Auschwitz-I A Portrait of Hell:

...It was too small, and its use was soon discontinued...

...The Nazis always pretended that their demagogic vote-catching was somehow a military campaign, and that their political enemies, in particular the Communists, were military ones too...

...five or six men attempting to share one blanket in the depths of a Polish winter: starving crowds fighting for their food and, in the end...

...Of middle-class origin, he served at a very young age in World War I, in which he had a distinguished record...

...Then the terror of the Kapos, these real criminals, usually men convicted of crimes of violence or sex, who were in charge of the male inmates, or the convicted prostitutes who controlled the women's camps...

...The answer is that everybody in Germany knew about the camps as places of brutal imprisonment and maltreatment, but that very few of them knew what actually happened there...

...If that description gives any idea of what Auschwitz is like today, then to imagine what it was in the early 1940s all this desolation must be crammed with people, with human bodies, some living, some dying, some dead—a perpetual, continual, well-nigh unbearable overcrowding: Crowds fighting for a drop of water from taps that barely drip...

...He volunteered for one of the Freikorps and served both in the East and in Germany proper during the early years of the Weimar Republic...

...But, being in some respects excellent psychologists, they realized that by leaving the exact details vague, in fact by giving the imaginations of the people a free rein, the terror would be increased even beyond that which could be aroused by revealing the truth of what went on in the camps...

...a prison is solitude, a camp its opposite...

...and 15 hours on end...

...It was to house these enemies that the first concentration camps, Dachau, Columbiahau and Oranienburg, were created...

...who would set their dogs on the women: who would order the prisoners to entertain them by performing sexual orgies, while they drank and watched...

...These were there, as were many of the politicals, technically to be "re-educated," It is on this, theoretically the most respectable of the concentration camp aims, that Hoess inevitably insists...

...Despite what he says in his autobiography, Hoess was an exceptionally brutal commandant, and survivors of Auschwitz have said that conditions there improved under Constantine FitzGibbon is an American historian and novelist whose special interest is contemporary German history...

...To the left of the railway line is the women's camp, which is still standing, scores of low, single-story hutments...

...the prevailing wind carried the stink of burning flesh across the women's camp...

...And the dirty, untidy, unpainted little town of Oswiecim, which the Germans called Auschwitz and which gave the whole place its name...

...In 1947 he was taken back to Auschwitz, and there hanged upon a gallows especially built so that the last sight to meet his eyes would be the camp he had created and administered, and in which he had sent millions of innocent people to their death...

...On the other side stretches away a forest of brick chimneys...

...But Auschwitz, and indeed the greater part of the monde concentrationnaire, was an insane world, into which sane people were thrown, there to be tortured and killed and themselves driven mad...

...and it was certainly superior to the nature of the Kapos and SS men whose objects they now became...

...Therefore it is important to remember what Auschwitz was...

...The buildings stink of death...

...These huts were modelled on German military field-stables, each about 100 feet long, 30 feet wide, 8 feet high, and windowless...

...The Nazis, however, made no attempt to educate their prisoners in the generally understood meaning of that word, let alone to cure psychologically unbalanced cases...

...But even those disgusting and terrifying places were so because they were exceptional, as a zoo is exceptional: All around them life went on in what was, and is, regarded as a normal manner...

...It has, therefore, no relevance so far as Auschwitz is concerned...

...Looking at it across the years, the predominant impression is one of screaming insanity...

...When in 1940 it was decided to set up a huge new concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, at Oswiecim (Auschwitz), Hoess was ordered to build it (using slave labor, of course), and became its first commandant...

...In this realized hell, as in the imaginary one, everyone was damned, tortured and torturers, and spectators as well...

...Another and far more important function of the camps from the very beginning was one in which the prisoners served only as a means: This was the terrorization of the population outside the camps...

...And here I must touch on a problem that has been much discussed and has led to a great deal of misunderstanding: namely, how much did the mass of the German people know about what was going on in the camps, and to what extent were they therefore accomplices in crime...

...They work in the factories the Germans built, And at Auschwitz II...

...for a camp, a strand of wire, hiding nothing, revealing everything...

...Starve him, beat him and terrify him down to an animal level and, saints and other such fantastic and admirable exceptions apart, he will, temporarily at least, cease to appear a man...

...The Nazi concentration camps fulfilled a number of functions of varying importance, and sometimes mutually contradictory, not all of which were primarily concerned with the inmates themselves...

...But it does raise this point: Everybody connected with the camp system was a victim, primarily of course the inmates, but to a less though considerable extent the entire population of Germany and, from another point of view, the guards...

