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The Holocaust | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture
In the fifth episode of our Academy series on Nazi Germany, Laurence Rees gives an expert overview of the Holocaust – from Nazi antisemitism to the horrors of the death camps
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Why Schindler’s List remains relevant decades on
Roger Moorhouse reflects on the lasting legacy of perhaps the most famous movie about the Holocaust ever filmed, Schindler’s List…
Schindler’s List chronicles the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman, who helped to save the lives of more than a thousand Jews during the Holocaust. Directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1993, it addresses one of the darkest chapters of human history – the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis – through the story of Schindler, a man who starts out as a profit-driven opportunist but evolves through the film into a selfless saviour. Shot in black and white, it presents a gripping picture of moral courage in the face of unspeakable horror, and stands as one of the most powerful historical films ever made. Is Schindler's List a true story? Schindler's List is based on a true story. Though, as with most historical movies, some creative liberties were taken for narrative clarity. The film is adapted from Thomas Keneally's 1982 historical novel Schindler's Ark, which tells the story of Oskar Schindler’s efforts to protect Jews during the Holocaust. Schindler, a member of the Nazi party, initially arrived in Kraków in 1939, driven by the prospect of financial gain in the ‘wild east’ of German-occupied Poland. However, as the horrors of the Holocaust unfolded around him, his perspective changed, and he began to use his enamel factory as a refuge for Jewish workers. He would ultimately save some 1,200 lives. How historically accurate is Schindler's List? While Schindler's List is widely regarded as a historically sound portrayal of the Holocaust – its events anchored in archival documentation and in the testimonies of those that Schindler saved – there are nuances to consider regarding its accuracy. For instance, that some minor characters and scenes were added or altered for dramatic purposes. A good example of this is the character of Itzhak Stern, played by Ben Kingsley, who is a composite of several people who helped Schindler to run his factory. The film also takes a few creative liberties to maximise its emotional impact, and the transformation of Schindler himself is a good case in point. Many take issue with the apparent beatification of Schindler, pointing out that – for all his later heroics – he arrived in Kraków as an agent of the German state, as a Nazi Party member, and as someone bent on exploiting the German occupation of Poland for his own ends. Though this fact is not exactly glossed over in the film, Schindler’s moral conversion is certainly subjected to some artistic licence. The telling scene in this regard is when Schindler and his mistress witness the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto while out riding. It is, of course, a hugely powerful and emotive moment, but not based on historical fact. We don’t know when Schindler’s moral conversion occurred, and whether he witnessed the liquidation in this way at all. Read more | 7 must-see WW2 films, from Schindler’s List to Letters from Iwo Jima Nonetheless, aside from such artistic flourishes, the film should be commended for its commitment to portraying the horrific reality of the Holocaust with unflinching authenticity. For instance, the depiction of the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto (with the exception of Schindler witnessing it) is perhaps as close to historical fact as it is possible to get in a Hollywood film, along with the execution of Jews in mass shootings, or the horrifying conditions shown in the nearby concentration camp at Płaszów. Spielberg himself deserves much of the credit for this. He used real locations in Poland, and many of the survivors from Schindler’s factory were consulted during the film’s production. His meticulous attention to detail, combined with his empathy for the survivors and victims, ensured that Schindler’s List would remain one of the most historically accurate depictions of the Holocaust in cinematic history. More from us HistoryExtra members can explore more Second World War history with exclusive content from our archives How the holocaust began Aftermath of the Holocaust: how Europe dealt with the crimes of the Third Reich The myth of the innocent bystander: conformity and complicity in Nazi Germany Experiments in evil: the shocking efforts to understand the atrocities of the Holocaust Not a HistoryExtra member? Explore our latest membership offers The cultural relevance of Schindler’s List Even 30 years after its release, Schindler’s List still holds the public’s imagination because it presents the Holocaust not just as an abstract historical event, but as a deeply personal story about one man’s moral awakening in the face of absolute evil. It forces us to confront the complexities of human nature and our capacity for both cruelty and kindness. It demands of us the discomforting question: ‘what would I have done?’ The most important philosophical theme in Schindler's List is the exploration of moral choice in a world consumed by immorality. The film shows that even in the face of totalitarianism and institutionalised violence, the actions of the individual can still make a difference. Schindler’s transformation from a selfish businessman to a man of compassion is a powerful narrative that speaks to the universal human struggle between good and evil, and shows the impact that our individual choices can have on the lives of others. One of the most memorable motifs in Schindler’s List is the ‘girl in red,’ a young Jewish child who appears briefly in the film amidst the chaos of the Kraków ghetto liquidation, and then later in a scene depicting the burning of the dead. In striking contrast to the otherwise black-and-white film, she is shown in a red coat, giving her presence enormous emotional weight. The use of colour for the girl is a powerful visual metaphor for the human cost of the Holocaust, emphasising the fate of the individual amongst collective tragedy. How Schindler’s List has shaped our understanding of the Holocaust It is rare for a historical novel or film to penetrate our collective consciousness, but Schindler’s List has had a significant impact on how the Holocaust is understood by the public. One might legitimately question whether Schindler’s List is the most complete and accurate representation of the Holocaust on screen, especially given its tight focus on events in Kraków. But, given its remarkable success, Schindler’s List has certainly played a significant role in bringing the story of the Holocaust to a much wider audience than any history book could manage, and offering an accessible yet deeply emotional account of events that may otherwise seem distant. Our historical understanding of the Holocaust continues to evolve, of course, as historians offer new analyses and more testimonies from survivors become available. However, the role of cinema is hugely significant in cementing the wider, popular understanding of the Holocaust, especially as the events themselves retreat beyond human memory. Schindler’s List is that rare thing: a film that transcends the genre of cinema. It is a timeless and essential work of art. For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV and film to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this wee WW2 | The Big Questions Member exclusive | Historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees explains major moments of the global conflict in this five-part series. Listen to all episodes now
“We need to understand the Nazis as human beings”: Richard J Evans on the motivations of Hitler’s followers
Adolf Hitler and those at the top of the Nazi hierarchy are universally denounced as monstrous aberrations. But, as Sir Richard J Evans stresses, separating them from the lessons of human history is the last thing we should be doing at a moment when democracy is under attack
