May 12, 1889 and 1942: Otto Frank and Auschwitz

I knew it would happen.

I knew that at some point, one Today in History would be more than the flap of a butterfly's wings in creating another Today in History.

But my God did I ever hope it wouldn't be like how today's entry was born.

For perspective, a few things you should know:

1. I only write about things everyone knows about when they're just that big. And when everybody knows about them, I try to find some new angle.

2. I really like covering things my generation hasn't heard much about.

3. I'm particularly drawn to stories we can learn from right now to make this country and the people around us better.

So when I saw that May 12 was the 119th birthday of Otto Frank and the 65th anniversary of an Auschwitz gassing, and when I immediately remembered back to this diary, ... well, the choice wasn't so hard. And yeah, I just published a Holocaust diary yesterday (though I began writing it probably two months ago), and yeah, this is two events, not one.

But yeah, there's a pretty strong case to be made that American anti-Semitism killed Anne Frank:

Between 1933 and 1939, more than 300,000 Germans, perhaps 90 percent of them Jews, had applied for immigration visas to the United States, and by 1940 about 90,000 German Jews had found sanctuary in America. Despite the sincere intent of some American activists to assist refugees fleeing Nazism, strict immigration quotas, public opposition to immigration during a time of economic depression, and antisemitism in the general public and among some key government officials were serious obstacles to any relaxation of U.S. immigration quotas.

Strict immigration quotas, which were born ultimately of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which I am coming to detest in increasing measure every day of my life.


To willingly learn more about the May 12 Auschwitz gassing, in which 1,500 people inhaled Zyklon B fumes and died, is to challenge yourself to accept how much bitter irony and evil can coexist. Karl Fritzsch, the man who ordered that gassing and the ones before it (including the first, nine months earlier) looks to have applied for membership in the Nazi party not so much because he hated Jews as because he wanted stability in his life, which he hadn't gotten in his childhood.

That desire for stability came at the expense of Fritzsch's soul:

On September 3, 1941, while [SS Commandant Rudolf] Hoess was away on business, Deputy Commandant Karl Fritzsch decided, apparently on his own authority, to experiment in using Zyklon B on 600 Russian prisoners of war and 250 tubercular patients in the Auschwitz hospital. He sealed up some of the underground bunkers of Block 11, headquarters of the Gestapo's Politische Abteilung, or Political Department. There he packed in the prisoners, then put on a gas mask and flung one of the disinfectant containers [filled with Zyklon B] into the midst of the victims. Within a few minutes, they were all dead. "Those who were propped against the door leaned with a curious stiffness and then fell right at our feet, striking their faces hard against the concrete floor," recalled a Pole named Zenon Rozanski, who served in the penal detail assigned to clear out the bunker. "Corpses! Corpses standing bolt upright and filling the entire corridor of the bunker, till they were packed so tight it was impossible for more to fall."

And this, according to Hoess, was the procedure:

[W]hen I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, l used [Zyklon] B, which was a crystallized Prussic Acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited about [half an] hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses.

He continued:

The way we selected our victims was as follows: we had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the Camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated.

But, of course, he was only following orders:

DR. KAUFFMANN: And then, you told me the other day, that death by gassing set in within a period of 3 to 15 minutes. Is that correct?
HOESS: Yes.
DR. KAUFFMANN: You also told me that even before death finally set in, the victims fell into a state of unconsciousness?
HOESS: Yes. From what I was able to find out myself or from what was told me by medical officers, the time necessary for reaching unconsciousness or death varied according to the temperature and the number of people present in the chambers. Loss of consciousness took place within a few seconds or a few minutes.
DR. KAUFFMANN: Did you yourself ever feel pity with the victims, thinking of your own family and children?
HOESS: Yes.
DR. KAUFFMANN: How was it possible for you to carry out these actions in spite of this?
HOESS: In view of all these doubts which I had, the only one and decisive argument was the strict order and the reason given for it by the Reichsfáhrer Himmler.

He would later repent: "All I could do was tell them that we had to carry out orders without permitting ourselves any human feelings." He realized the depth of the depravity to which he was party (bolding mine):

My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the "Third Reich" for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done. I ask the Polish people for forgiveness. In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me. May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time.

