Auschwitz-Birkenau

Last week I went on a short 2 day drinking holiday to the Czech Republic to catch up with an old friend from Plymouth. Whilst my mate was showing me around his crappy town he mentioned that Auschwitz was only 50 miles away across the border in Poland. Visiting Auschwitz was something I had always planned to do, but I had no idea it was so close. So the next morning we set off for Osweicim.

We spent most of the morning at Auschwitz before going to Birkenau in the afternoon. Even now I am struggling to find words to describe what it was like - other then utterly horrific. The "bricks and mortar" of Auschwitz is that of an Army barracks or a prison, but Birkenau is just a purpose built extermination centre. The Nazi's tried to cover their tracks by demolishing the gas chambers but the ruins are still there. Just standing at the stairs leading into the gas chambers knowing that this was one of the last things that half a million people saw 70 years ago was almost too much. We were there on warm day - god only knows what it must have been like in the middle of winter.

The only positive thing about the whole place is that the people that died, and the horrors that took place will never be forgotten.

I visited Belsen a long while ago. Not a lot there but I'll never forget it.

Auschwitz is somewhere I'd like to go one day. I've been to Poland a few times but didn't have the time to visit the site, even though I wanted to. However, I too have visited Belsen, or rather the site where Belsen was (it was destroyed by the British after it was liberated in April 1945), during a visit to Hamburg about 15 years ago. Although, unlike Auschwitz Birkenau, Belsen wasn't actually a death camp but a 'holding' camp. However, many thousands died there from starvation and disease, especially when it was filled with prisoners evacuated from concentration camps in Poland by the Nazis before they could be liberated by the advancing Russians.

Moist_Von_Lipwig wrote:

I visited Belsen a long while ago. Not a lot there but I'll never forget it.

i too have been there its a horrowing experience thats for sure.

I was based in Munster for a fair few years, not much still there as it was a Waffen ss barracks but the Battalion sign had a Swastika underneath it, in the Officers mess it has a Swastika on the roof and in the accommodation for the junior ranks it still had the rifle racks for the Mauser 38k weapons.
I was in the Mortar Platoon for many years there, the cellars where the Anti tank weapons, and Mortars are kept apparently was during the war kept as holding tanks for Jews during the war....walk round those cellars at night ..eerie as feck

punchdrunk wrote:

I was based in Munster for a fair few years, not much still there as it was a Waffen ss barracks but the Battalion sign had a Swastika underneath it, in the Officers mess it has a Swastika on the roof and in the accommodation for the junior ranks it still had the rifle racks for the Mauser 38k weapons.
I was in the Mortar Platoon for many years there, the cellars where the Anti tank weapons, and Mortars are kept apparently was during the war kept as holding tanks for Jews during the war....walk round those cellars at night ..eerie as feck

I was in Germany too. In some of the cellars, you could still see the "graffiti" showing through the whitewash.

Moist_Von_Lipwig wrote:

punchdrunk wrote:

I was based in Munster for a fair few years, not much still there as it was a Waffen ss barracks but the Battalion sign had a Swastika underneath it, in the Officers mess it has a Swastika on the roof and in the accommodation for the junior ranks it still had the rifle racks for the Mauser 38k weapons.
I was in the Mortar Platoon for many years there, the cellars where the Anti tank weapons, and Mortars are kept apparently was during the war kept as holding tanks for Jews during the war....walk round those cellars at night ..eerie as feck

I was in Germany too. In some of the cellars, you could still see the "graffiti" showing through the whitewash.

Yep Celle is a prime example,
The Tank sheds were actually used as Panzer sheds for the German Army, even at the main gate it has "1938" in the cobbles.
Celle was where the Hardcore SS units were based, even though most of their dirty work in the East was carried out by Ukranians or Latvians

I've never been to any of them and I'm not sure that I would if I could. I certainly wouldn't go because I wanted to. I might feel compelled or obliged to go but that isn't the same thing at all. Even reading Frank's brief account is unsettling.

