Why on anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation it’s more important than ever to keep memory of horror alive

In early June 1944 the train carrying 20-year-old Freda Wineman, her family and nearly a thousand other Jews from France passed under the red-brick guardhouse of Auschwitz Birkenau and down a railway line directly into the camp.

As the doors of the freight wagon opened and they emerged into the light, Freda thought she had arrived in Hell: “The smell! The smell was awful.”

She was confused and bewildered. Nothing seemed to make sense.

Prisoners from a special unit, dressed in pyjama-like uniforms, shouted out to the new arrivals: “Give the children to the older women.” Amidst all this turmoil, Freda’s mother was handed a baby by a young woman in her twenties.

The Jews were quickly separated, the young and fit like Freda sent to one group and children and the elderly to another.

Freda’s older brother, David, saw their mother moving off with the elderly and told their youngest sibling, 13-year-old Marcel, to go with her. Marcel had initially been selected by the SS to join the group of young and fit adults, but his brother reasoned that “it might be easier” for Marcel if his mother was able to look after him. The SS raised no objection and Marcel left one group and joined the other.

Unwittingly, David had helped send his brother to his death.

They did not know it at the time, but the new arrivals had just participated in a selection process in which SS doctors, in a matter of seconds, decided which person should be allowed to live temporarily and work as slave labour, and which person should die at once.

The great majority of people on this transport were selected to be murdered immediately in the gas chambers of Birkenau — including Freda’s mother, the baby that had been placed in her arms and, now, her youngest son Marcel.

The Nazis did not want children, the old or the sick to last more than a few hours in the camp.

It’s all but unimaginable that such a situation could ever have come to exist on this Earth. That standards of common decency and morality could have been inverted so unspeakably. That the compassionate gesture of a brother directing a sibling to be with his mother helped cause his death. That the only chance a young mother had of surviving more than one day was for her baby to be taken from her and murdered.

Freda, having survived the initial selection, was sent to the women’s camp in Auschwitz Birkenau “near the crematoria” from where ”you could see the smoke and smell the fire. Not just smoke, fire. I couldn’t believe that anybody could inflict such horror on another person”.

But Freda was immensely resilient: “I felt even then, I was only 20, I really had no teenage years, nothing, because we lived under the occupation. And now I’m here, I haven’t even lived yet, you know. So there was still a little light in me that wanted to live.”

Thanks to the allied victory in the Second World War, Freda survived. And it was a privilege for me to interview her at her flat in North London just over ten years ago.

Elegant and dignified, she was an inspirational example of how suffering can be overcome, and her presence offered a direct link back to the horrors of Auschwitz. In my years as a historian and television documentary maker, and for my book on Auschwitz, I met very many survivors of the Holocaust.

Their testimony was engrossing, disturbing and intensely moving. On every occasion I heard their stories, I came away shaken, staggered by the depth of the inhumanity and sheer scale of it.

On Monday (January 27) I attend the 80th anniversary remembrance ceremony at Auschwitz Birkenau as a guest of the World Jewish Congress, and I expect to see very few survivors. That sad reality represents an enormous challenge.

How can we keep the memory of this appalling crime alive once we lose the special connection with the past offered by those who suffered at Auschwitz?

It’s an especially urgent question, because it has never been more important that we learn from the terrible history of the Holocaust. As I write in my new book, The Nazi Mind, what happened at Auschwitz is more than just history — it offers us a series of warnings, particularly at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise across the globe, when some organisations in Europe have recorded a terrifying 400 per cent increase in incidents since the Hamas slaughter of Israelis in October 2023.

Above all, it’s a warning of where hatred and conspiracy theories can lead. That’s because — incredibly, you might think — the vast majority of the SS at Auschwitz thought that their murderous work was justified.

Just over 20 years ago, when I met Oskar Groening, an SS man who worked at Auschwitz, he told us that he and his comrades believed then that the Jews were “the cause of Germany’s misery”.

