All over the world, Auschwitz has become a symbol of terror, genocide, and the Holocaust. It was established by the Nazis in 1940, in the suburbs of the city of Oswiecim which, like other parts of Poland, was occupied by the Germans during the Second World War. The name of the city of Oswiecim was changed to Auschwitz, which became the name of the camp as well.
Over the following years, the camp was expanded and consisted of three main parts: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz. It also had over 40 sub-camps. At first, Poles were imprisoned and died in the camp. Afterwards, Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, and prisoners of other nationalities were also incarcerated there. Beginning in 1942, the camp became the site of the greatest mass murder in the history of humanity, which was committed against the European Jews as part of Hitler's plan for the complete destruction of that people. The majority of the Jewish men, women and children deported to Auschwitz were sent to their deaths in the Birkenau gas chambers immediately after arrival. At the end of the war, in an effort to remove the traces of the crimes they had committed, the SS began dismantling and razing the gas chambers, crematoria, and other buildings, as well as burning documents.
Prisoners capable of marching were evacuated into the depths of the Reich. Those who remained behind in the camp were liberated by Red Army soldiers on January 27, 1945. A July 2, 1947 act of the Polish parliament established the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the grounds of the two extant parts of the camp, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
On August 8, 1938, just a few weeks after the Nazi occupation of Austria, prisoners from the Dachau, concentration camp near Munich, were transferred to the Austrian town of Mauthausen, near Linz.
They were brought to the rock quarry there, known as the "Wiener Graben", where they began to build the granite fortress-prison of the main camp, mostly with their blood, bodies, bare hands and backs. It was known as the “mother camp” for all of Austria, comprising some 49 sub-camps. Between Aug. 8, 1938 and May 5, 1945, about 195, 000 persons, men and women, were forced into these camps. Most of the people were imprisoned under the Nazi “protective custody” laws, that is, they were consider dangerous to the Third Reich of Germany and Austria, and therefore, these two nations, now joined, had to be “protected” from these people because of their racial origin, nationality, political affiliation or religious belief. It should be noted that Austria contributed more volunteers for the SS, per capita , than did Germany.
The Mauthausen camp was one of the most infamous in the entire Nazi alternate universe of human destruction. Many people, most of whom were innocent of any crimes, were tortured to death in its rock quarry, and in the tunnels of Mauthausen-Gusen, the most infamous of the sub-camps. The policy of death through work was instituted by Chief of SS, Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler. Prisoners were to be given only the most primitive tools, and also, whenever possible, they were to work with their bare hands. This policy was known as “Primitivbauweise”. In Mauthausen it resulted in a harsh, stone world, deprived of any human kindness and compassion. It is there today still... sitting on a small mountain-top in the astonishingly beautiful and bucolic Austrian countryside, maintained by the Austrian government.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
American newspapers and magazines reported the existence of concentration camps in early 1933, when Dachau first slammed its gate shut on a group of Communists and other political enemies of the Nazis. The camps had gained reputations for harsh and sadistic treatment of prisoners.
1937
Buchenwald was built by the Nazis as a camp for political prisoners like German Communists and Social Democrats. Between 1937-8, Jews were added as Germany's anti-Semitic campaign was set in motion. With a population of 15,000 prisoners, the camp was one of slave labor, with German Communists at the top.
August 18, 1940
Hans Frank, Nazi governor of occupied Poland, announces plans to make Cracow free of Jews, declaring, "the Jews must vanish from the face of the earth."
1941
In Alsace, France, up a winding road from the village of Natzwiller, the Nazis built a labor camp, Natzwiller-Struthof, whose inmates originally were German, and whose duties were to supply labor for building V-2 factories in man-made caves dug out of the Harz Mountains. The prisoners would live in the cold, damp tunnels as they built them.
1943
Natzwiller-Struthof was expanded by the Nazis with the installation of a gas chamber and improved crematory for the killing of Jews, Gypsies, and captured Resistance fighters from Holland, Belgium, and France. Under Paragraph 175 of the German legal code, male homosexuality was punished by imprisonment, but not female lesbianism. After 1943, male homosexuals were forced to wear a pink trangle and were sent to the death camps. The Americans did not repeal Paragraph 175 and sent homosexual inmates liberated from the camps to other prisons.
