A History of Auschwitz

On January 27th 1945, the Red Army liberated the concentration camp at Auschwitz unveiling its almost unspeakable horrors to the world. The concentration camp system began almost immediately after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. It was an integral part of the Nazi regime's rapid dismantling of German democracy. Within weeks, the first concentration camp, Dachau, was opened to imprison political opponents, marking the start of a vast and brutal system of camps across Germany and later in the occupied territories. The camps began as places to imprison political enemies and people the Nazis deemed to be “undesirables”. But, as the Second World War progressed, these camps became centres of industrial-scale genocide, with Auschwitz becoming perhaps the most infamous. In this episode, Dan is joined by Nikolaus Wachsmann, Professor of Modern European History at Birkbeck University of London. They discuss the historical context and horrors of Auschwitz, marking Holocaust Memorial Day on the 80th anniversary of its liberation by the Red Army. Warning: This episode contains a detailed discussion of the Holocaust and genocide which some listeners may find upsetting. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:33Speaker 01

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• 1:12Dan Snow?

  Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It was January 30th, 1933, that Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. And immediately, his Nazi regime began dismantling what was left of German democracy. Opposition newspapers were shut down, political opponents were silenced, they were rounded up, and the Nazi regime instantly realised it needed somewhere to put them. Within weeks of Hitler becoming Chancellor, the first concentration camp had opened, at Dachau, 10 miles north-west of Munich in southern Germany.

• 1:58Dan Snow?

  It was the source of a vast system of imprisonment, through which the Nazis extended their control over Germany and then occupied territories as they invaded one neighbour after another. That system, already cruel, violent, morphed into something truly terrible. Some of the most horrific places in the long and lamentable catalogue of human crimes. As the Second World War progressed, camps were built within that system that functioned as places of large-scale industrial slaughter, of murder, of genocide, among them famously, Auschwitz.

• 2:42Dan Snow?

  At the end of January every year, we mark Holocaust Awareness Day. The Red Army liberated the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau on the 27th of January 1945, 80 years ago.

• 2:58Dan Snow?

  This year, we've got a series of podcasts looking at Auschwitz. In this episode, we're going to be hearing harrowing details about how Auschwitz worked, what happened there. We're going to break it down. We're going to look at the process of murder, from the moment people arrived through to their death in gas chambers, they disposed of their bodies, clothes and valuables. This is the story of Auschwitz. Needless to say, elements of this podcast will be deeply upsetting.

• 3:28Dan Snow?

  Joining me on it, I've got one of the best historians working in this field, Nicholas Waksman. He's a professor of modern European history at Birkbeck University of London. He's the author of the absolutely brilliant Wolfson History Prize-winning book KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. Every year, we mark Holocaust Awareness Day, and every year, it seems to get that little bit more urgent. I know I'm always bothering you, but please feel free to share this podcast or any other Holocaust-related material that you've come across over the last few days. Share it with people, share it with people who might not otherwise engage with it. In the meantime, on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, here's our history of that murder camp.

• 4:25Dan Snow?

  Nicholas, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me, Dan.

• 4:30Dan Snow?

  Are concentration camps part of that original package? Are they part of the Nazi starter pack when the Nazi Party takes control of Germany?

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, I think the first camps are set up almost as soon as the Nazis come to power. They are part of the attempt by the regime to establish that new dictatorship. And within the first weeks or months, hundreds of camps are set up all over Nazi Germany.

• 5:01Dan Snow?

  Camps to us mean something very precise. They probably are indelibly the final years of the war, the horrors of Belsen when it's liberated. What initially are camps just, are they prisons? Are they interned facilities? What are they for?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  One of the key points, I think, is that there isn't a blueprint for these kind of camps as they emerge in 1933. The Nazis don't come to power and draw a clear plan out of some drawers, which they then implement. There isn't national coordination either. Instead, there is plenty of improvisation. There's local initiative. And that means that there isn't a typical early camp. These camps come in in all shapes and sizes and local and regional authorities use all kind of spaces, sites they can find, they can get their hands on to set up

• 5:53Speaker 02

  these early camps. So they use rondan hotels, boats, pubs, old castles, and derelict factories, like in the case of Dachau. So when the Nazis come to power, there isn't yet a Nazi concentration camp. And indeed, the regime still has to invent what a concentration camp actually is and how it will operate.

• 6:17Dan Snow?

  Why do they discover they need them? Who are they putting in them? Who are they arresting suddenly in such large numbers?

• 6:23Speaker 02

  Well, 1933 for the Nazis is in the first place about securing power. That means coordinating the state. It means coordinating Nazi society. And it also means destroying any potential political opposition. So there is a storm of political violence that sweeps the country in 1933. And estimated 200,000 men and women are dragged to camps and early prisons. Most of them outside the law and they are arrested and detained, not necessarily for what they've done, but more often they're not for who they are.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  And that is suspected enemies of the political order, that new order that is emerging in Germany. The aim of these early camps, as different as they are, I've said before, they come in all shapes and sizes. But as different as they are, they share one overriding aim. And that is to destroy the possibility of political opposition in Germany. And the great majority of these prisoners early on are left wing inmates, trade unionists, social democrats, and above all, German communists. And without these early camps, the regime would have never been able to establish itself as quickly as it does in 1933.