Guilt was not foremost on the mind of Heinreich Himmler once the going was apparently going nowhere further. From the same site (bolding mine):

Following Hitler's death Heinrich Himmler set up a provisional government in Flensburg, on the German-Danish border. When Hoess reported to him there he was shocked to find the commander he had so revered beaming and in a great mood; yet the world, our world, had perished. If he had said, 'Well gentlemen, now it's over, you know what to do,' I would have understood - this would have corresponded with what he had preached year in and year out, 'Self-sacrifice for the ideology.' But instead, he gave us his last order: 'Hide yourself in the army!' That was the goodbye from the man I respected so highly, in whom I had placed such tremendous confidence, whose orders and sayings were gospel to me.

Hide yourself.

Not stand up for your actions, not fight to the last man standing. (This is the directive Hitler gave his field generals, as noted in The Ultra Secret, by F.W. Winterbotham, a book you'll understand even if you don't understand it. It's heavy on tactical history, and I still don't remember much of it, but I remember the gist, which is that we are very lucky we got Enigma.)

Hide yourself.

Hitler killed himself rather than admit defeat. Himmler killed himself rather than answer to the British.

Fucking cowards.

So big and tough, hiding behind concrete doors while they gassed innocent people for three years. "Among [the gassed victims] lay the bodies of pregnant women, some of whom had expressed the head of their baby just before they died ..."

Hiding behind "The Final Solution" like there was some Gordian knot made of barbed wire that guarded immortality, world domination and omniscience from unworthy owners. Because, of course, a solution implies a problem.

Hiding by marching prisoners away from incoming Allied armies in foot-deep snow just to delay the inevitable liberation for a week, a day ... just to kill off what few were close enough to death. They tried to kill Gerda Weissmann, but her will to live was greater than theirs, and she had her ski boots. And I met her in 1995.

Yeah, just following orders, ignoring the little voices in their heads saying, "These are people, not insects. Don't do this." Just following orders, sure.

And they were killing lesser people. Sure. Germany was in a shambles because of Jews, not men who ran and hid when their plans collapsed.

How does anyone willingly latch onto these guys without a fundamental problem? How does one derive strength from such cowards without ultimately being fucked in the head?

Hide yourself.

Hide your moral compass and you will lose yourself to horrors.

The irony I spoke of above is that Zyklon B was developed by a German Jew in the 1920s. Developed as an insecticide, no less. In a dark way, I suppose it is fitting that an innovation meant to kill something we view as less than human was use by monsters to kill those they viewed as being less than human.

Zyklon B was also the source of some claims by Holocaust deniers that the Germans couldn't have killed so many people. Those deniers can go to Hell, along with so many Nazis. Residue from the insecticide was found exactly where you'd think it would be found, and it was absent from exactly where you'd think it would be absent.

But today is not just about evil. Today is about good, and the name of that good is Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, about whom the more said, the better.

We know what we know about Anne Frank through her friends, yes, but we also know about her because Otto Frank was as determined to tell his (her) story as was Poldek Pfefferberg. He talked here, four years before he rejoined his wife, who starved to death, and his daughters, who died of typhus weeks in Bergen-Belsen weeks before it was liberated. And his daughter's words have lived on since 1947, having been translated into not nearly enough languages.

One of those languages, of course, is English, and my high school staged a play in 1998 based on Anne Frank's diary.

I remember that play because I became immersed in it. I normally can keep myself separate from a work of art, whether a play or a painting, and I often did that as a teenager just so I wouldn't have the disappointment of emerging later on to my miserable (but comparatively joyful) existence.

But this play hooked me.

So when the gassing scene started, my first thought was "DEAR FUCKING GOD NO! THEY'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!"

That gassing scene is basically all I remember from that play. But I also remember that one person said she found the scene distasteful, and that person was neither of our female German exchange students. It was the wife of one of our history teachers, and I remember thinking very unkind thoughts about her.


A Holocaust survivor remembers Anne Frank. An American University professor has more on Otto Frank's attempt to save his family from certain death.

