Auschwitz - The Nazis And The Final Solution [DVD]

The documentary is made up of interviews with SS guards and survivors of the most heinous atrocity ever committed. After reading the book and also reading Rudolph Hoess autobiography, “Commandant of Auschwitz” I thought I was prepared for the total lack of remorse which would be exhibited by the SS guards. I wasn’t. Those interviewed still don’t believe, 60 yrs later, that they did anything wrong. I found those interviews particularly disturbing. The stories of survivors of Auschwitz described in great detail the conditions and treatment that they were subjected to and I can only imagine the rage they must still feel towards those SS guards who are still alive today.

Never having been through anything of the sort most of us could never imagine what it must have been like to be in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Those there saw evil so often that one survivor even commented that ‘you see death so much that you become immune to it’.

This BBC documentary is a chilling account of Auschwitz but one which everyone should see to ensure that such an atrocity never happens again. The camps are reconstructed using digital imaging and together with the SS and survivors stories and the original footage available this makes for a fascinating mini-series.

One question remains at the end of the documentary……could this really have happened in the 20th century?!

The BBC presents a totally absorbing study of the extermination camp. You begin to watch it feeling guilty, feeling that somehow you will be tainted with voyeurism, that your interest in obscenity points to some essential weakness in your character and soul. Within minutes you are absorbed. It's the blandness which gets to you.

The writer, Hannah Arendt, attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the German officer in charge of the 'Final Solution': she expected to look evil in the face - instead, she found an innocuous, bald, insignificant little bourgeois, devoutly sticking to the mantra that he had only been following orders. [ See Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil".]

Auschwitz was conceived as an industrial complex, exploiting local natural resources, existing railway lines, and the new-found sources of slave labour. Slowly, it evolved into a death camp, its primary industrial objective being the extermination of a race.

Using archive footage, interviews with survivors (from both sides of the wire), and computer animation to reconstruct the camp, the BBC delivers the tale of a bureaucratic nightmare. The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, was an ambitious Nazi whose management skills were devoted to the task of finding more efficient and cost-effective ways to kill and dispose of the bodies. Morality? It has no place on the balance books.

Of the thousands who contributed to the running of the camps, the vast majority were 'ordinary' people. Jobsworths. The chilling lesson from the study of Auschwitz is that if you demonise people - point to their religion, colour, nationality, or whatever makes them different - you erode their humanity. Jews were brought to Auschwitz in cattle wagons - regarded as little better than vermin, a commodity to be traded on the no-futures market. Their dehumanisation had gathered momentum in the decades preceding the outbreak of war. Bureaucrats and functionaries simply consigned numbers for death. Brutalisation within the camp was echoed by indifference without. People did their jobs, consoling themselves that they were only obeying orders, that if they didn't do it, someone else would.

Evil is a railway timetable. Evil is a clipboard. Evil is a list of names. Evil is the completed requisition, ordering bricks to build an oven. Evil is a million discreet little signatures or ticked boxes or bland memos. The BBC delivers the history of an industrial complex and the bureaucratic-industrial-military machine which sustained it. Bit by bit, mass murder becomes a possibility, an inevitability, a simple process, a production line.

It's a chilly production. You find it very difficult to put your hand on your heart and attest that if it had been you, if you'd been in Germany in the 1930's, that you would have said "No!" You watch this production and you think about our present day world - and note the erosion of civil liberties, the genocide in the former Yugoslavia and in Africa and Asia, you note the need for our political leaders to find enemies and demons to pursue.

"Auschwitz" should be essential viewing. Apparently, something like half the teenagers in Britain had never heard of the place, and had no idea what happened there. Make sure your children watch this, then sit down and talk with them about what happens when ordinary people become too lazy, to scared, too greedy, or too frightened to ask questions or say no.

[For the interested, I'd also recommend the book of the series by Laurence Rees, Primo Levi's "If This Is a Man", the account of a survivor, and Deborah Dwork's "Auschwitz", where she dissects how the town became the centre of death.]