...crowds, everywhere crowds, being screamed at and struck and harried by the supervisors and guards, and always, save in some of the torture-chambers, the sight and sound and smell of these huge masses of human beings, the great majority of them starving, filthy and sick...

...He was involved in a political murder, was convicted, and in 1924 was sentenced to 10 years in prison...

...Like so many Freikorps officers, he was a violent anti-democrat...

...who would throw a prisoner's cap into the forbidden zone by the wire, order him to retrieve it, and shoot him whether he did or not...

...For her it was perhaps only a deserted spot, nothing now but a dirty stain upon the flat and tragic countryside of southern Poland, where once, as she knew, hell had stood...

...The latter now house administrative offices—for the camp is a public monument, a memorial—and a museum, while others stand empty...

...Here it was bodies, not souls, that were beaten and starved and befouled and burned, And any man who, like Hoess, maintains that mental torment is worse than physical agony and death is either a liar or else has no idea of what he is saying, is in fact a fool...

...in a camp anything, that is to say anything unpleasant or terrifying or disgusting, can happen at any moment...

...The Nazi Government wished the people to know that any disobedience would be cruelly punished...

...There is one other and vital distinction...

...the men's camp was burned and only the chimneys remain, as far as the eye can see, line after line of them, for here there were over 150 of these stables for men...

...A prison is sense reduced to its most humdrum and prosaic flatness...

...a prison deprives man of human company, a camp makes humanity hateful to the prisoner, In a prison there is the grinding boredom of life regulated down to the most minute detail...

...Apart from Auschwitz he can, as his autobiography makes utterly plain, have little claim on our interest...

...a camp is insanity exacerbated to a screeching, agonizing pitch...

...They did not look like other people, living in other little country towns...

...Next must be added the back-breaking work and the endlessly protracted roll-calls, standing to attention for hours on end in driving snow or dust or rain, and so the perpetual physical exhaustion on top of the exhaustion of starvation...

...So far so good, and a well-fed member of the lower middle-class who had joined the SA or SS might well regard himself as superior to a Jewish old-clothesman from Ruthenia who could barely speak German...

...Auschwitz was not a spiritual phenomenon...

...And even this pretense of reeducation was abandoned once the war began, since to all intents and purposes no prisoners were thenceforth released from the camps...

...It is a vast city of chimneys...

...Then the fear and omnipresence of death, the greasy smoke pouring day and night from the crematoria...

...This, I must remind the reader, is for the period before the mass exterminations, which began in 1941 (and of which I shall write in the second installment of this article...

...He was tried and condemned to death...

...The main gate, through which under a great arch surmounted by a high watchtower run the railway lines and the road, rears up out of the swampy plain, the only tall building...

...The inmates of the concentration camps, and particularly of Auschwitz, were, in the overwhelming instance, guilty of nothing whatsoever...

...While awaiting trial, he was ordered to write his autobiography...

...This, to be sure, is not an incident of which the British have any right to be, or, so far as I know, are proud...

...Inside the gate, and half underground, is a small gas chamber...

...Most men who are sent to prison, and are to a certain extent transformed into objects at the mercy of the authorities, have committed a crime...

...He usually kept his mouth shut...

...From Auschwitz he went to the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps at SS headquarters in Berlin...

...And then there are the comfortable, well-spaced, well-heated barracks where the SS guards slept...

...In the first place, where Auschwitz I is close and cramped, and seems dark even at mid-day, Auschwitz II is vast and open...

...Perhaps her kind and sensitive words were true...

...crowds fighting for a few moments' use of the primitive closets already running over with excrement...

...This is not a figure of speech...

...I came to hate the sky...

...A prison is silence, a camp hideous noise...

...Sometimes they contained 1,000 or 1,200...

...Let me try to describe it, first as it is today...

...A mile or so outside the wire of Auschwitz I is Auschwitz II, or Auschwitz-Birkenau, This is visually very different...

...An excessively strict father had destined the boy for the priesthood, but by the time he returned from service in the Middle East his father was dead and he had lost his faith...

...That is terrorism in action...

...There was one other prime purpose of the camps, of all the camps, which must be mentioned, and that is degradation...

...they did not know quite what, but they knew, and those who might have resisted were frightened and obeyed...

...Even though some of them may not regard what brought them there as a criminal act, it is made plain to them, during their trial and in their prison, that society does...

...Auschwitz was being enlarged until the end...

...He remained there until the summer of 1943, that is, until approximately half-way through the mass extermination of the Jews...

...But the Germans knew...

...But it should be pointed out that to use the word "education" in this sense is a typically Nazi perversion of meaning...

...They were supposed to house 300 women each...

...A secondary purpose of the brutality inside the camps, and again one in which the prisoners were only a means to an end, was the demoralization, in the first sense of that word, of their SS guards...