• 7:47Dan Snow?

  You're physically removing the opposition. You're concentrating them into these detention facilities, just getting rid of them.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the plan isn't to hold them there forever or to murder them there, though there are deaths. But the the main aim is to torment them, to torture them, to break them and to intimidate all those outside who might still be thinking of a position that they better not rise up, they better not stand against the regime. The great majority of prisoners in these early camps are released again, but they're released broken and battered. And quite often, these wounds are visible to their friends and their family when they come out.

• 8:27Dan Snow?

  Not unlike the Tsarist and then communist so-called Gulag Archipelago.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes, you know, there have been questions after the Second World War where the idea of the camps comes from. But what happens in Germany is not that the Nazi rulers are looking elsewhere. These are very much homegrown camps which spring up in 1933. And actually, it's not even clear at this point in time whether these camps are going to become a permanent part of the dictatorship or not. There are some leading Nazi officials who believe that once the opposition is broken, once the regime is securely in place, these early camps can be closed down, and it is most of them are closed down.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  And these officials believe that some kind of authoritarian Nazi law, Nazi prisons are going to be enough to sustain and keep this regime in power. But what happens, of course, as we know, is something very different.

• 9:31Dan Snow?

  And I just wondered, does this system of camps bring its own momentum and create its own logic? First of all, you build a mindset that accepts the existence of these places, but also do you create a generation of people who become veterans of these camps in terms of running them, who therefore start to no longer question their legitimacy, are in turn brutalised by their running of this system? I mean, does it develop its own energy?

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, a prisoner in Dachau, Dachau is the first SS concentration camp set up in in March 1933 as part of this wave of early camps which are set up. A prisoner in Dachau in 33 would have not recognised Dachau in 1939 or in 1945. There is a huge dynamic process here, massive momentum. And what drives this increasing dynamic of violence in part are the corps officers Sman, who are formed in these camps, men like Rudolf Hess, the later commandant, the first commandant of Auschwitz, has joined the SS.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  In Dachau and he goes through what can be called a school of violence in Dachau. This is where SS men learn to treat prisoners as enemies of the people, as subhuman. They have to crush these enemies without any mercy. And Menlike has learned to do this and they impress their superiors with displays of violence. And thus can have a career in the camp. Hesse himself moves up the ranks, later is sent to Sachsenhausen, a new camp that is set up. And then becomes the first commandant of Auschwitz.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  I mean, this is one of the ways in which these early camps influence later camps set up during the war like Auschwitz.

• 11:33Dan Snow?

  Yeah, we've got a whole podcast directed to the life and career of Hesse coming up. As the 1930s goes on, the Nazis, you tell me, do they slightly switch their gaze from political opponents, people who threaten their grip on the country to their religious and if ethnic, for want of a better word, religious and ethnic opponents, you know, Jews, Roman people's. Do they start to make up more and more of the prisoner population?

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Yes, I think once it becomes clear in the mid 30s, very much with Hitler's backing, that the camps are going to be permanent parts of the Nazi dictatorship. And under the SS and police apparatus, once that becomes clear, the camps are coordinated and expanded. So in addition to political prisoners, the regime also forces thousands of social outsiders inside these camps. This is part of the drive by the regime to create its mythical national community. And amongst those who are dragged to the camps following massive police raids in 37 and 38

• 12:42Speaker 02

  are so-called asocials. This is a catchall term for all those who are seen to be living on the edges, on the margins of society. Homeless beggars, prostitutes. And the regime also focuses on so-called criminals. In reality, these are, for the most part, minor petty offenders. And thousands of these are dragged to camps in the second half of the 1930s, where they are joined by those persecuted for racial reasons as well. And this is above all, German Jews. So in the initial period after the camps are set up,

• 13:22Speaker 02

  the number of those who are dragged to the camps as Jews is relatively small. This changes shortly before the Second World War breaks out in 1938. Above all, after the November program in 1938, when some 26,000 Jewish men are dragged to camps in Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen. But the important thing, I think, here is that this isn't the start of the Holocaust. And the aim of the regime at this point is to intimidate Jews, to make life for German Jews so intolerable that they will integrate. So the great majority of those Jewish men who are dragged to the camps

• 14:07Speaker 02

  following the program are released again in the weeks after. But the camps are certainly changing in this period. And this isn't just true for the prisoner population, it's also true for the camps themselves. So I've mentioned these early camps, which are set up in 1933. Almost all of them are closed down. The only early camp that remains throughout the existence of the Third Reich is Dachau, the first SS camp set up in Spring 33. Instead, the SS purpose builds a small number of large camps, which can be extended at any time. For example, Sachsenhausen and others. And it is these camps where some 20,000 or so prisoners are held

• 14:51Speaker 02

  when the Second World War breaks out.