July 1944
Red Army soldiers discovered the abandoned Majdanek extermination camp near Lublin, in Poland.
September 1944
American reporters visited Lublin, Poland, and stories with pictures of a warehouse bursting with 800,000 shoes that had once belonged to Nazi victims were widely published.
On This Date
Natzwiller was evacuated by the SS as Allied troops approached.
November 1944
The French Army found Natzwiller, the first major Nazi concentration camp to be uncovered in the West.
December 5, 1944
The New York Times's Milton Bracker toured the abandoned site of the Natzwiller concentration camp, explaining, "It might have been a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, from the winding road to the bald hilltop, the sturdy green barrack buildings looked exactly like those that housed forestry trainees in the United States during the early New Deal."
Members of the Free French showed Bracker a small dark room with almost fifty S-shaped hooks suspended from metal rods on the ceiling. Prisoners hung from the hooks by their bound wrists before Zyklon-B gas was pumped into the room to kill them. A dissection room, with an autopsy table , and a small storage room crammed with burial urns was also discovered. Reportedly 16,000 persons had come as prisoners to Natzwiller between late 1941 and the evacuation in the summer of 1944, 4,000 perished.
December 9, 1944
Americans Colonel Paul Kirk and Lt. Colonel Edward j. Gully of the American Sixth Army Group arrived to inspect Natzwiller. They duly reported their findings: a disinfestation unit, a large pile of human hair, a gas chamber, an incinerator room with equipment intended for the burning of human bodies, a cell room and an autopsy room.
After their first-hand look and detailed report to war crimes investigators, they retained a certain measure of disbelief, or "double vision" as Bracker described it. The correlation between the remains of Natzwiller and millions dead could not be grasped even on personal inspection.
This "double vision" is as much a story as the discovery of the camp itself. "Double vision" was typical of many American officers in France, who infuriated local populations by doubting and sometimes even scoffing at stories of German inhumanity.
"Double vision" - in WWI false propaganda about German atrocities was widely reported. Many remembered this and thought perhaps the reports coming from Europe to the United States were false too. However, Bracker attributes the disbelief to simply the inability to conceive the magnitude and detail of the horror.
April 5, 1945
In search of secret Nazi communications along the Autobahn, units of the American Fourth Armored Division of the Third Army moved on Gotha and Ohrdruf, discovering the first of the camps containing prisoners and corpses to be uncovered by American armies. 10,000 men had lived and slaved at Ohrdruf. Near the end, the SS had marched the prisoners to other camps, known as death marches, or killed them.
Ohrdruf was a minor sub-camp of Buchenwald, and on the edge of the camp was a gigantic pit, where the Nazi's had stacked bodies and wood and burned them.
Ohrdruf had actually been discovered by accident. After the Americans had taken the town where part of the communications center was located, reconnoitering troops found the main gate to the camp just over the crest of a small hill. Corpses in striped uniforms were found right inside the gate. Some found were alive, others long since dead. One man greeted the first American soldiers, as he gave them a tour, a Polish prisoner came up to him, and in full sight of the Americans, hit him with a piece of lumber and stabbed him to death. The dead man had been a guard parading as a prisoner.
Ohrdruf is significant as the first camp that contained both the starved, frail bodies of hundreds and the prisoners who had managed to survive. The revelation of the horror, the mutually exclusive desires to remember and to forget, would serve to mark the loss of innocence of the entire world.
April 11, 1945
North of Ohrdruf, near the town of Nordhausen, the American Timberwolf Division came upon 3,000 corpses and more than seven hundred barely surviving inmates. Both living and dead lay in two double-decker barracks, piled three to a bunk. The rooms reeked of death and excrement. Victims of starvation and tuberculosis, the prisoners had also suffered from American bombing of the V-2 factories just one week before.
