in the complex. Whether a registered prisoner lived or died at Auschwitz was often determined by whether she or he survived the first weeks or months. Generally, those prisoners accustomed to relative comfort had the most difficulty in accommodating themselves to the severity of camp life, whereas those who had already been in prisons or ghettos, or who had been prisoners of war had less difficulty adjusting to the brutality and deprivation.

      Upon arrival at the camp prisoners were not only stripped of any possessions, but they were also robbed of their identities. Names, as far as the SS was concerned, became irrelevant; each prisoner was assigned a serial number that was tattooed on the left forearm or, in the case of small children, on the leg.¹⁴ Prisoners were usually given a pair of clogs and an ill-fitting striped uniform on which was sewn a piece of cloth bearing the prisoner’s number as well as a symbol designating his or her category. Jews, for example, wore a Star of David; homosexuals, a pink triangle; political prisoners, an inverted red triangle; ordinary criminals, a green triangle; and the so-called “asocial,” a black triangle. Such markings made the prisoners easily identifiable to the camp guards and were immediately associated with a prisoner’s status in the camp hierarchy.

      Not surprisingly, the markings on a prisoner’s uniform—both numbers and symbols—bore a relationship to his or her chances for survival. For instance, a German criminal with a low number had learned over the months or years many of the tricks of survival, was perhaps among the camp’s prisoner elite, and may have held some supervisory position. A Jew fresh off a transport, on the other hand, even when spared death upon arrival, was usually subjected to more severe treatment and was far less likely to survive. In general, Jews and Gypsies, regardless of their country of origin, were at the bottom of the camp prisoner hierarchy and were consequently the least likely to survive. Above them were the Russian POWs, and then civilian Slavs, mostly Poles, who were considered by the Germans to be conspiratorial and inferior but who, with the exception of the Polish intelligentsia, governmental leaders, and military elite, were not marked for annihilation. Members of other European nationalities formed the next category, and at the top of the rankings were German prisoners.

      The topography of the different camps at Auschwitz certainly varied, but all camps were designed to keep prisoners under strict control and at the very edge of human survival. Describing his early impressions of Auschwitz-Monowitz, Primo Levi recalled:

      [O]ur Lager is a square of about six hundred yards in length, surrounded by two fences of barbed wire, the inner one carrying a high tension current. It consists of sixty wooden huts, which are called Blocks, ten of which are in construction. In addition, there is the body of the kitchens, which are in brick; an experimental farm, run by a detachment of privileged Häftlinge [prisoners], the huts with the showers and the latrines, one for each group of six or eight Blocks. Besides these, certain Blocks are reserved for specific purposes. First of all, a group of eight, at the extreme eastern end of the camp, forms the infirmary and clinic . . . Block 7 which no ordinary Häftling has ever entered, reserved for the “Prominenz,” that is, the aristocracy, the internees holding the highest posts; Block 47, reserved for the Reichsdeutsche (the Aryan Germans, “politicals” or criminals); Block 49, for the Kapos [supervisory prisoners] alone; Block 12, half of which, for use of the Reichsdeutsche and the Kapos, serves as a canteen, that is, a distribution centre for tobacco, insect powder and occasionally other articles; Block 37, which formed the Quartermaster’s office and the Office for Work; and finally, Block 29, which always has its windows closed as it is the Frauenblock, the camp brothel, served by Polish Häftling girls, and reserved for the Reichsdeutsche.¹⁵