A little over two decades ago, the first volume of my history of the Third Reich was published. My aim was to produce a comprehensive study encompassing the origins and rise of the Nazi Party, the transformation of Germany under Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship, and the events and impacts of the Second World War. It was, of course, a major undertaking and, after the third and final volume was published in 2008, I moved on to other topics. But a commission to contribute to a nine-part television series, BBC Two’s Rise of the Nazis, shown from 2019 to 2022, prompted me to take a fresh look at the Third Reich and its crimes. What struck me forcibly, given the biographical orientation of the TV series, was that I knew relatively little about the individuals involved in Nazism and the Reich – and, specifically, very little about their personalities and motivations. For decades, German historians in particular had avoided biography, long tainted by its indirect association with the ‘great man’ approach to history – or, as they called it, personalisierende Geschichtsschreibung (‘personalising history-writing’). Read more | Fake news and Nazis: Richard J Evans on the spectre of conspiracies The rise of ‘perpetrator research’ Yet in recent years, a massive amount of new documentation and research has been published about the leading Nazis. What historians describe as ‘perpetrator research’ has been at the forefront of scholarship since the turn of the century, and has yielded innumerable fresh insights. A 12-volume edition of Hitler’s speeches before his seizure of power was completed in 2003. The final volume of the diaries of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels appeared in 2008. The diaries of self-proclaimed Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg were published in 2015. The second volume of SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s appointments diary, discovered in an obscure Russian archive, came out in 2020. And many other sources have come to light documenting the thoughts and actions of what one might call ‘ordinary’ mass murderers, Nazi activists, SS officers and fellow travellers. These have so far formed the main focus of ‘perpetrator research’ in the 21st century. German historians have finally overcome their allergic avoidance of biography. Volker Ullrich’s two-part life of Hitler complements the classic biography by the British historian Ian Kershaw, while major studies on Goebbels, Himmler, Rosenberg, Speer, Röhm, Heydrich, Eichmann and many others at all levels of the Nazi hierarchy have been published as well. We now have almost too much biographical material to deal with, rather than too little. Key individuals in the Nazi hierarchy The time seemed ripe, therefore, to undertake a new study of Nazi perpetrators, starting with Hitler himself and going down the hierarchy to encompass representative figures from various parts of German society. The quantitative research of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s had answered the questions of what kind of people voted for the Nazis, who belonged to their movement, and who implemented Hitler’s orders. Now it was time to delve deeper into the mentalities and motivations of powerful and representative individuals. Read more | How did the Nazi party rise to power in Germany in 1933? And what were Hitler’s motivations? In addition to all this, an important new reason has emerged for turning our attention to Hitler and those who carried out his orders. For the past few years, democracy has faced a growing threat in many parts of the globe. Would-be dictators and strongmen have emerged, undermining and attacking democratic institutions in one country after another, replacing the rule of law by the arbitrariness of their own whims, muzzling the media and curbing freedom of thought. They have millions of followers who swallow their propaganda lies and seem to care little about truth, probity or general human decency. While history never repeats itself, it does, as Mark Twain is reputed to have said, sometimes rhyme. By trying to understand Hitler and the men and women who joined him in creating the Nazi dictatorship, we may perhaps help ourselves to better understand the enemies of democracy and the leaders and followers of authoritarian or populist movements and regimes in our own time. Such considerations underlie my new book, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich. It was published in August, with the US presidential election campaign approaching its climax – an election in which many fear that democracy and its central institutions are at stake. In writing this book, I consciously took as my model the late German journalist and historian Joachim Fest’s pioneering and bestselling book The Face of the Third Reich, first published in 1970. Since Fest wrote, the amount of research published in this area has burgeoned almost beyond the manageable. So, while sticking broadly to Fest’s structure, I was able to replace his numerous (and not always convincing) psychological speculations with new and more persuasive material grounded more firmly in the historical sources. Demythologising Hitler and the Nazis What did I find? Before I could get very far, I needed to clear away a huge amount of invention and speculation. A nimbus of myth surrounded these people, starting with Hitler himself. Posterity had demonised them to such a degree that they scarcely seemed human any more. Writers repeatedly referred to the collapse of the self-styled Third Reich as the Götterdämmerung, the ‘twilight of the gods’, like Richard Wagner’s music-drama of that name. But Hitler and his followers were not gods. It would be more appropriate to apply the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s term Götzendämmerung, ‘twilight of the idols’, to the last days of Nazism. Read more | Bitter end: Hitler's downfall and the end of the war and the Third Reich I wanted, therefore, to demythologise Hitler and the Nazis, to understand them as human beings. This has proved controversial, not least in Germany itself, where many historians and broadcasters have expressed their fear that ‘humanising’ Hitler, Goebbels and other leading Nazis runs the risk of making them appear in an inappropriately sympathetic light. But calling these men and women monsters or psychopaths has the convenient implication (convenient for us, that is) of presenting them as not really human – in other words, not like us. Not only does this help us avoid feeling that we have anything in common with them, it also implies that nothing like Nazism can possibly happen again, because it is not really part of human history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-541058425web-734ac75-e1731337578956.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="SS chief Heinrich Himmler (back right) with his wife Margarete, playwright Hanns Johst and propagandist Edith von Coler (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)" title="SS chief Heinrich Himmler (back right) with his wife Margarete, playwright Hanns Johst and propagandist Edith von Coler (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)" /> This is no help at all in defending democracy against the most violent and extreme of its enemies. To portray Hitler and the Nazis as human beings like us is really the first step in understanding their conduct, and ensuring that nothing like it happens again. Many attempts have been made to portray Hitler as a man who was personally outside humanity, rather in the way that he himself demonised the Jews and called them “bacilli” and “lice”. None of them are convincing. Too many historians have been prepared to accept his own claim that he was a “man without qualities” who had no private life because he sacrificed it in the interest of the country he led. Yet, his sex life, for example, appears to have been straightforwardly heterosexual; before spending the night with his long-term companion, the much younger Eva Braun, he took an aphrodisiac made from bull’s testicles, prepared by his doctor, Theo Morell. Hitler grew up in comfortable, middle-class circumstances, but underwent a dramatic social descent after his failure to secure a place at Vienna’s art academy, followed by the death of his parents. He was rescued from his aimless existence by service in the Bavarian army in 1914, and found his way into politics after the war ended. He could explain Germany’s defeat only through a bizarre and extreme conspiracy theory that laid the blame on a global conspiracy of Jews, who formed a tiny minority of Germany’s population. Rise of the Nazi Party Discovering and developing a talent for rabble-rousing oratory, Hitler tried at first to lead his small, fringe Nazi Party in a violent coup against the new, democratic Weimar Republic. When that failed, he combined a continued campaign of violence with a drive for votes that put him in power after the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression made the Nazis Germany’s largest political party. In collaboration with conservative elites who wanted to overthrow democracy and return to the authoritarian system of the kaiser, Hitler established a dictatorship that began to prepare for a new European war to again make Germany the continent’s leading nation. More than this, he told his followers that he would achieve “world domination” for Germany, as he proclaimed in 1930. Read more | Hitler's millionaire