That was because they accepted the lie that the Jews had secretly plotted to cause Germany to lose the First World War — the so-called “stab in the back” conspiracy theory — and also believed the falsehood that the Jews were behind communism, the ideology they most hated.

“We were convinced by our world view that there was a great conspiracy of Jewishness against us,” said Groening.

“And that was expressed in Auschwitz in the idea that said, ‘Here the Jews are being exterminated what happened in the First World War — that the Jews put us into misery — must be avoided. The Jews are our enemies’. So we exterminated nothing but enemies.”

The fact that the Nazis maintained that the Jews were a “race”, and so every single Jew was a threat because of their “blood”, meant that it was immaterial that the people they killed had committed no crime.

You deserved to die simply because you had been born Jewish. This warped thinking even meant that the Nazis thought it was necessary to kill children and babies.

“The children are not the enemy at the moment,” said Groening.

“The enemy is the blood in them — the [capacity] to grow up to be a Jew who could become dangerous. And because of that the children were also affected.”

Fuelled by these lies, the Nazis opened four crematoria/gas chambers complexes at Auschwitz Birkenau in 1943.

It was the creation of these new buildings at Auschwitz that marked not just the final evolutionary stage of the Holocaust, but was one of the key reasons why this genocide is different from others.

They, more than any other structures, were the physical embodiment of the Nazis’ attempt to eliminate an entire people — swiftly and via a quasi-industrial process. The pernicious ideology of the Nazis thus came to be represented in the brick crematoria/gas chambers at Auschwitz Birkenau.

The Nazis were desperate to keep the Holocaust a secret and tried to do everything they could so that future generations would never learn of the atrocities they committed. We cannot let them win this last battle.

These horrendous murder factories were also a perverse statement of modernity. As the Soviet correspondent Boris Polevoy pointed out in an article written for Pravda days after the liberation of the camp, the crematoria/gas chamber facilities at Auschwitz resembled an “enormous industrial plant”. Modern technology and innovation had been harnessed together to create a new kind of genocide.

But what was less commented on were the immense psychological advantages that this “modern” method of killing offered the perpetrators. The Nazis had done everything they could to make committing mass murder easy for themselves — and had succeeded.

Unlike the Nazi killing squads in the east whose job was to kill any Jews they could find in occupied Soviet territory, and who had to witness the emotional trauma of their victims as they shot them from close range, the SS in the death camps could pretend to new arrivals that they had no intention of committing murder.

The practice of telling Jews as they entered the gas chambers that they were about to take a “shower” seems to have emerged at Auschwitz in the late autumn of 1941. It wasn’t an entirely new idea, since the gas chambers of earlier “euthanasia” centres were also disguised as showers — starting in 1940 the Nazis had created these killing centres to murder selected disabled people.

But Auschwitz was the first time this deception was used in the context of the extermination of the Jews and it eased the minds of those who sent them to their death.

Pery Broad, an SS man at Auschwitz, observed how the procedure worked in Auschwitz’s main camp early in 1942, when the killings were conducted in a converted room in the crematorium. On arrival Jews were told by an SS officer that they needed to “bathe and be disinfected”.

“We don’t want any epidemics in the camp. Then you will be brought to your barracks where you’ll get some hot soup. You will be employed in accordance with your professional qualifications. Now undress and put your clothes in front of you on the ground.”

After they heard these words, Broad noticed that the Jews “all felt relieved after their days full of anxiety”.

Moments later they were ushered into the gas chamber, the door locked and Zyklon B crystals poured in from a hatch above. The screams of the dying were so loud, and the crematorium in the main camp so close to other buildings, that a truck engine was turned on to try to drown out their cries.

The new crematoria/gas chambers that opened at Auschwitz Birkenau, less than two miles away from Auschwitz main camp, streamlined the whole killing process and from the perspective of the SS “solved” these “problems”.

A combination of the remoteness of the site and the solid brick building of the gas chamber made this location much more secure — and ensured most of the staff at Auchwitz could turn a blind eye.

