Showing posts with label death camps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death camps. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Memory of the Camps - FRONTLINE PBS documentary

A mass gave.











Hitchcock and the Holocaust: “Memory of the Camps”

 by 
Night Will Fall, a documentary that recently aired on HBO, tells the story behind what has been called “Alfred Hitchcock’s lost Holocaust film” — a 1945 documentary filmed by camera crews who accompanied Allied armies as they entered the Nazi death camps at the end of World War II.
Five of the Hitchcock film’s six reels aired for the first time on FRONTLINE nearly 30 years ago, in Memory of the Camps.
“At the time we found the film in a vault of London’s Imperial War Museum, it was not entirely clear what role Hitchcock played in its development,” says David Fanning, executive producer of FRONTLINE. “Moreover, one reel of the original six, shot by the Russians, was missing. There was a typed script intact  — undated and unsigned  — but it had never been recorded.”
The footage was as horrifying as it gets: Gas chambers. Pits full of the bodies of thousands of systematically starved men, women, and children. Crematoria designed to burn large numbers of corpses. And haunted, emaciated survivors.
Work on the documentary featuring the footage had begun in the summer of 1945, with some of the editing done under the direction of Hitchcock (who, according to the film’s director, Sidney Bernstein, would not take a fee for his work). But as Night Will Fallexplores in detail, the film was ultimately shelved.
In 1985, after finding five of the film’s six reels, FRONTLINE added the script and asked the late British actor Trevor Howard to record it. FRONTLINE’s plan was to present the film unedited, as what the film’s producers had originally intended it to be: an unflinching documentation of the conditions of the death camps.
FRONTLINE broadcast the film for the first time in May of that year, using the title the Imperial War Museum had given it: Memory of the CampsThe New York Times said, “Memory of the Camps is a filmed monument that does more than tell the story of what it is recalling. It is the story itself,” and the Boston Globe called it “an uninterrupted silent scream that one can’t turn a deaf ear to or look away from.”
Watch Memory of the Camps in full, for free, on FRONTLINE’s website here, and learn more about the film’s remarkable history and backstory here.

In Mapping the Holocaust, a Horrifying Lesson in Nazi “Paths to Persecution”

 by and Ly Chheng
When Allied forces marched into the towns of Bergen and Belsen in the heart of Germany in 1945, there were few obvious signs of the atrocities they’d soon discover. As the forces moved in from the countryside, they passed tidy orchards and well-stocked farms. In a way, it was almost picturesque.
Then came the smell that would lead them to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp of 60,000 prisoners. Inside they found decaying bodies that numbered into the thousands. Men, women and children. For those still alive, there was no functioning water supply. Some had not been fed for days. Others were simply too ill to eat. The soldiers filmed what they witnessed, and in 1985 the grisly footage would form the basis for the documentary, Memory of the Camps, which airs again tonight on FRONTLINE (checklocal listings).
Bergen-Belsen was only the beginning, though. In time, ghettos and camps would be discovered in Nazi-occupied territory throughout much of Europe. In all, at least 6 million people died in Nazi Germany’s system of camps — more than 3 million were Jews.
The map below is just a sliver of the reach of Germany’s network of enslavement under the rule of Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1945. Based on the work of historians at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it shows the locations (in grey) of 1,096 out of 1,150 ghettos they’ve identified in Nazi-occupied Eastern-Europe. The locations in black represent 868 of the 1,094 concentration camps they’ve documented. (Locations in yellow were filmed in Memory of the Camps.)
The true figure of sites is well above the number pictured above. When historians at the Holocaust museum began their research, they suspected they’d uncover somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 sites, said Geoffrey Megargee, the project director and general editor. What they soon found is that the actual number is closer to 42,500. But even that, says Megargee, “is a conservative figure.”
The grim census of enslavement, torture and death is part of a multivolume encyclopedia being published by the Holocaust museum. The above figures from the first two volumes have already been released. Six more are planned by 2025.
The early work, Megargee told FRONTLINE, has helped foster a better understanding of what he described as “paths to persecution” during Nazi Germany.
“People tend to think of camps in isolation — concentration camps or ghettos or POW camps or that sort of thing, but there were lots of ways in which prisoners went from one camp to another,” he said.
Equally important, says Megargee, is that given the sheer size of the numbers, it is nearly impossible to believe that ordinary Germans were unaware of Hitler’s system. As he explained:
After the war you had a lot of Germans who tried to say, “Oh we didn’t know anything about these camps,” and they may have been talking about the concentration camps, the extermination camps, that sort of thing but frankly the concentration camps were publicized. The regime wanted people to know about those. It wanted people to know that if they misbehaved, that’s where they were going to go. So these were no secrets, and beyond that, when you have tens of thousands of camps and millions of forced laborers and POWs and concentration camp prisoners everywhere doing every kind of work imaginable, it’s pretty hard to say that you’re not aware of this system.
The slogan 'Arbeit Macht Frei' (Work Sets you Free) at the main entrance of the Sachsenhausen Nazi death camp on the international Holocaust remembrance day in Oranienburg, Germany, Friday, Jan. 27, 2012. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