backers: how Germany's elite facilitated the rise of the Nazis He was neither a military nor a political nor a diplomatic genius; he was a gambler whose all-or-nothing approach, aided by circumstances, initially won him success at home and abroad. This bolstered his popularity, aided by a state-enforced, overwhelming cult of personality, the like of which the world had never seen. But Germany was only a middle-sized European power, and it could never defeat the combination of three huge empires: the British, the American and the Soviet. Hitler’s drive for world power inevitably led to disaster. In the end, suicide was the only way out. He would kill himself if he failed, he said, but “we’ll take a world with us”. The result was the most destructive war in history, and the deliberate murder of 6 million European Jews. Hitler was a fantasist from start to finish. Read more | Laurence Rees on the perpetrators of the Holocaust: “What they told us was, at the time, they felt it was the right thing to do” Why did so many Germans follow this man and stick with him to the end, as most of them did? In an effort to answer this question, I turned to his paladins – men such as Joseph Goebbels, his propaganda chief; Hermann Göring, his second-in-command; and Heinrich Himmler, his police chief. Many historians have tried to write them off as psychopaths or people from the margins of society. A Hollywood film made in 1944 to inform American troops going to fight in Europe – The Hitler Gang, directed by John Farrow and shot in the style of a 1930s gangster movie – portrayed them as a gang of criminals. Inside Hitler’s inner circle Snobs such as Joachim Fest dismissed the Nazi leaders, including Hitler himself, as “petty-bourgeois”. In reality, however, almost all of them came from a solidly middle-class background. Not one leading Nazi was working class, and none of them had ever been a socialist or a communist. They were all brought up in a conventionally conservative, German nationalist milieu. Many of them, though, had suffered a drastic social decline. Having been an air ace in the First World War, Göring then had to eke out a living as a commercial pilot and stunt flier. The comfortable existence of Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the son of a successful military officer, was abruptly ended when his father was dishonourably discharged for criticising the kaiser. Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg lost everything when his privileged position as a Baltic German was lost when the tsarist regime that sustained it was overthrown, followed by the triumph of Estonian independence. Stormtrooper leader Ernst Röhm was not a revolutionary thug but a friend of the Bavarian royal family and a professional army officer whose vision of Germany’s military future eventually alienated the generals and led to his execution on Hitler’s orders in 1934. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/BAL3405249web-0d82adb-e1731337683113.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Hermann Göring, pictured while a pilot during the First World War. He was one of many high-level Nazis who had suffered social decline (Photo by Granger/Bridgeman Images)" title="Hermann Göring, pictured while a pilot during the First World War. He was one of many high-level Nazis who had suffered social decline (Photo by Granger/Bridgeman Images)" /> Hitler’s endlessly repeated narrative of Germany’s decline and fall from 1918 onwards, and his promise to reverse the country’s fortunes, held a visceral appeal to such men, who saw in it a parallel to their own fall and rise. Once in power, their subservience to him brought huge rewards in terms of status and power, and in the very concrete form of major additions to their personal fortune. Those who formulated policy were not, of course, largely the same people who executed it. I therefore studied the leading Nazis who did so – all, of course, within the broad lines laid down by Hitler. Again, several of them found in Nazism a solution to their personal crises. Those crises included leading SS man Reinhard Heydrich’s dishonourable discharge from the navy, and the family catastrophe that befell the young Robert Ley – subsequently head of the vast German Labour Front under Hitler – when his father was imprisoned for burning down the family farm in order to claim the insurance. What was interesting about many of them was the central role that various aspects of Nazi ideology played in their allegiance, from the arch-antisemite Julius Streicher’s espousal of nature and folklore to Ley’s stress on its promise of social equality (this was, no doubt, partly for personal reasons – Ley’s family had lost its position). Hitler’s original vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, a Catholic aristocrat, was motivated by the Catholic authoritarianism and fear of communism typical of the 1930s. Far from being the politically neutral bureaucrat of legend, the young Adolf Eichmann – the principal organiser of the Holocaust – was impelled towards Nazism first as a member of the Protestant minority in Catholic Austria, then as a young man enrolled in the German nationalist youth movement, and finally as a bitter opponent of the peace settlement of 1919 implemented in the Treaty of Versailles. It is striking that these and other leading Nazis were often well educated: a number of them had studied at university and some, including Goebbels and Ley, even had a PhD. Many possessed such bourgeois accomplishments as violin playing (Ribbentrop, Heydrich, Eichmann) and mastery of the piano (Röhm and Hans Frank, the ‘butcher of Poland’). The question of complicity in Nazi atrocities All of this underlined the origins of many of them in the German middle class. An explanation of their adherence to Nazism cannot be found in social marginality or deviance. Leaving aside their perpetration of horrific crimes, they cannot be described in conventional terms as ‘uncivilised’. What ran through almost all of them was a deep and committed antisemitism – a belief that Jews everywhere were, by their very nature, subversive and engaged in a vast conspiracy to undermine and destroy German and ‘Aryan’ civilisation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/2MAP0T5web-758c9c8-e1731337751376.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Female guards pictured after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Many Holocaust perpetrators showed no remorse (Photo by Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Female guards pictured after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Many Holocaust perpetrators showed no remorse (Photo by Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo)" /> The final group of people I looked at comprised what one might call ordinary perpetrators. These were mainly exemplary figures, including a relatively little-known army general, Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, who was uncomfortable with antisemitic atrocities carried out in his area of command on the eastern front by the SS, but allowed them to continue anyway, and was pacified by what was in effect a massive bribe offered to him by Hitler. It is at this level, in one of the most male-supremacist states in history, that women enter the picture, from female camp guards who maltreated and murdered prisoners without compunction, to a conventionally conservative schoolteacher who denounced her brother to the Nazi authorities for anti-Nazi behaviour. Read more | The myth of the innocent bystander: conformity and complicity in Nazi Germany Some of these figures have been demonised by posterity to an extraordinary degree, as in the largely imagined sexual deviance of women like the camp guard Irma Grese. Once again, it was women from a nationalist, middle-class background who proved most susceptible to Hitler’s appeal. One of the most striking facts at every level was the almost universal lack, among perpetrators, of any remorse for or even recognition of their crimes. Some, such as Goebbels, killed themselves at the end of the war. Some, including Eichmann, fled into exile. Some went underground and tried to make a new life in postwar Germany. Some, such as Nazi doctor Karl Brandt, refused to admit they had done anything wrong when brought to justice after the war. Modern-day threats to democracy and freedom Nazism, and Hitler, still retained their power over these perpetrators. It was only the ‘economic miracle’ of the 1950s and 1960s, when West German democracy delivered prosperity – and when a new generation of democratically educated Germans reached adulthood from the late 1960s – that the retrospective hold of Hitler on many Germans was decisively weakened. What can we learn from this dismaying narrative? It’s clear that economic and political crisis and trauma can bring disillusionment to many and turn them against democracy and its institutions. Equally obvious is the fact that strong legal and political institutions, as those of the Weimar Republic were not, can provide a bulwark against attacks on freedom and legality. Propaganda, such as that expertly orchestrated by Goebbels – and above all when amplified by the state – can have a hugely persuasive effect on popular opinion as it ceaselessly pumps out lies and distortions of the truth. Modern-day real and would-be political strongmen and dictators may not want to militarise society or conquer the world as Hitler did, but they nonetheless pose a threat to all of our freedoms. We can learn a good deal about what makes them successful by understanding what brought their predecessors such popularity. This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Are we right to fictionalise the Holocaust? It’s a question The Tattooist of Auschwitz should make us ask ourselves