• 14:53Dan Snow?

  You mentioned the Nazis didn't have a blueprint at the beginning of their period of rule. But when they invade Poland in the autumn of 1939, and they discover they now have a very large population, both of Jews and of potential threats to the regime, aristocrats, educated people, socialists, the whole world. They now do have a blueprint. They can just extend this camp network into occupied Poland.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Yes, the camp as it had developed in the last year before the war is extended then into Nazi occupied Europe. The regime as it grabs more and more land in Europe also extends the camp system into Europe. Before the war, the vast majority of prisoners are German men. During the war, more and more prisoners from occupied Europe are dragged into these camps so that by 1944-45, German prisoners only make up a small minority of the prisoner population. And more prisoners obviously means more camps as well.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  So the SS also starts building camps in occupied Europe. The first of these camps is Auschwitz and the SS certainly brings everything it has learned about repression, about terror, about the organisation, the internal bureaucracy of terror, about prisoner hierarchies, about prisoner routines, the uniforms, the prisoner classifications on these uniforms. All of that is, if you will, exported to new camps set up in the war like Auschwitz.

• 16:34Dan Snow?

  Auschwitz is set up primarily to deal with Polish prisoners. To what extent is it a prison of war camp and what extent is it a camp for political prisoners? The elite of Poland sent there to be terrorised.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Germans invade Poland in autumn 1939 and the very clear aim is to crush, to destroy the Polish nation. So tens of thousands of Polish nationals are executed in the first months of the occupation and many more are dragged to prisons, to makeshift camps. And these sites are very soon overcrowded. So the SS starts to scout. They actually have a party of officials who's looking at different sites for what they call their first concentration camp.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  In the east and in the end they they settle on the town of Auschwitz. This is in a part of East Apostalesia that is incorporated into the German Reich, after the occupation, and is renamed by the Germans Auschwitz. There are a number of reasons why they choose this particular site. Auschwitz has traditionally very good transport links. This is important for moving prisoners to the camp and out of the camp. It's also important for moving building materials and other goods to the camp. The early uniforms which are used in Auschwitz come from places like Dachau.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Later on, of course, the belongings of murdered Jews are deported or transported out of Auschwitz. So transport links are important. And there is also on the edge of town, an existing structure of buildings, which had been used before the war by the Polish military and the SS. Things, it can quite easily and cheaply convert this site into a concentration camp by building fences around it and some watchtowers. And this is indeed what happens. And that's the birthplace, if you will, of the Auschwitz camp. This is what we call the the main camp where prisoners are then marched through the gate with the inscription Arbeit macht frei, work liberates.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Incidentally, Kommandant Hess had first seen this inscription, of course, at the camp in Dachau and Sachsenhausen. So this is another import from the camps in the German Reich.

• 19:08Dan Snow?

  So no suggestion yet, though, that this would be an industrial murder factory?

• 19:12Speaker 02

  No, Auschwitz is set up explicitly with the aim to destroy the Polish political opposition. The first prisoners, the first mass transport of prisoners in Auschwitz, who arrive in June nineteen forty from the prison in Tarnow, are Polish political prisoners, for the most part, young men.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Accused of resistance against the regime. And it is Polish political prisoners who make up the vast majority of the prisoner population. For more than a year in Auschwitz, they suffer great humiliation, terror, torment, torture, abuse by the SS on a daily basis. Also hunger overcrowding, illness and disease. But the camp in Auschwitz has not yet become a death camp. And Jewish prisoners in particular are still in a relatively small number at this point.

• 20:12Dan Snow?

  Tell me how Operation Barbarossa changes everything and a gigantic German assault into the Soviet Union.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Well, it it has an immediate or almost immediate impact on concentration camps like Auschwitz in two ways. First of all, the Nazi regime develops a program of systematic mass murder of those Soviet POWs who are seen as politically dangerous. And many thousands of them are taken to concentration camps, including to Auschwitz, and are executed there. At the same time, the SS Himmler also develops a gigantic plan

• 21:00Speaker 02

  to force vast numbers of POWs from the Soviet Union into slave labor in concentration camps with the decided aim in Auschwitz to use them to what the SS calls make the East German, in other words, to push forward the German settlement of the occupied territories. So Himmler has these visions of vast armies of Soviet POWs arriving in Auschwitz. And this leads then to the plans for a new sub camp across the train tracks on the other side of the main camp in Birkenau to be built and set up.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  The first of these Soviet slave labors arrive in. October nineteen forty one, there's about ten thousand. But what was expected to be many, many, many thousands of prisoners never arrive. And those ten thousand Soviet pilgrims who do arrive and have to start to build this new camp in Birkenau, few of them survive for more than a few months. So out of the ten thousand or so, within six months, less than a thousand are still alive and very few of them survive Auschwitz overall. But clearly, Barbarossa and the invasion of the Soviet Union has an immense effect in this way on the camp.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  And also more generally, it has a huge effect on radicalizing what the Nazis call the Final Solution.

