Is Zionism merely Nazism dresssed up in new threads?
City of horrors
Sunday, August 28, 2005
REVIEWED BY LESTER PIMENTEL
Auschwitz: A History
Of all the cities around the world associated with horrific events (Verdun, Hiroshima, Chernobyl), Auschwitz is alone in the revulsion it evokes. Synonymous with the genocide of Europe's Jews, the mere mention of the city immediately triggers images of the Nazis' most notorious extermination camp. In "Auschwitz: A History," German historian Sybille Steinbacher clinically details the importance of this city in the Nazi imagination -- a city once billed as the Third Reich's utopian model.
As the so-called "bulwark of the German presence in the East," Auschwitz embodied two main pillars of Nazism. It was the "biggest stage for the mass murder of European Jewry, and at the same time a crystallization point of the policy of settlement and Germanization," Steinbacher writes. The latter called for the forced expulsion of all non-Germans, in this case Jews and Poles, and the resettlement of the depopulated areas with Reich Germans. Anything that recalled the life and culture of the eastern territories' former residents was violently expunged. Naturally, the Nazis changed the name of the Polish city of Oswiecim, a Jewish redoubt before the war, to Auschwitz in 1940.
In an understated style, Steinbacher describes how the Nazis enticed Germans to relocate to Auschwitz with mundane inducements, like low taxes and "child benefit and marriage loans." In 1942, chief architect Hans Stosberg, seemingly unbothered by the human pyres smoldering around him, sent greeting cards bearing the inscription "Birth of the new German town of Auschwitz." His drawings of this "model settlement town" featured "leafy Silesian lanes" and "a fountain in the marketplace and lime trees."
By 1943, 6,000 Germans had moved to Auschwitz, coming from cities like Hamburg, Munich and Vienna. These settlers worked for the railway operator, directing the death trains, or for IG Farben, which produced the lethal Zyklon B gas. After the war, railway employees, who had watched the "selection process," claimed ignorance of the killings.
Whether the subject is willing executioners or Holocaust deniers, Steinbacher touches on all the major themes relevant to Auschwitz. Her account may appear slight at under 200 pages, but she sacrifices neither thoroughness nor intellectual rigor. In this concise telling, she offers an incisive précis on the city that was once a pulsing hub of mass murder.
Lester Pimentel is a New York- based journalist.
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