The Ark

Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp Colin Tatz reflects on its unique place in the history of the Holocaust.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Rachael Kohn: Most people arrived by rail, with one suitcase. Those that survived the long journey, in cattle wagons, were destined for slave labour or the gas chambers. This could be only one place: Auschwitz.

Hello, this is The Ark, and I'm Rachael Kohn. On the 60th anniversary of its liberation by the Russian Red Army, we're remembering the concentration camp that became a symbol of the Holocaust. Films, books and memorial museums, such as Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, try to convey its horror.

Historian of Genocide, Professor Colin Tatz, explains why the Nazis built Auschwitz in Poland.

Colin Tatz: Hitler realised at the time that to set up industrial death camps in Germany wouldn't have been acceptable to the German populace. And even though Hitler had enormous support form the German peoples at large, there were limits to the anti-Semitism that they could tolerate, and as far as Hitler was concerned and the Nazi elite, they were absolutely determined to continue with their Final Solution, but knew that it couldn't be carried out in Germany.

So they went to occupied Poland, found the small little town about 37 miles from Krakow, and set up in March 1940 a camp which was ostensibly for the treatment and re-education of Poles in a concentration camp, and then the following March-April 1941, Himmler ordered a second installation which is now known as Auschwitz-Birkenau to be established there, and from about February 1942, we begin to see the thousands upon thousands of truckloads of Jews being taken to this very, very secret place called Oswiecim.

Rachael Kohn: Now you mention the Final Solution, and I think many people wouldn't really know what that specifically refers to. Was it a Final Solution to the Jewish question?

Colin Tatz: Yes, indeed. The Jews Problem. It's very interesting, Rachael, that in 1936 Hitler said they will resolve the Jewish question so oder so in German, one way or another.

In 1938 after the events of Kristallnacht, which was an enormous pogrom that the Nazis instigated against Jews right across Germany, in November 1938, and about 191 synagogues were destroyed, and 30,000 Jews were rounded up, and over 100 murdered on that terrible night, which was the sort of semi-final, if you like to the Final Solution. Goering said after that event 'We will deal with the Jewish question again, so oder so, one way or another'.

Now the historians have debated whether Hitler knew what the final shape of that so oder so was going to be, and the answer is that it began to jell round about December, 1941, or perhaps a little earlier, when the mobile gas vans were employed at a place called Chelmno in Poland, where the first serious industrial size extermination events began.

Rachael Kohn: So Chelmno concentration camp was actually a death camp before Auschwitz was?

Colin Tatz: Before Auschwitz, yes.

Rachael Kohn: What other death camps were established?

Colin Tatz: The most notorious ones were the three, Sobibor in which something like 200,000 people were exterminated; Belzec in which 500,000 people were exterminated, and Treblinka, where 750,000 people were exterminated. Auschwitz accounted for 1-million people.

Rachael Kohn: And were they only Jews?

Colin Tatz: No, they weren't only Jews. About 95% were Jews. There was a small percentage of Poles, originally in Auschwitz 1, and of course there were probably 25,000 to 30,000 gypsies who were exterminated at Auschwitz.

Rachael Kohn: Auschwitz is notorious for other reasons, namely Dr Mengele and his infamous experiments.

Colin Tatz: Yes, Auschwitz has been described by several writers as another planet, and Auschwitz has become the symbol of the ultimate in evil.

It's partly to do with scale, the industrialisation of death, the by-products of death. It's to do with the fact that it was not only a death camp, it was also a concentration camp and it was also a forced labour camp. So there's Auschwitz 1 which was the original small camp, there's Auschwitz-Birkenau which is the huge camp, Auschwitz 2, and Auschwitz 3, Monowitz, is where the Buna Tyre factory was. So it's the scale of Auschwitz, it's the medical experimentation, the punishments that were carried out at Auschwitz.

It was the ultimate in barbarism. Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, has also left an autobiography called 'Commandant of Auschwitz'. When one goes to Auschwitz, you see just near the first crematorium, there is a gallows in which he was hanged within sight of his elegant home that was in the grounds of this rather beautiful little place, called Auschwitz.

