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The big questions of the Holocaust
00:47:23
Laurence Rees charts the course of the Holocaust – from its origins to its devastating conclusion
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Ryan Reynolds
What is this place?
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Rachel Dinning
Welcome to Cloud 9.
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How exactly did I get here?
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Rachel Dinning
You're a Toyota Crown driver and only Crown drivers ever reach this level of pure bliss.
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Lawrence Rees
The captivating Toyota Crown Family Toyota. Let's go places.
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Monday 27 January is Holocaust Memorial Day, and in advance of that, we wanted to bring back this episode from 2023 with the historian Lawrence Rees speaking to Rachel Dinning. Lawrence tackles the big questions that surround the Holocaust, charting its course from its origins to its devastating conclusion. If you're interested in finding out more about this period of history, then you can listen to our recent episode with Lawrence on the Nazi Mindset that went out the 22nd of January. And Lawrence is also leading an upcoming six part history extra masterclass on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. To subscribe to the course and access video lectures and additional learning material, then head to historyextra.com Nazi Germany from 27 January onwards.
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Rachel Dinning
So Lawrence, we've got an extremely difficult task this episode which is to try and understand the Holocaust. And my first question to you is what were the origins of the Holocaust?
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Lawrence Rees
I preface it with saying it's a very difficult and complex subject. And I would recommend in particular with this subject really, that people also consult, you know, what books they can as well on it, or longer television documentaries because I can't encompass the whole thing, but I'll do my best to give some broad headlines. If you're looking at the origins of this. Well, I mean the first thing to say is antisemitism has been around for thousands of years. There's antisemitism in the Bible, seeing in the relationship between Jesus and the Jews in terms of some of the quotes described and some of the views expressed in the in the New Testament are anti Semitic. Medieval times, you see that with Martin Luther in Germany writing diatribes against the Jews and so on. And then you have the Enlightenment, primarily in the 18th century, but spreading over from that. You have a sense that actually this has been unfair in The Jews, that they should have greater rights. And there's a loosening up of these restrictions, which previously had been placed in many cases on Jews in Germany. Something interesting happens during the 19th century, which is that you find that Germany changes more than any other country in Europe. It unifies, but also it industrializes. There's change going on all over. It increases in its population and so on. And there become some groups that begin to see the Jews as one of the instruments of this change. The Jews who predominantly were living in cities, often involved in commerce and so on. And that there was, if you like, traditional values of the countryside, of small workshops rather than big factories and so on. And this is characterized by being called Volkisch movement. English translation would be kind of people or community or whatever. But it's more than that in German, it means much more a sense of connection with the native soil and so on. And as a general rule, Jews tended to be excluded from that because, as I say, they were looked on much more as creatures of the city rather than the countryside. So there was this element growing, which isn't to say that you had levels of antisemitism in Germany that made you think before the First World War that the horror of the Holocaust would come through a German administration. In fact, as I write in my own book about the Holocaust, if you'd been asked, I think, at the turn of the century to say which country in. In Europe will provoke this absolute horror, you probably would have said Russia. Because at turn of the 20th century, there was a number of pogroms in Russia. There was attacks on Russia's. Russian Jews were fleeing, some Russian Jews fleeing to Germany. And then you have the First World War. It's during the First World War that you begin to find a great deal of scapegoating of the Jews. The Germans have high hopes, obviously, with that war. They think that they're going to do well in it. When it turns out that they start not doing well, there begins to be a lot of scapegoating of Jews. This myth comes up called the stab in the back myth, that Jews had somehow been plotting behind the lines in order to destroy the efforts of soldiers on the front line. But it's a myth. It wasn't happening. But nonetheless, I think in some quarters, at any rate, it gets traction because it's a way of stopping yourself feeling bad about losing the war. You say, well, Germany lost the war, but actually I wasn't responsible. We weren't responsible. It's the shady group, this conspiracy of people who they Say they're Germans, but actually they're acting across international boundaries with other Jews and so on. Horrible prejudicial stuff, which isn't true. But nonetheless it begins to come up. That's the background against which what we're going to see starts to grow.