Fred Bohm, an Austrian-born American soldier who helped liberate Nordhausen described that his fellow American G.I.'s "had no particular feeling for fighting the Germans. They also thought that any stories they had read in the paper, or that I had told them out of first- hand experience, were either not true or at least exaggerated. And it did not sink in, what this was all about, until we got into Nordhausen."
History of The Holocaust (The Holocaust Museum)
The disbelief of Americans in general, and American soldiers specifically, exemplifies the "double vision" of the human psyche, when one man is forced to face the evidence of torture inflicted on another, only to realize his own helplessness, consequently he represses all emotion, all senses, he becomes numb.
On this date
American Combat Team 9 of the 9th Armored Infantry Battalion, Sixth Armored Division, captured the town of Hottelstedt. 50 Russian prisoners emerged from the woods and said they were from Buchenwald just to the southeast. Buchenwald had 30,000 prisoners in a pyramid of power, with German Communists at the top and living in the main barracks, and Jews and Gypsies at the bottom, living on the outskirts, in Little Camp, as assortment of barns. Buchenwald barrack prisoners were reasonably healthy-looking and ready to assist in administering food.
Little Camp was a nightmare with 1,000 to 1,200 prisoners in a space meant for 450. In Germany in Defeat, Percy Knauth described Little Camp's prisoners as, "emaciated beyond all imagination or description. Their legs and arms were sticks with huge bulging joints, and their loins were fouled by their own excrement. Their eyes were sunk so deep that they looked blind. If they moved at all, it was with a crawling slowness that made them look like huge, lethargic spiders. Many just lay in their bunks as if dead."
The smell of Little Camp, the smell emanating from discarded, decaying flesh, burning bodies, and an open concrete ditch that serviced as the latrine, was indescribable. Even after liberation, twenty prisoners in each Little Camp block died a day. They were gnomes, sticklike figures with sunken eyes who would hobble forward to cry and yell at the sight of their liberators.
April 12, 1945
Generals George Patton, Omar Bradley,and Dwight Eisenhower arrived in Ohrdruf. They saw more than 3,200 naked, emaciated bodies that had been flung into shallow graves. Eisenhower insisted on seeing the entire camp: a shed piled to the ceiling with bodies, various torture devices, and a butcher's block used for smashing gold ngs from the mouths of the dead. Patton became physically ill behind the barracks. Eisenhower felt that it was necessary for his troops to see for themselves, and the world to know about the conditions at Ohrdruf. The day ended with news that Roosevelt had died.
Many American soldiers did not know what they were fighting for. Eisenhower realized that it was imperative for the soldiers to at least understand what they were fighting against. He wanted the world to know of the conditions at Ohrdruf. His message to Washington read:
"We are constantly finding German camps in which they have placed political prisoners where unspeakable conditions exist. From my own personal observation, I can state unequivocally that all written statements up to now do not paint the full horrors."
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
The Landscape of Place and Memory:
In February, 1942, three months after Pearl Harbor, the United States took unprecedented action directed at its own population. Executive Order 9066 and Civilian Exclusion Order 5 decreed that over 120,000 Japanese Americans be removed from their homes in the "western defense zone" of the United States, and incarcerated in ten "internment" camps, which were located in isolated areas of Utah, Montana, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, and Idaho. These ten camps functioned as prison cities, with populations of 10,000 to 18,000 people in each camp.
With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Americans in America were no longer seen by other Americans as industrious, immigrant neighbors but were transformed into enemy aliens overnight. There were no trials, no hearings to prove innocence or guilt. They were assumed to be the enemy and made prisoners, indefinitely incarcerated because of their race. Successful Japanese-Americans were informed that, according to Civilian Exclusion Order 5, they were required to liquidate all property, including homes, real estate, business holdings, and anything else that they could not carry themselves into the prison camps.
They lost their homes, property, and communities. Families were separated. After the war there was a long silence because of their shame and guilt, not unlike the victims of the holocaust.
The work "American concentration camps" is about a collective memory of the camps that "interned" 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II without trial. Its memories are about the reconstruction of that time and space fifty years later. It is about transition of the immigrant Japanese American people caught between two countries at war; people caught without a country that would claim them as their own. It is about their collective voices and memories of that displacement, and it is about the quiet silence that surrounds the land, those prison cities, and that time.
