Auschwitz Must Be Preserved

An Address at Auschwitz- June 24, 2003

Gas chambers were first developed at the handicapped killing centers. So was the use of burning to dispose of dead bodies. In the death camps the technology was taken to a new level: thousands could be killed at one time and their bodies burned within hours.

When religious leaders protested the murder of the handicapped, the killing was driven underground. When Jews were killed wholesale, the church was silent.

Physicians trained in the medical killing centers went on to grander tasks. Irmfried Eberl, a doctor whose career began in the T-4 program, became the commandant of Treblinka. His colleagues moved up to Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz, where killing of a magnitude as yet unimagined would take place.

Gassing then underwent further refinement in Chelmno and then in the murder of Yugoslavian women and children in the early winter of 1942.

Yet gassing was not the first method employed to kill Jews. Einsatzgruppen followed invading Wehrmacht troops and they rounded up Jews in cities and towns, villages and hamlet murdering them one-by-one-by-one, bullet by bullet town by town. Aided by local gendarmerie and by antisemitic neighbors, these mobile killing units did their task, but at great cost to the killers. There is a debate in contemporary Holocaust scholars as to their motivations. Were they ordinary men as Christopher Browning maintained? Were they willing executioners as Daniel Goldhagen argued, men who had internalized eliminationist antisemitism and whom then easily carried out the orders for exterminationist antisemitism carried out their task with great skill and little complaint. Or were they criminals – at least potentially so – when recruited as Richard Rhodes has recently argued. Yet there is no debate that the few who opted not to perform the murderous task faced no penalty. They perhaps did not advance in their careers, but they had the ability to refuse these orders if they so desired with little consequence.

Yet killing took its toll. There were complaints. Alcohol was needed before and after -- sometimes even during and despite Himmler's bravado at Poznan, there was a price to be paid in discipline and in the psyche of the killers. So another way was found.

Instead of sending mobile killers to stationary victims, the victims were made mobile and the killing centers stationary. Railroad trains were the means of transport. “Auschwitz had 44 parallel railroad tracks,” Raul Hilberg wrote, more than twice the number of Pennsylvania Station in New York, which can handle 750,000 passengers on a major holiday weekend. Auschwitz was chosen for its infrastructure and that infrastructure was enhanced by the massive investments of German business in the slave labor complex.

At Auschwitz the human being was reduced to a consumable raw material to be discarded in manufacture and recycled into the war economy. All mineral life was drained from the slave who was not given conditions that permitted adequate rest or food and was literally work until they died or were no longer able to survive the selektion and then their remains hair from their head, gold from their teeth were recycled into the war economy not only by the Nazis and their allies but seemingly even by so-called neutral powers who were its economic beneficiaries and the mainstay of support for the Third Reich.

The methodology of murder and not merely the intention of the killers is part of the uniqueness of the Holocaust and nowhere was it more completely and compellingly practice than at Auschwitz.

And at Auschwitz gassing reached its apex. Zyklon B operating effectively and efficiently to kill so many at such little cost, economic and social, that the killing could have been sustained indefinitely.

Corporations benefited by the seemingly endless supply of slave laborers who could be worked to the limits of human endurance and cost so little, required so little and could be mere cogs in the corporate manufacturing strategy.

And Auschwitz has become a symbol, shorthand for the Holocaust in its entirety, a magnet drawings pilgrims and students to enter its portals and walk through its gates. When almost four decades my teacher Richard Rubenstein went to find a title for his book that considered the theological implications of the Holocaust on Jews and Judaism and Christians and Christianity, he found a catch title understood by all in the words After Auschwitz.

It is unthinkable not to preserve Auschwitz.

Only one place rivals Auschwitz in its symbolic importance for 20th century humanity – Hiroshima – but with the end of the cold war and the lessening of the nuclear threat – albeit, I fear, temporarily -- we are in far greater danger of genocide than nuclear annihilation.

 Auschwitz stands for itself and for more than itself. It is arguably one of the most important sites – if not the most important site -- of 20th century humanity.

Where did the Holocaust happen?

You and I know the answer. Almost everywhere. This continent was soaked in blood.

But where did it happen?

The answer again and again is: Auschwitz.

It is our obligation to history to preserve Auschwitz.