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Rachel Dinning
And how big a role did antisemitism play in Hitler's eventual rise to power? How much did he pull on anti Semitic trait?
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Lawrence Rees
The first thing to say is that it's an obsession. It's a, it's an obsession to virtual pathological levels with him, the Jews. And we can date this really to September 1919, when he writes a letter to a fellow soldier called Adolf Gemlich. And in it he explains his anti Semitism. And he sees the Jews as a racial tuberculosis or something. He sees them, it's like almost a disease. And it's that they are responsible for the disintegration of cultures as he sees it. So you've got to understand this is a different type of antisemitism to the one I've just been talking about, which is you might call characterizes Christian based antisemitism. I'm not saying all Christians felt it, but nonetheless you can see it's coming through from that environment. Hitler's antisemitism is racially based. And what he believes is that there's Jewish blood. Hitler believes that the way of understanding the whole nature of the world, the secret of understanding how the world is, is race. That the world is divided into different racial groups and the struggles between different racial groups. And it's important to keep racial groups pure. That's to say they mustn't interbreed with other racial groups. And that of these groups, the Jews are the most insidious and dangerous. So it follows that you shouldn't ever have sexual relationships with Jews. You Jews should not be citizens of Germany because they're not true Germans. So his anti Semitism is of that type. And where that's gonna play out in the Holocaust to come is that if you in the medieval times were a Jew, there was often a chance that you could escape persecution by converting to Christianity. So you say, well I was a Jew, I'm not a Jew now. Cause it's religious based. There's no possibility of that happening under the Nazis and Hitler. And that's because their view was you are racially a Jew, you're not Jew. As a result necessarily of religion, even in its own terms, it became nonsensical because obviously they didn't have a test for Jewish blood. They had to define who was Jewish by how many of your grandparents practiced the Jewish religion to try and answer how important was it in his rise to power? It was important in his early speeches. It's important in his attempts to grow the Nazi party in the early 1920s. But when he is actually moving forward and gaining power as chancellor from about 1928 to 1933, you see that he mentions Jews much, much less in his speeches. And I think that's because he recognizes that this kind of vitriolic, horrendous anti Semitism that he possesses is not going to get him huge numbers of votes. So he just tones it back. He never pretends that he likes Jews. He doesn't pretend that he doesn't have this hatred. But nonetheless, he's toning it down and focusing much more on saying he wants to create a national community, this Volksgemeinschaft, much more of a kind of feel good idea, rather than focusing during that period on his anti Semitism.
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Rachel Dinning
But then, once he was fully in power from 1933, how did Hitler begin to act against Jews?
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Lawrence Rees
It's a gradual process, but with peaks and then troughs. But the overall trajectory of it is getting steadily worse. If you're a German, Jewish, initially, when he comes to power, they do create concentration camps. And these concentration camps are predominantly to imprison his political opponents. So communists and socialists, and some of them were of course, Jews as well. And it tended to be that if you were a Jew and sent to these camps, generally speaking, you would be treated worse than if you weren't. But it's very, very important because people, they get confused about the origins of concentration camps in that they think, well, okay, a camp like Dachau, terrible, infamous place, was created in 1933, pretty much straight after Hitler comes to power. And it was created in a place that wasn't hidden. So he thought, well, oh, well, the Germans must have known about the killing of the Jews. But of course, firstly, it was mostly not Jews who were sent in those days to Dachau. And secondly, they weren't places of mass killing yet. What they were were places of horrible political oppression where some people did die, some people were murdered. But the majority of people who were sent to a camp like Dachau in the 1930s, maybe a year or a year and a half or so on, and then they were released. They were never given a determinate sentence. Part of the torture of these places was that you were taken there for what they called preventative dissension, meaning you didn't Even have to commit a crime to go there. Anyone the Nazis didn't like, they could send that. And then they never told you when you were leaving. So every day you didn't know they might never leave or you might leave today. These concentration camps at this stage were not focused primarily on Jews. There was persecution going on outside. One of the first pieces of legislation in 1933 was forbidding them from being in, for example, Jews in the civil service. Although I think some Jews should escape that if they proved they were veterans of the First World War. But the state is beginning to close in on the German Jews. And you had local atrocities. You had Nazi Stormtroopers in villages who would then just take it into their own head to. To go and beat up a Jew. Or particularly targeting Jews who were having relationships with non Jews. Going back to the whole racial idea was absolute anathema to the Nazis so that you would. You would find these terrible stories of local atrocities. I met a man who's Jewish, whose father was taken in Nuremberg, and they were made with a group of other Jews. This is 1933, to cut the grass and eat it with their teeth. This was just a day of humiliation for. So this kind of thing is happening. They're showing that their kind of contempt and hatred of Jews as early as this.
