Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979
Описание книги
Few places in the world carry as heavy a burden of history as Auschwitz. Recognized and remembered as the most prominent site of Nazi crimes, Auschwitz has had tremendous symbolic weight in the postwar world. Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration is a history of the Auschwitz memorial site in the years of the Polish People's Republic. Since 1945, Auschwitz has functioned as a memorial and museum. Its monuments, exhibitions, and public spaces have attracted politicians, pilgrims, and countless participants in public demonstrations and commemorative events. Jonathan Huener's study begins with the liberation of the camp and traces the history of the State Museum at Auschwitz from its origins immediately after the war until the 1980s, analyzing the landscape, exhibitions, and public events at the site. Based on extensive research and illustrated with archival photographs, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration accounts for the development and durability of a Polish commemorative idiom at Auschwitz. Emphasis on Polish national “martyrdom” at Auschwitz, neglect of the Shoah as the most prominent element of the camp's history, political instrumentalization of the grounds and exhibitions—these were some of the more controversial aspects of the camp's postwar landscape. Professor Huener locates these and other public manifestations of memory at Auschwitz in the broad scope of Polish history, in the specific context of postwar Polish politics and culture, and against the background of Polish-Jewish relations. Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration will be of interest to scholars, students, and general readers of the history of modern Poland and the Holocaust.
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Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979
Series Editor: John J. Bukowczyk
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When Eichmann visited Auschwitz, he acquainted Höss with the workings of gas chambers used at “euthanasia” installations and the mobile gassing vans used at various locations. Both used carbon monoxide as the poison, but neither, it was decided, would be suitable for the sort of mass extermination that was to be undertaken at Auschwitz. Instead, a preparation of hydrogen cyanide normally used as a disinfectant, fumigator, and delousing agent was chosen. The product, commercially marketed as “Zyklon-B,” was readily available at the Auschwitz complex. While Höss was away, his deputy Karl Fritzsch used Zyklon-B as a killing agent for humans on a group of Soviet prisoners. When the commandant returned, he supervised the first large-scale killing in the cellar of the base camp’s Block 11, where approximately six hundred Soviet prisoners of war and two hundred fifty other prisoners were gassed to death. After witnessing this second experiment, Höss became convinced that death by Zyklon-B gas would be the most efficient and appropriate means of killing Jews at Auschwitz in the future, and the mortuary of the “old crematorium” (later named Crematorium I) was converted to a gas chamber. It was first used on transports of Jewish deportees in February 1942.
Corpses of the victims of gassings at the base camp, as well as those who had been gassed at Birkenau, were buried in pits near the Birkenau bunkers. In the summer of 1942, however, SS Colonel Paul Blobel from Eichmann’s RSHA arrived at Auschwitz with orders that the corpses be removed. From September until late November 1942 a mass exhumation and incineration effort took place, as pyres of up to two thousand bodies each and, later, mass incineration pits were used to dispose of more than one hundred thousand corpses.
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