There were also 7-1/2-thousand survivors of Auschwitz. There were no survivors from Belzec or Sobibor, about a handful from Treblinka. So it's because we have something like 8,000 survivors with their tattoos and their numbers intact who've lived to tell the story, including famous survivors like Elie Weisel and so on, that Auschwitz has come into the forefront amongst a pantheon of extermination sites.

Rachael Kohn: Well those tattoos, those numbers on the arm, readily identify Auschwitz survivors.

Colin Tatz: Yes, only Auschwitz inmates had those numbers, and an interesting thing about those numbers is that it was only those who were slated for work who were numbered. Those who were slated for death were not tattooed particularly, there was no point in putting numbers on people who were going to go up chimneystacks, so it was basically workers who had a function for a while at any rate, who had those numbers.

Rachael Kohn: Well Colin, much has been written to explain the phenomenon of Auschwitz, and many people have called it a product of modernity, scientific racism, industrialisation, an industrial attitude to race problems.

Colin Tatz: Yes, this is true. I think that one of the things that demarcates the Holocaust from the other major genocide of the 20th century, namely the extermination of 1-1/2-million Armenians at the hands of the Turks between 1915 and about 1922.

The methods of killing Armenians were crude in the extreme: forced death marches all the way into Syria, sending people out on marches and have brigands released from prison. Part of the price of freedom was to go and club Armenians to death, pushing people over cliffs, pouring petrol over people and burning them. I mean the most excruciatingly horrible things.

What happens is in the Nazi instance, although they adopt a lot of the techniques used by the Turks, including elementary steam gas chambers, which began in the military hospital in Istanbul in about 1915-1916, where the Nazis become inventive is the scale of industrialised killing. And that makes the Holocaust different from all other genocides of the 20th and even previous centuries, or even post-Holocaust, is the scale of industrialised death.

In other words, death could be a death in itself, murder became an end in itself in an industrial process in which the Nazis could boast that in some instances they could 'process' - this is their word, process 15,000 or 12,000 stucke (pieces) per day in 24 hours. So death becomes an industrial, mechanised end in itself, and that's what makes Auschwitz this other planet.

Rachael Kohn: Well I suppose Auschwitz then would have become the symbol of genocide in other places. Was it a watershed in the consciousness of the West?

Colin Tatz: You know, it wasn't for a long while, and for a considerable period after the Holocaust, there was a concern, especially by Jewish and non-Jewish historians, a number of Christian historians like Franklin Litell, whom I think taught you once when you studied with me at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

The concern was that the Holocaust would be lost, the Holocaust would be flattened, the Holocaust would be trivialised, it would be forgotten. And a conscious effort by historians has restored Auschwitz absolutely to the consciousness of the West. It's an indelible part of the Western consciousness, so that this week were hear Gerhard Schroeder getting up and talking about the evils of the Nazis and we must never let them forget it, we had Kofi Annan standing up and saying 'I pledge the UN to deal with anti-Semitism once and for all' etc. etc.

So in one breath it is cosmically the symbol of evil of the 20th century, those striped, skeletal figures hanging off the wires at Auschwitz, but in another breath it has become the symbol of attack by radical Islam, it has become the symbol of attack by resurgent anti-Semitism in Europe.

Rachael Kohn: And we also have our deniers here in Australia.

Colin Tatz: Absolutely. Deniers in Australia. Because if you can get rid of Auschwitz, there is an equation: anti-Semitism equals Auschwitz. If you can destroy one half of the equation, Auschwitz, and say it never existed, or it was a hoax or it was just a de-lousing centre, if you can do that, then you enable anti-Semitism to become legitimate once again. And this is the whole motivation of a lot of deniers.

Rachael Kohn: Well doesn't it also sidestep the issue of other sources of anti-Semitism, namely the Christian churches, or the history of Christian anti-Semitism?

Colin Tatz: Absolutely. Well the point about this is that the Nazis didn't invent anti-Semitism, the Nazis took anti-Semitism to an extreme, but where did the Nazis get their anti-Semitism, and the answer was from traditional Christian anti-Semitism.