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Rachel Dinning
And then it's in 1938 that sees probably a big ramping up of attacks on Jewish people. Is that right?
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Lawrence Rees
Yeah. 1938 is an absolute landmark year in all of this. You'd had, prior to that, you'd had this growing persecution. You'd had in 1935, the passing of the Nuremberg Laws, which made it put into law that you could not have sexual relations if you were a Jew with a non Jew in Germany, which deprived the Jews of citizenship. So this was happening. I met Jews who lived through that time in Germany who thought, well, now it's in the law, you know, that might stop some of these ad hoc horrible attacks. So it's law now. We know where we are. And they kept thinking it might settle down. So, you know, not everyone felt that there was a lot of emigration of German Jews, but there was a sense that among some people that, you know, we are. We're loyal Germans. It'll settle down. 1938 changes all that, because in 1938, three crucial, crucial things happen. The first is in March 1938, the Germans move on Austria in what's called the Anschluss, and incorporate Austria into Germany. Austria has proportionately far, far more Jews than Germany. People forget or don't know that less than 1% of Germans were Jews, that German Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, of course, but they were proportionately a fractionate number of them. And yet people somehow think, who don't know much about this, that the target of this was numbers wise, was German Jews. Actually, there weren't that many German Jews in Austria. Proportionately, there are many, many more. So in Austria, they start immediately. This is under Adolf Eichmann, who's going to play a role in the Holocaust to come. They operate almost a conveyor belt system of robbing these Jews and then trying to force them to emigrate. And that's the policy at the minute. The policy is rob them and force them out. Rob them and force them out. And they're doing that very, very, very brutally and forcefully in Austria. This is from March 1938. And then the second infamous thing that happens as far as the Nazis are concerned that year is in November. You get Kristallnacht on one night in November when, as a result, the catalysts for this is the murderer of a German diplomat in Paris who's murdered by a Jew. And immediately they take revenge on the German Jews. And tens of thousands are sent to concentration camps. About 100 are killed. Synagogues are set on fire. It's just this outpouring of hatred. In the summer, something else happens that I think is important and we should remember as well, and that is something called the Evian Conference. What the Evian Conference is, is a product of Franklin Roosevelt, President Franklin Roosevelt. He's seen with horror, as other people have seen with horror, what's been happening in March with the Anschluss in Austria. And the conference is designed to take representatives from all nations to look at who's going to take what they call refugees, although they all understand, I think, that refugees, they mean Jews. And it's a devastatingly upsetting moment in the history, because what happens is they all get together in the town of Evian, and each country more or less in turn, says they deplore what's happening. But there's no. We can't really take very many people any more refugees, I'm afraid. Oh, no, no, no. Not for us. So it's all these fine words and no actions. I think one or two countries try and say they will, but it doesn't actually necessarily follow through. I mean, but whatever happens, the notion that Evian is going to take substantial numbers of Jews from Germany or Austria and save them absolutely doesn't happen. As a result, you find the Germans in Particular Hitler are absolutely not just disgusted, but it just sums it up to them. And their view is that there's one headline in one paper so nobody wants them. It's Hitler calling out the hypocrisy as he sees it, of the west and other countries, and not just the west, but anywhere. You all say it's terrible what we're doing to the Jews, but you're not prepared to do anything about it. That shows you, that shows you the nature of the world we're living in. And it also shows you how you must kind of secretly agree with us that there's a problem because you don't want these people either. So this is a big moment in terms of Nazi mentality, the confirmation that they're right because they're not doing anything either. So you have those three things going on in 1938 that I think are absolutely beginning to radicalize the whole anti Semitic situation.
