Anatomy of the SS State
by Helmut Krausnick, Martin Broszat, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen
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Book Summary Information
Author: Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Helmut Krausnick, Martin BroszatEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Published: 1970-11-02
ISBN: 0586080287
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Flamingo
Book Reviews of Anatomy of the SS State
Book Review: Insights into the Nazi Extermination of Jews and Slavs (Notably the Zamosc-Area Poles)
Summary: 4 Stars
This anthology, written by German scholars, provides invaluable information about German Nazi policies and conduct.
Buchheim makes the following sage comment about the Gestapo: "The characteristic of the Gestapo was not physical coercion nor physical torture, although they made good use of both; it was that they had become a thought police aiming at unlimited power over men." (p. 202). In this age of speech codes, political correctness, and criminalized "hate speech", the foregoing comments are sobering!
Krausnick recognizes the fact that Poles were greater victims than Jews in the first few years of the Nazi occupation of Poland: "During the Polish campaign no general orders to shoot the Jews were issued to the Einsatzgruppen...In addition, the systematic extermination policy ordered by Hitler was, for tactical reasons, at first directed more against the Polish ruling class than against the Jews." (p. 51).
Broszat recounts the history of the Nazi concentration camps: "Indeed in the early days of its existence, when almost nobody but Polish prisoners were sent to Auschwitz, it did partly have the function of a transit camp. Many of the Polish prisoners who in 1940/1 were sent to camps situated in the Old Reich (Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen, Dachau, Flossenburg, etc.) came via Auschwitz." (p. 474).
Krausnick has the following comments on the Holocaust: "The exact moment at which Hitler made up his mind that the Jews must be physically destroyed cannot be precisely determined from the evidence available." (p. 59). It was probably no later than the spring of 1941 (p. 68).
Proponents of Holocaust uniqueness sometimes claim that, whereas the genocides of non-Jews all had some rational purpose, that of Jews had none. In actuality, given the framework of warped Nazi ideology, the Holocaust had been quite rational. Buchheim comments: "The war was presented as a war waged by Jewry against the German people, a life-and-death war between races...Anti-Jewish measures were therefore presented as action in battle...In a racial and ideological war on the National Socialist model, however, the enemy had to be killed even when a prisoner--as proved by the systematic murder of Russian commissars in the prisoner-of-war camps." (Buchheim, p. 364). In addition, Himmler rationalized the killing of Jewish children as a preventative action against their eventual revenge directed against successive generations of Germans (Krausnick, p. 123).
Wiskemann recognizes the intertwined fate of Jews and Slavs, and how practical matters got in the way of total extermination, especially of the Slavs (who--if nothing else--were too numerous to forfeit as a source of slave labor and to readily exterminate under wartime conditions): "In 1939 and thereafter many Poles were liquidated in conquered Poland, and Dr. H.-A. Jacobsen's account of the Kommissarbefehl shows that Hitler envisaged his war against Russia as a war of extermination. He was, however, faced with another paradox, for he needed the labour of the people he had marked down for destruction. Hence in the winter of 1941/2 many Slavs and some Jews were reprieved, for those who could work were switched from a sentence of death to one of hard labour." (p. xi).
Proponents of Holocaust uniqueness state that, whereas deported Jews were usually killed, the Poles deported from the Zamosc region were usually "only" sent to concentration camps [BTW, to die slowly rather than quickly]. It is therefore instructive that, originally, the Germans DID plan to treat the Zamosc-area Poles in very much the same way as the Jews (albeit with a greater fraction of able-bodied adults spared for forced labor). This is shown by the following letter from Dr. H., the Medical Officer to Warsaw, to Hitler (on December 7, 1942): "During a discussion at government level concerning the fight against tuberculosis, Oberverwaltungsrat W., Head of the Population and Welfare Section, told us under ban of secrecy that 200,000 Poles were to be deported from Eastern Poland to make room for German settlers and that in this connection it was intended, or at least planned, to treat approximately a third of them (70,000 old people and children under ten) similarly to the Jews, in other words kill them." (Buchheim, p. 379). Dr. H. was opposed to this policy for strictly pragmatic reasons. He feared, among other things, that Polish resistance to its implementation would devastate the very area that Germans wanted for their lebensraum (ibid, p. 380). Those Zamosc-area Poles murdered at Auschwitz were killed by methods that disguised the actual cause of death (Broszat, p. 502). (The ferocity of Polish guerilla resistance, along with reverses on the Eastern Front, prompted the Germans to ameliorate their extermination plans against the Zamosc-area Poles, and eventually to cancel the Zamosc-area deportations entirely).
Jacobsen (p. 523, 531) estimates that the Nazi Germans murdered at least 3.3 million Soviet POWs.
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