Lecture 12: Auschwitz and the Mentalities of the Murderers

1. Preliminary
   • comments on journals: learning to deal with difficult issues
   • study questions for Primo Levi book:
     • What were the factors that enabled him to survive? (How many can you come up with?)
     • Why did his tormentors/persecutors behave as they did? (different reasons for each)
   • Film tomorrow & Thu: "Escape from Sobibor," 2hrs., Girvetz 1119, 7-9pm.
2. Concentration camp system, Phases
   • Phase 1, civil war: neutralization of opposition (real and imagined)
   • Phase 2, race war: Enslavement, Extermination, Extermination through labor
   • Phase 3, chaos: panic and desperation
3. Auschwitz (book by Dwork and van Pelt: Auschwitz, 1270-present)
   • town founded 1270 by Germans; 1457 Polish; 1772 Austrian; 1880s westward immigration
   • 1890s: migrant labor for industrializing west; 1910: 315,000 seasonal agricultural workers
   • 1914: 27 brick barracks for 3000 troops; 90 wooden barracks for 9000
   • 1919 (Versailles treaty): Polish again; barracks housed refugees
   • May 1, 1940: Commandant Rudolf Höss and 30 prisoners from Sachsenhausen
   • June 14, 1940: 728 Poles; crematory with 2 "muffles" (70 corpses in 24 hrs)
   • March 1941: Himmler's visit, plans for camp at Birkenau, "ethnic cleanising" of region
   • June 22, 1941: invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa)
     • Labor to prepare infrastructure for German colonization: 100,000 Soviet POWs
     • Birkenau: 500->744 per barrack (portable horse stables)
     • "toilet" facilities: 2 barracks with 400 holes each for 12,000 inmates (15 persons/hole)
   • Sept. 1941: test gassing with Prussic acid "Cyclon B" in Auschwitz I (6 muffles: ca. 400/day)
   • 13 October 1941: crematorium designer Prüfer, morgues with slides for corpses vs. stairs for people
   • early 1942: test gassing in two retrofitted cottages from Birkenau village
   • July/Aug. 1942: 4 new crematoria with gas chambers
4. Film clip (14 mins.): "Nazi Designers of Death" (1995): Mar. 41 Himmler visit to Oct. 41 plans
5. The Mentalities of the Murderers (see textbook pp. 183-91, also Reader 10, 11, 18)
   • Crude prejudice: the "justification" for mass murder (antisemitism)
   • Cold cult of professionalism: medical "experimenters" (Policeman Stangl, Dr. Kremer, Mennecke)
     Book on Stangl: Gitta Sereny, Into that Darkness
   • Dehumanization of the victims (ghettoization, excrutiating train journeys)
   • The moral blindness of leadership (Himmler, "Papa" Trapp)
     opportunism/careerism: a question of values
   • Obedience to higher authority (Höss, Milgram experiments)