In the dark times

reminder

Five days after the Pearl Harbour attack, on December 12, 1941, Hitler called a meeting of his closest aides in a private room of the Reich Chancellery.

No official records of the meeting exist; but Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, wrote in his diary that the great leader had decided to ‘clear the table’. “The world war is here... destruction of the Jews is a necessary consequence... must be carried out without sentimentalism.” It has been 75 years since the birthing of this ‘final solution’.

Five years before this meeting, the womb had been readied.
In the summer of 1936, it was nothing out of the ordinary for the residents of Oranienburg — a small, bucolic town north of Berlin — to see truckloads of prisoners pass along their pretty cottages and tree-lined avenues, to build the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Intended as the standard, both in design and treatment of prisoners, for all future such ‘necessary endeavours’ of the Reich, the camp was built by 900 prisoners, nearly all of whom died due to hunger and torture — a ‘minor inconvenience’ really, but neatly fitting into the SS architects’ larger scheme of things.

So powerful was the propaganda in those years before the actual war that the town’s residents went about their everyday work even as an elaborate design for the systematic death of an entire race was being developed right in their midst. After all, the Führer had reiterated, in speech after emotional speech, that his countrymen must unite to work for the greater good. If Germany had to become the greatest nation in the world and its intellectual and racial superiority had to be established without doubt, then all ‘obstacles’ on this path had to be dealt without the guilt of compassion. The SS officers (and the townspeople) were only following this dictum. They probably put up the welcome message at the entrance of this concentration camp themselves — it read ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (German for ‘Work makes you free’).

Enter the gates below this inscription and even an unpractised eye can spot the famous German architectural precision. It’s only much later that you get to read how defined the blueprint was, how elaborate the entire plan and how efficiently its carriage by a whole host of people.

The camp’s perimeter is a perfect equilateral triangle, with barracks built in straight radiating lines from the gate so that a single machine gun at the gate could see (and kill) all. Economy of usage has always been one of the Nazi strongpoints. Additional watchtowers did look down from the edge of the perimeter, and the deadly three-layered electric fence surrounding the three-metre-high wall is intact. No imagination is sufficient to understand the horrors that might have occurred on the ‘death strip’ on the inside of this electric fence. Any prisoner who ventured into this area would be immediately shot dead by an SS officer. Unsurprisingly, many did prefer this cruel end to the daily terrors inside the barracks.

Inside the barracks

Camps that were built later, such as Auschwitz, followed the path perfected at Sachsenhausen. In fact, Sachsenhausen was also the central training facility for SS officers. The barracks consisted of two sleeping areas linked by washing and storage areas. Heating was near non-existent. Inmates mostly slept and worked in the biting cold, and were given a maximum of 15 minutes to wash and eat up in stinking washrooms, which sometimes housed a dead body or two. They were usually of fellow inmates who were killed mostly for food or sleeping space and then dumped unceremoniously. The officers often encouraged inmates to fight and kill.

In 1942, the officers forced the inmates to build an installation in a section of the industrial yard where they worked, solely for the extermination of prisoners. It even saw a grand ‘inauguration’ where many high-ranked Nazi officials were invited. The clinical efficiency of the new installation was proven by executing 96 Jews. Its name, Station Z, was intended as a macabre joke — the entrance of the camp was through Building A, and Station Z was meant to be their exit.

In 1943, a gas chamber was added to Station Z, the sophisticated remains of which make you want to say nothing and take no pictures. In all, around 2,00,000 people passed through Sachsenhausen between 1936 and 1945, when it was liberated by the Soviets. Nearly 1,00,000 died in the camp, some from exhaustion and disease, and most others because of execution or torturous medical experimentation.

Swept by propaganda

As you walk past the stark walls dotted with narratives about the inmates who tried to escape the camp, you wonder how a regime so cruel to fellow human beings received support from the average German. German historian Gotz Aly has an explanation. He says Hitler was a feel-good dictator and a national leader who not only made the German feel important, but also inspired in him a sense of energy and dynamism. After years of hopelessness, the people felt that they had a government that was doing something to get Germany back on track and avenge its enemies. Hitler introduced tax breaks and social benefits. He particularly pampered soldiers and their families, offering them double the usual salaries. The propaganda mastermind Goebbels did the rest with his strategy of projecting Hitler as the saviour of the masses, a charismatic leader who was a ‘gift to the nation’.

Visitors can go through some of the “funny” posters, snarky advertisements and propaganda articles (not unlike present-day social media forwards) that Goebbels insidiously used to strengthen Germans’ sense of supremacy and inherent feelings of anti-Semitism. This warm feeling of ‘being loved’, says Aly, made the masses overlook the Reich’s evil, murderous side and turn a blind eye to the blood on its hands.

As you trudge towards the modern exit gates of the camp, on the grey wall nearby is a commemorative quote from one of the prisoners that declares that the world cannot exist without remembering all the people who were murdered with “complete contempt and hate.” But, can the world exist without a repetition of those dark days?