Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Holocaust: will we ever learn from what happened?
Some of you may be aware that earlier on this year (March 8th to be precise) I travelled to Auschwitz-Birkenau the Nazi concentration camp in Poland. Two students from our college were chosen to go with the Holocaust Education Trust on this one day trip to a place where one of man's darkest chapters in history occurred.
For those unfamiliar with what happened I shall give a brief history of it here, for those who are familiar with it, please scroll on to the bottom of the page where you will find my accounts from the visit.
January 30th 1933: Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party, becomes Chancellor of Germany, after the Wall Street Crash that tore apart Germany's economy, leaving 6 million unemployed. Hitler was a strong anti-Semitic, which means that he disliked Jews (putting it mildly.) He believed that it was because of the Jews that Germany had lost WW1, and that many of them were reaping all the wealth from the country. He used them as a scapegoat for all of Germany's problems. Anti-Semitism wasn't a new idea, it had been rife across Europe since the 19th Century.
There is an extremely brief history of anti-Semitism prior to the Holocaust. More will be explained in the following writings on the actual visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, so please do read on to find out more about this horrible episode in history. It is essential to learn from our mistakes otherwise it will happen again and again, which is one of the reasons why I decided to put this up on the site so other people can learn from it too.
With Hitler's rise to power came a number of laws and decrees that disadvantaged Jews in Germany. One of the first, for example, was the Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service, which meant, effectively, that Jewish men and women could no longer work in the Civil Service. However, it wasn't until 1935 that the Nuremburg Laws were passed, isolating and singling out Jews in German society.
Although this harsh treatment simmered down during 1936 (because the Olympics were being held in Germany), by 1938 Nazi savagery reached it's height with the coming of Kristallnacht. The Night of Broken Glass - called so because of the smashing of Jewish shop windows - was a reaction against the assassination of a German diplomat in France by a Jew. Thousands of Jews were rounded up and taken to concentration camps, others were brutally killed by the SS.
After the invasion of Poland by Germany in September 1939 and the outbreak of WW2, more concentration camps were set up around Poland. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the one that most people associate with the Holocaust, was set up in 1940. Originally an army barracks, it became a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners. Later it would be extended to house other 'undesirables' including gypsies, homosexuals and Jews.
It is important to remember that Auschwitz-Birkenau was a concentration camp, not a death camp such a Majdanek or Treblinka, it was intially set up to set the prisoners to work. It wasn't until 1942 when the 'Final Solution' was agreed upon at the Wannsee Conference, that it also became a centre of mass murder in Poland, although it remained partly a work camp right up until the Soviet liberation in 1945.