RELATED


Monday, March 31, 2014

Archaeologists Find Treblinka Gas Chambers

Israel Breaking News - Archaeologists Find Treblinka Gas Chambers 

trablinka gaschambers
The first-ever archaeological excavations at the Nazi death camp Treblinka in Poland have revealed new mass graves, as well as the first physical evidence that this camp held gas chambers. The camp had been bulldozed in 1943.

To cover their tracks, the Nazis went so far as to plant crops and build a farmhouse on the leveled ground. Presented in a new documentary, "Treblinka: Hitler's Killing Machine," which aired Saturday on the Smithsonian Channel, the excavations revealed brick walls and foundations from the gas chambers, as well as mass graves and massive amounts of human bone, some of which was close to the ground's surface or exposed to the elements. Historians estimate that about 900,000 Jews were murdered at the camp over just 16 months.
The Nazis began deporting Jews to Treblinka in July 1942, mostly from the ghettos of Warsaw and Radom. There were two camps: Treblinka I was a forced-labor camp where prisoners were made to manufacture gravel for the Nazi war effort. A little more than a mile (2 kilometers) away was Treblinka II, the death camp, where Jews were sent on trains. The victims were told that they were going to a transit camp before being sent on to a new life in eastern Europe.

The deception was elaborate: Nazis erected a fake train station in the remote spot, complete with false ticket-counter and clock. "There was an orchestra set up near the reception area of the camp to play," archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls told Live Science. "It was run by a famous composer at the time, Artur Gold." The gas chamber was the subject of the teams' second dig. The excavations revealed a brick wall and foundation.

There were two sets of gas chambers built at Treblinka, the first with a capacity of about 600 people, the second able to hold about 5,000. The gas chambers were the only brick buildings in the camp, Colls said. The digs also revealed orange tiles that matched eyewitness descriptions of the floor of the gas chambers. Each tile was stamped with a Star of David, apparently in order to fool the victims into believing that the building was “a Jewish-style bathhouse.”
The Jewish deportees were split into two groups, one of men and the other of women and children, and ordered to undress for "delousing." After handing over their valuables and documents, the victims were sent to the gas chambers, which were pumped full of exhaust fumes from tank engines.

“Within about 20 minutes, some 5,000 people inside would be killed by carbon monoxide poisoning. Corpses were initially buried in mass graves, but later in 1942 and 1943, Jewish slave laborers were forced to reopen the graves and cremate the bodies on enormous pyres,” adds Live Science. After the war, Treblinka was turned into a memorial. Out of respect for the victims, no excavation was allowed there, until Colls and her colleagues won approval from Polish authorities as well as Jewish religious leaders to conduct a limited dig.
Source: Arutz Sheva

Monday, January 27, 2014

To murder 6 million people, the Nazis showed us, you don’t even need fanatics

INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY - To murder 6 million people, 
the Nazis showed us, 
you don’t even need fanatics

Buried at Auschwitz is our certainty in a shared humanity. 
We now know that any limits to human cruelty, if they exist at all,
lie beyond the most rabid viciousness ever conceived


 January 27, 2014 
THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
Prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau during liberation, in January 1945 (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)






WRITERS

Haviv Rettig Gur is The Times of Israel's political correspondent.
Follow or contact: Facebook Twitter Email RSS


AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU — It is hard to convey what was lost at Auschwitz. Through constant retelling, the numbers of the dead are well known. The gas chambers, the enslavement, the wanton killing are paradigmatic chapters of German and European history.

Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email
and never miss our top stories
FREE SIGN UP!

The Holocaust also has a clear meaning for the Jews, its paradigmatic victims: as a dismayingly vast proof that there is no safety in European pluralism, culture or “civilization,” in high-minded talk of humanism, individualism and international community, or in calming analyses that downplay future threats.

These are all important reflections on the “lessons” and “meaning” of Auschwitz, but they constitute too much of our public conversation about it, almost as though we are willing to discuss any aspect of that event except the choking, shivering bodies of the real-life gas chamber. Auschwitz too often serves as a bludgeon for our social or political agendas, an instrument to express our own fears and passions. There is a vague consensus that Auschwitz reflects something ultimate and untouchable, and so we immediately set about sullying it.