In the pantheon of historical drama, the Holocaust is among the hardest topics to cover without making difficult – and some might say questionable – choices. Rob Attar spoke to historian Professor Richard J Evans about the perils of fictionalising an episode of such horror and sensitivity
Whether we like it or not, the fact remains that most people’s introduction to historical topics comes from fiction. And that’s as true for the Holocaust as it is for the Tudors, ancient Rome or medieval Europe. But should the sheer horror of the Nazi genocide impose additional constraints on authors and filmmakers? And should we even be fictionalising it at all? These are questions I was keen to put to Professor Richard J Evans, one of the world’s leading experts on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. We spoke just before the release of the TV adaptation of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which is one of 2024’s most hotly anticipated historical dramas. It’s based on a 2018 novel by Heather Morris, which is itself centred on the real story of Slovakian Jewish Holocaust survivor Lale Sokolov (a tattooist at Auschwitz), who met the author in later life. The trouble with The Tattooist of Auschwitz The Tattooist of Auschwitz has sold millions of copies around the world and won plaudits from many reviewers, but also come in for criticisms from some Holocaust scholars for a number of inaccuracies within the book. Evans read the novel in advance of our conversation and found himself sharing many of these concerns. “I'm afraid the historian in me is always on the lookout for little mistakes and little errors, which can be a bit irritating,” he said. “But the major one for me is that this book cannot cope with the extremes of inhumanity, brutality, and horror that you find in Auschwitz. “For 99 per cent of the inmates, the concentration camp is a degrading, humiliating, appalling and shocking experience from which there's no escape. And this novel is about escape: escape through love, escape through an affair, escape through the humanity and the help of other prisoners and of some of the camp auxiliaries and camp guards. That softens the contours of what was really a horribly appalling experience. So, to me, that doesn’t ring true.” In response to the critics of the book, both Heather Morris and the book’s publishers argued that this was a work of fiction – albeit based on a true story – and therefore shouldn’t be judged by the same criteria as an academic history of the camp. I asked Evans for his response to that. “If you're going to set a novel in a historical context, then I think you do need to get as much right as you can about that context,” he said. “A lot of people come to the Holocaust, not through academic books, which are often very difficult to read, admittedly, but through fiction. And so, I think fiction writers have a duty not to distort the context and to distort the nature of the camps and of human relations in them.” The challenge of telling Holocaust stories Evans made it clear that these criticisms do not apply to The Tattooist of Auschwitz alone. For example, he believes that The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (a hugely successful 2006 John Boyne novel later made into a film) “gets it completely wrong”. “The book imagines the son of the commandant of Auschwitz starting to chat through the fence to a boy in striped pyjamas – in other words, a young boy who's a prisoner there. Now, young boys were almost all taken straight to the gas chambers. They weren't made into permanent prisoners. And the idea that the son of the commandant of Auschwitz would not be a dyed-in-the-wool Hitler youth is just completely misleading.” Read more | Rudolf Höss & the men behind the mass murder at Auschwitz Even Schindler’s List, surely the most important Holocaust film ever made, takes some liberties. “It concerns Oskar Schindler, who is a businessman, a corrupt, immoral German businessman who goes to occupied Poland in order to get cheap labour for his factories. These cheap labourers are Jews, essentially forced labourers. Schindler keeps them working for him in order to save them from the gas chambers. It's a remarkable story and it is a true story. But in making the film, Spielberg converts it into a moral parable. “Historical records show that Schindler was as corrupt a businessman before and after. It didn't affect his character at all. He was always having extramarital affairs with women. The film sort of prettifies this by showing him reconciling with his wife, which he didn't do at all according to the historical record.” As listeners to our podcast may recall, Evans admires the recent Jonathan Glazer film The Zone of Interest, itself based on the Martin Amis novel of the same name. But even here he felt that some aspects were misleading. “It’s a very good film, but it has a problem, which is that it's about what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’ when referring to Adolf Eichmann, one of the main officials of the Holocaust. “The film shows Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, living a kind of conventional bourgeois home life, but in fact his memoirs say that the stress of his work was destroying his marriage and his home life.” On the podcast | The man who ran Auschwitz: the real story of The Zone of Interest Why is it so difficult to translate the Holocaust info fiction? One reason that telling stories about the Holocaust can be so difficult is that so few people survived long enough to provide a sufficient narrative arc. “Films have to have a beginning, a middle and an end. And for a lot of people this did not happen,” said Evans. “The Holocaust was not structured in that way.” Another issue, specific to screen adaptations, is that it’s incredibly difficult to reflect the appalling condition of those who had to live in the camps. As Evans pointed out: “You've got healthy, well-fed Hollywood actors and extras playing people who in reality were starving, covered in lice, sick and brutalised. You can't really convey that on film.” Considering the challenges confronting those seeking to write books or screenplays about the Holocaust, is it even possible to do it properly? “That's a very difficult question because I think it's very difficult to actually convey the full horror,” said Evans. “I've read stomach-turning accounts of eyewitnesses and victims, and I think it's really difficult. But I think it could be possible and I think authors should try, but they owe it to the readers to do some serious, hard research.” More from us HistoryExtra members can explore this topic further with exclusive content from our archives How the holocaust began The liberation of Auschwitz: what happened and how do we remember the Holocaust? Aftermath of the Holocaust: how Europe dealt with the crimes of the Third Reich The complex history of concentration camps Not a HistoryExtra member? Explore our latest membership offers Are there any well-told Holocaust stories? There is one film that Evans cites as an excellent example of fictionalising the Holocaust – 2001’s Conspiracy, starring Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci, which dramatises the 1942 Wannsee conference. This was the meeting where the plans for the Holocaust were laid out. “The film is based very closely on the minutes of the meeting, prepared by Adolf Eichmann. And where they can't fill in some details, the film cleverly takes from other documents: the diaries of Alfred Rosenberg for example, who was the chief ideologue of the Nazi party. It is a very good introduction if you do want some kind of dramatisation.” WW2 | The Big Questions Member exclusive | Historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees explains major moments of the global conflict in this five-part series. Listen to all episodes now
The real tattooists of Auschwitz: who were the men who turned people into numbers?
