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At Auschwitz I employed my usual strategy of arriving at big touristy areas an hour or two before closing so that the tour groups have cleared out. In the past, this has helped me imagine Petra, Ancient Egypt, Ankgor Wat, and other places as bustling cities instead of modern ruins full of tour groups. For Auschwitz, it made the whole experience severely unsettling, which is exactly what I was looking for.
Standing in the small gas chamber and crematorium in silence, I began hearing the screams of dying prisoners along with the whirring machinery of the creamatorium. It's hard to describe how chilling the place is. I have a picture of the room, but the picture provokes a far stronger reaction in my mind than it probably would in yours unless you've been there. The pictures seem like they're burning a hole in my camera... when I'm browsing through my photos and I see them wedged between snaps of salt mine adventures and happy friends trying out my drink concoctions, I have an urge to delete them.
The other exhibits give you a visceral sense for the scale of the Holocaust -- massive piles of braided hair, shoes, and other personal effects. However, Auschwitz was the smaller of the two camps in the area. The second camp, Birkenau, is where the largest-scale killings took place. Over one million people died there. The scale of this camp is enormous. It takes ten minutes to cross it in either direction.
It was also bizarre to look at the engineering, logistics, and bureaucracy at work in service of the death camp operation. A Nazi doctor performed a variety of experiments on prisoners to determine the most efficient methods of killing large numbers of prisoners. He invented new poisons and tested their effectiveness. A team built small gas chambers and crematoria, tested out the procedures, and then built a massive "productized" factory employing the same techniques to kill thousands of people per day. A large bureaucracy handled logistical issues, documented production levels, and generally kept everything running. This white-collar work, aside from the terrible meaning of it all, seemed so ordinary. People spent all day with a pen and paper filling in spreadsheets that tracked the rates of slaughter.
I didn't know this, but apparently a lot of the dirty work involved in the killings was handled by Jewish prisoners and other inmates. These prisoners were often given a choice between immediate death or following Nazi orders, and those who were dehumanized or scared enough to follow the orders handled the gassings and cremations. Originally, the Nazi bureaucracy had used German guards for this purpose but they found that many of them were being driven insane by the work. These prisoner-collaborators were usually killed after a couple of months and replacements were found. The mass killings were so radioactive to the human soul that the Nazis had to keep even their indoctrinated people at a safe mental distance from the acts taking place.
I at first wondered about the psychology of the Nazi guards who were able to calmly carry out these acts, thinking that they must have chosen the most sociopathic people they could find to do the job every day without breaking. However, I soon remembered my psychology. Very few people have no moral conscience whatsoever. While the most independent-thinking and empathic Germans were unlikely to become prison guards, most of the people involved were ordinary Germans. It was the strategy of the legitimizing power structure that made it all possible. It was the barrel that was bad, not the "few bad apples" as Bush used to say in reference to Abu Gharaib. The Nazi leaders had skillfully executed the Eight Stages of Genocide such that most people involved with managing the horrific acts could carry them through so long as their hands didn't get too dirty. While I don't relieve the guards of responsibility for their actions, it's extremely important to realize that it's the actions and policies of the authorities that makes these things possible.
The banality of evil has been a subject of interest to psychologists for a while, and experiments such as the Milgram Experiment and the more famous but far less scientific Stanford Prison Experiment have confirmed that a good portion of any population will commit acts of torture if instructed by a legitimate-looking authority, so long as they don't have to do too much dirty work.
I'm interested to read more.
In any case, I highly recommend that you all visit Auschwitz if you get the chance. Getting a visceral sense of what a genocide is really like and how it can occur should be something everyone is exposed to. Unfortunately, while the exhibits do a powerful job of conveying the horror of the Holocaust, they focus entirely on documenting the acts themselves as opposed to the psychological work the Nazis did to make it happen. The educational system should fill in the gap, teaching children about the techniques employed to enact genocides so that they can recognize and stop them in the future.
Standing in the small gas chamber and crematorium in silence, I began hearing the screams of dying prisoners along with the whirring machinery of the creamatorium. It's hard to describe how chilling the place is. I have a picture of the room, but the picture provokes a far stronger reaction in my mind than it probably would in yours unless you've been there. The pictures seem like they're burning a hole in my camera... when I'm browsing through my photos and I see them wedged between snaps of salt mine adventures and happy friends trying out my drink concoctions, I have an urge to delete them.
The other exhibits give you a visceral sense for the scale of the Holocaust -- massive piles of braided hair, shoes, and other personal effects. However, Auschwitz was the smaller of the two camps in the area. The second camp, Birkenau, is where the largest-scale killings took place. Over one million people died there. The scale of this camp is enormous. It takes ten minutes to cross it in either direction.
It was also bizarre to look at the engineering, logistics, and bureaucracy at work in service of the death camp operation. A Nazi doctor performed a variety of experiments on prisoners to determine the most efficient methods of killing large numbers of prisoners. He invented new poisons and tested their effectiveness. A team built small gas chambers and crematoria, tested out the procedures, and then built a massive "productized" factory employing the same techniques to kill thousands of people per day. A large bureaucracy handled logistical issues, documented production levels, and generally kept everything running. This white-collar work, aside from the terrible meaning of it all, seemed so ordinary. People spent all day with a pen and paper filling in spreadsheets that tracked the rates of slaughter.
I didn't know this, but apparently a lot of the dirty work involved in the killings was handled by Jewish prisoners and other inmates. These prisoners were often given a choice between immediate death or following Nazi orders, and those who were dehumanized or scared enough to follow the orders handled the gassings and cremations. Originally, the Nazi bureaucracy had used German guards for this purpose but they found that many of them were being driven insane by the work. These prisoner-collaborators were usually killed after a couple of months and replacements were found. The mass killings were so radioactive to the human soul that the Nazis had to keep even their indoctrinated people at a safe mental distance from the acts taking place.
I at first wondered about the psychology of the Nazi guards who were able to calmly carry out these acts, thinking that they must have chosen the most sociopathic people they could find to do the job every day without breaking. However, I soon remembered my psychology. Very few people have no moral conscience whatsoever. While the most independent-thinking and empathic Germans were unlikely to become prison guards, most of the people involved were ordinary Germans. It was the strategy of the legitimizing power structure that made it all possible. It was the barrel that was bad, not the "few bad apples" as Bush used to say in reference to Abu Gharaib. The Nazi leaders had skillfully executed the Eight Stages of Genocide such that most people involved with managing the horrific acts could carry them through so long as their hands didn't get too dirty. While I don't relieve the guards of responsibility for their actions, it's extremely important to realize that it's the actions and policies of the authorities that makes these things possible.
The banality of evil has been a subject of interest to psychologists for a while, and experiments such as the Milgram Experiment and the more famous but far less scientific Stanford Prison Experiment have confirmed that a good portion of any population will commit acts of torture if instructed by a legitimate-looking authority, so long as they don't have to do too much dirty work.
I'm interested to read more.
In any case, I highly recommend that you all visit Auschwitz if you get the chance. Getting a visceral sense of what a genocide is really like and how it can occur should be something everyone is exposed to. Unfortunately, while the exhibits do a powerful job of conveying the horror of the Holocaust, they focus entirely on documenting the acts themselves as opposed to the psychological work the Nazis did to make it happen. The educational system should fill in the gap, teaching children about the techniques employed to enact genocides so that they can recognize and stop them in the future.
