Auschwitz by Laurence Rees

we know it would not have occurred, but almost certainly there would still have been another type of genocide.
    Himmler passed his memorandum to Hitler, who read it and told him that in his view it was “gut und richtig” (“good and correct”). Significantly, Hitler never wrote down his views on the memo. It was sufficient for Himmler to be armed with the Führer’s verbal approval for its contents. This was the way that high policy was decided in the Nazi state.

    Rudolf Höss and his embryo concentration camp at Auschwitz were but a small part of this overall picture. Auschwitz was situated in one of the parts of Poland that was to be “Germanized,” and so the immediate future of the camp would be decided, to a large extent, by its location. The Upper Silesia region had passed between the Poles and the Germans a number of times before and, immediately preceding World War I, it had been part of Germany, only to be lost in the Versailles settlement. Now the Nazis wanted to reclaim it for the Reich.
    Unlike the other areas to be “Germanized,” however, Upper Silesia was heavily industrialized and large parts of it were unsuitable for settlement by the incoming ethnic Germans. This meant that many of the Poles would have to remain as a slave workforce which, in turn, meant that a concentration camp was thought particularly necessary in the area in order to subdue the local population. Originally Auschwitz had been conceived as a holding concentration camp—a “quarantine” camp in Nazi jargon—in which to keep prisoners before they were sent on to other concentration camps in the Reich. But, within days, it became clear that the camp would function as a place of permanent imprisonment in its own right.
    Höss knew that the war had radicalized everything, including the concentration camps. Although modeled on a place like Dachau, this new camp would have to deal with a more intractable problem than the institutions in the “Old Reich.” The camp at Auschwitz needed to imprison and terrorize Poles at a time when the whole country was being ethnically reordered and Poland—as a nation—was being intellectually and politically destroyed. Thus, even in its first incarnation as a concentration camp, Auschwitz had a proportionately higher death rate than any “normal” camp in the Reich. Of the 20,000 Poles initially sent to the camp, more than half were dead by the start of 1942.
    The first prisoners to arrive at Auschwitz in June 1940 were not Poles but Germans—thirty criminals transferred from Sachsenhausen concentration camp. They would become the first Kapos, the inmates who would act as agents of control between the SS and the Polish prisoners. The sight of these Kapos was the strongest first impression made on many of the Poles who arrived in the initial transports to the camp. “We thought they were all sailors,” says Roman Trojanowski, 31 who arrived at Auschwitz as a nineteen
year old in the summer of 1940. “They had berets like mariners–and then it turned out they were criminals. All of them were criminals.”
    â€œWe arrived and there were German Kapos and they yelled at us and struck us with short batons,” says Wilhelm Brasse, 32 who arrived at about the same time. “When someone was slow in coming down from the cattle truck he was beaten, or in several instances they were killed on the spot. So I was terrified—everyone was terrified.”
    These earliest Polish prisoners at Auschwitz had been sent to the camp for a variety of reasons—they might be suspected of working in the Polish underground, or be members of a group the Nazis specially targeted, like priests or the intelligentsia, or simply be someone to whom a German had taken exception. Indeed, many of the first group of Polish prisoners, who were transferred from Tarnów prison and arrived at the camp on June 14, 1940, were simply