This use and misuse of the Holocaust is often done for noble, honest reasons, for example by those advocates who, under the banner of “never again,” distill the Holocaust into a moral-political lesson about the dangers of the Nazis’ imagined ideological errors: racism, chauvinism.

The Holocaust was undoubtedly a product of its time and place, of Nazi racial theory and totalitarian psychology. But its “lesson,” its “significance,” is both more permanent and more immediate. The vast, meticulously engineered infrastructure of death; the murder conducted according to immutable categories of human beings, erasing the victims’ individuality, and thus any possible pretense to their guilt, in the very framing of the reasoning for their annihilation; and the intimacy of the murders, the physical proximity of murderer and murdered for weeks, months and years — with these hard-won achievements, the Nazis plumbed the depths of human mercilessness.

Seen up close, Nazism was less an experiment in totalitarianism or fanatical collectivism — the usual images associated with the Third Reich — than a test of the elasticity of the very boundaries of humanness.
The engineers

Thus we find an ordinary German company, Topf & Sons from the city of Erfurt (actual sign at the entrance to its administrative offices: “Always glad to serve you”) taking pride in being selected to build 46 furnaces to handle the daily disposal of over 10,000 corpses each day at Auschwitz.

The company even applied for a patent in 1941 for its continuously operating “corpse incineration oven,” apparently fearful its innovations in human corpse incineration technology would be stolen by competitors.

The engineers were under no illusions as to the purpose of their work. Asked in a March 1946 interrogation whether he knew “that in the gas chamber and in the crematoriums [that he helped build at Auschwitz] there took place the liquidation of innocent human beings,” Kurt Prufer, Topf & Sons senior engineer, said he did.

Auschwitz was a thoughtful, considered project, built and maintained by normative, highly educated family men devoted to their craft. Some were not even members of the Nazi party

“I have known since spring 1943 that innocent human beings were being liquidated in Auschwitz gas chambers and that their corpses were subsequently incinerated in the crematoriums,” he stated flatly.

By spring 1943, Prufer, one of the chief civilian engineers of the Auschwitz death machine, not only knew what he had built; he was actively engaged in its upkeep. He visited Auschwitz three times after that spring: in autumn 1943 “to inspect a fault in the construction of a Krema [crematorium] chimney,” in early 1944 to inspect the repairs on that chimney, and a final time in the fall of 1944 to consider the engineering challenges of relocating the death facilities as Soviet forces crept nearer.

Auschwitz was a thoughtful, considered project, built and maintained by normative, highly educated family men devoted to their craft. Some were not even members of the Nazi party.

By their skilled work, Auschwitz became startlingly efficient. Between 1941 and the closure of the death camp in January 1945, most of the inmates who arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau, at least 85% of them, or some 1.1 million people, were dead within four hours after their arrival.

To achieve that rate of industrial killing, the machinery had to be fast. Arrivals just off the train were told they were headed to showers. Outside the killing complex, the truck containing the Zyklon B gas was painted with the symbol of the Red Cross. In each of the two largest gas chambers, 2,500 arrivals could be killed in a single blow. Two smaller gas chambers could handle 1,800 each.

The bottleneck was not the gassing, which took just six to ten minutes before all the hundreds of arrivals lay in piles of dead, gaping corpses. It was the incineration process that frustrated the SS men throughout the camp’s operation and led to constant pressure to improve the facilities. It took 30-40 minutes to burn the three bodies that would fit in each oven (sometimes four, if a baby could be fit in between the adults). It was this bureaucratic pressure that gave the civilian engineers such an important role in the camp’s operation.

By the end of 1944, just weeks before the camp’s liberation by Soviet forces, 1,000 Jewish slave laborers were “employed” in the work of the death facilities, doing all parts of the work except the gassing itself. They herded the arrivals into the undressing hall, then into the gas chamber. They carried the bodies to the ovens for incineration, all under the watchful and vindictive eye of the SS guards.

The gassing itself was handled by a handful of SS officers trained to handle the Zyklon B gas.

It was a vast, monstrous mechanism, overseen by careful, thoughtful men and operating with pitiless efficiency for four long years. To murder six million people, the Nazis have convincingly shown us, you don’t even need fanatics.

So to say that Auschwitz is a warning against racism, or even against the dangers of desensitization and dehumanization under totalitarian regimes, is to miss the stark reality of the actual experience. At Auschwitz is buried our certainty in a shared humanity, in the undeniable, intrinsic value of the human being. These remain lofty ideals, to be sure, but they are no longer axioms premised on the human condition itself. Any limits to human cruelty, if they exist at all, lie beyond the most rabid viciousness ever conceived in the human imagination.



