Understanding the Nazis: Part 3

Warning: this post is quite gruesome, and rich with disturbing mental images. It was inspired by my visit to Auschwitz.

Yesterday I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau near Krakow, and witnessed the pictures of horror up close and personal. Historically, Auschwitz was the culmination of how bad things got, probably a testament to the most heinous crimes ever committed on this planet.
One of the things that struck me the most was the exhibition of the mountain of hair, that went on and on. All of the hair was original from the victims, discolored into a nameless mixture. The hair was meant to be used in textile manufacturing. There was another mountain, this time of suitcases that the Jews brought with them thinking they had a new life ahead of them. The suitcases were marked with names, and dates of birth. All of the suitcases were emptied, sorted, accounted for meticulously, and used to enrich the perpetrators, in a systematic way. There was no negligence here. Everything was done with thoroughness, meticulousness and genuine disregard for human life.

Even though just about everyone in German society at that time was implicit in the crime, not everyone participated to the same degree or had the same level of exposure to the suffering. There were people who rounded Jews up and hoarded them on trains, there were people who shaved their heads and took away everything they had, there were people who did the sorting of their belongings. They all knew the fate they were sending the Jews to, and yet they did not have to be exposed to the suffering up close. There were the people who sorted the Jews left and right - who would be sent directly to the gas chambers and who would be sentenced to a more slow death from exhaustion, starvation and brutality. There were the people who dropped poisoned gas into the gas chambers and heard the screams of the victims (or tried not to, as they typically turned on loud music or engines to drown the sounds). So there we see a tiny trace of humanity, as little as the Nazis cared about the Jews, they were not entirely immune to the horrors going on around them, and tried to dissociate themselves from the situation as much as possible, so they wouldn't have to deal with it as directly. Or was this trace of humanity called disgust? It's hard to say, there may be a fine line there.

The cleanup of the piles of corpses was outsourced to the prisoners themselves, again, so the Germans wouldn't have to. Then comes the starvation, and the humiliation. The Nazi officers outsourced the worst of that too. The most direct and brutal atrocities, that were up close and personal were committed by the kapos, true criminals, with background in violent gangs, for whom brutality was second nature. In any other situation, they would have been in prison by themselves. In the concentration camps, those bastards were put in charge of the other prisoners. They were given batons, and were "responsible" for distribution of food. It is directly at the hands of the kapos that the most inhumane treatment took place. They did the "dirty work" of torture and humiliation that most of the SS personnel couldn't be bothered to do, there were next-to-last on the "food chain", and could be turned into victims at any time. This was the last and most brutal link in the chain of the "final solution".

The typical prisoner in Auschwitz, who didn't go directly to the gas chambers, lived between a few weeks and a few months. Something to think about.