I have visited Anne Frank's house and that was upsetting enough for me. Luckily the Ann Frank "huis" is in Amsterdam so there's plenty to distract once you've been.

I suppose, essentially, economic disaster and national humiliation is never going to bring the best out of a, or any, nation and Nazi Germany is just a manifestation of this but there has also been Rwanda, Cambodia, Yugoslavia where a kind of hysteria obliterated all reason and also the horrors of Mao's China and Stalin's Russia where, arguably, even more millions died than did in Nazi Germany.

And let us not forget that it was us British, during the Boer war, who first invented concentration camps.

My brother and I were station in Fallingbostel, His married quarters was in Celle so we saw a lot of Belsen.Bad memories

Sir Francis Drake wrote:

I suppose, essentially, economic disaster and national humiliation is never going to bring the best out of a, or any, nation and Nazi Germany is just a manifestation of this but there has also been Rwanda, Cambodia, Yugoslavia where a kind of hysteria obliterated all reason and also the horrors of Mao's China and Stalin's Russia where, arguably, even more millions died than did in Nazi Germany.

Not condoning anything but if you get the chance, read the book "Human Smoke" by Nicholson Baker. It was given to me as a present. Quite eye opening! As I said though, not condoning anything.

I just think it's a case of "there but for the grace of God" etc. Had we lost WW1 and the Kaiser had imposed wickedly punitive and humiliating conditions on us then it's not that impossible that the whole shebang would have been turned upside down with a relatively enlightened Germany standing firm against a fascist UK (possibly led by Oswald Mosely in the Hitler role?).

I just think that, ultimately, in terms of mindset and temperament the Germans are about as close to us British as it is possible to be rather like the Spanish are a bit like the Italians. It happened there but it could have happened here and thank God it didn't.

I was in Krakow recently, but only for 26 hours so not long enough to go to Auschwitz, although I do intend to go soon - probably in the winter. I've been to a number of Holocaust sites, though: Mechelen in Belgium, where the building used as a holding pen for the Jews of France, Belgium and the Netherlands is now a heartbreaking Holocaust museum; Terezin, near Prague, which was the Nazi's 'model' ghetto (they shipped lots of people out and cleaned the place up to fool the Red Cross that they were simply providing separate living space for Jewish people - and the Red Cross fell for it); various places around the Warsaw ghetto, and the square in Krakow where the Jews were put on the trains to Auschwitz - it's got iron chairs all over it to represent the furniture and belongings that were left once all the people had gone. Oh, and I've been to the excellent museum in what used to be Oskar Schindler's factory, also in Krakow.

As Frank says, knowing something so monstrous happened on the very spot where you're standing makes it all so much more real - and in the case of the Holocaust so much more difficult to comprehend. It's not only the genocide, though, incomprehensible though that is. It's the massive planning and resources that were put into it, the systems that were developed, not only to kill so many people but also to plunder their bodies for everything that could be made use of - teeth, hair, clothing, glasses - as if they were animals or not even living beings. Like a production line in reverse.

Sir Francis Drake wrote:

I just think it's a case of "there but for the grace of God" etc. Had we lost WW1 and the Kaiser had imposed wickedly punitive and humiliating conditions on us then it's not that impossible that the whole shebang would have been turned upside down with a relatively enlightened Germany standing firm against a fascist UK (possibly led by Oswald Mosely in the Hitler role?).

I just think that, ultimately, in terms of mindset and temperament the Germans are about as close to us British as it is possible to be rather like the Spanish are a bit like the Italians. It happened there but it could have happened here and thank God it didn't.