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Ryan Reynolds
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Rachel Dinning
So then when we come to the war itself, what happened during this time to accelerate policies that were anti Jewish or anti Semitic?
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Lawrence Rees
The first thing to say is that genocides almost always seem to happen in wars and particularly horrible, horrific wars. Genocides can come through it. When the Germans move into Poland, they're not targeting Jews to kill per se. They're not going in trying to kill all the Jews. What they're doing is they're trying to turn Poland essentially into a slave state. So they're targeting what they call the leadership class. But also they're killing Jews as well. They're killing any Jews who kind of get in their way. Pretty soon it turns out their policy towards Jews in Poland is to imprison them in ghettos in the big cities. So the first big ghetto that's sealed, as it were, meaning completely closed, is the Lodz ghetto in Poland by Spring of 1940. The thinking is twofold, really is. One is they've convinced themselves that Jews are A threat, They're a physical threat. It's nonsense. I mean, it's terrible to talk about this and to talk through policy wise because they're making decisions based on, predicated on phenomenal untruths. But in order to understand how it happens, we need to understand what they're thinking. And this is what they're thinking. The second reason they're ghettoizing Jews is because they're planning on sending them somewhere, deporting them. If you think back to the Avian Conference, the idea was put them on boats, send them some, go, go, go. Not talking about mass murders of everybody, go. And so they're still thinking, how can we expel them? Well, they realized in those early months of the war we can't expel them at the minute. So let's just keep them somewhere temporarily prior to expelling them. So they've gathered Jews together in ghettos in Poland and bear in mind there weren't that many German Jews. There are a phenomenal number of Polish Jews, I mean millions of Polish Jews. Polish Jews are going to be the greatest single proportionate group of people who are going to die in the Holocaust. And it has to be said Jews are dying in the ghettos because they're horrendous places and there's completely insanitary places and there's not enough food and so on. And worth mentioning that the Nazis create in the horror of the situation they have created, they create the very people or very sites that they're frightened of. So they look into the ghettos and they see people who are diseased and starving and dirty and suffering and they say, yep, that's exactly what Jews are, but they weren't before you did that to them. But nonetheless it feeds into this circularity loop of their mentality of how they rationalize it.
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Rachel Dinning
So at the same time as this ghettoization, the Nazis are also pursuing something called adult euthanasia policy. Can you tell us a bit about that and how it relates to what was going to happen to the Jews?
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Lawrence Rees
Again, I think this is really important. Well, first of all, it goes to the question of what do we mean by the Holocaust? Is the Holocaust simply the extermination of European Jews or is it the broader penumbra of the people who are also going to be killed around it? So for example, Sinti and Roma, the people the Nazis called Gypsies, are going to be killed in large numbers. You're going to find a whole variety of other different groups, including severely disabled people. And Hitler has always wanted to target These people, it's one of the reasons, one of the first things they do is put forward very, very strict, horrible sterilization laws so that if you are selected as severely disabled, you're not able to have children, and they force that on you. He's always, I think, secretly wanted to go one stage further because the Nazis have these big, Even in the 30s, these big propaganda things saying, why are we keeping mentally disabled people in asylums? How much does it cost versus what else could we do with this money? It's wrong. And now he's able to act on it. The war's here, he's going to act on it. And so by 1940, they are murdering selected, severely disabled people. How are they murdering them? Well, they come up with a novel way of killing people, which is in gas chambers. What they do is they take these severely disabled people and they tell them they're going to take a shower and lead them forward into tiled rooms that have shower heads and everything in them. But outside there are bottles of carbon monoxide gas. And then once everyone inside, the doctor. And it's fascinating from the beginning, this is a medical issue. And this is also going to happen with the Jews. Remember that thing about their erasial tuberculosis? This is. It's almost a pseudo medical problem for the Nazis, all of this. It's a doctor turns on the carbon monoxide gas and kills them. This is happening before. This method, any kind of gas method is used on Jews. But the people who are involved in this process are later going to transfer to some of the death camps to be involved in killing. But they're doing it here first, again, not in anything like the numbers that they're going to end up killing Jews. But you can see how this mentality of killing people who you think are not wanted and are dangerous to the state, even though they're by any measure innocent civilians, is already happening.