...As certain Germans are never weary of repeating, the modern concentration camp is "a British invention," dating from the Boer War, when Boers, including women and children, were rounded up and placed in camps, for military reasons—lest they assist their compatriots, but also and undoubtedly for the purpose of punishing and terrorizing the population...

...And beyond its wire, out of sight, are the other 30-odd sub-camps, the labor camps where lived the slaves who worked in the factories that I. G. Farben and others built here...

...And these areas are cut up and cut off from one another by wire, the omnipresent, electrified, floodlit, barbed wire...

...The railway line runs straight for a half-mile to its end, and this was also the end for most of the freight it bore from all four corners of Europe, for the line stops between the gas chambers and the crematoria...

...As soon as they had achieved power, they proceeded to round up, intern, and torture or kill such enemies...

...In 1933 he joined the SS, and in the following year went to Dachau as a guard...

...They could and did pretend that these were dangerous men who had to be segregated lest their machinations overthrow the Hitlerian regime...

...Over the gate through the wire is the metal placard on which the words Arbeit Macht Frei are written...

...For me, even though I had read a great deal about it, even though I had seen foul and shocking things in war, even though I thought I knew in theory how disgusting humanity can be, this place was quite unspeakably horrible, even deserted, even mostly burned down, even with the grass growing again between the huts that still stand there...

...A prison cuts a man off from the life of his fellows, and that is the principal punishment...

...While there he became intimately acquainted with Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of executing "the Final Solution of the Jewish question," whose extraordinary capture was revealed last week by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion of Israel...

...All around the stone buildings is a high wire fence, which was electrified, supported on concrete stands some 12 feet high that curve inward at the top...

...By making the SS men into accomplices in crime, into damned souls, Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich and Theodor Eicke believed that they would bind them forever to the Nazi chariot...

...Released in 1928, he joined a cranky back-to-the-land movement, the Atamanen, to which many Nazis including Heinrich Himmler belonged...

...his successors...

...It was with these criminals that the people thrown into the camp came most in contact, who plundered, bullied, screamed at and tortured them most directly, both in the huts and out at work, (In other Nazi Concentration Camps the Kapos were Communists: But whether Communists or criminals, they were invariably German nationals, most of whom were in these camps from 1933 to 1945 and who created a powerful hierarchy...

...But it is an insanity of a very special sort...

...This was the death camp...

...A man's humanity is what distinguishes him from the animals...

...It was a place of madness...

...It was hard, even for the SS...

...They were transformed into objects to be starved, mishandled, murdered and burned, not because of anything that they had done, but because of what they were...

...But could he really believe that he, the half-educated man in the brown or black shirt, was absolutely better than the well-dressed Jewish doctor who lived up the street, that his tow-headed wife was absolutely the superior of the beautiful Jewish actress he had seen at the cinema, that his boring beer-hall acquaintances were supermen compared to Einstein or Heine or Freud or even the Jewish lawyer or journalist he had once met...

...But into them they also put men who could certainly not be regarded as dangerous politically: homosexuals, professional criminals, even alcoholics and men who would not work...

...Here was the Czech camp, this the Gypsy camp, here is where the property of the murdered Jews was stacked and sorted...

...And the house which was the SS officers' mess, where I saw wash hanging on the line and Polish children playing in the dusty front garden, And the cottage that was made air-tight for the gassing of the Russian prisoners of war who built the first huts of Auschwitz II...

...Auschwitz—I A PORTRAIT OF HELL Constantine FitzGibbon RUDOLF HOESS, the SS officer who built and for several years was commandant of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi extermination camp, had a career that was not atypical of many senior Nazis...

...sometimes overturning the whole vat of watery soup, to the amusement of the guards...

...So constant was the shuffling of feet between the huts that in all those square miles no blade of grass grew...

...People live there, have lived there throughout...

...The catalogue is endless...

...The nucleus of the camp—Auschwitz I—is an old Polish cavalry barracks, two dozen three-story rectangular brick buildings, some of which were built by the Germans on what had been the parade ground, so that there was no open space...

...The Nazis talked a great deal about being supermen, perverting in their usual fashion the complex ideas of Nietzsche and Stefan George, But superior to what...

...Thanks to his friendship with Himmler and also, it seems, to the meticulous thoroughness with which he carried out his duties, he secured fairly rapidly promotion in the Concentration Camp service at Dachau and at Sachsenhausen...

...Auschwitz was hell on earth, which is the only sort of hell there is...

...This he did, apparently quite willingly...

...And beyond is yet another camp, uncompleted, where stood another 150 huts...

...In the first place, and particularly in the early days of the Nazi revolution, they were places of segregation, torture and, to a very limited extent, re-education...