I know it's all speculation, but I'm not so sure about that. I'm just reading a book by a Polish Jew who hid in the forests with several hundred others, carried out raids against the Nazis and helped people escape from the ghetto in the nearest city (there's a film about another group like this - Defiance, with Daniel Craig in one of the lead roles). What's really shocking in the opening chapters of this book is the depth of anti-semitism amongst the Polish people at the time: even after the Nazis occupied Warsaw, which you'd have thought would have created a common purpose, an awful lot of Poles refused to help Jews and even turned them in. I don't think anti-semitism in this country ever reached that level. And, of course, we had huge economic problems of our own in the late 20s and 30s, but Mosley never enjoyed mass support.

The bigger question is of course how Hitler managed to take a whole country along with him: after all, he had to use a lot of force - and a lot of prison cells - to take power. I think it's only in our generation - and hopefully later ones - that anybody's going to be able to assess how much the average German really believed in it all. The late Bert Trautmann's a case in point: he was only ten when Hitler came to power, so spent his formative years being brainwashed and won a number of medals, including the Iron Cross, for his service in the Luftwaffe. Later on, he said his eyes were opened during his time as a PoW.

Where to begin!? .....

My children's grand-mother is Austrian. She's aged about 80. As a young girl she lived in a village and just outside the village was a concentration camp - can't remember which one. She said they were aware that something was going on up there but not sure what. Her father, a nice old man when I met him, fought against us as an ordinary soldier. It's those 'normal' people who bring home the 'normality' of being an ordinary person in that situation.

I had a friend whose father was Lithuanian. Apparently, it was pretty clear that he had been a policeman, camp guard or similar working for the Nazis and had been involved in herding Jews. He was her father and he had done such things. Veronica was certainly British and ordinary to the extent of being boring. And yet she had to live with the near-knowledge of what her father had been involved in.

When we lived in Israel we had the opportunity to visit Yad Veshem - the Holocaust Memorial building and grounds. We decided not to. We decided we had no need to put ourselves through that trauma. We 'knew' what would be there. We were told that medical people are always on hand there as so many people collapsed after seeing the displays. I've often wondered if we did the right thing, if we made the right decision, if we had simply chosen to close our eyes. Again, the ordinariness of what happened to ordinary people was frequently brought home when you saw elderly people with bare arms with their camp numbers tattooed into their skin. Ordinary people doing ordinary things such as drinking in a cafe in the sun but with far from ordinary backgrounds. The experiences of what they had gone through was beyond my comprehension.

I don't know if anyone knows Bertoldt Brecht's play "The Resistible Rise of Artuo Ui"? It's an allegory of the rise of Hitler and makes a comment about the rise of such states anywhere. The closing speech is powerful and contains the closing line after the defeat of Ui/Hitler "Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again." That's the constant threat - that the next Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pinochet is around the corner. It's good ordinary people doing nothing that allows it to happen.

Shit! That's a bit heavy for this time of night and on a football forum. But it's important.

Sorry to trivialize things, but I remember watching the world at war as a kid and being distraught that humans could do this to other humans and for it to be so routine almost.

you aint trivialising anything, every face/body featured was an important person to someone.  

Peggy wrote:

Sir Francis Drake wrote:

I just think it's a case of "there but for the grace of God" etc. Had we lost WW1 and the Kaiser had imposed wickedly punitive and humiliating conditions on us then it's not that impossible that the whole shebang would have been turned upside down with a relatively enlightened Germany standing firm against a fascist UK (possibly led by Oswald Mosely in the Hitler role?).

I just think that, ultimately, in terms of mindset and temperament the Germans are about as close to us British as it is possible to be rather like the Spanish are a bit like the Italians. It happened there but it could have happened here and thank God it didn't.

I know it's all speculation, but I'm not so sure about that. I'm just reading a book by a Polish Jew who hid in the forests with several hundred others, carried out raids against the Nazis and helped people escape from the ghetto in the nearest city (there's a film about another group like this - Defiance, with Daniel Craig in one of the lead roles). What's really shocking in the opening chapters of this book is the depth of anti-semitism amongst the Polish people at the time: even after the Nazis occupied Warsaw, which you'd have thought would have created a common purpose, an awful lot of Poles refused to help Jews and even turned them in. I don't think anti-semitism in this country ever reached that level. And, of course, we had huge economic problems of our own in the late 20s and 30s, but Mosley never enjoyed mass support.

