The Holocaust: A Warning From History

G.M. Gilbert was one of the prison psychologists during the Nuremberg war crimes trial. On April 9, 1946 he had a brief conversation with Colonel Rudolph Hoess, who had been the commandant of Auschwitz. The following is an excerpt of his book  Nuremberg Diary : We discussed briefly his activity as the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp from May, 1940, to December, 1943, which camp was the central extermination camp for Jews. He readily confirmed that approximately 2 1/2 million Jews had been exterminated under his direction. The exterminations began in the summer of 1941. In compliance with [Hermann] Goering's skepticism, I asked Hoess how it was technically possible to exterminate 2 1/2 million people. "Technical?" he asked. "That wasn't so hard -- it would not have been hard to exterminate even greater numbers." In answer to my rather naive questions as to how many people could be done away with in an hour, etc., he explained that one must figu...

As the Soviet Army moved closer to the slave labor camps that the Germans had set up on Polish soil, the slave laborers were evacuated westward, to factories and concentrations camps on German soil. The largest slave labor camp in the region to be evacuated was the factory zone around Auschwitz. More than 30,000 Jewish men and women were being employed there at the time of the evacuation. The evacuations started in mid-1944 and accelerated in January 1945. Many began on foot. After several days, most of the evacuees were put on trains. Some marches continued on foot for many days, even weeks. An estimated 100,000 Jews died in these "death marches." Thousands who were too weak to march away were shot on the eve of evacuation. On the marches, those who were too weak to continue were also shot. "Anybody who was weak," recalled Israel Gutman -- a survivor of Majdanek and Auschwitz, "anybody who had to sit down for a few minutes, was shot at." On the marches in...

The man who did most to hinder the atrocities in the East was a thirty-four-year-old German lawyer who worked for Himmler. Georg Konrad Morgen, son of a railroad conductor, had become imbued with the ethics of law from his student days and even as an assistant SS judge was outspoken in his disapproval of illegality whoever committed it. His judgement, based strictly on the evidence, so exasperated his superiors that Morgen was posted to a front-line SS division as punishment. Because of his outstanding reputation he was transferred in 1943 to the SD's Financial Crimes Office with the understanding that he was not to deal with political cases. Early that summer Morgen was given a routine investigative mission to clear up a long-standing corruption case at Buchenwald concentration camp. The commandant, Karl Koch, had been suspected of hiring out camp laborers to civilian employers, racketeering in food supplies and, in general, running the camp for his own personal profit. The initia...

While all his power had come from Hitler, the Fuehrer wanted nothing to do with Himmler personally. "I need such policemen," he told an adjutant, Julius Schaub, "but I don't like them." Hitler went so far as to order another adjutant, SS Captain Richard Schulze, not to keep his nominal chief informed about the daily military discussions. At the same time, he put the Reichsfuehrer fully in charge of the operation closest to his heart, the Final Solution. In some respects it was an appropriate appointment. From the beginning Himmler had been under Hitler's spell and he remained totally Hitler's man, his disciple and subject. Furthermore, Himmler was the epitome of National Socialism, for it was as a diligent professional party worker that Himmler had overcome is own problems of identity. He was the Fuehrer's faithful right hand who, despite squeamishness in the face of blood or beatings, had become a mass killer by remote control, and efficient busines...

Many thousands of non-Jews risked -- and in many cases lost -- their own lives to save a Jewish life. Some non-Jews -- Christians, Muslims, atheists, men and women of all nations -- saved more than one life. There were those who saved whole families and even several families. Non-Jews who were caught helping Jews faced execution. The Polish Jewish historian Szymon Datner, who had escaped from the Bialystok ghetto to fight with a Jewish partisan unit, recorded after the war just how severe reprisals could be: "In thirty-eight cases of Jews being saved by Poles, as established on the basis of one source, the Nazis murdered ninety-seven Poles, including thirty women, fourteen children and one infant." From other documents and enquiries, Szymon Datner established that 343 Poles had been shot in the Bialystok region for helping Jews. Among those shot were forty-two Polish children under the age of thirteen. At Belzec, the monument to the 600,000 Jews murdered there also honors 1,5...

A still photograph from the movie Escape From Sobibor . On reaching a death camp, small groups of Jews were taken out of the trains and made to work in the camp, taking bodies out of gas chambers, and sorting the clothing of those who had just been murdered. Others had to cut off the hair of the murdered women. All of those in these  Sonderkommando  (Special Commandos or Death Commandos) were marked out for death, to be replaced with new arrivals. In every death camp there were attempts by these slave laborers to revolt. On August 2, 1943, the Jewish slave laborers at Treblinka managed to break into the arsenal. Gasoline was then put into the camp disinfector, used for the daily disinfecting procedure, and operated by the Jewish slave laborers. Gasoline instead of disinfectant was then sprayed on the camp buildings. The next afternoon, the "disinfected" buildings were ignited, and many of the camp buildings set on fire. The chief of the SS guards was shot dead, and fifteen ot...