Each year in late January, the eyes of the world turn to Auschwitz-Birkenau. (Actually, Prague and Terezin might also be hoping to attract some interest this year, but that’s an altogether different story…). It’s hard to ignore the fact that “Auschwitz” is one of the most recognizable Polish town names worldwide.
And here we run into a problem right away, one that involves the facts of the Second World War, and something that goes by the name of “politics of history” (quite an unfortunate term). And this gets even more complicated by the sensitivity of the Polish people to everything related to the last war, particularly the Holocaust. So, is “Auschwitz” the name of a Polish town? Unfortunately yes, except that it’s a German name of the Polish town of Oswiecim, given to it after a section of what before the war was south-western Poland was incorporated into the German Reich.
Permit me a short digression here. Irrespective of our origins and beliefs, we have all, historians included, gotten used to using the popular, albeit superficial and confusing, term “Third Reich.” The problem is that such a state never existed, any more than the “Weimar Republic” or the “Second Polish Republic” did. We use those customary names because they may be shortcuts for thoughts, replacing phrases that describe a political regime and its period in history. For the sake of clarity, I think that we should make a point of not sanctioning Hitler’s imaginary “Third Reich” in our language. Officially, between 1871-1945 the German state was called Deutsches Reich, or German Reich.* For this reason, I think that it’s this name that should be put on WWII maps.
October 26, 1939. Proclamation of Governor-General H. Frank tasked by A. Hitler with governing the occupied part of Poland named Generalgouvernement für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete.
Getting back to Oswiecim: having been annexed to Germany in the autumn of 1939, the town (renamed Auschwitz) became a part of theRegierungsbezirk Kattowitz (originally, this district lay within the Provinz Schlesien and, from January 1941,Provinz Oberschlesien). The Auschwitz population was largely a Polish-Jewish mix, yet for almost six years the town itself remained German; it was incorporated (true, in violation of international law) into the German state and managed by German authorities; and its governing law was basically identical to that in Berlin, and Bavarian or Westphalian cities.
In May 1940, a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners was established in the town of Auschwitz. On June 14 that year, the first transport of 728 men was sent to the camp. German criminal prisoners served as prisoner functionaries (or Kapos). As was earlier the case with the KL Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, KL Auschwitz was supervised by the SS Concentration Camps Inspectorate.
The decision to expand the Konzentrationslager Auschwitz coincided with the decision that the Endlösung der Judenfrageshould take the form of physical annihilation of the European Jews, instead of mass displacements or establishing a “Jewish reserve” in the General Government’s Lublin District (near Nisko).
On 29 July 1941, Rudolf Höss, commandant of KL Auschwitz, held a secret conversation with SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, during which he was informed about the decision to exterminate Jews on a mass scale. He was also given four weeks to develop construction plans for a separate camp in the vicinity of KL Auschwitz, which was to function as a camp of instant death.**
Two days later,Herman Göring—who was using the high-sounding title of Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches—in an official letter to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Security Police and Security Service (and one of the major figures at the Reich Security Main Office, RSHA), ordered him to oversee all that had to do with organisation, assigning tasks and financing related to the “comprehensive solution of the Jewish question in Germany’s European sphere of influence.” He also demanded a “comprehensive plan of organisation, tasks and financial resources needed to proceed with the final solution of the Jewish question” (quoted after D. Czech,Kalendarz wydarzeń w KL Auschwitz, Wydawnictwo Państwowego Muzeum w Oświęcimiu-Brzezince, 1992, p. 76f.).
Towards the end of November 1941 Höss took part in a Berlin conference organised by Adolf Eichmann, chief of the IV B4 RSHA section (Judenreferat). One of the conference’s aims was to discuss the logistics of exterminating the Jewish people, among other things, how to arrange for special train transports and adjust their schedules. At the turn of August and September 1941, the Zyklon-B gas (Prussic acid) was for the first time used to kill inmates in the so-called KL Auschwitz Main Camp (Stammlager). Several hundred Soviet prisoners of war were killed in this way in the cellars of block no. 11. In November of the same year, a Central Construction Office of the Auschwitz Waffen-SS and Police was set up, charged with the task of expanding the Auschwitz I camp and building another one 3 km off in Brzezinka (Auschwitz II-Birkenau). The other camp was designed to hold around 100,000 Soviet POWs (Kriegsgefangenenlager).
In the early spring of 1942, first Jewish transports (from Upper Silesia) started to arrive at Birkenau to be murdered with Zyklon-B in two makeshift chambers set up in the former houses of Poles who had been expelled from the village of Brzezinka (the so-called “little white house” and “little red house”). Thus started the process of extermination, which was continuously “modernized” and led to the murder of around 960,000 Jews from all over Europe; among them approximately 300,000 from Poland. A further 150,000 victims who were murdered at the camp were Poles and other Slavs, Sinti and Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.
The history of Auschwitz-Birkenau has become part of the history of Poland. There’s no escaping it. The concentration and death camps have left their mark on the history of 20th century Poland and on our life today, which is a fact beyond our control. Yet the German context of crimes that were perpetrated at those places may not be reduced to an embarrassing footnote. And the antisemitism unfortunately popular with a considerable section of Polish society (before, during and after WWII), has nothing to do with that context, which some foreign commentators choose to ignore. It’s hard to tell whether it’s down to the negative stereotypes about the Polish people or a lack of knowledge… Nevertheless, let everybody atone for their own sins, not their neighbours’. As the Polish nation, we have our fair share of extremely painful and extremely difficult issues that our collective memory has been grappling with. There’s no need for us to shoulder the burden of someone else’s guilt… Therefore we can never be precise enough: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kulmhof, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek—these were all German Nazi camps. Occupied Polish soil, often Polish place names—but German crimes. That’s all there is to it.
I’ll leave Jedwabne, Wasosz and the navy-blue police for some other time.
* Alternatively,Großdeutsches Reich in 1943-1945.
** NB, on the same day, in revenge for the escape of a Polish inmate, the camp commandant picked ten others to be starved to death; Father Maksymilian Maria Kolbe volunteered to take the place of one of the condemned.
Sebastian Rejak
The author is the Special Envoy of the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs for Relations with the Jewish Diaspora.
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Photo-Auschwitz-Birkenau, source: http://euromaidanpress.com/