liter of thin soup averaging 350–400 calories, and for supper about 300 grams of bread with a small amount of sausage, margarine, cheese, or jam. Prisoners engaged in heavy labor were given slightly larger, yet still insufficient rations. The nutritive value of meals at Auschwitz depended on the dietary norms set for inmates of concentration camps, and these norms changed several times from 1940 to 1945. But generally, the amount and quality of food distributed at Auschwitz was far below these norms. Whereas regulations called for 1,700 calories per day for prisoners engaged in lighter work and 2,150 calories for prisoners doing heavy labor, such prisoners at Auschwitz received an average of 1,300 and 1,700 calories per day, respectively.21 The discrepancy resulted from SS plundering of foodstuffs or the maldistribution of food by functionary prisoners, who often had the power of life and death over the inmates in their charge. Whether, for example, one’s soup was served from the top or the bottom of the vat could make a tremendous difference in caloric intake.
Poor housing, inadequate diet, and physically demanding work all made the mortality rate among registered prisoners extremely high. Jewish registered prisoners, who by mid-1944 made up approximately two-thirds of all Auschwitz inmates, had an even higher mortality rate. Their treatment at the hands of the SS and functionary prisoners was generally worse than that meted out to other prisoner groups; they were frequently perceived as inferior by their fellow prisoners; and they suffered from an additional psychological burden, namely, that Jews “lived in the shadow of certainty that their relatives had perished, that their own fate was sealed, and that their incarceration in the camp was but a reprieve granted by the Germans to drain them of their strength through slave labor before sending them to their deaths.”22
Yet those Jews who entered Auschwitz as registered prisoners were, in fact, a small minority of deportees. Although the exact number of Jewish victims will never be known, according to data compiled by Auschwitz historian Franciszek Piper, 890,000 (about 81 percent) of the Jews deported to the Auschwitz complex were not registered, but rather met their deaths immediately after arrival.23 There is, moreover, a crucial point to be emphasized here: unlike other prisoners at Auschwitz (with the important exception of Gypsies), the overwhelming majority of Jews deported to Auschwitz were not brought there on the grounds of criminal charges, anti-Nazi conspiratorial activity, service in an enemy army, religious convictions, or “asocial” behavior. Jews were deported to Auschwitz for exploitation and extermination because they were defined and identified as Jews by Nazi racial laws. This is the critical distinction that must be made between Jews and Gypsies on the one hand and, on the other, Poles, Soviet POWs, and other prisoner groups.24 It is also a distinction that has frequently been lost on postwar memorialists of Auschwitz.
The above description offers a picture of conditions for registered prisoners, but such a generalization should not overlook an element of Auschwitz history that sets it apart from other camps: the variety of ways in which registered prisoners lived, worked, and died there. The prisoner’s experience depended on a myriad of factors. State of health upon arrival, location in the camp complex, work assignment, nationality, ability to communicate with guards, Kapos, and other prisoners, relationships with supervisors, relationships to the camp resistance movements, the length of time in the camp, the personal will to survive—these are only a few examples of the factors that could determine how, and whether, a prisoner lived or died.
Moreover, the differences in the ways prisoners experienced Auschwitz were at times shockingly crass. Some prisoners fought to stay alive by any means available; others quickly lost their will to live, became so-called Muselmänner,25 and were dead within weeks of arrival. Some prisoners were well fed, although the diet of nearly all was woefully insufficient. Some prisoners enjoyed solidarity and mutual support among their peers; others were taken advantage of, abused, and left to die, friendless and alone. Some prisoners had the connections and courage to become active in covert resistance; others remained unaware of any underground conspiracy whatsoever. Treatment of Soviet POWs was infinitely worse than treatment of German criminals. One prisoner may have been in Auschwitz because of her politics, another because of her “race” as defined by Nazi ideology. At Birkenau there were soccer games and gas chambers—each within sight of the other. In short, Auschwitz, its victims, and its prisoners defy generalizations and convenient categorizations. Just as the history of the camp was multifaceted, so too have collective memories and public manifestations of those memories been diverse and at times even contradictory, to the extent that the commemoration of one prisoner or prisoner group has offended or silenced the memory of another.
Wide diversity of prisoners, complicated administrative structure, brutally harsh conditions—all are aspects of Auschwitz that render it unique among Nazi concentration camps and extermination centers. Although these characteristics are essential to our understanding of Auschwitz and are central to Polish commemorative uses of Auschwitz, the murder of nearly nine hundred thousand Jews immediately after their arrival at the camp remains the most salient and important, but not entirely definitive aspect of its history. The scale of the killing operations at Auschwitz and the manner in which they were carried out have, more than any other aspects of the camp’s history, remained in the consciousness and memory of Jews and non-Jews around the world, and an awareness of the machinery of mass extermination at Auschwitz and its role in the execution of the “final solution of the Jewish question” continues to awaken both horror and interest on the part of scholars, students, and visitors to the memorial site. As the largest single killing center for European Jews, Auschwitz has appropriately emerged as a metonym for the Shoah, and its memorial grounds have become a primary destination for millions of pilgrims, both Jewish and Gentile.
Raul Hilberg has noted that the status of Auschwitz as the foremost symbol of the Shoah is based on at least three of its characteristics: first, more Jews died in Auschwitz than anywhere else; second, Auschwitz was an international killing center with victims from across the European continent; third, the killing at Auschwitz continued long after the other extermination centers of Nazi-occupied Europe had been liquidated.26 There are other bases for the symbolic and metonymic value of Auschwitz—bases that will be addressed in the course of this study—but these three characteristics are an appropriate point of departure for a brief description of the killing operations that were undertaken at the Auschwitz complex.
Auschwitz, as the description of its early history has made clear, was not initially intended to be an extermination center for European Jews, but was a large concentration camp on annexed Polish territory. As at all concentration camps, death was omnipresent and had numerous causes. Executions by hanging or by shooting at the so-called “wall of death” adjacent to Block 11 were commonplace at the base camp and later at Birkenau, Monowitz, and the various auxiliary camps. So-called “selections”—the weeding-out of prisoners considered unfit for work—and the subsequent murder of prisoners by lethal injection or gas began in the spring of 1941. Moreover, prisoners at the Auschwitz complex were continually subjected to various forms of what could be called indirect extermination, that is, death resulting from the effects of hunger, disease, so-called “medical experiments,” exhaustion, or torture.
The systematic and efficient killing of prisoners and recently arrived deportees in gas chambers was, however, a later development at Auschwitz. According to the postwar testimony of Rudolf Höss, the camp’s first commandant, Himmler summoned him to Berlin in the late summer of 1941 and announced, in Höss’s words, the following: “The Führer has ordered that the Jewish question be solved once and for all and that we, the SS, are to implement that order. The existing extermination centers in the East are not in a position to carry out the large actions which are anticipated. I have therefore earmarked Auschwitz for this purpose, both because of its good position as regards communications and because the area can easily be isolated and camouflaged.”27 Höss was also informed that further details of the extermination plans would be brought to Auschwitz by Adolf Eichmann, chief of the Jewish Department of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). Later that year Eichmann and Höss worked out many of the details of the plan, including transport and railroad arrangements and, in September, development of a suitable killing method.
When
