This Day in Holocaust History (Auschwitz Receives 1st Prisoners)

June 14, 1940—Though it became a byword for the mass destruction of European Jews, the first prisoners received by Auschwitz on this date were 728 teachers, priests, and other non-Jewish Poles.

The final grim demographics produced by this concentration camp—more than a million dead, site of the greatest mass murder in world history--illustrates one of the pithiest summaries of who suffered during the Holocaust: “Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.”

This dilapidated, vermin-infested former Polish military garrison, which once contained a huge horse-breaking yard, had been hastily converted over the past month and a half by Jewish slave labor into a holding pen that broke the bodies and spirits of other political prisoners, gypsies, homosexuals, common criminals, Russian prisoners of war and Jews.

Look at the photo accompanying this post. The letters over the iron gate, ARBEIT MACHT FREI, translate roughly as “Work makes you free.” But it might as well have read, “Abandon hope, all you who enter here.”

I’m not sure even Dante could have conceived this particular version of hell. After all, as Edward R. Murrow reported in his radio broadcast of December 13, 1942, in one of the earliest news reports about the Holocaust, the Nazis were perpetrating “a horror beyond what imagination can grasp.”

Six concentration camps already existed either in Germany or the lands it had absorbed as part of its ruthless drive for lebensraum. But the Nazis judged the small town of Oswiecim (renamed Auschwitz by the new occupying force) to be particularly suitable for the first camp of this kind in Poland, for several reasons:

* it was centrally located in Europe;

* it was located near a major railroad junction, making it easy to transport prisoners to the facility;

* it was located in an area rich with coal deposits, creating the possibility for a unique—and lethal—public-private partnership with chemical cartel I.G. Farben;

* its military buildings might be crumbling, but at least they didn’t have to be created from scratch—and the fabled German industrial efficiency could make it useable in no time.

A key phrase should follow “German industrial efficiency” in the prior sentence: and slave labor. The Third Reich couldn’t spare any tools for this experiment in terror, so prisoners were forced to make do with stones instead. If the guards didn’t like the job done with so little, they beat you. It was just a small preview of what was to come.

Rudolf Hoss, promoted to commandant of the new facility because of his brutal efficiency at the Dachau concentration camp, threw himself into adapting the complex to its new use—driving up to 100 miles for the prisoners’ kitchen, hustling to the Sudetenland section of Czechoslovakia for bed frames and straw stacks, even stealing badly needed barb wire.

What made this elevated thug (he’d been imprisoned for murder in 1923) throw up his hands was the truly impossible assignment SS head Heinrich Himmler gave him after all this: triple the camp capacity. The commandant’s protest—it was impossible!—was met with no sympathy by his boss, who said: “For an SS officer there are no difficulties! When they come up, it’s his job to get rid of them. How you do that is your business, not mine.”

It would take another couple of decades for the term to be invented, but Himmler was already transmitting its essentials: plausible deniability. In a way, it’s the same defense used by the Holocaust denial industry ever since.

The death industry achieved irresistible momentum at Auschwitz after the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, where plans were put in place for “the Final Solution.” But the first steps had already been taken when the initial bureaucratic barriers toward opening and enlarging the complex were overcome in June 1940.