Almost fifty years later, Presidents Clinton and Reagan have issued letters of apology to the camp survivors that are still living. Collective voices now reach beneath the surface of the stereotypical Japanese American image of passive acceptance, "gamman" ("endurance"), "shikata ga nai" ("it cannot be helped"), and survival. Their voices call out beyond anger and memory.
The panopticon:
The French theorist Michel Foucault noted that nineteenth century prison architectural plans were often based on the panopticon, where one prison guard can see all of the prisoners in their separate cells. Such a space exudes hierarchy and control. These photographs of the concentration camps are about a mapping of space. The viewer can instantly see a 360 degree panoramic view which would otherwise circle around her, thus the viewer becomes both prisoner and guard within the photograph's memory. The camera's eye records a panoptic space, an impossible two-dimensional space composed of overlapping cubist images. From over 100 images, sequential fragments make up one panoramic photo collage, extended and stretched like a warped shoji screen. They present the gestalt of looking at many fractured images and seeing a unified whole. These photographs confront the viewer with the beauty of the natural landscape and ironically with the history and memory of the land.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
Nazi medical experiments: a prisoner is submerged in a tank filled with cold water. The goal of this type of experiments was to check how long German pilots, who had to parachute into the cold north sea, would survive. Different types of clothing were tested, as well as different methods for reviving the experimental subjects who survived.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
He was a doctor at the Auschwitz extermination camp. He was appointed chief doctor by Himmler. He joined other doctors (such as Koenig, Thilon, and Klein) in the task of choosing employable Jews to operate the industrial machines and sending others to the gas chambers. The selection was mostly haphazard. The inmates were paraded before Mengele, who called either "Right!" (to the work squads) or "Left!" (to the gas chambers). He promoted medical experimentation on inmates, and he took an especial interest in dwarves and twins. He supervised an operaiton by which two Gypsy children were sewn together to create artificial conjoined twins. The medical tools employed in the operation were dirty, and the children soon acquired an infection where their veins had been resected. They died of gangrene two weeks later.
Witnesses at the Frankfurt Trial told of his standing before his victims with his thumb in his pistol belt and choosing candidates for the gas chambers. When it was reported that one block was infected with lice, he solved the problem by gassing all of the 750 women assigned to it.
The only firsthand evidence on these experiments comes from a handful of survivors and from a Jewish doctor, Miklo Nysizli, who worked under Mengele as a pathologist. Mengele subjected his victims - twins and dwarves aged two and above - to clinical examinations, blood tests, X-rays, and anthropological measurements. In the case of the twins, he drew sketches of each twin, for comparison, He also injected his victims with various substances, dripping chemicals into their eyes (apparently in an attempt to change their color).
He then killed them himself by injecting chloroform into their hearts, so as to carry out comparative pathological examinations of their internal organs. Mengele's purpose, according to Dr. Nyiszli, was to establish the genetic cause for the birth of twins, in order to facilitate the formulation of a program for doubling the birth rate of the "Aryan" race. The experiments on twins affected 180 persons, adults and children.
Mengele also carried out a large number of experiments in the field of contagious diseases, (typhoid and tuberculosis) to find out how human beings of different races withstood these diseases. He used Gypsy twins for this purpose. Mengele's experiments combined scientific (perhaps even important) research with the racist and ideological aims fo the Nazi regime, which made use of government offices, scientific institutions, and concentration camps.
From the scanty information available, it appears that his research differed from the other medical experiments in that the victims' deaths were programmed into his experiments and formed a central element in them.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
Himmler, writing to SS-Oberführer Brack, on August 11, 1942, expressed an interest in sterilization experiments involving the use of x-rays (See auschwitz sterilization). In April of 1944, he received a report of the work of Dr. Horst Schumann "on the influence of X-rays on human genital glands" at Auschwitz. The report included the following statement:
"Previously you have asked Oberführer Brack to perform this work, and you supported it by providing the adequate material in the concentration camp Auschwitz. I point especially to the second part of this work, which shows that by those means castration of males is almost impossible or requires an effort which does not pay. As I have convinced myself, operative castration requires not more than 6 to 7 minutes, and therefore can be performed more reliably and quicker than castration by X-rays."
