It correlates with the student revolts of the 1960s—the beginning of an extra-parliamentary opposition that emerged in the 1960s, fed up with the Adenauer era. Adenauer ceases to be Chancellor in 1963. There’s a lot of student unrest developing in the 1960s; these are people in their 20s, born in the 1940s, suddenly exposed to the full horror of the crimes of their elders (and supposed betters), then galvanized into that generational conflict summarised as “1968”. Frankl doesn’t talk about that so much as his critics do. His critics point out that he had managed not to be deported until quite late, and when he was in Theresienstadt, he had certain privileges. But he’s not actually as interested in that aspect as he is in the inner life. It’s about how meaning can give you psychological sustenance. to move very cautiously about offering to take all the Jews out of a country – if we do that then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar efforts in Poland and Germany. Hitler may well take us up on any such offer and there are simply not enough ships and means of transportation to handle them. (p312)

When German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously said that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” he meant that there was no way aesthetics—or art—could live up to the barbarism of the Holocaust. Maybe he was right. But here are 10 lesser-known texts that can, at the very least, increase our understanding—and our empathy. Badenheim 1939by Aharon Appelfeld Even today Morris has "no problem" with having killed this German prisoner. It mattered not that the man he murdered had been a fellow inmate of Auschwitz. All that was important was the language he'd been speaking. "I was happy. They [the Germans] killed all my family, thirty or forty people, and I killed one German. Phuh! That was nothing. If I could kill a hundred of them I would be glad, because they destroyed us completely." No matter how he is questioned on the subject, Morris is unable to see any difference between the Germans who ran Auschwitz and the German prisoner he killed on the cattle car on that freezing winter night in Poland. January 27, 2020 marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi concentration camp, by the Red Army. Laurence Rees, a British historian, documentary filmmaker, and creative director of history programs for the BBC, has written this book as a companion volume to a six-hour documentary series that was aired on PBS and the BBC in 2005. While the largest mass murder in human history took place at Auschwitz, its story has not been fully known. In this new history of the Nazis’ most notorious death camp, Rees gives a complete history of the camp—how it was turned from a concentration camp into a death factory. But this is more than an anecdotal account of Nazi brutality; this groundbreaking work is based on impeccable scholarship and more than 100 original interviews with both survivors and Nazi perpetrators. Their testimonies provide a picture of the inner workings of the camp in unmatched detail. The inclusion of insights gathered from interviews with the Nazi officials and soldiers gives the reader an unprecedented glimpse into the mindset of these perpetrators. In addition, Rees mines a wealth of new information about Auschwitz that includes Himmler’s desk diary—discovered in Russia fifty years after they were thought to have been burned in an SS furnace. Through these new sources, this incredible narrative history of the most notorious concentration camp preserves the authentic voices of those who suffered and those who caused their suffering.

Even when it was decriminalized, Seel said he felt so ashamed about it. He couldn’t talk to his family, his friends. He tried to get married, and had children with his wife even though he was gay. He eventually became an alcoholic, had a total breakdown, got divorced and then finally came out and said he had to speak about it. Ghastly and heart-rending though Delbo’s experiences are—and I have to admit the first time I read the book I was just in tears; I couldn’t bear it—I think we have to recognize that there were other experiences too, experiences that were awful in a wide variety of ways.

Auschwitz prisoners were even ‘sold’ to the Bayer company, part of I.G. Farben, as human guinea pigs for the testing of new drugs. One of the communications from Bayer to the Auschwitz authorities states that: ‘The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price." Rudolf Hoess emphasized in his memoirs how the key to successful mass murder on this scale was to conduct the whole process in an atmosphere of great calm." Yes. It’s an interesting contrast to Delbo. Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. He spent very little time in Auschwitz; in fact, he was in Theresienstadt, the supposed ‘model ghetto’ for the Red Cross inspection. Then he was deported to Auschwitz where he spent only a short period of time because he was selected for labour. He spent most of the rest of the war in a sub-camp of Dachau in Bavaria. Not at all. There were more trials of people who’d been involved in Auschwitz in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and there were several other major concentration camp trials in the 1960s and 1970s, going through to the Majdanek trial of 1975-1981 in West Germany. But all of them were bedevilled by this need to show subjective intent and excess brutality. Out of more than 140,000 people investigated, fewer than 6,660 were actually found guilty—and of these, nearly 5,000 received lenient sentences of less than two years. Only 164 were found guilty of the crime of murder”

I just wanted to add that. It is important, I feel, to get a larger view of the factors and decisions that resulted in so many people to be removed from their homes, their countries, and their families, leading them to Aushwitz, Sorbibo, Treblinka and Belzec, and these facts should not be forgotten from history, or disregarded as unimportant. Toivi Blatt, a boy sent to Sobibor (a death camp) and spared so he could assist in the killing process by cutting hair, sorting clothes, taking baggage and cleaning camps. There was a hierarchy of prisoners. At the bottom were the Jews considered unfit for work. They were killed. In the middle were the Jews, Russians and Poles who were considered fit for being worked to death. At the top were kapos and German prisoners who had specialist jobs. For these, Hoess set up a brothel in August 1943. The deniers have jumped on this bizarre fact – a death camp with a brothel? Come off it. Proves it was an okay place really. There were no gas chambers. And so on.