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•  Tips and fibro awareness

  Today is also Fibromyalgia Awareness Day. Stop over and learn about it or meet Kossacks with fibro or who know people who have it.

  by iampunha on Mon May 12, 2008 at 05:28:10 AM PDT

•  When I was in Junior High when

  I read "Commandant of Auschwitz" by Hoess.  I had to read it twice to let the full horror sink in.  He was a devoted father and husband, with a cottage at the edge of Auschwitz.  

  He mentions, matter-of-factly, the IG Farben technocrats who agreed to produce the necessary amounts of Zyklon-B, after testing was done for its suitability to the task.

  He succeeded in mentally distancing himself from the horror, even his autobiography.  I think that, at last, he realized the evil he had done.  This does not excuse him in the slightest.  He followed orders until the end.  

  Taking orders.  This is the way of cowardice, in a bad cause, but of heroism in a good cause.  Or so it would seem.  I would argue that taking orders is always to be accompanied by a certain soul-searching.  After all, none of us can deny responsibility for the wrong we have done, no matter that we were goaded on by authority or ignorance.  

  That which we do well, bouys humankind to new heights of awareness.

  One only prays that we pull up against following orders far earlier than did Hoess, as he agreed to write his story before he was hanged.

  I have yet to see our own MIC called to account in the atrocities committed in Iraq.  Make no mistake:  the tortured corpses on the roads near Baghdad reveal the sin that has sprung from our own desire "to bestride the world like a Colossus."  

  Forty-eight years ago, I had such hopes...

  It is hard, very hard, to hope for any improvement, today.  Those who can walk, I hope you may walk.  This is the last election of any consequence in American History.  After this, it will be too late; unfortunately "too late" seems to have been left behind too early.

  by willb48 on Mon May 12, 2008 at 06:10:50 AM PDT

•  The United States Holocaust Museum has

  has a photo album from Hoess.  It is quite remarkable.  It shows the level of disconnect that these men had, how they had compartmentalized and disassociated from reality.  There are no graphic photos in this album but they are chilling just the same.  I had to write a response paper to this exhibit and I could only come up with more questions than answers.  The photos are taken in Auschwitz and the surrounding region. It is something to see.
  album

  by mouser68 on Mon May 12, 2008 at 07:16:20 AM PDT

  •  the shoes

    I was in Pennsylvania back in October for the impending (and then actual) death of my wife's grandmother, and one of her uncles told me he was planning to eventually go to Washington. He asked me what he might find interesting there, and I immediately noted Holocaust museum.

    I have been twice -- I used to live 30 minutes from D.C. -- and I told him that if he went, he should plan to spend the day at that museum. I told him about the pictures of the experiments conducted on children (including one in which the children were injected with seawater), and then I told him about what was, to me, the most powerful exhibit: shoes.

    There is a pile of shoes, taken from the victims, sitting in about a 10-by-10-by-20 space, and it was as tall as I was then (about 5 feet). It is wider than it is tall, and it is impossibly powerful. I may well write about it for my Holocaust Museum diary, whenever that comes.

    by iampunha on Mon May 12, 2008 at 03:56:41 PM PDT

    •  I have never been there but if I made it to Wash

      I would make the museum one of my first stops.  I have seen the photos of the shoes and that is troubling.  I really found the picture of the prostetics the most disturbing.  I worked with persons with disabilities and I imagined my clients going through that horrifying event and I start to cry.  

      Another important Holocaust survivor and author that has made an impact on my life is Primo Levi.  I have read Survival in Auschwitz and I am starting the second in this series.  He opened my eyes to the dehumanization and humiliation.  If you have not read the book-I recommend.  He was a brilliant writer.

      by mouser68 on Mon May 12, 2008 at 07:08:55 PM PDT

      •  I did not see or did not remember

        the prosthetics exhibit.

        Nothing new I encounter about what the Nazis did surprises me.

        As insensitive as it might seem, I am kind of burned out on concentration camp stuff after the last few days, so I will take a pass on the book for now. There is also so much more I want to do with this series, so much more pain that needs to be known -- and fortunately a little bit of happiness along the way.

