 Starring: Samuel West (narrator)
Director: Laurence Rees
Year Of Release: 2005
Plot: This six-part documentary looks at the full history of Auschwitz, from its beginnings as an Austrian military barracks, through to being chosen as a camp for prisoners and POWs, before it was massively expanded and the Birkenau camp built, when it morphed into a largely Jewish concentration camp and the worst factory of death in human history. |
Although it doesn’t make for happy viewing, this BBC documentary series really should be seen by as many people as possible. While most people know the basics of the Holocaust and that six million Jews were killed by the Nazis, this series takes you deep into mechanics of what happened, and reveals that an event that already seems horrifying on an unimaginable level is even more disturbing when you realise what it took to pull off such a gargantuan crime.
What the series reveals for me is the difference between knowing and understanding. I know what happened in the concentration camps, at least on a basic level, and I know what the Nazis did, but I find it impossible to understand it. I simply can’t get my head round how you can get into the mindset where you believe killing millions of people is okay.
I know on an intellectual level the arguments about people being under orders, and that propaganda had demonised the Jews to the point where most Nazis saw them as sub-human, but I still find it impossible to put myself mentally in that position, to truly understand how something like this could take place. In fact I find it rather disturbing that these acts were committed by other human beings, yet it seems so alien to me that I literally cannot wrap my head around how the Nazis could get to the point where they did what they did, and that nobody involved even seemed to wonder whether they were doing something wrong.
In Auschwitz, The Nazis and the Final Solution, they talk to a man who was involved in rounding up Polish Jews early on in the war. Even 70 years on he can’t give up his hatred of the Jews. He says he knows the way he feels is wrong and unjust, but he simply can’t feel any other way. To me that seems unfathomable, that despite his knowledge of what happened and that he knows he’s utterly wrong, the unadulterated hatred of a group of people that was instilled in him as a child is something he still cannot get over. How can that be?
It’s the same with many of the former Nazis that they interview, who seem to have little guilt about what happened. This appears to be because when they were involved in the genocide, they didn’t even have the slightest flutter that they were doing anything wrong, so that even though they would never do it again and wouldn’t want to, it’s difficult for them to genuinely feel bad about something that they and everyone around them didn’t even question at the time. They are left in the paradoxical situation that even though they now know what they did was wrong, at the time if they’d done anything else, they’d have felt they were doing the wrong thing. To our modern minds, it’s bizarre and somewhat baffling.
Likewise, when the series goes through the events that took place at Auschwitz, although nearly everything that happened there is unbelievably awful, the thing I found most shocking is the planning that went into. Most of the time when people talk about the Holocaust, it’s difficult to get past the headline number of six million people. However you can’t just go out and kill that many people without an awful lot of logistical planning.
The series takes you through the testing that was done into the best ways to kill people and dispose of the bodies. It shows how the Nazis went from shooting people, to testing out killing people in explosions and piping car exhaust fumes into a locked room, until they started using Zyklon B, which had originally been developed as a disinfectant.
The cold planning and massive machinery needed to do what the Nazis did is truly shocking. Again, it is impossible from our perspective to truly understand thousands of people building an infrastructure that turns death into an industrial process, from train tracks to get people to the camps, to constructing building where thousands of people can be killed in one go, to devising ways to dispose of the bodies. How do you get that many people into a mindset where they’re prepared to do that, and to do it casually? It makes no sense to me, but it happened, and it is truly disturbing that human nature is so malleable that one group of people can commit such an act, while to others it is almost impossible to understand how they could do it.
I once had the privilege of meeting an Auschwitz survivor, who seemed to home in on the only group of young people at a gathering in order to tell us his story. He was immensely keen to pass on his tale to future generations, so that what happened would never be forgotten. It was as harrowing a story as you might expect, although almost as bad as what happened to him in the camps was his life afterwards, where he practically became an itinerant world traveller. Despite the knowledge of what had happened in the concentration camps, he encountered hatred and anti-Semitism in several countries, before settling within a Jewish community in America. How could people from Allied nations, knowing full well what had happened in Auschwitz, still treat this man so awfully that he felt the need to traipse from country to country to escape persecution? I honestly can’t understand it, but it happened.
While in the modern age it is difficult for us to understand how something like this could come about, it is important that we don’t stop trying to get our heads around it. We see today with things like suicide bombings and extremism a tendency not to try and understand but to instead find easy answers that bolster our viewpoint while not even attempting to comprehend how others could get to the point where they feel strapping a bomb to themselves is the right thing to do. We end up with people saying things like it’s because the extremists hate freedom, which is an easy answer, but doesn’t actually make a lot of sense. How can we hope find a solution to the problem and change the way these people feel, if we can’t even try to understand it?
We need to look at the Holocaust not just as a terrible event, but as a reminder that human beings are capable of convincing themselves of things that seem unfathomable to others. Perhaps most disturbing of all is that we should never forget that had we been living in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, there’s no guarantee that we wouldn’t have been happy to be complicit in genocide. We may like to think we’d have stood up against what was happening, but the truth it we probably wouldn’t have even considered it was something wrong, which is a powerful reminder to always question our beliefs.
Auschwitz is not just a story of the past, but a haunting reminder of what we should always be mindful of for the future, and that we should never stop trying to understand how these things can happen, so we can watch out for the signs that would suggest they’re happening again. It may be impossible to truly get our heads around it, but even the effort to try is worthwhile.
TIM ISAAC
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