Auschwitz - The Nazis And The Final Solution [DVD]

Many documentaries exist regarding the concentration and extermination camps but not many have Sir Ian Kershaw as the script supervisor. To have the world's authority on the Nazi state work on such a project speaks volumes for its quality.

This 6 part series focusses on the emergence of Auschwitz as a detention centre for political prisoners and eventually its transformation as a killing centre for the Jews of eastern europe. It's flawless in its design and presentations. Even the music used at times, for me in particular, the Symphony of Sorrowful songs, really hit home the gravity of the whole thing.

The series used computer technology to recreate the gas chambers and crematoria with striking accuracy. These reconstructions are based around documents only recently found. This part in particular I found fascinating. It is one thing to look at maps of Auschwitz in books, but quite another to be taken on a virtual tour down dimly lit corridors to a huge gas chamber.

Interviews are given from a huge variety of people ranging from SS guards who (allegedly) did not like working at Auschwitz, Polish prisoners, Jewish prisoners, Slovakian guards, gypsies and Soviet prisoners.

Some of the stories the people interviewed tell are genuinly moving, such as the story of the SS guard who fell in love with a Jewish woman (interviewed) and his determination to save her sister for her but unfortunatly could not save the children. The Jewsih woman expresses that she hated the guard but eventually admits she loved him for what he did and gave evidence on his defence at his post war trial. Another story was of a Nazi official who, upon realising the ghetto was to be liquidated, hid as many Jews as he could, and actually risked his life by driving into the ghetto with trucks and simply driving the Jews elsewhere. He is now remembered in the Avenue of the Righteous in Jerusalem. Such acts of humanity among the seemingly endless stories of evil stick with the viewer.

Other stories made me wonder about the mentaility of those telling them. Some, such as the Slovakian guard, show no remorse at their past deeds and even smirk while telling their stories. Their defense 'they were convinced that the Jews deserved it'. Sickening, but nonetheless represents the mentaility of the perpetrators. We will never understand their actions, but their comments show their pattern of thought.

This series also made cry at times. In particular the Jewish woman who claimed the worst part of what she had to deal with was going home. She claimed that the thought that some day she might go home gave her the drive to survive, but when it finally did happen, it was the worst thing she had to deal with as her home was no longer hers, and the town's inhabitants were as hostile to her as the Nazis were. Another story was one of Dr Mengele's twin children used for experimentation who remembered being liberated by the Soviet Army and being given chocolate. She said that they soliders also attempted to cuddle them and that meant more than anything because they had been starved of love for so long.

The footage of tiny children going to the gas chambers, or going to Dr Mengele's labs, was enough to make me sick to my stomach but as one of the Jewish men interviewed said 'this must not be forgotten. What happened must never be forgotten'. He's standing in a muddy field and looks around him, turns to the camera and says "My father and brother are buried here, you know." On a similar note, an ex-SS guard interviewed said a similar thing. That the only reason he was appearing was to emphasise that what happened at Auschwitz must be remembered so that it does not happen again.

What is so refreshing about this particular telling of Auschwitz's story is that almost every party involved has the chance to have their say. Too frequently such documentaries are obviously anti-German but this is not the case. The series looks at many of the countries of Europe in turn and how they gave up their Jewish citizens to the Nazis. It was shocking in particular to hear that the Slovaks had paid the Nazi state to have their Jewish citizens taken away. It was also striking to hear the lengths the people of Denmark went to in order to protect their Jewish citizens. Another area I was disgusted at was being shown a telegram from the British Government who by that point knew the goings on in Auschwitz. They had been offered 1 million Jews in return for military trucks. They refused, believing it to be blackmail. The telegram goes on to mention that they did not want Germans unloading Jews onto Britain (paraphrasing). Horrific. One Jewish lady interviewed stated that the whole world forgot about them. It's sad to say I think she was right.

What struck me the most was the fact that almost every party states what happened so frankly. The Slovakian guard giggles when he tells of the time he helped himself to the Jews' possessions once they had been sent away for "evacuation". A Jewish prisoner just shrugs when he is asked why he smothered an apparent German prisoner during transportation, having spent years in Auschwitz. When confronted about their actions, both act in a similar way. They look away from the camera as if it all happened in another lifetime, to another man. One man interviewed, a Polish political prisoner if I remember correctly, said when describing Auschwitz; "Death. Death. Death. Death in the evening. Death in the afternoon. We lived with death."

Auschwitz is unbiased and broad in terms of verbal sources and also offers insights into the mind of Rudolph Hoess using his journals.

I could go on forever reviewing this series but to be honest, all that needs to be said is this in a very well written and presented piece of work. You will not find a broader ranging source for the development of Auschwitz anywhere. Nor will you find one created around the expert advice of Ian Kershaw.

Absolutely first class and should be mandatory viewing for everyone.

I’d read the book of the same name so I had an idea of what was to come when I bought the dvd but still it a good accompaniment to the book.

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 has worked long at establishing a reputation for historical enquiry and the presentation of intelligent, balanced analysis of the distant and the near past. Auschwitz is near enough to be remembered vividly by millions, but there is something about it which tries to convince you that such barbarism could only be traced to our darkest, primeval past. Surely modern man is not capable of that?

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.]