It’s coming up to the 75th anniversary of the Russian liberation of this abomination. What went through the heads of those that oversaw or enacted the killing of over 1 million men, women and children in this camp is something that none of us today will ever understand. On the 27th of this month is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. I know this is a long time ago, but it formed the heart of Hitlers ‘final solution’.
TBF it’s only possible to begin to approach an understanding of what they did by acknowledging that they employed absolute scumbags, criminal people who were phenomenally corrupt on a scale that would even embarrass people nowadays and who had been failures before the murder programme was planned.
These (and the staff of the rest of the camps, the Einsatzgruppen and the other “anti-partisan” formations) were the men (and women) who bunked off from the actual war, who enriched and enjoyed themselves at their prisoners expense and who seem to have spent their time high, pissed or otherwise sated whilst they murdered so many.
There are loads of examples of this, but perhaps the most relevant here is when an SS judge called Georg Konrad Morgen (who had previously tried to investigate the bloke who was briefly Hitler’s brother in law and was sent to the Eastern Front for his pains) started to investigate what was going on at Auschwitz, thinking that there may have been something afoot there.
He thought this because a dental technician based at the camp tried to send a relative a fist-sized lump of dental gold, through the post.
(Morgen’s story is fascinating and well worth reading about, if anyone is interested).
