AND REES' PROGRAM REMINDS US
WHY WE NEED TO REMEMBER THEM."
By
Michael Rubinoff, Ph.D.
Dept. of Religious Studies
Arizona State University
The Auschwitz story has been told countless times in both documentaries and Hollywood reenactments. Like scenes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the familiar footage numbs our brains, echoing in us like a bad nightmare. Few words in any language can conjure in the human mind what is contained in the two syllables: Auschwitz. This extermination factory was a grim reality for its inmates. It is also a reality for which the world needs a constant reminder. This month is the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation. As Michael Berenbaum says to host Linda Ellerbee at the close of the first episode, the advanced age of the youngest eyewitnesses makes this an essential document.
This six-hour PBS series does an effective job of telling the camp's past. With a combination of both captured black and white footage and docudrama segments, this BBC production relates Auschwitz through the career of its notorious commandant, Rudolf Hoess. He was briefly depicted in the 1980s miniseries War and Remembrance. But in this new production, writer Laurence Rees uses the commandant as a backdrop upon which the entire tapestry of Nazi terror is focused. While this series is not a comprehensive review of the Holocaust, it does give an excellent glimpse of the Nazi mindset and how amoral bureaucracy led to mass murder. We see this both in Hoess speaking through his postwar memoirs and in the testimony of aging former SS killers like Hans Friedrich. The ordinariness of Hoess brings to mind Hannah Arendt's study on his crony Adolf Eichmann, subtitled, The Banality of Evil . Hoess was a family man who maintained his household outside the camp complex but close enough to make for a very short commute. He could execute over 200,000 children with impunity. Like others in Nazi Germany, Hoess blindly accepted the regime's anti-Semitism and feared the children would grow up into Jews – Enemies of the Reich. After a day of supervising the killings, he could return home and embrace his own children without any misgivings.
Noteworthy are extensive interviews, including former Auschwitz SS guard, Oskar Groning, whom at the series' end states the “Holocaust Denial” is a myth because he was a personal witness to the barracks, mistreatment, mass graves, and entire gas chamber/crematory apparatus. There are many poignant comments from Auschwitz survivors, mostly Jewish and some Polish. Each has a unique story to preserve and the series allows us rare glimpses into the Nazi hell. Rather pathetically, an octogenarian Slovakian Hlinka Guard with crucifix at his side recalls participating in the very first Jewish deportation to Auschwitz. One wonders if he ever saw this as a crime.
The Allies are not spared in the series. British Bobbies complied with the deportation of the few Jews resident on the German-occupied Channel Islands off the coast of France. American Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy turned down a request to bomb the railroad lines to Auschwitz along with the camp itself. In 1944, the British Foreign Office refused a Nazi offer to swap one million Hungarian Jews for 10,000 trucks; less they have an unwanted surplus population.
Docudrama in itself is always perilous, as the producer sometimes does not have proper dialogue. The use of German lends itself to authenticity, but the subtitles tell us we are watching actors. In this series, verbatim German meeting summaries and court transcripts are relied upon. The use of color (in contrast to Schindler's List ) does at times appear surreal because the war was usually seen in black and white. But rather it serves to abruptly transition viewers from the actual newsreel footage and offer a sharp contrast to what is recreated. Older viewers might object to the You Are There approach. But then again, we really can't absorb the smells of death, the stench, along with endless beatings and tortures. When the program ends, we return to our own realities.
Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State does the job of explaining an event concurrent with our own time. The horrors were not so long ago and Rees' program reminds us why we need to remember them.