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Rachel Dinning
It's extremely hard today to sit and think about, well, you mentioned that it was doctors and it was a medical procedure to participate in this. It's extremely hard today to get your head around the idea that a doctor who's trained, surely to protect life at all costs, we're doing these kind of things. Do we have any understanding of how these perhaps normal people rationalized what they were doing to other human beings?
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Lawrence Rees
There's a brilliant book by a man called Robert J. Lifton on this which examines exactly this. And first thing to say is, I think proportionately there are more doctors in the Nazi party than any other profession. From memory, I think that's right. Why? Because the Nazis massively valued doctors. Because if you're involved in selection of race and racial identities, and these are all, as they see it, the Nazi phrase for it was racial hygiene. Keeping the race pure is the absolute number one aim. And how the doctors involved in this absolutely rationalized it was that you have a responsibility to an individual for their health, but a bigger and more important responsibility is the health of the state, the health of the nation. And I think there's again some quote from a doctor saying something like, just as I would take out your diseased appendix so that you can live, I have to take out the diseased appendix, I.e. the Jews, from the body of the state to let the state live. You can see the echo of all this going right the way through so that you end up at a place like Auschwitz with doctors doing the selection. So it's. Imagine it. I mean, doctors who, as you say, are trained to save lives, are selecting who dies and doesn't die. And also at Auschwitz, they are conducting the most horrendous medical experiments, but they believe that what they're doing is, well, you may die, but the benefits of that will go to other people. And also the Japanese. The Japanese conducted unspeakable, vile medical experiments in the war against China. I, I met and talked to a doctor who, who actually participated in these things. And he talked about how one experiment, they got a Chinese farmer and they shot him in the stomach and then they performed an operation on him without anesthetic to see if it was possible to save someone's life who was shot and then where you take the bullet out without anesthetic. So they're doing the most vile, horrible things, these doctors. And after the war, that doctor, the Japanese doctor, who was telling me about these tremendously horrible things he did after the war, he became a local gp and everybody thought he was great. Just the situation changed and he changed. But anyway, so doctors absolutely, going through the euthanasia scheme, going through the gassing, the early gassings, are really crucial characters.
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Rachel Dinning
I wanted to go back a little bit to June 1941, when the Germans invade the Soviet Union. What was the relevance of this year to the Holocaust or what was happening at this time?
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Lawrence Rees
This is a big, again, another big moment. I mean, I think people say, what's the moment the Holocaust decided? And I think most historians would now say there was no one moment the Holocaust. It was an evolutionary process characterized, as one historian said, by moments of radicalization. And one of the moments of radicalization was undoubtedly the invasion of the Soviet Union, June 1941. Because as they're invading the Soviet Union, they know they're going to encounter, first of all, large numbers of Jews. Secondly, Hitler has already declared this war a war of extermination. And that's to say the Nazis want this territory. They just don't want the people who are on it. Himmler, head of the SS, just before that war starts in June 1941, he says to his senior colleagues, the purpose of the war is to kill millions of the people there and take their land. Paraphrasing him, but that's what he's saying. He's saying they know they're going to kill millions of innocent civilians, not just Jews, but their overall plan is tens of millions of people. I mean, the extraordinary thing is we look on the Holocaust, as I certainly do, as the greatest crime in the history of the world. But actually it was going to be the core of an even of a bigger crime in terms of numbers, which is killing large numbers of the population of the Soviet Union as well. But their immediate task, as they see it, is to go into the Soviet Union, deal with the most dangerous elements first. The dangerous elements are they're going to shoot the commissars, the political leaders of the Red army. And they're also going to kill. Initially they talk about killing Jews in the service of the party or state. That is the bare minimum they're looking at. Actually, within a few weeks and months in the June, July, August, September, they move into killing essentially all the Jews they're coming across. They're either ghettoizing them in horrendous situations or very often just shooting and killing them. And these are women and children as well. Now, again, people I've met who witnessed this of the pit killings of small children and women and old men and old women just lined up and shot and everything. It's the stuff of the worst nightmares you've ever heard. Just terrible.