A love story between two prisoners at the worst of the Nazis’ concentration camps? The plot of the Tattooist of Auschwitz might be considered unduly light given its setting but, as Roger Moorhouse explores, the job of inking those dreaded identification numbers on prisoners’ arms was indeed a real one
Auschwitz: the largest of the concentration camps in the Second World War, where more than a million were put to death in the Holocaust. That is the setting for a six-part period drama streaming on Sky Atlantic in the UK from 2 May, based on the 2018 novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris. Lale Sokolov (played by Jonah Hauer-King), a Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942, is made to tattoo new arrivals to the camp with a registration number on their arms. When he meets a young prisoner named Gita (Anna Próchniak), he falls in love and so is offered a slither of hope in this otherwise hopeless place. Here, Roger Moorhouse, an expert in modern German and Central European history, explains that not only was tattooing exclusive to Auschwitz, but that the drama series’ protagonist – Lale Sokolov – was a real person. Was there really a tattooist at Auschwitz? There were a few, in fact. From the middle of the Second World War, it was standard procedure in Auschwitz to identify those arriving prisoners who had been selected for work by tattooing them with their camp registration number. The logic was that the corpses of dead prisoners, which were sometimes stripped of their clothing, had to be identifiable to ensure that camp records could be satisfactorily maintained. WW2 | The Big Questions Member exclusive | Historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees explains major moments of the global conflict in this five-part series. Listen to all episodes now Was everyone at Auschwitz tattooed? Initially, the SS had only tattooed Soviet prisoners of war, and those who were in the infirmary or scheduled to be executed. The expansion of Auschwitz in 1942, however, saw the practice extended to include all prisoners that were selected to work. Those that were exterminated upon arrival were not registered, so there was no need for them to be tattooed. In the early phase, prisoners were tattooed on the left side of the chest using a form of metal stamp that could be changed to make different numbers. This would then be punched at one blow into the prisoner’s skin, before ink was rubbed over the resulting wound to create a crude tattoo. This method was considered impractical when the numbers of people being registered increased. Instead, a single-needle device was introduced, with which the serial number could be tattooed onto the outside of the left forearm. This process did not take place at the other concentration camps, only at Auschwitz. It was primarily Jews that were marked, although other prisoners, such as Roma and some Poles, were processed in the same way. In all, some 400,000 registration numbers were issued. Who were the tattooists of Auschwitz? Not much is known about the tattooists themselves, except that they were part of a small group of prisoners working directly for the SS in the registration office and could be called on at any time to perform their task. Granted extra rations and bonus payments, they were thereby preserved from some of the worst horrors of the camp. Was Lale Sokolov a real person? Lale Sokolov (formerly Ludwig Eisenberg), the character at the heart of Heather Morris’s novel was one of the tattooists at Auschwitz. Though the book has received criticism by historians for its rather cavalier treatment of its wider subject matter, Sokolov was a real prisoner at the camp. Upon arriving in 1942, he was duly tattooed with the number 32407. Later, in 1943, after a bout of typhus, Sokolov was engaged by the SS as a tattooist, in which capacity he is thought to have seen out the remainder of his time at Auschwitz. Camp records show him working for the registration department at least up to the end of September 1944. As the end of the war approached, and with the Red Army advancing, he was evacuated in January 1945 and taken to Mauthausen, but he managed to escape. Sokolov survived the war and later emigrated to Australia, where he would be interviewed by Morris. This meeting is part of the new television drama, with the older Sokolov depicted by Harvey Keitel. Only in his last years before his death in 2006 did he feel able to talk about his experiences at Auschwitz. More from us HistoryExtra members can explore this topic further with exclusive content from our archives How the holocaust began The liberation of Auschwitz: what happened and how do we remember the Holocaust? Aftermath of the Holocaust: how Europe dealt with the crimes of the Third Reich The complex history of concentration camps Not a HistoryExtra member? Explore our latest membership offers
The man who ran Auschwitz: the real story of The Zone of Interest
Professor Richard J Evans talks to Rob Attar about Rudolf Höss, the notorious commandant of Auschwitz, whose story is the focus of the acclaimed new film The Zone of Interest
The Oscar-nominated film The Zone of Interest is one of the most acclaimed and talked about films of 2024. Directed by Jonathan Glazer and loosely based on a novel of the same name by Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest focuses on the life of Rudolf Höss and his family during the Second World War, when he was commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. In today’s episode, Professor Richard J Evans, one of the world’s leading experts on Nazi Germany, speaks to Rob Attar about the real story of Rudolf Höss. He also offers his thoughts on the film and recounts his experience of working with Martin Amis on the original book.
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The real history behind The Zone of Interest: Did Rudolf Höss really live next door to Auschwitz?