The bigger question is of course how Hitler managed to take a whole country along with him: after all, he had to use a lot of force - and a lot of prison cells - to take power. I think it's only in our generation - and hopefully later ones - that anybody's going to be able to assess how much the average German really believed in it all. The late Bert Trautmann's a case in point: he was only ten when Hitler came to power, so spent his formative years being brainwashed and won a number of medals, including the Iron Cross, for his service in the Luftwaffe. Later on, he said his eyes were opened during his time as a PoW.

I'm pretty sure lots of Germans just did the right thing by their country. Just as our boys did by ours. Not much thought was involved beyond loyalty to their kinfolk. Obviously this was led by Goebbels's vigorous propaganda campaign backed by plenty of thugs more than ready to crack a few skulls to reinforce the point but as Knecht says just ordinary people doing what they hoped was the right thing.

The big problem we have is understanding just how things evolved to where they did but it didn't all happen in one incomprehensible jump but in lots of small increments each of which made sense in terms of its own internal logic. It was a process that led from the mundane to the obscenely, murderously grotesque with an inevitability that went largely unquestioned and just sort of happened.

I can't help but think of the Christmas Day football match in No Man's Land during WW1. Just blokes making the best of it. Hatred and animosity banished and the realisation that them over there are just the same as us over here. For a few moments at least. I don't believe that the motivation for Fritz or for Tommy to take part was any different.

It is never the common people who want war and conflict and all that goes with it because they know that it is them that will pay the price.

But even with all of that said Nazi Germany had to be opposed and stopped and, for all the reservations I have about gung ho nationalism I'm glad, and proud, that it was Britain that, famously, stood alone.

I just think that people, when left to sort things out for themselves, are fundamentally decent but rarely are they given the chance to make the decisions that really matter.

What is the old expression? Those who seek power are those least suited to wield it? We should be very wary of charismatic leaders.

I have also visited Anne Frank's house SFD and yes, it is upsetting and it takes a lot for me to get upset. It's hard to believe that one human being can do such things to another but I think that given the brainwashing that most nations are capable of such things and most have at some stage in their history. Looking at the world today, we don't seem to be learning very well.

This is quite an apt thread for me because me and Ms GOB are taking a bike tour next year taking in Amsterdam and down through Germany to the Black Forest, on to Geneva and over the Swiss Alps to Madrid before making our way back via Germany again. We intend to visit a concentration camp in the Black Forest as well as a few other WW1 and WW2 memorials etc. - I'm not sure why I want to visit these places really but I think it's out of a sense of respect for Dad and the war that he fought in as well as being a good reminder of why intolerance of fellow human beings can never be permitted.

GOB wrote:

I have also visited Anne Frank's house SFD and yes, it is upsetting and it takes a lot for me to get upset. It's hard to believe that one human being can do such things to another but I think that given the brainwashing that most nations are capable of such things and most have at some stage in their history. Looking at the world today, we don't seem to be learning very well.

This is quite an apt thread for me because me and Ms GOB are taking a bike tour next year taking in Amsterdam and down through Germany to the Black Forest, on to Geneva and over the Swiss Alps to Madrid before making our way back via Germany again. We intend to visit a concentration camp in the Black Forest as well as a few other WW1 and WW2 memorials etc. - I'm not sure why I want to visit these places really but I think it's out of a sense of respect for Dad and the war that he fought in as well as being a good reminder of why intolerance of fellow human beings can never be permitted.

If you intend to visit the Remagen Bridge, let me know and I'll meet you there. Good museum.

Moist_Von_Lipwig wrote:

GOB wrote:

I have also visited Anne Frank's house SFD and yes, it is upsetting and it takes a lot for me to get upset. It's hard to believe that one human being can do such things to another but I think that given the brainwashing that most nations are capable of such things and most have at some stage in their history. Looking at the world today, we don't seem to be learning very well.