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Rachel Dinning
And what's the early role of the concentration camp, Auschwitz, which is probably the one that most people are familiar with in all of this?
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Lawrence Rees
Well, Auschwitz goes on to be and is, was the site of the largest mass murder in the history of the world. It's quite something when you think about it, because it also means it's the site of the largest graveyard in the history of the world. Round about 1,100,000 people were murdered there, which is an extraordinary thing to try and get your head around. But Auschwitz is almost a microcosm for the process I'm talking about with the Holocaust, which is Auschwitz, was never established by the Germans to do this. It evolved into doing this through the decisions that they took. Auschwitz was started in the spring of 1940 under the commandant, Rudolf Hirst, as a concentration camp. Like a much more brutal, nasty aversion of an already brutal, nasty place like Dachau. Hearst trained at Dacha and it was designed to terrorize and imprison Polish political prisoners. Not Jews specifically, but Poles. It was in a region of Poland that the Germans wanted to Germanize and make part of Germany. So they were particularly keen in that area on making sure that the Poles were kept down, were turned into slaves to work for them, were either deported to other areas, but some were kept to work for them in the mines and factories there, but also to make sure there was no political opposition, no resistance of any kind from anyone. So it was designed to take Polish political prisoners. And actually half of those taken would be dead within a year or two. It was that concentration camp. But Auschwitz role begins to change, like so many things begin to change because of the invasion of the Soviet Union. What happens in the summer of 1941 is Soviet commissars are brought to the camp. And if you remember when I talked about the Nazi policy and going into the Soviet Union, they had a thing called the Commissar order, which was this order that was to shoot political officers of the Red army as soon as you caught them. But some of them managed to evade being spotted as commissars and they weren't spotted until later on. They ended up in prisoners of war camp. And we have to say the prisoners of war camp where millions of Soviet prisoners of war would die. If it hadn't been for what was going to happen with the Holocaust, they would have been looked on. We'd be talking about that as the biggest atrocity of the war in terms of numbers. So these were places of absolute horror as well, because there was just not enough food or care for these people. But the commissars are selected and they're taken to concentration camps like Auschwitz. And they're essentially taken there to be murdered. So in the summer of 1941, you see in these gravel pits at Auschwitz, these prisoners brutally worked horrendously to death. This actually causes in the camp real upset. I mean, it causes upset because horrific as Auschwitz has been up to now, it hasn't seen anything like this. It hasn't seen people openly worked and tortured to death. So in the autumn of 1941, the Deputy Commandant, he's thinking, well, what can we do about this. And he comes up with an idea which is we've got in our possession here at Auschwitz a poisonous insecticide called Zyklon B. And Zyklon B is in crystal form and it's used for killing lice. What you do is you take your clothes that are infected with lice and they put them in a room, hermetically sealed room, throw in the crystals which then on exposure to air turn into a poisonous gas, kills the lice. And they think, in Auschwitz, well, if it kills lice, maybe it can kill people. And so then in the scariest place of a scary place, that Block 11 of Auschwitz Main camp, they sealed off the bottom level of of cells. They put in them Russian prisoners of War, Soviet Prisoners of War and also some sick prisoners. And they threw in the Zyklon B. And over a period of days they experimented. Because initially the problem was they didn't put in. It was too much ventilation, there wasn't enough Zycon B put in. So some of these poor people were taking days to die in most, again, horrendous situations imaginable. But eventually they work out a system. Then they have another issue. I was going to say problem. And this is again a difficulty in talking about this because you talk about the problem the Nazi has in killing people. The problem was the people being killed. The problem was they were there doing it. But anyway, if you're trying again to understand how they're approaching this and the development of Auschwitz, the mentality was, well, we've got this way of killing people that's more effective than working people to death doing anything like that. The difficulty is we're killing them in block 11, which is quite a way away in the main camp from the crematorium where we're burning their bodies and we're wheeling all these bodies through the camp. So everybody knows what we're doing. It's, you know, it's not good. So they go, right, why don't we take one of the rooms in the crematorium of the main camp and kill them there and use Zyklon be there. Because then the bodies are immediately next to where we're going to burn them. So that's what they do. They then start experimenting with killing still Soviet prisoners of war there. Then once that begins to happen towards the end of 1941, they go, Ah, we've got some Jewish workers in the local area, just take them in and kill them. And then what they're doing is they, they're able to take them in and they announce to Them as they're standing outside the crematorium. Welcome to Auschwitz. It's a work camp. You just need to go in here, take your clothes off and, and go in here and have a shower and then be admitted to the camp. And they do that to calm everybody down, to assure them that there's nothing bad going to happen to them and so they can go in and then they go in and kill them. And that's the first use of a gas chamber dedicated to kill Jews at Auschwitz.
