Jan. 27 marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of parts of Auschwitz, the most notorious of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. It was located in an area of Nazi-occupied Poland annexed into the Third Reich.
Auschwitz was not a single camp, but rather a complex of more than 40 sub-camps called Auschwitz-Birkenau which, together, formed only a portion Germany’s enormous concentration camp system of combined extermination, forced labor and prison camps, collection and transit points. Besides Auschwitz or perhaps Dachau, the earliest camp that specialized in political prisoners, you have never heard of most of them.
Auschwitz-Birkenau’s claim to infamy comes from its death toll, more than 1 million people in less than five years of operation, murder on an industrialized scale. However, its extermination operation was nowhere near the Nazi’s most “productive.” That dishonor probably belongs to the Treblinka extermination camp, where approximately 850,000 humans were destroyed in less than 18 months.
In the West, the historical focus of the system’s atrocities revolves around the Holocaust, commonly considered the systematic murder of almost 6 million Jews – nearly 80 percent of Europe’s Jewish population – but they were hardly the only victims. According to Wikipedia’s footnoted totals other victims included, “two to three million Soviet POWs…, two million non-Jewish ethnic Poles…, 90,000-220,000 Romani, 270,000 mentally and physically disabled killed in Germany’s eugenics program, 80,000–200,000 Freemasons, 20,000–25,000 Slovenes, 5,000–15,000 homosexuals, 2,500–5,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses and 7,000 Spanish Republicans, bringing the death toll to around 11 million.”
In the case of the Soviet POWs the Nazis let starvation and disease do much of the work for them, especially in the early part of the war when they captured a large number of combatants.
As a young Jew, the suffering of those other groups never resonated with me; I was always focused on the plight of “my people.” When I saw the films or heard the testimony about the Holocaust a feeling went through me that I could not put into words and still can’t to this day. Then I met my wife whose father spent the entire war in Japanese POW/slave-labor camps only to die as a result of his maltreatment shortly after being repatriated. Although I have the greatest sympathy for her and her family, I came to realize that you can never walk in someone else’s shoes. She could never feel the depth of what I feel about the Holocaust and I could never feel the depth of what she feels about the frequent atrocities committed by the Japanese.
All these events and many other situations, continents and sometimes decades apart, had one thing in common, the perpetrators saw their helpless mass of victims as less than human and treated them accordingly. That was the critical step that made mass murder possible. It was not anger, fear, or even revenge; it was the philosophy of dehumanization that unlocked the worst of mankind.
I am no pacifist, there are those, like the dedicated Nazis, who must be killed if free societies are to survive, but during those violent confrontations the innocent often suffer with the guilty; it’s when we forget that last part that we risk losing our own humanity.