This is quite an apt thread for me because me and Ms GOB are taking a bike tour next year taking in Amsterdam and down through Germany to the Black Forest, on to Geneva and over the Swiss Alps to Madrid before making our way back via Germany again. We intend to visit a concentration camp in the Black Forest as well as a few other WW1 and WW2 memorials etc. - I'm not sure why I want to visit these places really but I think it's out of a sense of respect for Dad and the war that he fought in as well as being a good reminder of why intolerance of fellow human beings can never be permitted.

If you intend to visit the Remagen Bridge, let me know and I'll meet you there. Good museum.

Whereabout is that? - We had intended to visit Natzweiler Struthof, are they in the same area? And, whereabouts are you Moist?

Get it, "whereabouts are you moist"...cracker eh!

GOB wrote:

Moist_Von_Lipwig wrote:

GOB wrote:

I have also visited Anne Frank's house SFD and yes, it is upsetting and it takes a lot for me to get upset. It's hard to believe that one human being can do such things to another but I think that given the brainwashing that most nations are capable of such things and most have at some stage in their history. Looking at the world today, we don't seem to be learning very well.

This is quite an apt thread for me because me and Ms GOB are taking a bike tour next year taking in Amsterdam and down through Germany to the Black Forest, on to Geneva and over the Swiss Alps to Madrid before making our way back via Germany again. We intend to visit a concentration camp in the Black Forest as well as a few other WW1 and WW2 memorials etc. - I'm not sure why I want to visit these places really but I think it's out of a sense of respect for Dad and the war that he fought in as well as being a good reminder of why intolerance of fellow human beings can never be permitted.

If you intend to visit the Remagen Bridge, let me know and I'll meet you there. Good museum.

Whereabout is that? - We had intended to visit Natzweiler Struthof, are they in the same area? And, whereabouts are you Moist?

Get it, "whereabouts are you moist"...cracker eh!

LOL

Remagen is just south of Bonn (where I am). Depends on which route you intend to take into Germany.

Will you be camping or staying in hotels/B&B?

We're heading from Amsterdam to Bad Durkheim, near Frankfurt. That's about the only motorway route we'll be taking but it's a fair old run so we're doing that because I can open the throttle a bit. We'll be passing your place so put the kettle on  

We're doing a combination, camping, hotels and B&B's.

GOB wrote:

We're heading from Amsterdam to Bad Durkheim, near Frankfurt. That's about the only motorway route we'll be taking but it's a fair old run so we're doing that because I can open the throttle a bit. We'll be passing your place so put the kettle on  

We're doing a combination, camping, hotels and B&B's.

Will prime the kettle. Let me know more nearer the date. A friend of mine owns a camping site near Koblenz on the Mosel river.

Elias wrote:

you aint trivialising anything, every face/body featured was an important person to someone.  

At Auschwitz a lot of the barracks are now used as a museum. On the walls are the mug shots of many of victims. Incredibly, the SS took photos of everyone who arrived. They also kept meticulous records - a lot of these were destroyed but enough survived to show what was going on.

I found walking past all these photos incredibly distressing. There were so many of them (but of course they were just a fraction of the people that went to Auschwitz). I felt that it was my duty to look at as many of the faces as possible so that they are not forgotten. I found it really difficult - underneath the photo is the name of the person, their date of birth, their crime (ie being Jew, Polish, Gypsy etc), their arrival date at Auschwitz and the date of their death. Most of them only survived a few months and if they arrived during the winter it was considerably less.

It was only after being at home for few days that I was able to get some sort of closure (if that's the right word). Despite these poor souls dying 70 years ago, I am was one of thousands of people that see their picture every year and think about them and what they went through.

Just reading the comments (especially knechts) raised the hairs on my arms.

Somewhere I've always wanted to go and see, a sobering reminder of how truly horrible humanity can be!

Ps: this IS atd right?