Niall McCrae
The British government is determined to build a highly prominent monument to the Holocaust on Victoria Gardens, a green strip beside the Houses of Parliament. Coachloads of schoolchildren will be taught the moral lesson of the Nazi annihilation of Jews, and it will be an obligatory stop on the tourist trail. Britain will boast of its role in defeating fascism, perhaps disingenuously claiming that saving the Jews was a primary purpose of fighting Hitler.
As a mental health lecturer at King’s College London, I featured Viktor Frankl in my lectures. As a psychiatrist in Vienna before the war, Frankl was experienced in suicide prevention, and he applied these skills in a concentration camp. Frankl saw that the human spirit could endure the most pitiful and cruel conditions, but this depended on the personality. Whereas some people succumbed, others stoically carried on. The difference, Frankl observed, was whether inmates retained meaning to their existence.
On this theme, I often told the story of Eugene Heimler, from his book Mental Health and Social Work (1967). It’s worth quoting in full here, not just for the message about purpose in life, but because it suggests that the Holocaust narrative is not wholly accurate on what happened to Jews and other persecuted groups in the Nazi camps. A high proportion who perished were worked to death (a release suggested by the Auschwitz gate slogan Arbeit macht Frei), as well as the tens of thousands killed in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. The Third Reich increasingly relied on slave labour..
Heimler recalled: –
During the summer of 1944 I found myself in a German concentration camp: Tröglitz, in Thuringia. I was twenty-one years old and had no training in social work or psychiatry. With hundreds of other prisoners, mainly Hungarian Jews, I found myself on a ‘planet’ where the laws and rules of civilized life were turned upside down by the National Socialists, and where the ultimate aim was our destruction in the gas chambers.
As it was probably unknown to Heimler at the time, the chemical method of the ‘Final Solution’ was mentioned in retrospect rather than based on his own experience. Heimler told of a dehumanising act: –
On 19 August the Allies appeared over Tröglitz, bombed the synthetic petrol factory where we prisoners were working, and managed to destroy it completely. After that there was nothing else for us to do but to clear away the rubbish. But one day the commandant of the camp decided, on the advice of SS ‘medical experts’, to do an ‘experiment in mental health’. He ordered a few hundred of us to move sand from one end of the factory to another, and when we had completed this task we were ordered to move it back to the original place.
This was at a time when the Germans were obviously losing the war, and the camp would inevitably be overrun. Although at the time their fate would have been uncertain, Heimler and others were eventually rescued. Heimler continued: –
At first we thought that our guards must have made a mistake, but it soon became clear that they had not. From then on, day after day, week after week, we had to carry the sand to and fro, until gradually people’s minds began to give way. Even those who had been working steadily in the factory before it was bombed were affected, for the work had some use and purpose, even if it was for the Germans, but in the face of a completely meaningless task people started to lose their sanity. Some went berserk and tried to run away, only to be shot by the guards; others ran against the electrified wire fence and burnt themselves to death.
Young greenhorn though I was, I could not help noticing that the first people to be affected in this way were those who back at home had always done a useful satisfying job in life – doctors, lawyers, electricians, mechanics, and so on. Those who survived the longest were people used to rather dull, routine, unskilled work. The suicide rate in Tröglitz went up as a result of this experiment. One day at Appelplatz (roll-call) the camp commandant ‘jokingly’ said ‘now there is no more need to use the crematoria’. It was clear that meaningless tasks and pointless work destroyed people.
This reference to cremation is indicative. The Nazis only wanted to feed people who could work for the regime. Their callous ideology was enacted before the war, when mental hospitals and colonies became killing fields. Nonetheless, the need for labour was desperate. After the camp’s productivity was smashed, perhaps the commandant was waiting for another order for hard labour, keeping the inmates busy in the meantime. Heimler concluded: –
My comrades died not at the hands of the Gestapo, but because they had nothing to live for and had been forced to do futile acts which killed their spirit.
Heimler quoted a fellow prisoner in Tröglitz. Ekstein, a doctor from Prague, observed that people who had previously led morally disciplined lives tended to degenerate in the camps, while the simple folk often showed superior qualities in the severe adversity. Ekstein asked: –
If you compare the two ‘civilizations’, don’t you find yourself compelled to conclude that the people who under these abnormal circumstances manage to prove themselves human are not necessarily those who can do so outside the prison bars? And if you can see an answer to this problem, tell me: on what does it depend whether a man remains a man?
Ekstein was speaking uncomfortable truth. Some professional people were given special roles in the camps, recreating a social hierarchy that the Nazis exploited: the higher class of prisoner monitored the others, reporting disobedience, which led to extremely harsh punishment.
Questioning of the Holocaust narrative has been made socially unacceptable. But here are the reflections of two Jewish men with the misfortune to be incarcerated and the fortune to survive. There were, indeed, many survivors. Furthermore, it is not ‘Holocaust denial’ to state that the vast Nazi cull was not only by the horror of gassing but also by forced labour with minimal food and rest. In the same year as Heimler’s book, twenty-two years after the war ended, my twelve-volume Everyman Encyclopaedia (1967) has no entry for the Holocaust, but under ‘concentration camps’ it refers to both systematic and consequential killing.
Throughout history, totalitarian regimes have enslaved an involuntary workforce for every joule of energy in their sinews, from the Pyramids of Egypt to the Gulags in Siberia. The Third Reich abused Jews from all lands that it conquered, with genocidal plans and practice. But the main use for Jews, Gypsies and other minorities was productivity: sewing Wehrmacht uniforms, producing mechanical parts, etc. War is labour-intensive.
Whatever the true quantity of lives lost to the evil doctrine of racial hygiene, the Holocaust museum is likely to convey the message that most Jews were clinically extinguished in gas chambers. In 1945, with the Russians rapidly advancing from the east, it would have been considerably easier for the Nazis to leave these poor people to starve – as General Dwight Eisenhower did to surrendered German troops in the Rhine meadow camps.
History, nowadays, is an instrument of morality, and facts may not be allowed to get in the way of an emphatic message. The treatment of the Jews is a dark stain on the twentieth century, but sadly it was not a unique crime against humanity. And as the chief of the United Nations recently remarked, the Zionist leaders of Israel should not use the Holocaust as a licence to do whatever it wants to defenceless Palestinians.