• 22:33Dan Snow?

  Right, because in those freshly occupied territories, there are vast populations of Jewish people.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Yes, so the regime sends in, together with the Wehrmacht, into the occupied Soviet Union's so-called task forces. There's also police units that operate there and they start the increasingly indiscriminate murder then of Jewish men, women and children. And this really is the point where Nazi policy towards Jews moves towards the systematic mass extermination of all European Jews during the Second World War. So this is a process in which policy radicalizes from summer forty one, from the invasion,

• 23:23Speaker 02

  then to summer nineteen forty two. And a key stepping, a point in this process is the Wannsee Conference in January nineteen forty two, where leading German state and party officials come together in a Berlin suburb on the Lake of Wannsee and effectively discuss ways of coordinating what they call the Final Solution. And what they mean by this is that the European Jews will be deported to the occupied East and either work to death there or murdered on arrival.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  And this very soon then also starts to change concentration camps, above all the concentration camp of Auschwitz.

• 24:11Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about Auschwitz. More coming up.

• 24:24Dan Snow?

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• 26:22Speaker 03

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• 26:33Dan Snow?

  So it's after Wannsee that Auschwitz becomes Auschwitz as we remember and understand it today?

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Auschwitz is always a site with multiple missions, with multiple functions. So you have Auschwitz being set up, as I said, as a camp to destroy the Polish political opposition. And throughout the entire life of Auschwitz, political prisoners are dragged here from Poland, but also from elsewhere in Europe. You also have other prisoner groups who are sent here, more than 20,000 Cinty and Roma. But from 1942, Auschwitz also becomes a death camp of the Holocaust. Around about the time of the Wannsee Conference, so January 1942,

• 27:21Speaker 02

  there are only a few hundred prisoners who are registered as Jews in Auschwitz, out of maybe about 10,000. But that changes very quickly because the SS selects Auschwitz as a destination point for deportations of Jews from Poland, but also from Europe. And Auschwitz is the only death camp. There are several Holocaust death camps. Auschwitz is the only one where the SS sends deportation trains from all over Europe. And this really transforms the camp in 1942.

• 27:59Dan Snow?

  And we should maybe just briefly say here how the Holocaust changes in 1942, because the Holocaust was underway in the aftermath of the advancing units of the German army in Barbarossa. There would be groups of men who would kill Jews, bury them, shoot them, club them, burn them. What is the death camp solution? What are they trying to achieve there?

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Well, effectively, what happens is that the SS starts to look for ways of mass murder, of mass extermination, which are less strenuous for the perpetrators. And one of the ways they come up with, one of the methods they develop, is the mass murder of victims by gas. This had already been pioneered in the so-called euthanasia programme in the early years of the war, where over 70,000 men and women who are classed as mentally ill and disabled were murdered in specially set up gassing facilities.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  And the SS then moves towards, in 1941-42, the mass murder of Jews, the so-called Final Solution, what we now call the Holocaust, by setting up specially dedicated death camps. Now, there are a number of these death camps which are being established in occupied Poland. There is Helme, nearly Lodge Ghetto, and then there are three death camps in the so-called General Government, of which Treblinka is the largest. These death camps only have a single function. That function is to murder as many Jews as quickly as possible, and this is what they

• 29:51Speaker 02

  do in 1942. In these camps, the SS murders perhaps around 1.5 million victims. Auschwitz also becomes a death camp, but Auschwitz also always operates as a major concentration camp as well. And this is why you have the infamous selections at the platforms, at the ramps in Der Canal, because this is where the SS decides who will be murdered as supposedly unfit for work on arrival, and who will be registered in the camp and worked to death.

• 30:28Dan Snow?

  Yes, and this is why you meet survivors of Auschwitz. We tend not to meet survivors of Treblinka and Helmer, as you say. The selection moment is such a profound one when you talk to the survivors. They deliberately disorientated, exhausted, broken after long train journeys with no sanitary facilities and little food, little sleep and overcrowded. And suddenly, boom, into the daylight, you're on a platform and there are doctors, are they, and they're just saying, you'll go right, go left. And that's the decision, well, that was life or death.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  Yes, and I mean, this is, this is, like you said, a moment of complete confusion, of chaos, of fear and disorientation. A lot of these transports also arrive at night, so there's also the blinding spotlights. Nobody really knows where they are and they are rushed out of the train compartments, often after days inside, not having eaten, not having drunk anything. The air in these compartments is rank with excrement, with sweat. It's hot and suddenly they find themselves outside and do not know what is happening. They are ripped apart from their loved ones.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  And this is often the moment at the ramp where they see their husbands, their wives, their children for the, for the very last time. The S S, of course, tries to keep some control here and spreads lies that these prisoners will be taken to a work camp, that they are here as labourers, as workers. And they're even told sometimes that they will, that families will meet again at weekends. And nobody suspects that the majority of those who arrive are going to be dead within a matter of hours.

