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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and Operation
of
the Gas Chambers © | |
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Contents |
Page 516 |
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| PART FIVE |
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| The unrealized future of
the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp |
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| The unrealised future of K L
Auschwitz-Birkenau |
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What the possible future of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
complex could have been is a topic that has not been researched and
never discussed in the literature. As far as the archivist of the
Auschwitz Museum can recall, only two people have ever taken an
interest in this now fictional evolution: a former prisoner and the
present author.
There were three main stages in the
development of KL Auschwitz: |
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| 1. |
Creation of the Stammlager or
main camp (Auschwitz 1) in July 1940; |
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| 2. |
Creation of a prisoner of war
camp at Birkenau (Auschwitz II) in October 1941; |
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| 3. |
Construction of a labour camp by
IG Farbenindustrie at Monowitz (Auschwitz III) in late October
1943. |
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The main camp was opened as a "protective custody"
[Schutzhaft] camp and was intended to receive Polish prisoners from
Silesia. Its rapid development was slowed somewhat by two successive
directives: the decision to build a POW camp (for Soviet prisoners)
and the decision to exterminate the Jews. The result was KGL ["POW
camp"- the name was not changed] Birkenau, with its four Krematorien
and its numerous gas chambers. The criminal conversion of the POW
camp was to be pushed even further according to 1944 plans, but
these could not be implemented for lack of material resources. This
last stage of homicidal activity was thus aborted and the
construction of the required facilities never completed, but the
instruments of extermination, absolute errors on the political and
human planes, were in any case destined for demolition, whatever the
outcome of the war for Germany and her satellites.
[The
probable evolution of these two programmes, the extension of the
main camp and reinforcement of the criminal structure of the POW
camp, interrupted before they were completed, are investigated in
the light of the remaining evidence from two standpoints: a future
without extermination and one with extermination.]
The Monowitz camp, directly linked with German industry,
represented the future “solution” for the concentration camp system:
slavery in the service of a “thousand year Reich”, triumphant or in
its death throes. The development of Monowitz, abandoned on 18th
January 1945, prefigured the way in which post-war societies, in the
West as well as in the East, would gradually come to be organized,
with the labour force dependent on the factories and the prison huts
or barracks being replaced by public housing. The improvement on the
“Monowitz principle” was to be more perceptible in the West, where
fairly complete freedom has replaced barbed wire and armed guards.
As for the food and the three-tier wooden bunks, the “liberal” and
“socialist” regimes have succeeded to differing extents in obtaining
sufficient of the former and replacing the later by decent flats or
comfortable
houses | |
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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and operation
of the gas chambers
Jean-Claude Pressac
© 1989, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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