The Challenge of Scale

I travelled to Auschwitz last year. It had long occupied an almost mythic place in my mind: the epicenter of an evil so unspeakable one can hardly believe it is a real physical place. It’s as if you could visit one of the circle’s of Dante’s Hell by taking a flight and a few bus rides. There is a disconcerting normality to the site, whose front entrance features a ticket booth, turnstiles, and a concessions stand. Without the barbed-wire fence and guard towers, you might think it was an old army base or some kind of immense summer camp. It would be impossible to discern the nature of the horrors perpetrated there without being told by those who saw it with their own eyes. And that was exactly the point.

The Nazis’ purpose at Auschwitz—as in the whole of the Final Solution—was not just to destroy an entire people, but to erase them from memory. There were to be no victory columns, no fanfare, no parades to celebrate the vanquishing of the hated Jewish race. History was not to record that they were conquered or enslaved or murdered. The Jews were simply to disappear. Perhaps the only thing more shocking than the scale of the Holocaust is how minimal are the remaining markers. It makes remembrance all the more difficult, and all the more vital.

I made my own visit on a pleasant summer day. Groups of tourists in shorts and sunhats strolled leisurely about. Young children played on the train tracks, and families took pictures smiling next to cattle cars that had helped ferry a million people to their deaths. Observing the wooden bunks in one of the barracks, I heard a young girl tell her father “that doesn’t look so bad—I could sleep on that.”

Of course, I wished the seriousness of the place were more apparent to the children—and even more so to their parents. But my reactions, too, were more muted than I had expected and wanted them to be. It was not easy to look at an empty bunk and imagine how it looked overcrowded with terrified prisoners, much less what it smelled like, sounded like, and felt like to be one of those poor souls, starving and brutalized. The barracks we saw, about the size of a small stable, officially held 744 prisoners. But what does 744 people look like? What does a crowd that big feel like crammed into a space that small? Human intuition quickly reaches its limits as numbers rise this high.

The problem of comprehending scale is endemic to Auschwitz. At first, the sheer size of the site has an emotional impact all its own. The primary subcamp stretches for 422 acres, dotted with the remains of brick prison barracks as far as the eye can see. But one soon realizes that the size of a site does not map directly to the scale of its crimes. The greatest center of death did not lie here, but in another area all its own—an extermination camp that feels much smaller, more secluded, and less remarkable than the vast concentration camp surrounding it.

The Nazis ran thousands of concentration camps and subcamps to imprison their enemies: members of various opposition groups, conquered nations, and minorities—chief among them, the Jews. The camps were meant to kill. Conditions at Auschwitz were so deadly (low caloric intake, lack of sanitation, extreme exhaustion, torture and physical degradation, summary execution) that life expectancy was measured in weeks. Many concentration camps had crematoria—the infamous “ovens” used to destroy the neverending loads of dead bodies. The camps were places of extreme misery and death, as close to hell on earth as one can find. Yet they were in theory designed for work: slave labor for Germany’s industrial war machine. There were motivations other than pure racial hatred for the monstrous evils committed there.

The extermination camps were different. The Nazis built only six, and for just one overriding purpose: the destruction of European Jewry. The vast majority of the 1.1 million Jews deported to Auschwitz never entered its concentration camp at all. They didn’t last the few weeks that most other prisoners did. They lasted less than an hour. When their trains arrived, these Jews (and it was only the Jews who were brought this way) were pulled from the lethally packed cars, stripped, and separated into men, women, and children. A few adults were pulled aside if they looked healthy or were known to have special skills. The rest were marched a few hundred yards down the line to the gas chambers. The largest held 2,000 people at a time. They were made to look like showers, but the pipes were filled not with water, but with a delousing pesticide called Zyklon B. Once released, the gas took only 20 minutes to kill everyone inside. It took half a day for the Sonderkommandos (Jewish prisoners forced to run the crematoria) to haul the bodies upstairs to the furnaces for burning.

Dead within an hour of arrival and, the same day, nothing but ash in the air. Some 960,000 Jews died at Auschwitz. That is more than the total combined number of American deaths in every war fought since 1865. If buried in 5-by-8-foot graves (the average dimensions at Arlington National Cemetery), they would fill an area larger than New York’s Central Park. Their names would fill the panels of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial more than 16 times over.

But there are no mass graves at Auschwitz, no physical markers that convey the magnitude of what happened. All that a visitor can see are the ruins of a half-sunken gas chamber, which the Nazis blew up as they retreated before the Red Army. It is less than half the size of a regulation basketball court. There were six other such chambers at the camp— all together making up an area no larger than a high school gymnasium. One looks at their mangled ruins—some charred brick, a bit of twisted metal, an empty hole in the ground—and the mind reels. How could a million souls have disappeared into a space so small?

Human beings are simply not equipped to handle such a mismatch in scale. We need visceral guideposts and personal experiences to understand things emotionally. The Nazis exploited this truth to diabolical ends.

Before the construction of the extermination camps, their principal method of killing Jews had been the Einsatzgruppen—SS death squads that roamed the eastern front rounding up Jews, shooting them by the thousands, and piling them into mass graves in each town they visited.

But Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was advised that these methods of murder were too intimate and traumatizing for the executioners, who would be psychologically scarred and eventually rendered insane, neurotic, or otherwise useless. Ridding Europe of its Jews this way would require too many men, too many bullets, and leave too much evidence behind.

The extermination camps were the answer: Their efficiency at scale was terrifying. Four of the six extermination camps had no attached concentration camps at all; they were pure factories of death. At Treblinka, 900,000 Jews were killed in 15 months of operation. It was run by 35 SS officers. That is a ratio of over 25,000 to 1.

Yet the unfathomable scale of these crimes did not seem to take a great toll on the men carrying them out. Interviews with guards after the war showed that most were not bloodthirsty maniacs or irreparably emotionally scarred. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, wrote that he was “relieved” that the gas chambers would spare him the “bloodbath” of firing squads. In the memoir he wrote while awaiting execution after the war, he never expressed any guilt for his prime role in the greatest mass murder in human history, stating instead that his one great regret was that he “did not devote more time to [his] family.” His complete moral blindness is a frightening testament to the Third Reich’s achievements in the bureaucratization, mechanization, and dehumanization of genocide.

The Nazis designed and built Auschwitz and its sister camps not only to destroy the Jews of Europe, but to do so in a way that denied their very existence and the moral significance of their murder. The sad truth is that the Nazis came very close to achieving the first of these goals. Two-thirds of the continent’s Jews were murdered during the war, and in the lands the Nazis conquered, fewer than 1 million remain today from a prewar population of nearly 9 million. Such horror can never be undone. But the Nazis’ second aim—to erase their victims from the world’s memory—was thwarted. It was thwarted by those who survived, by those who bore witness, by those who uncovered, preserved, and presented the evidence. And so too it must continue to be thwarted by the vigilant efforts of every future generation. This is why we remember.

Daniel Krauthammer is a consultant in San Francisco.