A Holocaust survivor talks to an Israeli delegation about his years at the Auschwitz death camp, as the delegation visits Auschwitz, Poland, as part of the March of the Living on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 7, 2013. (photo credit: Moshe Milner/GPO/FLASH90)

In a 1965 lecture, twenty years after the Holocaust and at the height of the nuclear fears of the Cold War, the social critic Theodor Adorno would wonder at the way in which Auschwitz shattered the pretense to “civilization” and undermined the universalist discourse of philosophers and moralists.

“In the face of the experiences we have had, not only through Auschwitz but through the introduction of torture as a permanent institution [a reference to the concentration camps] and through the atomic bomb — all these things form a kind of coherence, a hellish unity — in the face of these experiences the assertion that what is has meaning… become[s] a mockery; and in the face of the victims it becomes downright immoral. For anyone who allows himself to be fobbed off with such meaning moderates in some way the unspeakable and irreparable things that have happened by conceding that somehow, in a secret order of being, all this will have had some kind of purpose.

“…There can be no one, whose organ of experience has not entirely atrophied, for whom the world after Auschwitz, that is, the world in which Auschwitz was possible, is the same world as it was before.”
The Knesset visits

The Israeli Knesset lifted off from Ben Gurion airport early Monday, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, for the largest-ever Israeli state visit to Auschwitz.

Some 64 MKs are here, at least six cabinet ministers, a Supreme Court justice, the state comptroller, two dozen survivors and a panoply of journalists, European Jewish leaders and activists, Polish parliamentarians and dozens of security agents. Organized by the nonprofit organization From the Depths, whose executive director Jonny Daniels first brought the idea to Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein and then raised much of the funding for the event, the massive commemoration event marks an apex of over a decade of official commemorations and delegations from the State of Israel to the death camps of Europe.

That such gestures pale into insignificance when set against the event being commemorated is a tautology. But there is also an overarching political message to the commemorations: Israel guards the world’s Jews now; Israel remembers; Israel will never allow another Holocaust.

And, perhaps: Israel could have prevented the Holocaust had it been founded sooner.

This is an important declaration, often uttered by Israelis. But it is an unexamined declaration nonetheless. The Nazi race eastward across North Africa was not stopped in autumn 1942 by the nascent Jewish pre-state militias, but by imperial Britain. It is not clear that had Israel been founded by then, and the British withdrawn, that the last living Jewish civilization of the eastern hemisphere, the Hebrew-speaking Israelis, would have survived the war.

The Israelis, heirs to a historical experience of unprecedented mass-death and mass-expulsion across three continents, come to Auschwitz to renew their commitment — and recall the alternative — to Jewish self-reliance.

Yet these messages, though noble, are in an important sense as deaf to Auschwitz’s stark reality as the ideology behind “never again.” This deafness is evident in the “Holocaust fatigue” often heard from Israelis — in the cheap cynicism of journalists, in the disdain one often hears from young and old alike, in the discomfort around official Holocaust commemorations, there is always a noticeable but unarticulated exhaustion.

It is hard not to sympathize with this fatigue. The reality of Auschwitz is so monstrous, so immense, that the very contemplation of it is necessarily accompanied by guilt. When faced with the insatiable horror of the machinery of death, expressions of ordinary empathy or ritualized commemoration can seem pale and unfeeling.



An Israeli delegation seen visiting the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, April 8, 2013. (Photo credit: Yossi Zeliger/FLASH90)

And then there are the shallower political uses of the event. Yitzhak Rabin was a Nazi for going to Oslo, the settlers are “Judeo-Nazis,” and on and on. On left and right, the very power given to the vocabulary of the Holocaust by the clouds of human ash floating over the air currents of Europe is employed for the polemics of the moment — and as often by Jews as by anyone else.

Throughout it all, in the ignorance and intellectual neglect of political polemics, the actual killing is often lost. The men and women and children, the beating hearts and screaming voices, the killing for killing’s sake, the inescapability of death, the irretrievable moral world forever destroyed by Auschwitz — are secondary to the vicissitudes and passions of the moment.

It is a hopeful, touching sign, then, that Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein eschewed traditional Israeli discourse on Israel’s own relationship with the Holocaust, and instead issued a simpler, brief statement ahead of the trip that placed the victims themselves as the event’s central message.

”The elected parliament of the nation of Israel,” he said, “is traveling to the killing valley in order to feel part of the pain [of the victims] and allow its memory to be engraved in our hearts.”

Read more: To murder 6 million people, the Nazis showed us, you don’t even need fanatics | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/to-murder-6-million-people-the-nazis-showed-us-you-dont-even-need-fanatics/#ixzz2rcD7tHAL


Times of Israel: Follow us: @timesofisrael on Twitter | timesofisrael on Facebook