However, the prisoners forced to work in the crematoria/gas chambers knew all too well what was happening. These “Sonderkommando” had to perform nightmarish tasks like clearing the gas chambers of bodies.

For the BBC TV series on Auschwitz I wrote and produced 20 years ago, several former members of the Sonderkommando gave important eyewitness testimony revealing the nature of the crime.

One of them, a Greek Jew called Dario Gabbai, remembered “the screaming” from people trapped in the gas chamber and how they “didn’t know what to do, scratching the walls, crying until the gas took effect”.

And when the door to the gas chamber was opened, after the Zyklon B gas had done its terrible work, Dario remembered seeing the bodies crammed together, “standing up, some black and blue from the gas. No place where to go. Dead. If I close my eyes, the only thing I see is standing up, women with children in their hands”.

Some of the SS overseeing this killing were sexual sadists. Dario remembered one member of the SS who would occasionally visit the crematorium and select seven or eight beautiful girls and tell them to get undressed in front of the Sonderkommando. Then he would shoot them in their breasts or their private parts so that they died right in front of them.

“There are no feelings at that time,” said Dario simply.

Only around two dozen SS were needed to supervise the operation of one crematorium/gas chamber complex at Auschwitz Birkenau that could murder up to 2000 people at a time. So the psychological and practical benefits to the Nazis from this system of killing were obvious.

It meant that most of the several thousand SS who worked at Auschwitz were employed not in directly murdering people, but as guards or in the administrative departments of the camp. It was this separation of tasks that allowed Oskar Groening, who worked at Auschwitz main camp in the economic section counting the money stolen from the Jews, to feel distant from the gas chambers not just physically but emotionally as well.

Groening came to believe that Auschwitz main camp was like “a small town. It had its gossip There was a cinema and a theatre [for the SS] with regular performances”. There was even an Auschwitz SS ‘Sports Club’ of which Groening was a keen member — he revealed during his interview that he “specialised in the high jump”.

And it was not just the social structures that allowed Groening to form the opinion that, from his perspective, Auschwitz was a “wonderful” environment in which to exist — that view extended to the SS who worked alongside him: “Apart from the fact that there are pigs who fulfil their personal drives, the special situation [at Auschwitz] led to friendships which I’m still saying today I like to think back on with joy.”

There was one final “benefit” the SS gained by the nature of the killing operation at Auschwitz — the use of doctors to oversee the selection of new arrivals.

Since trained medical professionals decided who could live, at least temporarily, and who should die at once, the Nazis could try to convince themselves that this process didn’t resemble the blood- and brain-spattered killings perpetrated by the Nazi murder squads operating in the east.

Instead, it was a cold, well-thought-through medical procedure. These people “deserved” to die, the SS at Auschwitz could pretend, as qualified doctors had made the decision.

This perversion of the German medical profession offers us yet another warning — that medical professionals need not be caring and moral.

“Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life,” said one Nazi doctor. “Out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.”

It was this murderous thinking, coupled with modern technology, that allowed Auschwitz to become the site of the largest mass murder in history. Around 1.1 million people died there, a million of them Jews.

Given all this, it’s not surprising that Giselle Cycowicz — another survivor of Auschwitz I met, also sadly no longer with us — summed up her experience succinctly this way. “I cannot get over it,” she said. “I cannot get over the evil.”

We all face a responsibility never to forget the experience of those who suffered in Auschwitz. But it isn’t easy to keep the history alive and vibrant once eyewitnesses to these horrific events are gone.

While charities such as the Holocaust Educational Trust have accepted the challenge and are pioneering new methods of remembrance via digital eyewitness testimony and virtual reality, there remains a danger that Holocaust deniers will exploit the lack of flesh and blood witnesses to spread their hateful lies.

The Nazis were desperate to keep the Holocaust a secret and tried to do everything they could so that future generations would never learn of the atrocities they committed. We cannot let them win this last battle. We need to remember.

The Nazi Mind, 12 Warnings From History by Laurence Rees was published by Viking on January 23, 2025.

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