As Nazi-next-door thriller The Zone of Interest arrives in cinemas, we explore the life of Rudolf Höss – the Auschwitz commandant who set up a family home just beyond the walls of the infamous concentration camp
One of the chief perpetrators of the Holocaust, Rudolf Höss was the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, inside which around one million Jews were murdered during Second World War. Höss is the subject of a new film written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest, in which his peculiar home life is examined. The Höss family lived in a luxurious villa directly next door to the gas chambers and crematoria of the camp. There, Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), constructed an apparent idyll for their children, despite the horrors taking place just beyond the garden wall. The film is derived from Martin Amis’s novel of the same name, though the plot is slightly different, telling the story of a Nazi officer who becomes infatuated with the wife of Auschwitz’s commandant; the commandant, Paul Doll – a fictionalised version of Rudolf Höss. View oEmbed on the source website Who was Rudolf Höss? Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz between May 1940 and November 1943, and returned to the camp between May 1944 and January 1945 to supervise the extermination of Hungarian Jews. Read more | The liberation of Auschwitz, 75 years on: what happened and how do we remember the Holocaust? He was from a military family, and at the age 14 joined the German army to fight in the First World War. By the time he was 17, he was already a non-commissioned officer. He was awarded both the Iron Crescent and the Iron Cross. After evading capture at the end of the war, Höss joined a number of nationalist paramilitary groups. He became a member of the Nazi Party in 1922 and, two years later, was convicted of the murder of a local schoolteacher believed to be supplying intelligence to the French occupational authorities. Sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, he served four. Within a year of his release, he married Hedwig Hensel, with whom he started a family. On the podcast | Nazi Germany: everything you wanted to know Rudolf Höss in WW2 In 1934, Höss joined the SS and was swiftly appointed as block leader at the Dachau concentration camp, a facility designed to incarcerate Adolf Hitler’s political enemies. Four years later, and by now an SS captain, he moved to the Sachsenhausen camp. After the Second World War broke out, Höss was commissioned to establish a concentration camp in occupied western Poland. He recommended adapting a disused army barracks, which became Auschwitz. Under his direction, the camp rapidly expanded and many Russian and Polish prisoners-of-war would meet their premature deaths there, whether by execution or starvation. View Green Video on the source website Rudolf Höss and the Holocaust In June 1941, Höss received direct instructions from the chief architect of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler, to use Auschwitz as the main crucible of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ – the extermination of Europe’s Jewish population. Höss experimented with various methods of mass murder, particularly those involving gassing huge numbers of people. By the start of his return to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, nearly 10,000 Jews were being murdered at Auschwitz every day. The number who lost their lives there was around one million. Read more | A brief history of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where Anne Frank died What was the Zone of Interest? By the end of 1940, to further distance and isolate the horrors of Auschwitz from public scrutiny, the SS commandeered all the land surrounding the camp to create a 40-square-kilometre exclusion zone, to be patrolled by both themselves and the Gestapo. This was the ‘Zone of Interest’ or Interessengebiet. The Höss family home sat inside this zone – largely in the shadow of the camp, in fact. A handsome villa with generous gardens and a swimming pool, it would provide the Hösses with a perversely ‘idyllic’ lifestyle, if the smoke from the crematoria chimneys, and the noise of frequently arriving trains full of the condemned, could be ignored. The children played happily with their pet dog in the garden, while Hedwig Höss dedicated herself to keeping the plants and bushes looking spruce. She kept herself spruce, too. As well as wearing fur coats confiscated from those heading to their deaths, she called upon the design and sewing skills of a couple of dozen female prisoners, as revealed in Lucy Adlington’s book The Dressmakers of Auschwitz. Read more | Sewing for the Nazis: who were the dressmakers of Auschwitz? Saved from the gas chambers, the group – known as the Upper Tailoring Studio – designed and produced high-end clothing for the wives of the camp’s officers and guards. Did Rudolf Höss's wife Hedwig know what happened in Auschwitz? Hedwig Höss apparently never visited the camp that was on her doorstep, nor did her husband tell her exactly what went on behind its high walls. But it is scarcely believable that, such were the vast numbers of daily arrivals at the camp by train, she would be unaware of the heinous acts being carried out under Höss’s instructions. Indeed, Höss himself said as much once he was captured after the war – that both Hedwig and their teenage son Klaus knew full well what was occurring just beyond their well-tended garden. “The smell of the burning bodies could leave no-one in any doubt.” What was Operation Höss? The reason for Höss’s return to Auschwitz in May 1944 was to oversee what became known as Operation Höss, where almost 400,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to the camp in a period shorter than two months. So vast were the numbers arriving that they exceeded the capacity of both the gas chambers and the multiple crematoria. Instead, they were led into fire pits, fatally shot and their bodies burnt. What happened to Rudolf Höss and his family after WW2? As the Third Reich fell, Höss went on the run and became a target for British army personnel hunting down escaped Nazis. In March 1946, these hunters tracked down Hedwig Höss and her children to the small town of Sankt Michaelisdonn in northern Germany, nearly 1,000 kilometres north-west of Auschwitz. Here, she had taken employment in a local sugar factory. Hedwig told the hunters that she last saw her husband in the April of the previous year and that he had subsequently died. Suspicious that they were being misled, the investigators subjected her to six days of interrogation, at which point she cracked and revealed the truth: her husband was alive and living in a remote farmhouse near the Danish border. The investigators swiftly made their way there, surrounding the farmhouse and taking Höss by surprise; he greeted them in his pyjamas. Initially claiming to be a farm worker called Franz Lang, Höss soon confessed to his actual identity. Höss was passed on to the unit responsible for investigating war crimes. He supplied a written confession while in custody: “I personally arranged, on orders received from Himmler in March 1941, the gassing of two million persons between June/July 1941 and the end of 1943, during which time I was commandant of Auschwitz.” He then offered testimony at the Nuremberg trials, implicating certain SS officers who had denied the heinous events at Auschwitz and other camps. He stood trial in Warsaw before the Polish Supreme National Tribunal and was sentenced to death three weeks later. Symbolically, Höss was hanged at the Auschwitz site, little more than a few dozen yards from his family’s former home. Hedwig Höss died while visiting her daughter in the United States, in Washington, DC in 1989 at the age of 81. Her son Klaus had also emigrated: he died in New South Wales three years before his mother as a result of chronic alcohol abuse. The Zone of Interest is in UK cinemas from 2 Febraury 2024
Nicholas Winton: the 'British Schindler'
Edward Abel Smith discusses the story of Nicholas Winton, who helped save hundreds of Jewish children from the Nazis by transporting them to safety in Britain
Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, a British stockbroker worked tirelessly to rescue hundreds of Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia by transporting them to new lives in Britain. Nicholas Winton's life and achievements are the subject of a new film One Life, and ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day, Edward Abel Smith joins Spencer Mizen to discuss his story. Edward Abel Smith is the author of The British Oskar Schindler: The Life and Work of Nicholas Winton (Pen & Sword, 2023) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
Today, the Nazi persecution of Jewish people is widely viewed through the prism of the death camps: places such as Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz. Yet before Auschwitz was even conceived as a centre of mass murder, more than a million people had been killed across eastern Europe. This is the story of the early stages of the Holocaust, when a campaign of appalling abuse and brutality became an explicit policy of annihilation.
