On 30 January 1933 Hindenburg asked Adolf Hitler to form a coalition government in which he would be chancellor and Papen vice chancellor. Papen and the other seven gentlemen in the cabinet were confident they could control the ill-bred chancellor and his two crude cohorts, Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and Minister without Portfolio Hermann Göring, but the trio refused to play by the Junkers' rules. They needs a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag, and they began a campaign to ensure that by the time of the new elections on 5 March the majority of upright German citizens would understand that a fully National Socialist government was only way to prevent Germany's descent Into Bolshevik chaos.[……]
But with eighty-one Communist deputies under arrest or in flight, and with the support of Nationalist and Catholic deputies, Hitler attained an effective majority to suspend the constitution,
It was the end of the Weimar Republic.95-96
Poles who settled in the Corridor and in Posen after 1919 were especially resented and were deported ruthlessly. Significantly, the first major town to be cleansed was Gdynia, which the German regarded as a symbol of Polish arrogance. In the beginning of October it was designated a major port of arrival for the Balts, and the returnees were to be given the homes of the erstwhile Polish population. Two days before the first shipload of Balts left the harbor of Tallinn, the deportations began in Gdynia.
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The towns that had been emptied of Poles lost their life. In January 1940 a Swedish newspaper commented on situation in Gdynia, which Germans had renamed Gotenhafen (Goth Harbor), that Totenhafn (Death's Harbor) was more appropriate.
"A town which formerly had a population of 130,000 now has 17,000 inhabitants. There are only a few hundred Poles left in Gdynia, and their lot is very hard. They are hungry, because they do not share in the rationing. "The port is completely dead.
The equipment is being dismantled and shipped to Germany."
The reduction in the population of Gdynia occurred in part because more Poles were moved out than Balts moved in, and in part because the Polish alternative to German Danzig had no future after Hitler’s triumphal entry into the older city. But it was also due to Himmler’s ambition to reduce the population density in the annexed territories. 149-151
As first transports of Poles began to arrive June, Höss focused on
Fencing in the prisoners’ compound―the protective custody camp proper. The solution seemed easy on paper, and a plan of 22 July shows twenty of the twenty-two brick barracks surrounded with a barbed-wire fence, while two double-story barracks, the half-buried ammunition depot, the twenty-two wooden horse stable barracks, and the forty-one dwelling barracks on both sides of the road to the station (inhabited by refugees from Teschen) were left beyond the enclosure. Delimited as that area was, Höss had difficulties cordoning it off because he was unable to obtain barbed wire. In frustration he sent thirty inmates to strip an abandoned prisoner-of-war camp for Polish soldiers. The history of the camp in Auschwitz thus began with used buildings to the camp with new steel gate, forged in hastily created workshop. Following the example of Dachau, he marked the passage into the camp with the promise “Arbeit macht frei”—Work will set you free. 168-169
It is baffling, but nevertheless a matter of record, that Judge Herbert’s view was a dissenting opinion. The majority of the tribunal accepted the far-fetched defense contention that the utilization of slave labor by IG Farben had occurred within the framework of cruel and inhuman regulations imposed by the Reich government.
To the inmates it matters little who set work pace. What mattered was the all-consuming slave labor on the construction gangs. “The Carbide Tower, which rises in the middle of Buna and whose top is rarely visible in the fog, was built by us,” the chemist, survivor, and author Primo Levi wrote in his autobiographical If This Is a Man? “Its bricks were called Ziegel, briques tegula, cegli, kamenny, mattoni, teglak, and they were cemented by hate; hate and discord, like the tower of Babel, and it is this that we call it:- Babelturm, Bobelturm; and in it we hate the insane dream grandeur of our masters, their contempt for God and men, for us men.” Ironically, the Carbide Tower was of no greater use to the Germans than the Tower of Babel had been to the Babylonians. “The Buna factory,” Levi reminds us, or perhaps reassures us, “on which the Germans were for four years and for which countless of us suffered and died, never produced a pound of synthetic rubber.”
Limpid as is Primo Levi’s prose, the irony he underlines is, in the end, irrelevant. And what if million pounds had been produced? 234-235
That process of selection is the core moral nadir of the horror of Holocaust-the selection is the gas chambers and crematoria. The Germans and their allies had arrogated to themselves the power to decide who would live and who would die. “As though,” Hanna Arendt accused Eichmann, “you and your superiors had any right to determine who should not inhabit the world.”
Mirka, Sara, and hundreds of thousands of other deportees lined up for selection by a physician. Had he worked alone, he could have done little harm. But he did not.His work was but a small part of a system envisioned by technocrats, operated by bureaucrats, financed by industrialists, serviced by technocrats, operated by ordinary men, and supported by millions of Germans whose daily lives were improved by the goods shipped home to the Reich for their use.
And Sara’s question remains: “And I said, ‘Why? ’“ 353