- [32:37]
Rachel Dinning
I wanted to ask you about the Wanzi Conference, which was held in January 1942. Can you tell us what happened at this conference and the significance of it?
- [32:48]
Lawrence Rees
It's the one thing that I think a lot of people who don't know much about the history have heard of. There was that famous film wasn't a Conspiracy, with Kenneth Branagh playing Heydrich in it. And I think it was interesting it was called Conspiracy because it sort of gave the impression, at least to some people, I think, that this is a crucial, crucial moment in the, you know, maybe even the moment the Holocaust is decided on. It isn't. It's another step along the way. And in order to understand the Wannsee Conference, you have to understand what happened in Hitler's mentality in December, the fanze conferences, in January 1942, in December 1941, something more important happens, and that is America comes into the war. Hitler has always said, he said in January 1939, before the war started, essentially, and I'm paraphrasing, if, if there's a world war, the Jews are going to be held responsible and exterminated. And we know what he said because Goebbels wrote it in his diary and we have that diary. And in it, essentially, Hitler is, is saying that there must be no sentimentality about that. The world war is here and the Jews will pay the price. That happens in December 1941. In January 1942, there's a meeting chaired by Heydrich of a number of senior administrators and ss. And really it's designed to ensure that the SS have control of the whole killing process. What actually Heydrich's talking about is that the Jews should be deported east to work on this big road projects and be killed when they're no longer useful. It also goes back to the idea of deportations. We were talking about either going to be deported into territory we own far in the east. And this has always been part of the Nazi mindset. There was even a plan in the summer of 1940, assuming Britain had made peace to send the Jews to the island of Madagascar, where again, it would have been quasi genocidal because it would be under an SS governor and the Jews would have died out over a longer period. But it was this notion of expulsion and death. And that is still part of the mindset that Heydrich is talking about. Meantime, what's happening is a more immediate problem for the Nazis, which is, you remember the Jews were ghettoized back in Poland, and there are millions of Jews ghettoized back in Poland. What's happening to them is that Hitler has decided in the autumn of 1941 that the Jews from Germany and Austria can be deported east into these ghettos like Lodz particularly. And so there's even worse overcrowding, there's even more, you know. So local solutions begin to be sprung up. And one of them is a camp called Helno. Another is a camp called Belzech. These are. Helno becomes operational in December 1941, and that is a base for a method of killing called gas vans, where Jews would be pushed into the back of a. Like a furniture van, and gas would be then put into the van and then they were driven off and buried. Belzec comes into operation at the beginning of 1942. That's the very first static killing factory that operates gas chambers and that is designed to deal with the very large numbers of Jews who are in the ghettos in the surrounding area. So you can see that the reason that all of the death camps end up being made in Poland is isn't, as some disgraceful commentators who didn't know much about this said at one point, oh, the Poles are anti Semitic. I mean, the reason that the Nazi death camps are in Poland is because that's where the largest number of Jews they wanted to kill by this method were. Then what begins to happen is foreign Jews start to be sent. Some foreign Jews from France and Slovakia are sent to Auschwitz in the spring of 1942. By then, the local solution they've devised, which was the crematorium, the main camp, they've got issues with that. They've got issues with that because it's still in the main camp. People can hear the screams of the people dying. And so again, it's not secret. In the autumn of 1941, they've been building a new camp about a mile and a half away from the main camp of Auschwitz that they call Auschwitz Birkenau. And at Auschwitz Birkenau, they take over two little peasant cottages, brick up the windows, and they use those as temporary Gas chambers that allows them to kill people in relative secrecy because there's no one around. But they have a problem of body disposal and they start burying the bodies. But in the summer they come to the surface so they go in and exhume them and burn. I mean, it's horrendous stuff. You can see how there can't be a big meeting and a plan. If there'd been a big meeting and a plan, they wouldn't have been constantly seeing it didn't work and evolving it. So you had. It's this extraordinary process that we can see in operation during this crucial period of a top down vision of Hitler. There's no question Hitler's responsible. Hitler wants to see these people go, but he's not going. Here's how to do it.
