6.1.4 The task of killing

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From the course by University of California, Santa Cruz

The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry

130 ratings

University of California, Santa Cruz

The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry

130 ratings

The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry is an adaptation of an on-campus course that has been co-taught by Murray Baumgarten, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature (Literature Department), and Peter Kenez, Professor Emeritus (History Department), for over 20 years at UC Santa Cruz. In this course, you will explore the Holocaust from the overlapping perspectives of literature and history—through memoirs, historical documents, poetry, documentary footage, filmic representations, and novels. You will expand your knowledge of the literature of the Holocaust, Eastern and Western European Jewish communities, the origins and development of antisemitism, the establishment of labor and extermination camps, resistance movements, and the Holocaust as a problem for world history. There is more than one way to take this course: You can complete all of the activities (and earn a Verified Certificate) or only the activities that are most interesting to you. Whatever you choose to do, we encourage you to find a havruta (a study partner) in your community or in the Coursera community so that you can experience the course in a more interactive and meaningful way.

From the lesson

Establishment of the camps

In this module Profs. Baumgarten and Kenez discuss the establishment of labor and extermination camps, memorialization, Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men.

6.1.1 The heart of the matter10:56

6.1.2 From labor to extermination13:24

6.1.3 Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka11:28

6.1.4 The task of killing6:22

6.1.5 Auschwitz11:15

6.1.6 Who knew about the murders?8:36

Meet the Instructors

Murray Baumgarten
Distinguished Professor of English & Comparative Literature
Literature
Peter Kenez
Professor Emeritus
History

So well, what am I saying?

So the task of killing was easy.

I mean, here you could kill tens of thousands of people.

It was all very quickly.

The transportation arrived in the morning and

by the evening everybody was dead.

Interestingly, perhaps paradoxically,

the more lethal a camp was, the less we know about it,

because of chances of survival.

You meet many people who survived Auschwitz,

which we just did the day before yesterday, or whenever it was.

Because it was possible to survive Auschwitz.

Imagine, you have never met anyone who survived Treblinka or Sobibór.

Actually later on in the fall of 1943, in both camps,

first in Treblinka and then few weeks later in Sobibór there

were breakouts ad something like 30 or

40 people manage to break out and some people survived.

There's only two people who managed to some how escape from [INAUDIBLE].

But you know, there were 1000s of people who survived Auschwitz.

So we know a great deal about Auschwitz.

You see Auschwitz is the, how should I say it, the poster child of the holocaust.

We talk about Auschwitz but there are places where the murder was,

how should I say, much better organized and

we know less about it, because there's nobody to tell the story.

And we know about the stories and of Treblinka, and Sobibor and

deaths because of German confessions, that is rather than what the Jews experienced.

The way it was of course, again Jews carried out the most

undesirable task of removing bodies and

then carrying them into a crematorium and

then these people also went through periodically negative selections.

Meaning they were on the job for a week or so and then they themselves were killed.

Get rid of the bodies.

So the interesting part is that from the German point of view,

the difficult part of the enterprise was A, to deliver

the bodies,not to deliver the live human beings to the extermination camp

and then the second difficult task was to get rid of the bodies.

The first task was difficult,

because in war time there is a shortage of rolling stock, that is,

you need soldiers to be taken from one end of the front to another and

consequently you heard about it.

Dora Sorell was talking about what it was

to be sent in the railroad carriage.

And how the railroad carriage, the journey lasted for days.

And the reason that the journeys lasted so long is because they had the lowest

priorities in the very much over extended

railroad network from the German point of view and

consequently they didn't care whether it took two days or three days when people

were entrained without food and water and people died.

There were instances when 50% of the people after two or

three days without water, and the heat in the summer and

the trains arrived, 50% of them were dead.

So, I mean, from the German point of view, these are the difficult task

to take people to the extermination camp and second,

what to do with the corpses.

In Auschwitz for example and

we'll talk about it later, in 1944, the crematoria cannot

keep up with the number of bodies which are arriving.

And so consequently they

would bind lump corpses.

Intermingling with wood, fire wood,

and lighting up the fire, and then,

as from the human body, the fat would ooze out.

They reused it in order to make the fire hotter.

In order to be able to burn more bodies.

By the way they were experimenting with all sort of things.

One of the characters by the name of Nebe,

experimented with putting people in bunkers and blow up the bunkers.

This was regarded as a failure as an experiment.

This created too much of a mess.

So the gas chambers were the most efficient methods of killing.

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