Auschwitz itself is a deeply odd place.
I remember being surprised at the quality of the buildings both at Auschwitz and the extermination camp nearby. The physical plant felt much like my junior school -- built to the standards of good quality construction circa 1940. The washrooms especially struck me -- porcelain fixtures, doors hung carefully -- and this was not a post war reconstruction. The washrooms for prisoners at Auschwitz were well built (the extermination camp did not have such facilities but the infamous railroad station is built to the same high standard as stations in the rest of the Reich).
I said to person I was with (a former business partner) "if I was building a death camp I wouldn't worry about making sure the brickwork was properly pointed" and he replied "but you wouldn't be building a death camp".
And he was right. Because, at base, the Holocaust was an entirely irrational exercise.
Ignoring, as if you could, the human suffering, there was no good reason for the Nazi to organise death camps. They killed people who could have been useful assets for the war and used resources killing people who were no threat. Unless you accept (and this may be the truth) that the Nazi went to war in order to kill untermenschen (mainly Jews but also Gypsies, and to a lesser extent Poles along with other Slavic people like the Russians, Serbs, Ukrainians) the Holocaust was a bad idea even from a Nazi perspective.
It was, in fact, ideology cut loose from reality that drove the Holocaust -- magical thinking rather than rational thinking. Absent the Holocaust the Nazi may well have won the War.
And as such, building Auschwitz to the quality of, say, a hospital or school did not seem odd -- the whole project was crazy so what was a touch more madness?
December 20, 2009
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WARSAW, Poland – Police said early Monday that they have found the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign that was stolen on Friday from the gate of the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz.
Police spokeswoman Katarzyna Padlo said that the sign was found in northern Poland. She said police also detained five men aged between 25 and 39 who are being transported them to Krakow for questioning.
Padlo said the steel sign, which symbolizes to the world the atrocities and cruelty of Nazi Germany, has been cut into three pieces.
James Morton
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2 comments:
I have no doubt the 3 pieces was for profit, but 3 pieces can also be symbolic. It's hard to understand any of it, but then our world at present is non-understandable by any measure of history. The world is a changing, for better and worse.
It was most likely cut into 3 pieces so as to be more easily transported. Think the sign is made of metal so it could be welded together again.
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