• 32:15Dan Snow?

  I'm sure like you, much of the research I've been able to do is the frustration that people feel among the many emotions that at that exact moment, no one knew. So there was never an attempt to fight if they'd known that this was a moment of existential peril, that they could at least have tried. It's the confusion, the sort of the bureaucracy of that moment that there is such a regret for so many people who, who saw their loved ones last at that exact second.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  That is a deliberate, of course, method which is used by the SS to disorientate those victims to try and prevent any uprisings, any resistance. Nonetheless, prisoners do try and escape, prisoners do sometimes attack the SS, and there is an uprising of Jewish prisoners and towards the end of the existence of Auschwitz in autumn 1944. But the very method of the SS is to try to, again, kill as many victims as they can as quickly as possible.

• 33:18Dan Snow?

  You mentioned those not selected for labour could be dead within hours. What would just take me through the rest of that process? The elderly, the infirm, or the very young would be led into a different section of the camp towards the gas chambers?

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Yes, early on in the existence of Birkenau, the platform where these trains arrive was some way outside of the camp itself. So what the SS often did is that they forced those Jews who were selected for the gas chambers, without them knowing, onto trucks, which were going at quite high speed from this platform towards the gas chambers in Birkenau. There are some testimonies by survivors who describe this moment. They describe how some SS men actually helped old people or children onto the trucks. And this led the

• 34:17Speaker 02

  others, those who looked on, to think that perhaps this camp wasn't going to be as bad as they thought. There was also a Red Cross van which followed the last of these trucks. And again, that created the illusion that somehow this was a work camp, perhaps, a camp where there would be some attention for the health of prisoners, for their well-being. What the new arrivals did not know was that inside of this Red Cross van was the SS doctor who would supervise the gassing at the gas chambers, and indeed also the cyclone B pellets,

• 35:00Speaker 02

  which the SS poured into the gas chambers, which then caused those inside to die an unimaginably dreadful death.

• 35:10Dan Snow?

  So how many people do we think might have been gassed and their bodies incinerated Auschwitz?

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Well, the estimated number of Jewish victims of Auschwitz is about 1 million. 1 million, about 1 million Jews died in Auschwitz, were murdered in Auschwitz. The vast majority of them in the gas chambers in Birkenau. And that makes Auschwitz the largest cemetery of the Holocaust. There's no other site anywhere in Nazi-controlled Europe where, no other single site where more Jews are murdered than in Auschwitz. Never does the SS murder more Jews in Auschwitz than in spring and summer 1944.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  What happens is that the Nazi regime occupies Hungary, its ally, and the Jews in Hungary had up to this point been mostly untouched by the Holocaust. The SS comes into Hungary, the SS killing and deportation experts enter, led by Adolf Eichmann, and within a matter of weeks deportation plans are made. And in mid-May, mass deportations from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau begin. In the space of about two months from mid-May to mid-July,

• 36:37Speaker 02

  some 430,000 Jews are deported from Hungary to Birkenau, and the great majority of those are murdered on arrival. You've got to imagine that there are some times, that there are single days where five trains arrive from Hungary. And this would be more than 15,000 Jews, the population of our town, which arrives. Sometimes trains arrive at the same time, so one is, one has to wait for hours until all those on the other train have been forced out and the great majority have been murdered.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  So Auschwitz really in this period reaches the absolute height of destruction and mass murder to the extent that the SS is murdering more Jews than they can burn in the new crematoria which had been built.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  By prisoners and private companies in nineteen forty-two and forty-three. So they also forced prisoners to throw bodies into ditches, which are dug on the edges of Birkanau. And this leads to the camp, especially when there's a wind blowing from the west, the camp being enveloped in the stench of death, the smoke blowing over from the crematoria chimney and from these open pits. And that smoke really comes into every corner of the camp. It suffuses the clothes of prisoners. They breathe in that air, they gag, they cough, they vomit.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  And even the SS, much as they would like to, can't escape the stench of death, which they've created. So the SS quarters in Birkanau are also full of this smoke.

• 38:27Dan Snow?

  And we've talked about some of the headline numbers and the big picture. Take me through an individual story, someone that you've documented.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Well, one of the prisoners I've been reading a lot about is a Polish Jew called Zaman Grodowski, who's deported with most of his family in December nineteen forty-two from one of the ghettos which the Nazis set up and are now clearing as they are emptying the ghettos and merging the great majority of Jews inside. Grodowski arrives in Birkanau, I think on the eighth of December nineteen forty-two. Most of those on board of the train with him are murdered on arrival. This includes his wife, his mother, I think two of his sisters.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  And Grodowski himself is amongst the smaller number of Jews who are selected by the SS for slave labour. And he is put into what is called the Sonderkommando. And these are the prisoners who are forced by the SS to assist in the mass murder of others. In other words, those who have to work at the gas chambers and at the crematoria, these pits. Grodowski, before...

