MONTHLY FEATURE: Auschwitz - The Beginning of the Story

Attempting to murder a nation and exsanguinate its soul

Anyone who’s ever listened to History Hack knows that my co-host Alina’s passion is Polish history, and remembering all those who died in the Holocaust. This feature is inspired by her masters thesis.

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I’ve time this for mid-June for a reason. The date coincides with the arrival of the first mass transport to Auschwitz, before the camp as you’re used to seeing depicted existed. The Nazi’s aim for this site was not mass extermination. It was to aid in the complete suppression of Polish culture and any resistance to the occupation of their country.

Prisoner #555, Leon Lipeński was a clerk working in Nowy Targ. He did not survive the war. He was Alina’s great great uncle. (Auschwitz Museum & Archive)

Why Auschwitz?

Hitler’s invasion of Poland began on 1st September 1939, and by 17th, Poland was also fighting the Soviets on a second front. When inevitable defeat came, as an independent nation it was wiped off the map. Carved up between two large powers, a different, depressingly familiar kind of ordeal then began for the Polish people.

Dachau, the Nazi’s first concentration camp on their own soil, was opened in 1933, and long before the invasion of Poland, they existed as an efficient way for the regime to round up political opponents, anyone with different ideologies who they deemed represented a threat, and people they just didn’t like. When it came to the fall of Poland this policy was kicked into overdrive. For Hitler, this was no shameless land grab, he didn’t just want Poland wiped off the map, he wanted to make sure there was nobody left to try and put it back.

The distasteful principle to achieve this was literally: if we kill every smart Pole in our hands, the ignorant masses left will have nobody to lead them in opposition. In October 1939, Hitler had the gall to state: "All representatives of the Polish intelligentsia must be exterminated. This sounds harsh but such are the laws of life.” Schools were shut down, public gatherings stalked and arrests began. Prisons filled up, and thousands were then sent to concentration camps that already existed in the Third Reich. By the end of the year, however, the sheer volume of prisoners meant that that there was no room left in those either.

In some cases the Nazi solution to this overcrowding was to take groups of prisoners into the woods and make them disappear, but southern Poland was presenting a particular problem. So many arrests were made among Poles attempting to flee over the border with Hungary, that the authorities there were wailing for a solution. Why not let them go? Because the chances were high that they would find a military unit to join, join the resistance and otherwise make trouble for the German authorities. With nowhere to put them, concentration camp inspector SS Gruppenführer Richard Glücks went looking for a new site, and on 27th April 1940, the order was given to construct a camp in the former Polish army barracks in Oswięcim.

Who were these prisoners?

The 728 political prisoners who arrived on 14th June 1940 with the first mass transport into the camp were overwhelmingly young men, (no women at Auschwitz until 1942) and largely well educated. Surviving information suggests that a significant number were caught on the border trying to escape, and that the Nazi’s thought it was funny to refer to them as ‘tourists.’ Then there were those that were arrested on being suspected of being involved in underground activity. Others were grabbed from the street and frequently there was no accusation made at the time, just the arrest and subsequent imprisonment.

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