- [37:39]
Rachel Dinning
There's not a specific, he wants to go.
- [37:40]
Lawrence Rees
He hasn't got a blueprint. He's going, sort it out, sort it out. The Jews are the single greatest danger we have. You know, they're going. And then lower down people are going, okay, well we could try this, we could do that, we could try this, we could adopt this method and so on.
- [37:56]
Rachel Dinning
I suppose one of my final questions to you as we get towards the end is what are the misconceptions we have about the Holocaust today that we really need to let go of?
- [38:05]
Lawrence Rees
Well, I think one is that I talked before about that the Nazis were also targeting other people. Again, you have to say predominantly by far, by far the number of people killed at Auschwitz were Jews. The vast number of people killed at Auschwitz were Jews. But nonetheless there were, there were other people killed there as well. And it's important not to forget that that's one misconception. Another is thinking that an absolutely horrendous, a big, big significant event has a big significant moment of cause, that that's not quite how it works with this. It's not quite how it works with this. And I think the reason it's important to understand that is because you see how if you're looking at how horrors can happen, you have to understand that they can be incremental. That the starting point for this, which isn't necessarily where it's going to end, but a necessary precondition of this happening is racial hatred. Doesn't mean that all racial hatred is going to take you here, but it's a necessary precondition of what's going to happen. Nothing's inevitable. But nonetheless, when you see levels of intolerance, levels of racism, all of that, you can be led along a Road where if you were a Nazi involved in this, I'm not sure you would necessarily ever have thought this is the day that we're going to do it. People would say to me, I did think there was a problem with Jews, but I never meant this to happen. You know, they didn't think, you know, I never thought it would go this far. Or I met this former member of the SS and he came up to me and he shook my hand and he said, good to meet you. And I just want to say from the very beginning, it should never have happened. And I said, well, that's very refreshing to have a member of the former member of the SS say this about the Holocaust. And he said, no, no, I don't mean that. I said it should never have happened that Britain and Germany were ever at war. We should have got together. We could have divided the world up between us. You with your naval empire, us with our land empire, and we could have ruled the world. And so, you know, frankly, I blame Churchill for this, but no hard feelings, you know. And I said, parking that for a second, what is your view about the Holocaust then? And he said, well, I've had many, many years to think of it about it since the war and I would be prepared to go as far as saying things got out of hand towards the end. But it's almost like in that mentality there's a thinking that they were pushed into this because they were the only people honest enough to understand the true nature of the problem. And then everybody else was criticizing them but not helping them with the problem. And here's the thing, the one message to take from this is there was never a problem. It was in their heads.
- [40:45]
Podcast Host
That was Lawrence Rees speaking to Rachel Dilling. For more resources on Holocaust Memorial Day and information on upcoming events and how you can get involved, then head to hmd.orguk and if you're interested in learning more about Nazi Germany more generally, head to History Extra forward slash Nazi Germany to subscribe to Lawrence's six part masterclass on the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.