Topography of Auschwitz – Was there something there?

The name of the place alone is explanation enough. As soon as he falls, the film starts playing in his head. We know the pictures. We know the message. And their abuse. We have in mind the appearance of a Green foreign minister when he forced Germany into a war in 1999 – the first since 1945, the year in which Auschwitz was liberated. Joschka Fischer justified the bombing of Serbian cities with the lie that there was a threat of a “new Auschwitz” in the Balkans, which had to be prevented. The NATO war with German participation was contrary to international law and was based on a comparison that was inadmissible in several respects. Either because those who used it did not know the history of the camp or because its purpose was known and was deliberately suppressed. Otherwise no analogy could have been made.

It was probably ignorance. The narrative has become entrenched that Auschwitz was exclusively an expression of the Nazis’ racial madness and was built solely to destroy the Jews. The Berlin historian Susanne Willems proves very convincingly in her book that it wasn’t like that.

Of course, Auschwitz murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been rounded up by the Nazis from all over Europe. Anyone who denies this either belongs in an institution or in court. But the causal purpose – and this had already been explicitly stated by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg – was to “permanently hold around 200,000 people captive in order to exploit them through extremely debilitating forced labor.” Auschwitz was a structural element of the German war economy. The slave workers, if they were “in a state of complete exhaustion,” were “killed as useless.” And these slaves were replaced by new ones brought into the camp. “It was a precisely worked out system, a terrible continuous chain of death,” stated the judges in Nuremberg.

Auschwitz was a gold mine for the German state and German corporations.

Susanne Willems proves this. She spent years researching the creation of the camp, its changes and ultimately its ongoing operations. Initially, the former barracks was planned as a “place for the internment, torture and extermination of Polish political prisoners.” Only over time did Auschwitz “become a place of enslavement and extermination of Soviet prisoners of war, the Sinti and Roma and a million Jews.” Because: “The SS based its decisions about the function and expansion of this camp,” says Willems, “not only on its own political and economic options, but also on the interests of its powerful partners: first the IG Farbenindustrie, then the Wehrmacht and finally the Ministry of Armaments.”

Willems documents the genesis of the camp with scientific meticulousness and also takes into account the very latest international research results. Your book therefore contains the highest, empirically proven level of knowledge about the Auschwitz concentration camp.

This is not about correcting numbers (that was also necessary), but rather about determining the function of the camp and the intentions of its operators. And these interests were primarily economic. Without sounding cynical, one can say: In Auschwitz, capitalism was most consistent in its exploitation of people. First he stole his labor, then he stole his dignity, and finally his life. His few possessions were completely disposed of: hair, teeth, bones, shoes, clothing, glasses, prostheses, combs and suitcases, enamel mugs…

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The barracks in Birkenau where all this was collected were cynically called “Canada.” For the SS, Birkenau was the Silesian “Klondike” – the region in Canada where gold was found at the end of the 19th century, triggering the largest wave of treasure hunters in American history.

Auschwitz was something of a gold mine for the capitalist German state and for German corporations. The scientist Willems puts it more objectively: “The expansion of the camp, carried out by the SS hand in hand with interested parties from the state and business, made Auschwitz the largest of the National Socialist concentration and concentration camps in terms of the number of people deported, murdered, captured and then transferred to other concentration camps Extermination camps.”

Willems doesn’t polemicize, she relies on the impact of the facts. She doesn’t use terms like fascism, capitalism, Holocaust or pejoratives; she consistently avoids using first names for all Nazis, which for her obviously represents the highest form of contempt. Above all, however, it sets a different tone and turns away from the moralizing, emotionalized assessment that prevails in bourgeois society, which ultimately serves to conceal the actual function of this camp.

Europe’s largest corporation, the world’s largest chemical company – IG Farbenindustrie AG – surveyed the area at the end of 1939, after the occupation of Poland, and “planned to expand into the Upper Silesian industrial area.” From mid-1940, IG Farben paved the way for the construction of a new factory in Auschwitz, which was covered by war contracts but independent of war-related Reich subsidies. The Reich government ensured that every investment was paid off quickly by declaring the occupied area a tax haven for German companies for an initial period of ten years in 1940. The number of slave workers abused daily on the plant’s construction sites rose from 150 in April 1941 to almost 10,000 in July 1944.

Everything proven, everything documented. All true. And IG Farben was just that a Company. It had little to do with racial madness and anti-Semitism. “With corresponding profits, capital becomes bold,” Karl Marx once quoted a British trade union official as saying. “Ten percent sure, and you can use it anywhere; 20 percent, things get lively; 50 percent, positively daring; for 100 percent it stamps under its foot all human laws; 300 percent, and there is no crime that does not risk it, even at the risk of the gallows.”

The gallows on which the camp commandant Rudolf Höß was hanged is still on the camp grounds. Other Nazi criminals also ended up hanging in Nuremberg. The trial against 23 senior employees of IG Farbenindustrie AG before a US military court ended with 13 prison sentences and ten acquittals “due to a lack of evidence.” On October 31, 2012, the company was deleted from the commercial register. Was there something?

Susanne Willems: Auschwitz. Terror – slave labor – genocide. With photos by Fritz and Frank Schumann. Edition Ost, 288 pages, hardcover, €20.
The Berlin historian will present her book on January 30th at 3 p.m. in the Hellen Panke in Berlin (Kopenhagener Str. 9, Prenzlauer Berg).

The photo on this page as well as the photos from the Auschwitz memorial on the following pages are taken from the book and come from the dpa Young Photographer Prize winner
Fritz Schumann.