And we still have now 60 years after the event, lots of gnashing of teeth and renting of clothing and tearing out of hair by Christian theologians, and Christian leaders saying 'Where were the churches during the Holocaust?' and that's a very good question, where were the churches during the Holocaust? In fact you can ask the question now, Where are the churches in Darfur, where were the churches during Bosnia, where were the churches during Rwanda? So Christianity in one sense has been very, very silent, relatively very silent, on matters of genocide from the Armenian events to the present day.

Rachael Kohn: You've written about the Jewish victims of the Holocaust as martyrs. Now is that a term that is widely accepted?

Colin Tatz: No, when I've used the term 'martyrs' I've done it in a curious sense. A martyr is basically I suppose Rachael, somebody who is prepared to voluntarily enter into death for the sake of a principle or a belief, a religious principle or philosophical principle, whatever. In the case of these Jews, there was no voluntary surrender, they were selected.

Jews were never given a chance of saying, Well if you convert, you may live, which was partly true of the Armenians during the Turkish episodes. Turks said, 'If you will surrender your children to become Muslim Turks, then the children may live.' You may say it's a hell of a choice, but the fact is, alive is alive, and dead is dead. Jewish children, 1-million Jewish children out of the 6-million who died, were never given any such choice. So martyrdom is a strange word to use, and it's not my term.

In 1948 when Israel was established, one of the very first things Israel did was to set up the Holocaust Martyrs and Memorial Institute, Yad Vashem, where you and I have studied. And it's interesting, the Israelis used the word 'martyr' in 1948. It's not a word that I would normally have used about Holocaust victims, because they had no choice in the matter.

Rachael Kohn: Well many people think of Israel today as the compensation for the Holocaust.

Colin Tatz: Yes, this is part of wonderful 20th century myth-making, and it's a myth that was perpetuated by some Israeli Prime Ministers, notably Menachem Begin. Auschwitz occurred, all these other things occurred, 6-million out of 18-million people die in the war against the Jews; the world suddenly has remorse and the great powers in 1945 or '47 or '48 suddenly say, 'Shame, poor little Jews, let's give them a national homeland as compensation for the terrible things that have happened to them.' The Holocaust had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of the State of Israel. The State of Israel was part of a Zionist movement, that is a national homeland for Jews, that goes back to the 19th century, and to say that the Holocaust is the direct causal creation of Israel is to deny nearly a century of Zionist history.

Rachael Kohn: One last thing: how do you feel about going back to the scene of the crime, visiting Auschwitz?

Colin Tatz: You know what, Rachael, I'm 70 this year, I have resisted all these years after teaching Holocaust and Genocide for nearly two decades, and finally in 2004, I made the decision to go.

Rachael Kohn: Was it a pilgrimage?

Colin Tatz: Yes, in a kind of sense. I went to look for roots, I went to look for Lithuanian origins where my grandparents came from, and in a sense, that was the key thing. Auschwitz was a side issue. Do I have to go and visit that place in order to comprehend, to understand the death? No, not really. But is it something that I regret having done? No, I don't regret having gone, but if you say to me 'Should every Jew or every non-Jew go to Auschwitz in order to understand what happened?' I don't think you'll find a key to understanding by visiting those rather gloomy and sordid and solemn buildings.

Rachael Kohn: Colin Tatz on Auschwitz. Professor Tatz's latest book is With Intent to Destroy: Reflections on Genocide.

Join me again next week for The Ark, featuring events, people and places in religious history.

So long from me, Rachael Kohn.

THEME

Guests

Emeritus Professor Colin Tatz
is Adjunct Professor of Politics at Macquarie University in Australia. He is also Director of the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Shalom Institute, University of New South Wales.

Further Information

The Shalom Institute
http://www.shalom.edu.au/main.asp?to=

Auschwitz: the perversion of humanity
A recent article in The Tablet magazine by Professor David Cesarani, an historian and consultant to the BBC series Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution.
http://www.thetablet.co.uk/cgi-bin/archive_db.cgi/tablet-00971

Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution'
A valuable and detailed website accompanying the BBC TV series.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/genocide/

Publications

Title: With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide
Author : Colin Tatz
Publisher: W.W.Norton, 2003