• 39:49Speaker 02

  The deportation had been a clerk in a shop in an office, but his real ambition was to write. And he brings what he has learned about writing and his literary sensibilities to writing about the Holocaust, writing under the shadow of the crematoria chimney. And what he wants to do is leave some kind of testament for future generations to help them, he says, form an image of this hell in Birkenau Auschwitz. So, Grodowski is one of a number of men in the Sonderkommando who write about their experiences,

• 40:33Speaker 02

  write about the daily carnage at the gas chambers at the crematoria, write about their own emotions and feelings as they see these processions of the doomed enter the gas chambers. And some of these notes are buried on the grounds of the crematoria. And a few of them have been found after the war. And this includes manuscripts written by Grodowski. So they survive and they are amongst the most invaluable documents which we have about the Holocaust. Grodowski himself does not survive. He perishes during the Sonderkommando uprising in the autumn of 1944.

• 41:17Dan Snow?

  If you could quickly give me a precis of that, because it's an extraordinary moment.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  So the SS forces hundreds of prisoners into the Sonderkommando. And these prisoners know that the SS will sooner or later come for them because they know more about the perpetrators and about mass extermination in Auschwitz than any other inmates. And the danger to the prisoners' lives becomes greater and greater as the Red Army advances towards Auschwitz. And the closer the Red Army comes, the more these prisoners fear that the SS will kill them. So there are a number of plans which they make for a possible mass uprising and mass escape.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  They have to be postponed several times until on the 7th of October 1944, the uprising does break out. And it's really two separate uprisings, if you will. The SS appears around lunchtime at one of the crematoria, this is crematorium four, to lead away about 300 men from the Zander commando. The SS claims that they will be taken to another camp, but all of these men know that this is camouflage, this is a lie, and they will be murdered. So several of these men do not come forward and then start to attack the SS with sticks, with stones, with whatever they can find.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  The SS is initially surprised and beaten back, several SS men are injured, but reinforcements soon appear and the vast majority of the men at crematorium four are executed, not before, however, they manage to burn part of the crematorium four. When prisoners at crematorium two, which is a few hundred yards away, see smoke rising, an uprising breaks out here as well, and the prisoners at crematorium two manage to cut through the fence and up to 100 of them manage to escape from the grounds of Birkanau, but none of them survive. The SS sends reinforcements to hunt them down.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  The men from the Zander commando stood no chance, they were barely armed, they tried to rise up in broad daylight, they didn't have a clear plan and could not really develop a clear plan, and they were up against heavily armed SS men who could draw on reinforcements and, as I say, kill the great majority of the Zander commando within a few hours.

• 43:58Dan Snow?

  So Kedrowski is killed in that, but thankfully, some of his writing survives. What was known outside the camps, what was known in Moscow, in London, in Washington, about Auschwitz?

• 44:14Speaker 02

  Well, the knowledge about Auschwitz grows and grows as the war progresses. There are secret notes and information which arrives in the West from the Polish underground, which partly draws on information which comes from inside the camp. There are prisoners who escape, who write reports, which then circulate in the West. The British also decrypt SS telecommunications and gain more insights into what is happening inside the camps in this way. In 1944, as the Allies get closer, the camps or camps like Auschwitz are also in reach

• 44:58Speaker 02

  of Allied airplanes. So there are aerial photographs of the camp, sometimes extremely detailed photographs. I mean, if you look at them, you can see tracks of prisoners marching, you can see smoke coming from these pits where Jewish victims are being burned. So all of this information together does, over time, create an increasingly clear picture of what is happening in Auschwitz, the canal. More, of course, is known in the immediate vicinity of Auschwitz. I mean, local Germans who move into this area, civilian workers who work for German industry

• 45:39Speaker 02

  like IG Farben, which sets up a huge factory drawing in part on forced labour, slave labour from Auschwitz. These officials, these workers, who often live there with their families, of course, also hear rumours, and sometimes it is more than rumours. There is a memoir, an unpublished memoir by a female German teacher who moves to Auschwitz to teach German kids in what is

• 46:08Speaker 02

  To become a German city in the east. And she describes how she comes home on time from school and finds that her desk is covered in some kind of fine dust which has flown in through the windows. And her landlady tells her that this is human ash which has blown over from the concentration camp. So there is even more known about Auschwitz in the immediate vicinity. And those local Germans who lived here had a general idea, at least, of what was going on inside the camp.

• 46:45Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about Auschwitz, more coming up.

