The Heart of Evil: Birkenau Extermination Camp, Poland

In my previous article, I wrote about the Auschwitz I camp in Oświęcim, Poland. After visiting the brick buildings and museum at Auschwitz I, visitors are taken by bus a few kilometers away to a second, and much larger, camp.

According to auschwitz.org:

The second part was the Birkenau camp (which held over 90,000 prisoners in 1944), also known as "Auschwitz II" This was the largest part of the Auschwitz complex. The Nazis began building it in 1941 on the site of the village of Brzezinka, three kilometers from Oswiecim. The Polish civilian population was evicted and their houses confiscated and demolished. The greater part of the apparatus of mass extermination was built in Birkenau and the majority of the victims were murdered here.

Various sub-camps were also built, but many of these have been demolished.

Birkenau was the largest of the more than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex. During its three years of operation, it had a range of functions. When construction began in October 1941, it was supposed to be a camp for 125 thousand prisoners of war. It opened as a branch of Auschwitz in March 1942, and served at the same time as a center for the extermination of the Jews. In its final phase, from 1944, it also became a place where prisoners were concentrated before being transferred to labor in German industry in the depths of the Third Reich.

The endless rows of electrified barbed wire fencing reinforce the horror and enormity of the site. The railroad tracks in the first photograph show where trains with prisoners packed into box cars were unloaded. The women, children, and elderly were separated and almost immediately marched off to the gas chambers. Their possessions and clothing were sorted by slave workers. The victims were gassed and then inspected by other slave workers. They removed gold from their teeth. Then the bodies were loaded by more slave workers into ovens (crematoria).

Today, few of the wood barracks remain standing. When Soviet troops approached western Poland in December 1944/January 1945, the SS sent remaining prisoners west on forced marches, during which thousands died. Then they burned the wood barracks and blasted the gas chambers and crematoria. Stark chimneys are all that is left of the barracks, while the gas chambers have been left as piles of brick and rubble.

From http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/40-45/liberation/:

As the Soviet army approached and the end of the war came closer the vast majority of Auschwitz prisoners were marched west by the Nazis, into Germany. Those few thousand remaining were thought too ill to travel, and were left behind to be shot by the SS. In the confusion that followed the abandonment of the camp, the SS left them alive. The prisoners were found by Soviet forces when they liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. 

Vasily Gromadsky, a Russian officer with the 60th Army liberating Auschwitz recalls what happened. 

"They [the prisoners] began rushing towards us, in a big crowd. They were weeping, embracing us and kissing us. I felt a grievance on behalf of mankind that these fascists had made such a mockery of us. It roused me and all the soldiers to go and quickly destroy them and send them to hell."

A couple of buildings still stand. Tens of prisoners slept on these bleak benches in filth and sickness.

Some primitive latrine buildings were built to reduce disease. The former gas chambers were piles of brick, which I did not photograph. The ovens were also destroyed by the fleeing Nazis just before Soviet troops arrived. A replica of one oven has been built, but I did not photograph it. It is amazing to me that as the Nazi 1000-year Reich collapsed, the Nazi authorities tried to cover up the physical evidence of their atrocities, as if that would be possible considering the magnitude of their industrial-scale death camps.

Dear Readers, please remember that these horrors were created by the same urbane and sophisticated society that previously brought us Martin Luther, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, and Bach. The camps demonstrated depths of depravity previously unimagined in cultured and civilized Europe. But evil lives very close below the surface of most societies. Government-sponsored and societal-approved brutality is insidious because ordinary people begin to believe that atrocities imposed on others is "normal" or quite all right. Consider how we treated African-Americans as late as the 1960s in the American South. It was "OK" to lynch blacks. And most people cannot or will not fight against the prevailing norms in their society - they just want to fit in. Considering the despicable hate talk we heard during the 2016 election in USA, remember the lessons of Auschwitz when you hear calls to imprison or deport Muslims and Mexicans, or when the specter of anti-semitism and racial superiority rears its ugly head again. Is the United States descending into this kind of tribalism?

The square photographs were taken on Kodak Tri-X 400 film with a Rolleiflex 3.5E with 75mm f/3.5 Xenotar lens. I developed the film in HC110 developer at dilution B for 4:30 minutes. I scanned the negatives with a Minolta Scan Multi medium-format scanner (approx. 2000 vintage). Click any picture to enlarge it to 2,400 pixels wide.

The Heart of Darkness: Auschwitz Concentration Camp, Poland

A visit to the Auschwitz and Birkenau Memorial Museum is profoundly disturbing. The former Nazi concentration and extermination camps demonstrate the incredible hatred and cruelty that men can bestow on their fellow humans under state-sponsored and state-rewarded social and political conditions. At these camps, the industrial-scale killing machine resulted in the deaths of more than a million Jews, as well as hundreds of thousands of Poles, Roma (gypsies), and Russian prisoners of war. Readers interested in the history should study the educational and historical material at the official auschwitz.org web page.

The camps are in the small town of Oświęcim, Poland, about 20 miles west of Krakow. My wife and I visited in August of 2016. The site is crowded, and you need to reserve your visit time online weeks in advance, although there are usually openings available early morning for drop-ins. Tours are given in many languages.

Originally, the first concentration camp was established in 1940 in the town of Auschwitz (the German name in the 1930s). Initially, this was a work camp, where slave labor toiled at industries set up near the perimeter by German companies. The site had been a Polish army base built in the early 20th century, and the sturdy brick barracks were already suitable to house prisoners. Today, most of the buildings still stand and house exhibits. The tour initially takes you through the site in about an hour. The site looks deceptively peaceful today.

Each building or block housed hundreds of prisoners. These were all young-middle age men, as far as I know. Women, children, and older men were weeded out at the railroad reception area and killed quickly.

The barracks are grim inside. The men were worked with minimal food, inadequate clothing, minimal heat, and no medical care. As they died, they were replaced with more men from the never-ending trains. According to auschwitz.org:

The blocks were designed to hold about 700 prisoners each after the second stories were added, but in practice they housed up to 1,200. 

During the first several months, the prisoners’ rooms had neither beds nor any other furniture. Prisoners slept on straw-stuffed mattresses laid on the floor. After reveille in the morning, they piled the mattresses in a corner of the room. The rooms were so overcrowded that prisoners could sleep only on their sides, in three rows. Three-tiered bunks began appearing gradually in the rooms from February 1941. Theoretically designed for three prisoners, they in fact accommodated more. Aside from the beds, the furniture in each block included a dozen or more wooden wardrobes, several tables, and several score stools. Coal-fired tile stoves provided the heating.

 

The concrete fence posts with electrified barbed wire and guard towers are a constant reminder that this was a brutal prison facility. The tour next takes you by bus to the second, and much larger camp, also known as Birkenau. You can see these photographs in the next article.

I took the square photographs on Kodak Tri-X 400 black and white film in a Rolleiflex 3.5E twin lens reflex camera. Film development: Kodak HC-110 dilution "B", 4:45 at 68° F. I cleaned spots and lint with Pixelmator software on a Mac Mini and resized to 2400 pixels for this blog. Click any picture to enlarge it. One photograph, that of the hallway, is digital from a Fuji X-E1 camera.