On 24 June 1941, SS officer Hans-Joachim Böhme stood in front of a group of 200 people from the Lithuanian border town of Gargždai. The majority were Jewish. Raising his ceremonial sword in the air he ordered their execution by gunshot for “crimes against the Wehrmacht on the order of the führer”. This incident took place some 48 hours after the start of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It was the Nazis’ first massacre of Jewish people in Soviet territory. Böhme’s claim about “crimes” was of course nonsensical. It was however tightly bound to the Nazis’ obsessive belief that Jewishness and communist-Bolshevism were inextricably linked. Over the following 18 months, at least 1.5 million Jewish people would be murdered in similar ways and based on a similar rationale. All of this happened miles away, literally and figuratively, from the death camps that would come to define the Holocaust in the popular consciousness. And yet it is because of the mass shootings that happened in these places – many of them long forgotten – that the course of events that followed happened as it did. Hitler had always imagined a world without Jews, but he had no meaningful idea at the outset about how this would be achieved. Most of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies in the prewar period were designed to make existence for Jewish people untenable within Germany’s borders in order to force them to seek refuge in other countries. When the war broke out this remained the plan – although in a considerably more direct and violent way, in what they described as a “territorial solution”. It was not until Operation Barbarossa, almost two years later, that Nazi policy became explicitly murderous. By the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Germany already occupied much of Europe. Though Jews across this territory had been subject to appalling maltreatment and abuse – and within Poland been centralised into ghettos – there was no explicit policy for mass murder. It was the massacres that followed Operation Barbarossa that took them over the threshold. Ideological crusade The conquering of the Soviet Union was central to Hitler’s worldview. He wanted his forces to wage a war of annihilation, believing that Germany’s future relied on both the occupation of this territory and the elimination of Bolshevism. For him, this was less a conventional military campaign than an ideological crusade. He had always despised communism and believed that his new world order relied on its total destruction. The massed ranks of the Wehrmacht were followed into Soviet territory by four newly assembled units known as Einsatzgruppen. These Einsatzgruppen were assembled on the instructions of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. They answered to Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, and were supposedly responsible for protecting the area behind the German line. In practice they rapidly became ideological instruments of genocide. Numbering a mere 3,000 men in total at the start of the invasion, they were mainly assembled from members of the Security Police (SiPo) and SS Security Service (SD). The men who commanded them, Dr Otto Rasch, Arthur Nebe, Dr Walter Stahlecker and Professor Otto Ohlendorf, were all highly intelligent and highly educated. Similar levels of education and intelligence also stretched to the units’ subcommanders, 16 of whom had doctorates. These commanders and subcommanders were acting under Hitler’s intentions but on their own initiative. Whatever the Nazis’ ideological agenda, they needed the practical means of enforcing it. The leaders of the Einsatzgruppen were central to this. Like many members of the apparatus of terror, their role was not strategy or policy, but implementation. Over time they compared methodologies for devising the means of mass murder that served their needs and resources best. For those within the Einsatzgruppen, the supposed relationship between Bolshevism and Jewishness – so-called “Judeo-Bolshevism” – provided a de facto rationale for mass murder. Their initial instructions were to covertly encourage and allow locally instigated massacres of Jewish people. At various locations local communities responded to this with enthusiasm. The reasons for this enthusiastic participation were varied. Long-standing anti-Semitism, of course, had a substantial role to play. Lots of people shared the Nazis’ conviction that Jews were at the heart of communism and therefore held them responsible for their suffering under the Bolshevik regime. In many places Jewish people had never been considered as compatriots by their non-Jewish neighbours, but rather as outsiders. In some cases the issues were entirely venal, with people seizing on the opportunity to steal property or belongings from those they murdered, or even to take revenge for old scores. Sometimes members of the Einsatzgruppen were present for these massacres and stood aside as observers; in Kovno, for example, they looked on as crowds of Lithuanians clamoured to watch a local man beating Jewish men to death with an iron pole. In other places, the Einsatzgruppen were not in the vicinity, and communities acted off their own volition, marching Jews to pits on the outskirts of towns and villages to be shot. Efficiency and scale After the pace of locally instigated violence began to slow, the Einsatzgruppen started to take a more direct and personal role, constantly refining the process in the pursuit of increased efficiency and scale. Typically they would issue instructions for local Jewish residents of a specific place to assemble at a given time and place for “resettlement”. When these residents gathered, they were walked to a pre-determined site somewhere in the vicinity and shot into graves that had been prepared in advance. Most of these Aktionen were preceded by a logistics meeting the night before in which those involved would review the plans. These plans included such incongruous details as catering provision – generally there would be a table of sandwiches and schnapps for the killers to refresh themselves between volleys of gunfire. The size of the pit to be excavated was determined by a specialist who calculated its dimensions based on the anticipated number of people to be shot. Normally it was dug by local residents acting under Nazi orders, but sometimes those who were to be murdered were forced to do it themselves. The shooters were a combination of local men operating under Nazi control and the members of the Einsatzgruppen themselves. Over time, additional reinforcements were brought in from Germany to support the murder operation, many of whom were drawn from the ranks of the Order Police (Nazi Germany’s uniformed police force). In their ordinary lives, these people would have been the ones directing traffic; in eastern Europe they shot unarmed civilians. As the scale of the Nazis’ ambitions developed, increasing numbers of German policemen were sent to the occupied Soviet Union. Soldiers with the Wehrmacht were also involved, providing logistical support and also sometimes participating in the shootings themselves. For example, in a postcard that serviceman Anton Brahsch sent to his uncle in Hamburg he wrote: “We will beat the enemy and slaughter the Jews wherever they are!” It is critical to remember that each of these murders took place face to face. It was an intimate, violent and profoundly barbaric process. Those doing the shooting would often finish the day covered in the blood of those they had killed. Despite the Nazis’ efforts to keep these killings secret, crowds of onlookers sometimes formed. A secret report compiled in October 1941 commented that: “Spectators stood around watching with interest the fountains of blood, flesh and torn limbs.” In the early stages of the operations, the killers would often personally accompany each individual to the edge of the pit. This gave them the opportunity for brief conversations before one turned a gun on the other. An appalling apex Within a matter of weeks, the targets of this mass murder moved from military-aged men to include women, children and the elderly. Children were spared none of the horror. Mothers were required to hold babies in their arms as both were shot, sometimes with the same bullet. By the end of September 1941 the massacres reached an appalling