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• 48:12Speaker 03

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• 48:26Dan Snow?

  Was it too difficult to intervene? I mean Churchill talks about his decision not to just bomb the camp. How has the debate sort of developed since the war on what the Allies could or could not have done earlier?

• 48:37Speaker 02

  I think by the summer 1944 or so Birkenau was certainly in reach of Allied planes and there are voices in the US of Jewish organisations who try to push the Allies or persuade the Allies into bombing the train tracks. In the end, these calls are not heeded because the primary focus of the military is on winning the war. That incidentally does not mean that no bombs ever fall on Auschwitz.

• 49:14Speaker 02

  There are several raids by US bombers, but they do not target the facilities, the infrastructure of the Holocaust. They target the huge IG Farm factory in Monovitz where the Germans want to produce synthetic fuel and rubber and this is seen as a prime target for the Allies. So there are bombing raids, big bombing raids in August and then September 1944 where some stray bombs fall on parts of the camp itself and kill a number of prisoners.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Had some of these bombs stray just a little bit further, the casualties would have been much, much, much higher. What that shows, of course, is that in an age where you do not have precision bombing, the risks for the prisoner population also were incredibly high.

• 50:13Dan Snow?

  In the end Auschwitz would be liberated by the advancing Red Army, but there was more horrors in store for the prisoner population there even after the crematoria were turned off, weren't there? I mean, as the Soviets approached, what happened to the inmates?

• 50:31Speaker 02

  Well, for the prisoners, this is a time of almost unbearable tension because the closer the Allies come, the closer the Soviet Army moves towards Auschwitz. And prisoners know, at least broadly, about what is happening. They hear rumours. Some prisoners are able to look at Nazi newspapers lying around in the camps. Some overhear conversations by S S guards or they listen in to German radio. So there is general knowledge of how the front is moving. And the closer the Red Army comes, the more nervous the prisoners become because they don't know what will happen. Are they going to be liberated in the camps? Is the S S going to kill them all?

• 51:16Speaker 02

  There are rumours that the S S is going to murder all the prisoners. Or is the S S going to move all of them away? None of this is clear. At the same time, the S S is beginning to start thinking and planning and then implementing the evacuation of Auschwitz. Auschwitz is the biggest S S camp and the S S is determined that nothing of value, nothing that could be of use, is going to be left behind. So they start forcing prisoners to dismantle buildings, to destroy buildings. Right at the end, just before the Soviets arrive,

• 51:56Speaker 02

  they burn the huge warehouses where the remaining belongings of murdered Jews are stored. Documents are burned. There's a whole bonfire of evidence. The great majority of prisoner photographs of mugshots are burned. This goes on for weeks in advance of the actual liberation. The S S also forces...

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Prisoners from the Zonderkomende to dig up some of these pits filled with ashes and other human remains, to scatter them in a nearby river and thus somehow try to cover up the evidence of mass murder. The SS also tries to salvage whatever it can still find. SS men officially cannot say that the war is going to be lost and they have to at least publicly convince the belief that just somehow Germany is going to turn around the war. So anything that could still be of use is being shipped or the SS tries to ship it to other camps and other sites.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  This includes building materials, it includes clothing, it includes the X-ray machine that had been used in sterilization experiments and it includes parts of the crematoria and the gas chambers in the canal. So some parts of these are dismantled. As prisoners do this, they find valuables which the doomed had hidden in the gas chambers just before the SS threw the cyclone B pellets inside. And these parts then of the gas chambers in crematoria are packed up and shipped to a secret site near the Mauthausen concentration camp and the aim is to rebuild at least,

• 53:47Speaker 02

  I think, two of those crematoria here. So goods are shipped out, buildings are destroyed or dismantled and prisoners are also taken out of the camp, sent elsewhere. And this already starts in the second half of 1944. Tens of thousands of Auschwitz prisoners are moved out in the second half of 1944, in autumn 1944. One of these is Anne Frank. She'd been deported with her family on the last major deportation train from the Netherlands to Auschwitz. Birkenau in September 1944.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  And is then sent to Bergen-Belsen on these trains going out of Birkenau in November nineteen forty four. You've got to imagine that for for the greatest part at least of the life of Birkenau, this is a place where prisoners are arriving and never leave. And now, in the second half of nineteen forty four, tens of thousands of prisoners are moved out of Birkenau to other concentration camps. And the climax of this then comes in January forty five. The Soviet troops are only a couple of weeks away from arriving in Auschwitz.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  And in mid-January forty five, the SS begins to move the great majority of prisoners outside, forces them on death marches, on seemingly endless marches through the frozen fields and streets of occupied Poland. And thousands of prisoners die during these marches, either from the cold, from hunger, from disease. Anybody who cannot keep up with the column is shot by the SS and dumped on the side of the road. Those who survive these endless marches are then often forced into open freight trains

• 55:52Speaker 02

  and transported through the wintry landscape of what is left of Nazi Germany into remaining concentration camps like Buchenwald, like Mauthausen, like Ravensbrück.