Schumann set up an X ray station at Auschwitz in 1942, in the woman's camp Bla. Here men and women were forcibly sterilized by being positioned repeatedly for several minutes between two x-ray machines, the rays aiming at their sexual organs. Most subjects died after great suffering, or were gassed immediately because the radiation burns from which they suffered rendered them unfit for work. Men's testicles were removed and sent to Breslau for histopathological examination.
The frequently following ovariotomies were performed also by the Polish prisoner, Dr. Wladyslav Dering. Dering once bet with an SS man that he could perform ten ovariotomies in an afternoon, and won his bet. Some of his victims survived. Dering was declared a war criminal but eluded justice and for a time practiced medicine in British Somaliland.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
Dr. Herta Oberhauser killed prisoners with oil and evipan injections, removed their limbs and vital organs, rubbed ground glass and sawdust into wounds. She drew a twenty-year sentence as a war criminal, but was released in 1952 and became a family doctor at Stocksee in Germany. Her license to practice medicine was revoked in 1960.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
Professor Carl Clauberg performed experiments into sterilization at both Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. This was done on Hitler's initiative, as he had been convinced by several doctors that mass sterilization could provide a powerful weapon against Germany's enemies during total war.
Clauberg injected chemical substances into wombs during normal gynocological examinations. Thousands of Jewish and Gypsy women were subjected to this treatment. Clauberg sought to answer Himmler's query about how long it would take to sterilize one thousand women, and eventually informed him that, using methods he developed, a staff of one doctor and ten assistants could do the job in a single day. The injections totally destroyed the lining membrane of the womb and seriously damaged the ovaries of the victims, which were then removed and sent to Berlin to test the effectiveness of the method.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
After Ravensbruck, she was the head of the women's camp at Auschwitz; the prisoners referred to her as 'the beast.' For her share in the selections for the gas chambers and medical experiments and for her torture of countless prisoners, she was condemned to death in 1947 as a war criminal.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
As an empolyee of IG-Farben and Leverkusen, he carried out medical experiments with different sorts of medicine at KZ Gusen. He specialized in tuberculosis and experimented in 1944 with "Ruthenol" and "Praeparat 3582" at Block No. 27 of KZ Gusen I. These were similar to his experiments at KZ Auschwitz.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
Besides his private experiments, he specialized in the production of preparations of human heads. Some of these preparations were shown in the KZ Gusen Pathological Museum. The others were sent to friends of Dr. Herbert Heim as special gifts, or were used by Heim as weights on writing desks.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
Between October, 1941, and autumn of 1943, he was Chief-Physician of the SS and the Police at Linz, Steyr, Wels and KZ Mauthausen-Gusen. He was the first to start mass-execution of ill and unfit prisoners by heart injections. So he was nicknamed "Dr. Spritzbach" (Injection Doctor) in the camps. In January of 1942, 732 Spanish inmates and 571 Soviet inmates were exterminated by heart injections at KZ Gusen Concentration Camp. In genereal, heart injections were given at KZ Gusen Camp two times a week until April of 1945. The career of Dr. Krebsbach ended at KZ Mauthausen-Gusen when he shot Josef Breitenfellner, a young man from Langenstein-Village who served in the German Army at that time and was home for vacation. Due to this crime, Dr. Krebsbach was moved from KZ Mauthausen-Gusen to KZ Warwara, where he led the selections along with the liquidation of that camp in August of 1944. Later, he worked as the Inspector for Epidemies in the occupied countires of Lettland, Estland and Lithuania. The following SS Doctors refused to give heart injections at KZ Gusen:
Dr. J. Fried
Dr. B. Adolph
Dr. K. Boehmichen
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
He carried out surgury on KZ Gusen inmates for no medical reason. To study the function of the human brain, Kiesewetter also carried out Trepanations with KZ Gusen inmates.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
05-21-2004 04:00 AM