apex at Babyn Yar, a ravine in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. Over the course of two days, the Einsatzgruppen and their collaborators murdered more than 33,000 people in a single Aktion. Each consecutive group was marched to the murder site and forced to lie on top of the still-warm bodies of those who had just been killed before they were shot themselves. The Nazis obscenely described this as the “sardine packing” method. The officer in charge of the operation at Babyn Yar, Friedrich Jeckeln, used his experience to create a process that he described as the “Jeckeln System”. This provided a structure for the management of all stages of the massacre, and was designed to ensure efficiency. Jeckeln was sent to Latvia to put this system into practice a few months later for a mass murder in the Rumbula Forest. This would be the second largest massacre of this nature and resulted in the killing of 25,000 people. On the face of it, from the Nazis’ perspective, this method of mass murder was serving the ambition that they had set for themselves – and yet, at the start of December 1941, the first designated death camp became operational in Chełmno, in occupied-Poland. Plans were simultaneously developed for a further death camp at Bełżec. All of this happened at almost exactly the same time as the Rumbula Massacre. In purely practical terms, this makes little sense. Why would the Nazis invest time and resources into developing new processes when the one they were using appeared to be working? In Lithuania, for example, the vast majority of the country’s Jews had been murdered by the end of 1941 through shootings and local massacres alone. Likewise, a report from Walter Stahlecker in January 1942 described Estonia as being Judenfrei: free of Jews. Ultimately, there were a few different factors explaining the shift. Not only were shootings difficult to conceal and resource-intensive (in terms of personnel as well as bullets), but senior Nazis also became increasingly concerned about the emotional toll that they were taking on the men who were doing them. Some also started to secretly wonder whether the barbaric methods they were using were somehow unbefitting of their national identity. The suffering of those who were being targeted never entered the equation. Importantly, it was also around this period that Hitler had resolved on extending the annihilatory policies that had been employed in Soviet territory to Jews across all of Europe. This was to happen in stages, but by the start of 1942 he had determined that the Nazis’ objective was the total physical extermination of Jews across Europe. Historians continue to debate the process by which this position was arrived at. However it is clear that the mass shootings across Soviet territory had taken the Nazis across a threshold that opened up horrific new horizons. Once the full scope of the Nazis’ murderous ambitions were established, they began to consider different methods with which to achieve them. The approaches that they had used in the Soviet Union may have been appropriate for a time in the “wild east”, but they were not considered suitable for other places. The use of gas was one of a few options that the Nazis considered. As had been the case in the Soviet Union, it was an improvised response to an evolving objective. The Nazis had first used gas to kill people as part of their so-called “euthanasia programme” targeting people with disabilities towards the start of the war. Though this was predominantly focused on individuals within Germany’s borders, a parallel “wild euthanasia” programme developed in occupied Poland. While the programme in Germany used subterfuge to conceal the reality of what was being done, in occupied Poland this was largely dispensed with. As part of this, SS member Herbert Lange oversaw the creation of the first gas chamber in October 1939. This was created from an outbuilding in the concentration camp that had recently been created at the historic Fort VII at Poznań. Those killed were patients at the nearby Owińska psychiatric hospital. The edges of the door were sealed with mud after they were closed and a pipe pumping carbon monoxide placed through a hole. Some months later, purpose-built gas chambers within “euthanasia centres” in Germany and Austria became operational. Unlike Lange’s improvised chamber, these were disguised as showers and used bottled carbon monoxide pumped through the pipes to murder those inside. Around two years after this, a few Einsatzgruppen units also made use of gas alongside mass shooting, using modified vans to divert the carbon monoxide from a running engine into the rear of the vehicle. Victims were loaded into the back and once the doors were sealed the engine was started. After those inside were dead the van was then driven to a site where the bodies were unloaded into pits. Around the same time, experiments were also conducted using Zyklon B to murder Soviet PoWs. Suffering and deprivation When the first purpose-built death camp opened in Chelmno, it was Lange – who had improvised the gas chamber at Fort VII – who was placed in charge of it. He used a large house on the site in conjunction with gas vans to murder those sent there. The use of gas attracted the attention of SS figures Odilo Globocnik and Christian Wirth. Globocnik had been placed in charge of a programme codenamed “Operation Reinhard” to devise a method to murder all remaining Jews in the area of German-occupied Poland known as the “General Government”. He consulted with the leaders of the “euthanasia programme” and used their experiences to develop the first death camp with fixed gas chambers at Bełżec. It was followed by two further purpose-built death camps, Sobibor and Treblinka. Each of these refined the process used at Chełmno and the narrative adopted in the “euthanasia centres”. Those running these sites were generally redeployed from the “euthanasia programme” where they had developed experience in the management of mass murder. However, despite the pretensions of the Nazis, these places were not the sites of systematic, organised mass murder that those running them claimed. They were places of extraordinary suffering and deprivation, where human beings were subject to terrible physical pain and mental anguish. The process was not “industrial” in any meaningful sense. It was personal and it was human. The death camps never strayed far from the unbridled barbarism they were seeded from in the blood-soaked massacres across eastern Europe. The technology was not sophisticated and efficient, it was crude and improvised. Carbon monoxide was pumped from stolen Soviet engines into hastily assembled buildings. The engines often broke down, leaving those waiting standing naked and terrified in the searing heat or bitter cold. The bodies of those murdered were hauled with straps and hooks towards pits where they were at first buried, and later burned on open-air pyres. By the end of 1943 the death camps at Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka had been closed. Though Jews from several countries has been sent to them, their primary focus had been the murder of people within occupied Poland, which had now been concluded. At least 1.5 million people had been murdered across the three sites. All of the visible traces of the camps were removed to conceal what had been done there. For the mass murder and enslavement of Jews in western Europe the Nazis refocussed their attention on a single site, Auschwitz. By the time this camp became the central focus of the Nazis’ annihilatory policy, 80 per cent of the victims of the Holocaust had already been murdered. To assume that this all happened as part of a highly systemised masterplan that operated with industrial efficiency is to overlook the level of effort and improvisation that was invested from all those who were involved. At every stage, the Holocaust was the work of human hands and the product of individual choices. At the centre of this was Hitler, but he did not act alone. He relied on people like Böhme, Langer, Stahlecker, Jeckeln, Globocnik, Wirth, Rasch, Nebe, Ohlendorf as well as Himmler, Heydrich and many others to translate his ideology into action. James Bulgin is head of content, Holocaust Galleries at Imperial War Museums. His books include The Holocaust (Imperial War Museums, 2021)