        A link for you on Otto Frank. I found it while looking for a picture of the prosthetics exhibit. The picture above the one of the prosthetics ... I can think of nothing to write here that would dignify those men as they deserve to be.

        by iampunha on Mon May 12, 2008 at 07:28:12 PM PDT

        •  The exhibit might have been in Germany

          I took a class on the subject and it is so overwhelming.  I can not imagine.  

          by mouser68 on Mon May 12, 2008 at 09:04:13 PM PDT

          •  I don't think I'd be able to

            take a class on it. Researching on my own -- where I have some small measure of control over how much I subject myself to -- is enough. Having someone else control the influx of new information would be far too much a loss of what sanity remains.

            While looking for obscure Holocaust survivors (there's a term that should not exist), I thought I'd found one who went in at three years old and somehow survived.

            Sometimes crying as hard as you can doesn't do it.

            (I later discovered the page editor had made a typo. I still included the survivor because how do you say no?)

            by iampunha on Mon May 12, 2008 at 09:24:33 PM PDT

            •  Yad Vashem

              I first visited Yad Vashem in the early 1980s.  I had already studied the holocaust, and did not actually learn that much that was new to me --- yet the effect is staggering

              I went in the company of some Italian friends.  Their daughter, who must have been in her late teens at the time, had never heard of the holocaust.

              She left Yad Vashem and didn't speak for two days.

              by plf515 on Tue May 13, 2008 at 01:18:38 PM PDT

      •  Primo Levi did not survive.

        He had a "delayed death", committing suicide, really not long ago now.

        by kaliope on Mon May 12, 2008 at 10:01:19 PM PDT

        •  Primo Levi

          Died in 1987, falling down the stairs to his death, which various people have said was or was not on purpose.

          In the words of Linda Lee Cadwell, I prefer to remember how he lived.

          by iampunha on Mon May 12, 2008 at 11:50:20 PM PDT

        •  I agree

          But he did contribute so much to humanity even though his spirit was destroyed.  He should be honored along with Tadeauz Borowski.  I learned so much from both.  

          So in a way at least his written word survived leaving a legacy for people to learn from.  I think they both would have loved Dkos.

          by mouser68 on Tue May 13, 2008 at 07:39:56 AM PDT

    •  I've been to both the museum and to Auschwitz.

      Both were harrowing experiences to be sure, but nothing could top the cold, stark, post-Soviet wasteland that framed the Auschwitz/Birkenau complex in Oświęcim, less than an hour outside of Krakow.

      It seemed that the victims of the Shoah had died twice--once during the actual Nazi genocide and again at the hands of anti-Semitic people in Poland who wanted to downplay the targeting of Jewish people in the Nazis' systematic execution of so many human beings and instead politicize their own nationalism, before and after the Iron Curtain fell down.

      I swear to God I've never gotten a colder, more vacant feeling in my soul than when I was looking down the barrel of the railroad tracks in Birkenau at this monstrosity:

      

      The fact that some of the shopping plazas around my neighborhood seem to emulate the archways and towers of this train station is just downright creepy to me.

      by boofdah on Mon May 12, 2008 at 09:18:24 PM PDT

      •  Frightening!! Stalin was thinking about

        starting a similar program of killing before he died, according to Niall Ferguson.  For humanity's sake, it is good that he died.

        by mouser68 on Tue May 13, 2008 at 07:47:13 AM PDT

        •  Stalin

          I have a book called '1000 years, 1000 people' an attempt to list 1000 significant people of the 1000-2000 millennium.  Each life is summarized in a paragraph to a few paragraphs.  But each is also given a one phrase description - like 'invented the telescope'

          For Stalin, the phrase is a word: Monster.

          by plf515 on Tue May 13, 2008 at 01:21:16 PM PDT

•  Historical note

  As far as we know, only Mr. Van Dann was gassed; all the others hiding in the annex died of hunger, disease, despair. Only Otto Frank survived.

  And neither of the two primary versions of the play Anne Frank depict a gassing scene. Both end with the Secret Police breaking into the annex;  one is followed by a brief scene of Otto Frank recounting everyone's fate.

  by Maggie Pax on Mon May 12, 2008 at 07:43:46 AM PDT

  •  The one we watched

    had Frank and her sister being gassed.