• 56:04Dan Snow?

  What does Auschwitz look like when the Soviets capture it, when the Soviets liberate it in late January nineteen forty five?

• 56:14Speaker 02

  But nothing like it would have done just a few months earlier. As I said, a lot of the infrastructure of the camp has been destroyed or dismantled, and there's only a very small proportion of prisoners left as well. In summer nineteen forty four, there are more than a hundred thousand prisoners in the Auschwitz complex. When the Soviet troops arrive on the twenty Seventh of January nineteen forty five, less than ten thousand survivors are still in Auschwitz. And a number of them are liberated only to then die within the first days or weeks after.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  I found a recently found a or looked at a ledger kept of surviving prisoners. At the time, you have their names there and their dates of birth, and often you also have their date of death in there. It is heartbreaking to see that they only survived the SS and their camps for a few days or a few weeks at best.

• 57:17Dan Snow?

  Yes, and sometimes they ate food that their system was incapable of digesting at that point, such as their state of weariness and degeneration, and that food would kill them. The stories I get told by the survivors, some of the most tragic episodes, chapters of the stories you're told, aren't they?

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Yes, and I think it's worth bearing this in mind. I mean, you know, sometimes there is a temptation maybe to see this as some kind of happy end to a terrible story, and it is not that. The survivors, even those few overall prisoners who survive, of course, carry the trauma, the marks of the camp with them for the rest of their lives. Those who survive are far more likely to survive after months and months of suffering in other camps than in Auschwitz itself. More Auschwitz prisoners survive Auschwitz elsewhere. In other words, the end of Auschwitz isn't the end of suffering, and it isn't the end of the concentration camps.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  In early April nineteen forty five, you still have more than five hundred thousand prisoners in SS concentration camps and the remaining camps like Dachau, like Buchenwald, like Mauthausen. And a good number of them are survivors of Auschwitz. They survived the camp, they survived the death marches and the transports, and very often they then perished in these remaining camps. Eli Wiesel writes about the death of his father, Schlomo, in Buchenwald and only days after they made it to Buchenwald following the death

• 58:56Speaker 02

  march and the train transport. So this isn't a story that somehow ends with the liberation of Auschwitz. It is really only the victory of the Allies and the total defeat of Germany that puts an end to the killings and the camps and the suffering.

• 59:14Dan Snow?

  As you lay out in your excellent prize winning book KL, History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. Nicholas Wachsmann, thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast on this important anniversary.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, Dan.

• 59:36Dan Snow?

  Well, thank you very much for listening to that podcast, folks. Thank you very much, in particular to my guest, Nicholas Wachsmann. I hope this episode has helped you understand a little bit better how these atrocities were carried out. But one thing that remains an enduring mystery is how ordinary people could have taken part in such horror, knowing full well what was happening. These are the people that oversaw and facilitated and participated and planned the murder of millions of people. Men and women who lived otherwise, ordinary lives, whose existence at that point had been unremarkable. People like you and me.

• 1:00:20Dan Snow?

  In the podcast you've listened to, you heard mention of Rudolf Hus, who was the commandant of Auschwitz. He oversaw the deaths of over 3 million people at the Nazi killing complex. It's been calculated that he is, as a result, one of the most, if not the most prolific mass murderer in human history. In our episode on Friday, we will be hearing his story. And we'll learn about the concept, the idea articulated by the philosopher Hannah Arendt. We'll talk about the banality of evil.

• 1:00:55Dan Snow?

  As you listen to this, I am in Poland for Holocaust Memorial Day, visiting Auschwitz on the day, eighty years on, on which it was liberated by the Red Army. And I'm also gonna be getting special access to the house where Horst lived, where he enjoyed what was described as an idyllic family life. With his children, his wife, sprawling gardens. He read to his kids, they ate well, it was a happy time for them. Just over the wall, from Auschwitz, from the camp where he oversaw the gassing of hundreds of thousands of people. And then, after a day's work, he went home for dinner with his wife and kids.

• 1:01:36Dan Snow?

  This is the first time visitors are allowed into the house, which is being opened by the Counter Extremism Project. And they've just bought the property and they'll be turning it into a space for exhibitions about fighting extremism. But before they make any changes, History Hit has been invited to see the house, which is remarkably, as you'll hear, it's still very much as it was when Horst and his family lived there. There are artefacts from the Holocaust period found in hidden spaces in the house just weeks ago. So join me on Friday to learn more about Horst and his house, where evil resided, but it looked like any other happy family. And we're also gonna learn a little bit about what's being done to fight extremism in the present day. Just hit follow in your podcast player.

• 1:02:21Dan Snow?

  Let's get Friday's episode. See you then.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

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• 1:03:39Dan Snow?

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• 1:04:55Dan Snow?

  The.