Auschwitz Read Free Page B

task he promised to ask them “no questions” about how it had been done.
    In just such a manner it is not hard to imagine Hitler saying to Himmler in December 1941 that he wanted the Jews “exterminated” and that he would ask him “no questions” about how he had achieved the desired result. We cannot know for sure whether the conversation went this way, of course, because during the war Hitler was careful to use Himmler as a buffer between himself and the implementation of the “Final Solution.” Hitler knew the scale of the crime the Nazis were contemplating and he did not want any document linking him to it. But his fingerprints are everywhere—from his open rhetoric of hatred to the close correlation between Himmler’s meetings with Hitler at his East Prussian headquarters and the subsequent radicalization of the persecution and murder of the Jews.
    It is hard to convey the excitement that leading Nazis felt at serving a man who dared to dream in such epic terms. Hitler had dreamt of defeating France in weeks—the very country in which the German army had
been stuck for years during World War I—and he had succeeded. He had dreamt of conquering the Soviet Union, and in the summer and autumn of 1941 it looked almost certain that he would win. And he dreamt of exterminating the Jews—which in some ways would prove to be the easiest task of all.
    Hitler’s ambitions were certainly on a grand scale—but they were all ultimately destructive, and the “Final Solution” was the most conceptually destructive of them all. It is of huge significance that, in 1940, two Nazis—who would subsequently become leading figures in the development and implementation of the “Final Solution”—each separately acknowledged that such mass murder would go against the “civilized” values to which even they aspired. Heinrich Himmler wrote that “physically exterminating a people” was “fundamentally un-German,” and Reinhard Heydrich recorded that “biological extermination is undignified for the German people as a civilized nation.” 9 But, step by step, within the next eighteen months “physically exterminating a people” was just the policy they would be embracing.
    Tracing how Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, and other leading Nazis created both their “Final Solution” and Auschwitz offers us the chance to see in action a dynamic and radical decision-making process of great complexity. There was no blueprint for the crime imposed from above, nor one devised from below and simply acknowledged from the top. Individual Nazis were not coerced by crude threats to commit murders themselves. No, this was a collective enterprise owned by thousands of people, who each made the decision not just to take part but to contribute initiatives in order to solve the problem of how to kill human beings and dispose of their bodies on a scale never attempted before.
    As we follow the journey upon which both the Nazis and those whom they persecuted embarked, we also gain a great deal of insight into the human condition—and what we learn is mostly not good. In this history, suffering is almost never redemptive. Although there are, on very rare occasions, extraordinary people who act virtuously, for the most part this is a story of degradation. It is hard not to agree with the verdict of Else Baker, sent to Auschwitz as an eight-year-old child, that “the level of human depravity is unfathomable.” If there is a spark of hope, however, it is in the
power of the family as a sustaining force. Time and again heroic acts are committed by those sent to the camps, for the sake of a father, mother, brother, sister, or child.
    Perhaps above all, though, Auschwitz and the Nazis’ “Final Solution” demonstrate the overriding power of the situation to influence behavior. It is a view confirmed by one of the toughest and