    I later discovered they were not gassed, but drama often takes creative license. The Crucible, for example, invented sexual tension by having one of the characters be not 11 but 17, and having one of the male characters be not 70 but 35.

    by iampunha on Mon May 12, 2008 at 03:51:55 PM PDT

•  Excellent Diary

  Thank you for publishing this diary, which also coincides with Israel's 60th birthday.

  The rampant world anti-Semitism of the 1930s which prevented the rescue of millions of Jews from the Nazis is being rescuscitated today with many people thinking that Israel is responsible for all of the world's ills.

  That is obviously patently false and just another manifestation of the 2000 years of anti-Semitism suffered by the Jewish people since being expelled from the Holy Land by the Romans.

  by tailor324 on Mon May 12, 2008 at 08:27:31 AM PDT

  •  Thank you for reading it

    and for reminding me that the struggle for equality and peace continues.

    by iampunha on Mon May 12, 2008 at 07:28:57 PM PDT

•  This has been on my mind recently

  There was a documentary on PBS the other day about Auschwitz. It covered the amazing ease with which Germany marched into Hungary and just whisked off hundreds of thousands of Jews.  They were show marching directly into the gas chambers.  They appeared calm .  

  Thanks for the diary.  

  by otto on Mon May 12, 2008 at 08:48:15 PM PDT

  •  By design

    Thank you for reading it and for taking the time to comment. It's not an easy subject, and I don't write it to be easy. I mean for all of this to be uncomfortable. Harder to forget that way.

    "They were show marching directly into the gas chambers.  They appeared calm ."

    That was by Nazi design. If asked, the SS men could say the soon-to-be-killed were going to be deloused, since Zyklon B was "just an insecticide" developed by a Jew, no less.

    Also, there were dummy showerheads inside, and hooks for clothing. It was supposed to look ordinary so there would be no panic, nothing to get in the way of the efficiency of the operation.

    In a way -- a horrific way, but a way nonetheless -- this method of mass killing was more humane than that employed by the crematoria, which the Nazis figured out operated at maximum efficiency with a dead man and woman and ... well. Toward the end of the second column here.

    It is not easy to read.

    by iampunha on Mon May 12, 2008 at 09:34:37 PM PDT

•  Thanks.

  This is a great diary. I'm sorry I don't know how to respond to it, but there's little to say in the face of such horror except that I don't understand, and I hope I never do.

  by missdewey on Tue May 13, 2008 at 09:34:02 AM PDT

  •  I sometimes struggle with

    how to write these.

    Because how do you say more than survivors have said? What can you add to those words, and the words of those who carried out those orders?

    Between my not knowing if I have done as I should and your not knowing if you have done as you should, I figure we both learn about the things that make us uncomfortable.

    by iampunha on Tue May 13, 2008 at 12:08:24 PM PDT

•  An antidote

  We must recognize Auschwitz.  We must.  

  But we must also recognize that there are other sides to this.  Not, of course, to Auschwitz or to Hitler.  But to 'this' that is, 'us'.  Humans.

  Two antidotes:

  1. See the movie Paper Clips.  It is a great film

  2. This story. At Yad Vashem, there is the Avenue of the Righteous, where a tree is planted for each gentile who saved Jews.  There is a sign "do not walk on the grass", yet, there was a man, standing on the grass, hugging a tree.  A guard asked him to move.  The man said "I want to hug my father".

  The man spoke no Hebrew and a little English
  The guard spoke no Polish, and a little English.  
  With some help, the following emerged:

  The man's father, having lost both legs fighting in th Polish resistance, had been unwilling to give up, and had then hid Jews in his attic.  

  So, we must remember, not only the horrific, but the glorious. It's all US.  

  by plf515 on Tue May 13, 2008 at 01:28:26 PM PDT

  •  Thank you for sharing that with me.

    I will try to cover it in the future. Og knows I could use a good Holocaust story.

    by iampunha on Tue May 13, 2008 at 03:34:23 PM PDT