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By Root 12484 0

Sophie and Rudolf Höss if we try for a moment to examine the nature and function of Auschwitz in general, but especially during the six months after her arrival in early April of that year 1943. I emphasize the time because it is important. Much can be explained in terms of the metamorphosis which the camp underwent as the result of an order (unquestionably originating with the Führer) which went down to Höss from Himmler sometime during the first week of April. The order was one of the most monumental and sweeping to be promulgated since the “final solution” itself was hatched in the fecund brains of the Nazi thaumaturges: that is, the recently built gas chambers and crematoriums of Birkenau would be employed solely for the extermination of Jews. This edict superseded previous rules of procedure which allowed for the gassing of non-Jews (mostly Poles, Russians and other Slavs) on the same “selective” basis of health and age as the Jews. There was a technological and a logistical necessity embedded in the new directive, the impetus of which derived not from any sudden preservative concern on the part of the Germans for the Slavs and other “Aryan” non-Jewish deportees, but from an overriding obsession—springing from Hitler and amounting now to mania in the minds of Himmler, Eichmann and their cousin overlords in the SS chain of command—to finally get on with the Jewish slaughter until every Jew in Europe had perished. The new order was in effect a clearing of the decks for action: the Birkenau facilities, gargantuan as they were, had certain ultimate limitations both spatial and thermal; with their absolute and uncontested priority in the lists of der Massenmord now, the Jews were tendered a sudden unaccustomed exclusivity. With few exceptions (Gypsies for one), Birkenau was theirs alone. Just the prospect of their sheer numbers “made my teeth ache at night,” wrote Höss, who meant that he ground his teeth, and who, despite the vacuum of his imagination, could turn a crudely descriptive phrase or two.

At this juncture, then, Auschwitz stands revealed in its dual function: as a depot for mass murder but also a vast enclave dedicated to the practice of slavery. Yet of a new form of slavery—of human beings continuously replenished and expendable. This duality is often overlooked. “Most of the literature on the camps has tended to stress the role of the camps as places of execution,” Richard L. Rubenstein has written in his masterful little book The Cunning of History. “Regrettably, few ethical theorists or religious thinkers have paid attention to the highly significant political fact that the camps were in reality a new form of human society.” His book—the work of an American professor of religion—is brief in length but wise and far-seeing in its final dimensions (the subtitle “Mass Death and the American Future” may give an idea of its ambitious—and chilling—attempt both at prophecy and at historical synthesis), and there is no room here to do justice to its full power and complexity, or to the moral and religious resonances it manages to convey; it will surely remain one of the essential handbooks of the Nazi era, a terrifyingly accurate necropsy and an urgent consideration of our own uncertain tomorrows. That new form of human society developed by the Nazis of which Rubenstein writes (extending Arendt’s thesis) is a “society of total domination,” evolving directly from the institution of chattel slavery as it was practiced by the great nations of the West, yet urged on to its despotic apotheosis at Auschwitz through an innovative concept which by contrast casts a benign light on old-fashioned plantation slavery even at its most barbaric: this blood-fresh concept was based on the simple but absolute expendability of human life.

It was a theory splintering all previous hesitancies about persecution. Bedeviled as they may have been at times by the dilemma of surplus population, the traditional slaveholders of the Western world were under Christian constraint to avoid anything resembling a “final solution” to solve the problem