...Furthermore, the majority had no reason to believe that what they were, or had been when free, was in any way inferior to the average of society...

...A CONCENTRATION camp partakes of the nature of a prison, in that the inmates are deprived of their freedom, but otherwise it is well-nigh its opposite...

...WHEN I first visited the site of Auschwitz in the spring of 1958, a Frenchwoman who had been in there for several years said to me: "It must be worse for you to visit this place than for us to revisit it...

...Furthermore, this policy of quasi-secrecy permitted the Nazi Government to pretend abroad that the camps were simply places of internment or enlarged prisons...

...We may remember descriptions of the bedlams of the 18th century...

...Another result of this fear, of this playing on the imagination and of their seeing the silent, broken men released from the camps was that they knew it was wiser not to know too much...

...They were successful, Hoess has a considerable amount to say about this process, which he calls "hardening" and of which he pretends to disapprove...

...The answer came back: the Jews...

...What they did was to subject their prisoners to such appalling ill-treatment that, once released, they would take very good care not to fall into the hands of the Nazi authorities again...

...A camp hurls him into a mass of humanity, from which he can never, even for a moment, escape...

...Grass grows, there are rank flowers, too, among the wire, and over it all is the pale, Polish sky...

...Should he break this oath, he knew the fate that awaited him...

...His torturer has thus proved that he is "superior" to the object he has created out of what once was a human being, Then, as at Auschwitz, drive this captive to perform on his fellow prisoners those same tortures he has learned to suffer at the hands of his guards— which most men will do, to save or prolong their lives— and the degradation and consequent sensation of superiority are almost or entirely complete...

...It is all quite small, perhaps an acre or two at the most, including the execution yard and the punishment block, which still has its windows boarded up...

...Also a translator of note, he was commissioned to translate Rudolf Hoess' autobiography, Commandant of Auschwitz, recently published by World (285 pp., $4.50...

...However, their prime motive, in so far as the prisoners went, was undoubtedly revenge...

...The symbol for a prison is a smooth blank wall...

...who would finish off a dying man outside his hut by thrusting the ferrule of a walking-stick down his throat...

...Auschwitz-Birkenau, the wind whistles very faintly through the wire where the railway lines lead to nothingness...

...Whenever, therefore, a man was released from a concentration camp—and at least a million Germans passed through them in the 1930s—he had to swear never to divulge what he had seen...

...As many as 150,000 people lived here, briefly...

...Barbed wire also bisects the camp in each direction...

...Their only excuse is that they were fighting a war of aggression and such measures perhaps shortened the war's duration...

...a former inmate of the camp told me, "I came to hate it...

...who would create the finest symphony orchestra in the world from the Jewish musicians in the camp, and compel this orchestra to play stale dance-music for 10...

...It is silent, and it stinks...

...This article, the second part of which we will print next week, was originally published in Encounter...

...We think of madmen as exceptions, as pitiful individuals inhabiting a world where the overwhelming majority is not mad and which is itself fundamentally sane...

...crowds of women trying to find their clothes in the darkness of their huts when suddenly ordered to parade, and, not infrequently, being set upon by Alsatian dogs...

...This was the world, it must be remembered, which Rudolf Hoess created, over which he presided, in which he had absolute power...

...Indeed, he says that he enjoyed composing this memorandum of his life's work...

...By 1933, serious penology had reached the point at which the main purpose of imprisonment was seen less as punishment, deterrence, or even segregation than as cure or re-education...

...Such, very briefly, is what life in Auschwitz was like...

...After appearing at Nuremberg, he was handed over to the Poles...

...They have no ceilings, only slate roofs laid above bare beams...

...crowds of the dying, too many for the mock-hospital: crowds of corpses, too many even for the massive incinerators...

...Yet a third huge area of huts was to be constructed beyond the women's camp...

...These wire entanglements are topped by strong floodlights, with a watchtower at every corner where the SS man sat behind his machine-gun...

...He always enjoyed hard work, he maintains, and since he saw little wrong in what he had done, he seems to have derived considerable satisfaction from his literary labors...

...At the end of the war he disappeared, and was only captured (by the British Field Security Police) in the spring of 1946...

...And behind the Kapos the ever-present and terrifying whims of the SS...

...W. W. Norton will shortly publish FitzGibbon's new political novel, When The Kissing Had to Stop...

...Millions, perhaps as many as four million, died down there, at the end of the railway lines, where crouch the squat ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria, There are five of these huge edifices, each equal in size to a London subway station...

...Therefore their prisoners, whether Jews or political enemies, must be degraded to the point at which they almost ceased to appear human to their tormentors, who would then feel all the more free to torture and degrade these inhuman objects even further...